by Ned Beauman
Coat the nitrocellulose base with the silver chloride emulsion and perforate the margins. Congratulations! You have made film stock, and you are ready to start filming again. Just remember the Whelt Rule, and everything will be fine.
*
‘Joan, get in here.’
‘May I open the door?’ Burlingame knew how angry they’d be if she let in daylight from the anteroom when she wasn’t supposed to. (This was the same day in 1946 that Kurt Meinong arrived at the temple in time to see Gracie Calix throw herself off the top.)
‘I told you to get in here, didn’t I?’
She opened the door. The roof hatch of the darkroom was propped open and the two men stood there under a shaft of dawn. There had to be enough space in here for two men to grope around at once so this cabin was one of the longest in the camp: it extended out over multiple steps with a scaffold underneath to hold it up.
‘Sorry to yell at you, Joan, but you’ve got to see this,’ said Yang. She came forward and Whelt passed her a ribbon of photographic negative. ‘It’s okay to touch it,’ said Yang. ‘Just hold it by the edges. Yeah, up to the light.’
The stock was as exact in its dimensions and finish as you’d expect given the personality of its manufacturer, and yet it nevertheless had the primordial quality of a rind of snakeskin you might find out in the forest. The sixty or seventy frames here showed Yang walking towards the camera while waving his arms and sticking out his tongue. They’d run the camera with a hand-crank, since of course the generators hadn’t been in use for years. Even at less than an inch high, in inverted grays already beginning to fog, the images had a startling, almost three-dimensional clarity, like the bas reliefs on the Frieze of Parnassus.
‘What do you think?’ said Yang.
‘I don’t know the first thing about film, but I think it looks marvelous.’
‘Just “marvelous”? Do you know how long we’ve been working on this?’
‘“Marvelous” is really rather emphatic where I come from.’
‘Joan, where you come from, nothing this exciting has happened in eight hundred years and that’s why you don’t have a word to describe it. We’ve made film in the jungle. We’ve made film in the jungle and it looks better than any Eastman Super X I ever laid eyes on. Whelt, tell her your theory.’
‘In 1925, a researcher at Kodak found that you get the best film speeds if you use gelatin from cows that fed on wild mustard seed,’ said Whelt. ‘The sulfur from the mustard makes the silver halides more sensitive to light.’
‘There’s no mustard out here, but whatever the tapirs eat, it must be twice as good.’
‘Does this mean you can start filming?’ said Burlingame. Outside this cabin, with famine never far away, the question would have been laughable, not to say offensive. But she knew Whelt thought of nothing but Hearts in Darkness. In 1938, when she first met him, he had understood that people could not be fed and sheltered in retrospect by a film that might one day come to exist. Now that awareness was lost. The closer his ship came to collapsing into the barren earth, the tighter he gripped the wheel. What Burlingame couldn’t understand was that although Whelt had probably eaten less and slept less over the last eight years than anyone else at the site, he seemed to have aged less too, as if it was only by the accumulation of labeled film canisters that his body was willing to acknowledge the passage of time. What she also couldn’t understand was why she had come to spend so much of her time mothering the director. Yes, if something needed to be done and no one else was doing it, she felt like a skiver unless she did it herself. But to scour a few crusty dinner bowls was one thing; to assume the guardianship of an adult male was quite another.
‘We have almost everything we need,’ said Yang. ‘We can even record sound negatives if we want. Even if we dilute the fixer we have left we’ll be out of developing chemicals soon, and assuming there’s no bush out there with hydroquinone in its berries we can’t make any more, but just because we can’t watch the rushes until we get home, that doesn’t mean we can’t shoot the movie.’
‘We just need more silver,’ said Whelt.
‘It wastes a lot of silver, making the silver chloride like this. An ounce of silver ought to go a long way but we only got a few feet of film this time. If only we had one whole suit of armor we could make enough to finish the movie as soon as we put the temple back together. That’s assuming we don’t need too many takes. But after all the test shots we’ve done …’
In other words, they weren’t actually any closer to returning to work. Burlingame remembered a joke her father used to make: ‘If we had bacon we could have bacon and eggs if we had eggs.’ From one point of view, this project had never been more urgent. Yang had discovered that some of the Kodak film they’d exposed in their first year at the site had already begun to decompose in the muggy air, speckling brown and giving off a smell like dirty socks. Whelt would have to reshoot all those scenes, which would at least solve the continuity problem of Aldobrand’s disfigurement, if that role wasn’t to be recast. But from another point of view, the stakes of this project were, as usual, nil. If the sheer heat of their hatred for Coehorn hadn’t vaporised him by now then it probably wasn’t going to vaporise him any time soon, so how were these two going to get their hands on a full suit of silver ceremonial armor, let alone the temple itself?
