Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘But nobody made a note of what I was saying just now, and I don’t think I could do it so well a second time,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Excuse me, but did I just hear you say that Mr Pennebaker is going to New York?’ said Meinong.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Coehorn. ‘They must be wondering what’s become of us so we’re going to soothe their curiosity.’

  ‘Will he be coming back?’ He kept his tone even.

  ‘No,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pennebaker. The man reminded Meinong of a buck-toothed and clerkish old colleague of his at Location D: when he made some trivial correction, he did his best to be casual about it, not because he understood that you didn’t remotely care, but on the contrary because he assumed you’d be humiliated by your error and thought he was helping you save face. ‘I’ll have to make sure the supplies are delivered here safely,’ Pennebaker continued. ‘Kerosene, rifles, disinfectant …’

  ‘Gramophone records, cognac, pajamas …’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Carpentry nails, bandages, prescription eyeglasses …’ said Pennebaker.

  ‘Lipstick, Benzedrine, the New Yorker …’ said Irma.

  ‘And of course enough funnel cakes to fill Carnegie Hall!’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Kurt probably doesn’t know what a funnel cake is,’ said Irma.

  ‘It’s a type of cake,’ explained Coehorn. ‘Pennebaker loves them, don’t you, Pennebaker? He cries himself to sleep every night because it’s been so long since he last ate a funnel cake.’

  Pennebaker did not smile so much as winch his lips into a mirthless cringe. Waving away a botfly about the size of a canelé, Meinong noted that many of the stouter blocks of limestone from the Mayan ruin above had been put to use here as side walls or mezzanines, so that the random positions in which they’d been abandoned by the savages eight years ago had been allowed to determine the whole plan of this holiday camp. He did not think it likely that the Russians in Berlin would be quite so lackadaisical about the rubble of Speer’s marvelous Reichskanzlei. Back when he was traveling through Puerto Cortés with forged Swiss papers, he had been trapped into sharing the only available taxi outside his hotel with an American businessman. Unprompted, the businessman started talking about the steamship voyage he was about to take to Europe. He made his living as an exporter of agricultural tools, but his largest buyer, the United Fruit Company, had just switched over to another company who claimed their ‘hygienic’ equipment would retard the spread of a leaf blight called white sigatoka. So he was going to try his luck in Berlin, where he thought there would be a robust market once all the factories were pulled down and the workers returned to the countryside. After this second offense, he said, the world would surely never again allow the German people to do anything but till their land like medieval peasants.

  ‘Hey, look,’ said Irma. ‘The temple – something’s going on up at the top.’

  ‘Is it another magical fairy flying off into the empyrean?’ said Coehorn. ‘Don’t waste my time. I’ve still got a crick in my neck from yesterday evening.’

  ‘No, it looks like they’re coming down this way.’

  The other three followed her gaze. Irma was right. Two men were being lowered like window-washers down the face of the temple, although at this point their platform was still only a few feet from the top. ‘If it were after dark I’d say it was another incursion by stealth,’ said Coehorn. ‘But they’re in plain view.’

  ‘Come on, Elias,’ said Irma. She and Coehorn hurried off for a closer look, perhaps forgetting that Meinong couldn’t keep up on his shaky legs.

  When the other two were out of earshot, Pennebaker said, ‘You know, I’ve never eaten a funnel cake. Never in my whole life.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve never even seen a funnel cake. I’ve tried pretty hard to remember what I might have said to make Mr Coehorn think I loved funnel cakes so much but I still don’t know.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to correct his misapprehension?’

  ‘I did once but he thought I was just embarrassed about the teasing.’

  ‘Will you sample one of these funnel cakes when you are in New York?’

  ‘I never thought of that. Do you think I should?’

  Meinong shrugged. ‘How soon do you expect to get back here?’

  ‘It shouldn’t take me more than a couple of months, depending. I’m especially looking forward to finding out what happened in the war. Everybody wants me to bring back some news. I mean, we all appreciate hearing about it first-hand from you, we really do, but my brother’s in the army and I want to know where he got sent off to fight. By now he probably speaks a little German! I don’t mean any offense, but I never would have thought there’d be a German-American Alliance, not after the last war. But I guess that was just a disagreement among cousins – whereas you take the Russians, or the Japanese …’

  Pennebaker burbled on. Meinong’s estimate was that each of these witless Yanks had once possessed at least a respectable intelligence but then voluntarily renounced it: Coehorn because it had complicated his egotism, Irma because in the long run the least exasperating way to maintain their friendship had been to abase herself to Coehorn’s level, and Pennebaker out of servility to the other two. He wondered who was really running the place. Tomorrow he would find someone to give him a proper tour of the camp on the staircase. Aside from a few of the bamboo scaffolds propping up the huts at the very bottom, which were dug into the earth just below, that camp had never been allowed to overspill the temple itself. To stand at the bottom and look up at the steps was like the approach by boat to one of those coastal villages in the Cinque Terre with the terraces stacked picturesquely on a rugged slope. Whether he decided to settle up there or down here, he believed this could be a better sanctuary than Erlösungfeld. At least if there were no disruptions. He regarded Pennebaker for a moment and then hobbled on.

  *

  When she’d opened her eyes in the night to see a skull grinning back at her, Calix had understood right away that she’d entered the country of the dead. But then dawn had come, and she’d reached out to snap an incisor from the skull’s crumbling jaw just to prove to herself that in fact she’d been turned back from that country at the border.

  It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing. That was what people always said. And she’d had no fall to speak of, but a hell of a lot of landing to make up for it.

  This was what must have happened: hours earlier, as she’d shuffled to the edge of the temple, a lasso of rope from Rusk’s rigging had crept up around her ankle, and she’d been in such a mess she hadn’t even noticed. The upper tackle, which hadn’t been stowed properly the last time it was used, had about fifteen feet of loose rope left in it before the truckle hit the brake. So when she leaped off, the thrilling interval of weightlessness or flight had only lasted an onionskin of an instant before the line went taut and she felt a jerk on her left leg and then she was swinging back down towards the temple in a vertical arc like a wrecking ball on a chain. By the time she smashed into the limestone, her kneecaps, which hit first, were above her face, which hit second. How many times she might have bounced, she couldn’t know, because she was knocked out by the impact. She was left dangling against the temple like a cliff-climber whose abseil had gone unspeakably awry.

  Later, in the moonlight, she moved in and out of a half-doze with no sense of time passing. All her blood had thickened in her head like the last of the catsup, except for some she could feel crusting over in her eyes. Her entire body was in such a tremendous amount of pain that for a long while her state of suspension upside down by one ankle nearly two hundred feet off the ground seemed, in comparison, barely worth mentioning. In particular, her left leg felt like more break than bone, and her right leg had nothing to support it, so she tried to prop it up against the cool stone at her side, but every time it slipped off, its useless weight ripped at her thigh muscles until she thought she wa
s going to retch over her own face again.

  When she was more awake, she mewled with all her strength, but she was no louder than a bird call in a night full of bird calls. Even before the sun set she would have been hard to make out against the notchy surface of the temple’s front elevation, and now she was as good as invisible. The next time she lost consciousness might not be the last, but one of these times probably would be. The longer her bowels pressed down on her lungs, the harder it was to breathe; that was what killed you, she knew, if the Romans crucified you upside down like Saint Peter.

  She needed to get back up onto the temple. And of course one thing she did have, the only thing she did have, was a rope. But she hadn’t climbed a rope since she was a kid, and kids can climb anything. Also, that was with her little feet scrabbling under her. She’d never tried to climb a rope with just her hands. Even to do that, she would have to jackknife in half at the abdomen to get her hands up as high as her left ankle, where the rope started. She knew before she tried it that she wouldn’t have the strength, but she tried anyway. The exertion made her snarl like a woman in labor and she still couldn’t hoist her torso up even the tiniest distance or get her hands anywhere near the rope.

  ‘Emmy,’ she said, and hung there gasping for a while.

  It made her think of the Chaplin movie where he got hoisted upside down from the bunting at the opening ceremony for the department store, except it wasn’t as funny. She realised that if she could walk her hands up the side of the temple, she would be levering herself inch by inch with mostly her arm muscles instead of clenching herself up all at once with mostly her stomach muscles. There were plenty of handholds in the broken masonry. However, she saw the problem with that as soon as she made a preliminary attempt. Usually when you were climbing a wall you kept most of your weight on your feet while you were making progress with your hands, but, short of hanging by her toes like a monkey, she couldn’t use her feet upside down. So she would have to brace her forehead against the temple to take some of the weight off her arms. Even if she found a few hospitable ledges, this was going to get harder and harder as she went on, because as her torso ratcheted from vertical to horizontal, she wasn’t going to be resting her head on the wall so much as just jamming it against the wall crown-first, relying mostly on friction between limestone and matted hair. And when her head inevitably slipped, her arms alone wouldn’t be strong enough to hold her up, so she would just flop right back down, and her entire body weight would yank against her left leg again. Just the thought was enough to make her whimper aloud in horror.

  She should just dangle there until either the rope broke or she passed out for good.

  No, she shouldn’t, because she didn’t know how long that was going to take, and in the meantime this pain wasn’t going to go away. The climbing wasn’t impossible, after all. It could certainly be done. By a circus acrobat. After some practice.

  She started again, hand over quivering hand, in earnest this time but more aware with every passing second that this was not going to work.

  Then she found the gap.

  At first it felt like just an especially large cranny. But as she groped further into it, she realised it had to be part of the architecture of the temple. It was deep enough that she couldn’t reach the back with the tips of her fingers, tall enough that she hadn’t found its ceiling yet, and maybe about eight or nine inches wide.

  This loophole was wide enough for her head but not her shoulders, so she would only fit if she came at it as if she were lying on her side. If she wedged herself in there, and if there was enough slack in the rope, she might be able to turn a slow cartwheel until she was the right way up, gaining a little elevation in the process. She still wouldn’t necessarily have the strength to climb back up to the terrace, but at least she wouldn’t be hanging by her ankle any more, and she might get within reach of the rope without having to fold herself in half. Every so often there came that distant popping, like firecrackers, that you heard more and more often these days when you were high enough on the temple for the sound to reach you. The small fraternity in the Hearts in Darkness crew who had seen active military service were insistent that it was gunfire coming from somewhere in the jungle, but there was still debate because gunfire seemed so hard to account for.