But of course Yang was as excited as a schoolboy, and even Whelt looked satisfied for once. He could never outwardly relax, she knew, but the calm in the deep of his jitters was the Rule in the deep of his metaphysics. All smash hits, the director had told her, followed the Whelt Rule, and any folktale that had endured long enough in a culture to be transcribed by an anthropologist must be regarded as a smash hit. So if somebody went to the trouble of converting the plots of all the folktales of the world into Whelt’s special notation, they would necessarily recognise the Rule in every single one of them. For her part, Burlingame was skeptical that all folktales really could be made to line up with perfect posture like that. She’d read too many that were fascinatingly lopsided and scoliotic. That aside, it seemed to her that the real question was exactly what type of rule the Rule was supposed to be. Did Whelt truly believe that all human beings in all times and places must prefer plots that followed his Rule? Did the Rule, in other words, reflect some immutable feature of the human mind? Once, after a rather challenging piece of ‘new music’ at a piano recital, her uncle had declared that even a Martian would prefer conventional harmony because conventional harmony was based on simple mathematical ratios. So would even a Martian prefer conforming plots? Often, Whelt seemed to be too practically-minded to interest himself in these speculations. He could still recite the ten highest-grossing films for every year going back to Birth of a Nation in 1915, and that metric, he sometimes implied, was the Rule’s only importance. But at other times he talked about the Rule as if it were a radiant categorical imperative.
Surprisingly, her discussions with Whelt had given her a new framework for understanding the Pozkito cosmogony. According to the accounts she had read, the Pozkitos didn’t believe that the gods had created material stuff, only that they had designed the Platonic forms. Except it was more like calibrating the laws of physics, or inventing the rules of a game, or … It wasn’t easy to pin down. But now Burlingame understood that, in essence, the Pozkito gods had stipulated the range of available narrative units, just like Whelt’s notation, or Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen. They had set the patterns of behavior into which things would inevitably fall for the rest of time. Despite this accomplishment, the gods’ powers were not to be exaggerated. They were closest, perhaps, to the asuras of the Hindus or the lares of the ancient Romans. The Pozkito attitude to them was not worship or fear so much as pragmatic alliance. Of course, Burlingame had hoped to find out a great deal more. But there were no Pozkitos around to study. So instead she studied the Americans.
She stole her observations furtively. There were two reasons for that. The secondary r
eason was that, with paper at such a premium, she hadn’t wanted anyone to learn that she still had a supply of 280-page Alwych all-weather notebooks, the very last of which she was now horrifyingly close to filling. But the primary reason was that if they found out they would probably be indignant and it would isolate her. At Cambridge it had been a commonplace to joke about studying the fellows at High Table as if they were headhunters, but the joke was funny only because everyone knew that anthropology was by definition the study of primitive peoples. All good fieldwork began with a brave man making a long journey into a dusky place. And she knew the Americans wouldn’t want to think of themselves as a tribe of that kind. Only once, so far, had she let slip what she was doing, and she still regretted it. She didn’t know what it was about Miss Calix that sometimes made her gabble herself into indiscretion.
That she was preoccupied with the assistant wardrobe ‘man’ this morning, however, was perfectly natural, because Calix had been absent from her cabin the previous night and seemingly hadn’t been seen by anyone at all since around sunset. Knowing there was no point raising the subject with Whelt and Yang, she congratulated them once more on their achievement and then excused herself.
Outside, clouds as slight as dandelion seeds speckled the whole sky. The first person she saw was Joe Hickock on his way downstairs. She knew he’d still be feeling sour about the disagreement last night. There were times when Burlingame wished she could just go quietly out into the forest and take care of the week’s foraging, gardening, hunting, and trapping for everyone at the camp, which would be so much less unpleasant than settling all these arguments about who wasn’t doing their share. Because that wasn’t quite feasible, however, she often had to play the umpire between two angry men who before long would hate her even more than they hated each other. Her first instinct this morning was to turn away fast enough that she could plausibly pretend not to have noticed Hickock. But conscientiousness forbade it.
‘A very good morning to you, Mr Hickock,’ she said. But he just nodded at her and carried on his way. Praying he wouldn’t make this too hard, she called after him, ‘Mr Hickock, I wonder if I could—’
‘What?’ He was a tall man whose eyes looked as if they were perpetually exhausted by the crushing weight of his brow.
‘I’m so frightfully sorry to hold you up but—’
‘You’re going to tell me I should be out looking for birds’ nests right now.’
‘No, Mr Hickock, not at all.’
‘So what is it this time? A ticket for littering? You’ve always got something to say, haven’t you, Burlingame? Always something. Can’t ever let anybody walk on by.’
Burlingame swallowed. ‘It’s only that Miss Calix hasn’t been seen since sunset yesterday and even if it’s not time for a search party yet I think we must all at least—’
‘You’re worried she might have had enough of all this. Done something about it.’
For a moment Burlingame didn’t understand what Hickock meant, and then with a chill she realised he was talking about suicide. She could no more imagine a girl as vivid and pretty as Calix choosing to annihilate herself than she could a butterfly flying deliberately into an oil lamp. Even if the possibility had ever occurred to her, she wouldn’t have been so crass as to raise the subject with Hickock, who had walked out into the jungle that night in 1944, and still carried himself like a man who never expected that failed attempt to be forgotten, almost in defiance of a community that might otherwise have been willing enough to forget it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I meant …’ She meant that Calix could have been mauled by a jaguar or bitten by a snake or tied to a tree by one of the New Yorkers. But she was now too mortified to finish her sentence.
‘You ever think that sometimes a person makes a decision? They make it, not you, and if you don’t like it, well, I’m so frightfully sorry, Miss Burlingame,’ Hickock said, imitating her accent, ‘but you can go fuck yourself. It’s their life. You’ve got no right. You think you’re everybody’s mother around here, but you ain’t. You stick your nose into every little thing that goes on, and nobody knows why, because you didn’t even come here with us, you’re just some old maid who we caught like a bad cold because the pricks over there wouldn’t have you. If the girl’s gone, let her go. You think I’m joining your fucking search party? Why can’t you just let somebody get what they want once in a while?’
Burlingame turned and fled up the steps.
She’d understood that her busybodying wasn’t always welcome. But she’d hoped that in the long run people saw that it was for the good of their little clan. To hear that she was resented so fiercely was to feel as if the temple had just been picked up and dropped on her. Even the words ‘old maid’ stung, which was silly. Yes, she was twenty-nine and it had been twelve years since her first and only kiss, but almost everybody here had put their private lives away in the icebox, because that was the nature of the expedition. (Moreover, she was alone more or less by choice: she knew she was plain, but there were so few ladies here that even she had endured plenty of passes over the years.) Behind those personal insults was the dreadfulness of what he’d implied about his desperate act a year and a half ago. Could it be true that he wished he hadn’t been fetched home by his friends? She’d always assumed that people who were saved from suicide were grateful for the rest of their lives. And then there was his beastly tone and language, as if she wasn’t worth anyone’s politeness, which made her so indignant she wanted to alert a policeman or at the very least a friend, but of course there was no one here who would care if she told them about it. She felt dizzy with the crashing plural hurt of it all. When she arrived panting at the upper terrace, she was relieved to find that there was no one else around, because she planned to sit there and weep until there was nothing left of Joan Burlingame but one of those little museum placards that read ‘EXHIBIT TEMPORARILY REMOVED’.
One thing was for sure. She was never, ever going to intervene in anybody else’s affairs again. Not without a written invitation. The last time Rusk’s rain-powered pulley system had been used, she noticed, the ropes had been left snagged up, but she certainly wasn’t going to do anything about it. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, wishing she was within fifty miles of a clean handkerchief. And then, faintly, from no direction she could identify, she heard a voice wailing for help.
*
‘I can’t think of anything else so I suppose that’s the end of the tour,’ said Coehorn later that day.
‘Thank you again,’ said Meinong. ‘This is a remarkable place.’ They were standing on a viny ridge that had a good view across the two-acre camp to the temple. At their backs the jungle grizzled and whined. This morning, after sleeping for something like fifteen hours, Meinong had awoken in the infirmary cabin afraid that somehow he was back at Erlösungfeld, and he was ashamed to recall that when the door creaked open he had cowered in his bed, expecting the next face he saw to belong to one of the farmers. But it was just Coehorn, the leader of this camp, coming in to check if he was awake. After that, sipping from a bowl of broth, Meinong asked several questions about where he was, but none of the answers made sense, so even though he felt as if he’d been shot, stuffed, mounted, and then shot again for good measure, he still insisted on getting up for a walk around the site with a borrowed cane at his side.
‘You know, that might be another way for Pennebaker to do it,’ said Irma.
‘Do what?’ said Pennebaker.
‘Sometimes if you want to figure out how to explain something you just need to wait until somebody new arrives and you’re showing them around. When Pennebaker’s in New York he could pretend he’s giving a tour just like you just gave Kurt. “Over here … On your left …” And they’d get a picture in their imaginations.’