  She put the palm of her left hand flat on the floor of the gap, and then straightened her arm to jack up her torso, because the higher she entered, the more rope she’d have to spare. By the time she locked her elbow straight, enough of her weight was on that arm to make it tremble under her. With her right hand, she felt inside the gap for a handhold on the wall, and when she’d found one that seemed good enough, she started to drag herself head first into the darkness. A mosquito settled on the caruncle of her eye, which was suddenly so sensitive that she was sure she could feel the mosquito shifting its weight from foot to foot like a golfer as it got ready to bite. This was another irritant to be ignored, just like the survival instinct warning her not to get into a space so small that she might not be able to get out again, which in any case had fallen silent as soon as all her other survival instincts rounded on it with fury in their eyes.

  She stuffed herself inside until she was up to her waist, and soon began using her elbows to work her torso higher, keeping her shoulders at a diagonal against the vice of the walls so that she couldn’t slip. Her intention had been to rotate until she was head over heels, but long before that there came a point when she was close enough to prone that almost none of her weight was on the rope around her ankle any more. For the first time, as the blood flowed back in, her left leg could relax into its desolation, and a sensation went through it that was a type of pain the same way the temple was a type of bird’s nest. She passed out again, and it wasn’t until a few hours later, when the setting moon shone directly into the gap, that she woke up and got acquainted with the skull in its shiny helmet.

  ‘You got any brothers or sisters, Miss Burlingame? Younger ones?’

  ‘No. Nor elders. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because if you did, I expect you’d know you can’t give someone a bath without looking at them.’ Burlingame blushed, and Calix felt a little wicked for making fun of her, but the situation was undeniably ridiculous: while she lay there naked under a sisal blanket, Burlingame was sponging the sweat off her bruises with her eyes averted. ‘You ever tried to wash a dish without looking at the dish?’

  ‘In any given week I wash quite a number of dishes in almost complete darkness.’

  ‘Besides, you oughtn’t to be going to the trouble. I’d say you did your good deed for the day when you heard me chirping in my nest and got me rescued.’ It was midmorning, and about twenty-four hours had passed since Calix had been brought here half-conscious. Outside the hut she could hear voices and she wondered if she were a subject of gossip.

  ‘Well, I can scarcely ask one of the men to do it. Anyway, they say the German fellow who came into the other camp was given the best of care. It wouldn’t do to let them show us up. How do you feel now?’

  ‘Like I got one of those Swedish massages from every man, woman and child in Sweden. But better than before.’ Her nurse was so proper that Calix couldn’t resist prickling her some more. ‘You still aren’t looking. You keep missing spots.’

  Burlingame swallowed and ran her tongue from left to right between her lower lip and her teeth, then very deliberately, as if recalibrating an observatory telescope, turned her gaze down towards Calix’s torso. This venture was so visibly costly to Burlingame that straight away Calix felt remorseful for making her do it, and even, for no good reason, a little ashamed of her nakedness.

  She’d brought a miserable silence upon the both of them. And the motion of the sponge had changed, as if Burlingame was now trying to pretend it wasn’t warm flesh she was varnishing but only some sort of furniture. Calix put most of it down to Burlingame’s native prudish qualities, but all the same it wasn’t the most reassuring feeling in the world to have someone react wi
th such squeamishness to your injured body. To fill the silence as the sponge bath entered its abdominal chapter, she said, ‘What were you doing up there, anyway? Up at the top of the temple. You never said.’

  ‘Just collecting my thoughts.’

  ‘Quiet up there, isn’t it? And the view’s peachy.’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘They should install a set of those nickel binoculars.’

  They were both aware that quite soon the bedsheet was going to have to fall below Calix’s hips. Calix wasn’t sure why this awareness should weigh so heavily, but it did. ‘What about you?’ Burlingame said, dipping the sponge in the bucket again. ‘Before you fell?’

  Calix smiled. ‘That’s nice of you, Miss Burlingame.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nice of you to pretend. But there really isn’t any obligation.’ She was getting goosebumps on her stomach, and although she didn’t think there was anything inherently licentious about goosebumps, she still wished to God they would retract.

  ‘You’re talking quite over my head, I’m afraid,’ said Burlingame.

  ‘I’m sure everyone knows why I went up there and everyone knows I didn’t just fall.’

  The sponge was now almost at Calix’s pubic bone.

  ‘If you were incautious of the height and you leaned out too far that’s no reason to—’

  ‘I jumped,’ said Calix.

  The sponge halted.

  From the anguish on her face it was clear that Burlingame wished her fiction could have been maintained for just a little longer. ‘You had a … moment of madness.’

  ‘It wasn’t just a moment.’

  ‘But of course now you’re glad you were saved,’ Burlingame said, her voice on a tightrope.