by Paul Theroux
Father promised more marvels, but there was still wood to add to the structure proper, and still brickmaking to do.
“Where is the bricks, Fadder?” Mr. Maywit asked.
“You’re standing on them.” Father pointed his finger stump at the ground. “Clay! This is all bricks, just sitting there, waiting to be made!”
There was ironwork, too.
“The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo,” Father said. “A month ago, it was the Stone Age—digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We’re moving right along. It’ll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I’m planning to skip the twentieth century altogether.”
There was more plumbing in this than a waterworks, but the building went on smoothly. The new people were glad to do the work and liked listening to Father, who talked the whole time.
“One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century?” he said. “I’ll tell you the worst one. People can’t stand to be alone. Can’t tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say, ‘Please call me up!’ It’s sick. People hate their own company—they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that’s a clue to the whole thing—”
Most of the plumbing was bends—enough to make a cow crosseyed. Some of the bends were the fixed elbows we had brought from La Ceiba, and some we made in the forge. The forge was built with the first bricks, and the bellows (a simple fire was not hot enough) was two paddles and a leather bladder. Father saved his welding torch for finishing off each seal, because he did not want to waste the cylinder of gas. The sight of Father in his welder’s mask, his eyes darting in the mask’s window, with his gauntlets and his asbestos apron and his fizzing torch, fascinated the onlookers. And he kept talking, even with his mask on.
“Why do things get weaker and worse?” came the echoey small mask-voice, as if out of a conch. "Why don’t they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don’t have to—they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It’s despair to accept the senility of obsolescence—”
They liked his talk, but they loved the spray of sparks and the scabs of dead metal flying. They were astonished to see iron bars soften and drip like tar under the jet of blue flame.
The welding torch was one of Father’s toys. There were others—his Thunderbox and Atom-smasher, and even his simpler ones, like the Beaver, which machined and threaded pipes—a hand-operated jaw of his own making with a toothy mouth set off by clamps. They were toys to him, but magic to the others. When he took a rusty pipe, reamed it, bent it, gave it threads, and fitted it with so many elbows it looked like a crankshaft, everyone gathered to watch him. Then he was a sorcerer in his iron mask, transforming a hunk of scrap iron into a symmetrical part for the plumbing that was the stomach and intestines of the plant. He claimed that even with this basic equipment, he could make the simplest rod or pipe into the tiniest computer circuit.
“I could make microchips out of the thickest iron brick around. I could make dumb metal talk. That’s what computer circuits are—words and paragraphs in a primitive language. You don’t think of computers as primitive,” he said—he was speaking directly to Mr. Harkins—“but they are. They’re mechanical savages.”
He said he was making a monster. “I’m Doctor Frankenstein!” he howled through his welder’s mask. He called one set of pipes its lungs, and another its poop shaft, and two tanks, “a pair of kidneys.” He always spoke of the plant as “he”—“He needs a gizzard today,” or “This will fit straight onto his liver,” or “How’s this for his gullet?”
Harkins and Peaselee laughed at this and asked Father if his monster had a name.
Father said, “Tell them, Charlie.”
I remembered.
“Fat Boy,” I said.
Everyone whispered the name.
Jerry and the twins were surprised that I knew something they didn’t—not only its name but its purpose, how it worked, and what it would look like when it was done. They showed me some respect and for a while stopped calling me “Crummo” and “Spackoid.”
Even Mother was a little curious about how I came to know so much. I told her that I had seen the scale model. I remembered the morning Father and I had loaded the little Worm Tub onto the pickup truck and driven past the scarecrow to give Polski a demonstration—Father happy, then Father fuming, and the wooden chest gulping and producing a disk of ice in a tumbler. I remembered more than that—the rubber seal in Northampton, and the policeman, and Father saying, “No one ever thinks of leaving this country. But I do, every day!” And the Monkey House. And “It’s a disgrace.”
That was all far away, but seeing this towering windowless building at the edge of the clearing, I understood why we had come here—to build Fat Boy, to make ice.
This was the distant empty place that Father had always spoken about. Here he could make whatever he pleased and not have to explain why to anyone. There was no Polski here to say “Vumble, vumble.” Father said, “You look at Jeronimo and you can’t tell what century it is. This is part of your original planet, with people to match. And you’re wondering why I gave that missionary the bum’s rush?”
Father had found his wilderness.
But the people were afraid of Fat Boy. It started with Francis Lungley. He said he heard noises in it at night. Mr. Maywit said it had a smell, not a machine smell but something like tiger breath. “They’s bats inside,” Ma Kennywick said, which was true. “He got twenty-two eyes at night,” Mr. Haddy said, which was not true. They all watched it anxiously, as if it were a dangerous monster. No one would go inside unless Father went first, but Father had a habit of singing inside, and this frightened everyone. Mr. Harkins said one morning that it was gone. We ran out of the house and saw it was there. He said, “It just come back.” The Zambus still heard noises in it. They were voices. Witches, they said.
Father told them to calm down.
“This isn’t something to be afraid of,” he said. “It isn’t new. It isn’t even an invention.”
But they were still afraid.
“It’s a marvel, but it’s not magic. People call me an inventor. I’m not an inventor. Look, what am I doing here?”
“Spearmints,” Mr. Maywit said. He had got the word from Mr. Haddy.
“I’ll tell you what I’m doing—what anyone who invents anything is doing. I’m magnifying."
Hammering the shoulders of a boiler, talking as he worked, Father said that most invention was either adaptation or magnification.
“Take the human body,” he said. That contained all the physics and chemistry we needed to know. The best inventions were based on human anatomy. He himself had two patents on ideas he had plagiarized from the body—his Self-Sealing Tank and his Metal Muscle. He said there was no better piece of engineering than the ball-and-socket joint in the human hip. Computer technology was just a clumsy way of making a brain, but the central nervous system was a million times more complicated.
“Insulation? Look at fatty tissue!” You had to study natural things. Anyone who took a good look at an alligator or a hicatee could make an armored vehicle. The natural world showed man what was possible. In a world without birds there would be no airplanes. “Airplanes are just magnified sparrows—they’re crascos with leg room.”
The Zambus stared at Father, and the others listened twitchily to this man who the harder he worked the more he talked.
“What’s a savage?” he said. “It’s someone who doesn’t bother to look around and see that he can change the world.”
Everyone looked around and said this was so.
Father went on to say that savagery was seeing and not believing you could do it yourself, and that that was a fearful condition. The man who saw a bird and made it into a god, because he could not imagine flying himself, was a savag
e of the most basic kind. There were tribes of people who did not have the sense to build huts. They went around naked and caught double pneumonia. And yet they lived in the same neighborhood as birds that made nests and jack rabbits that dug holes. So these people were savages of utter worthlessness who did not have the imagination to come in out of the rain.
“I’m not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I’ll give you the best one I know. Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your sandwich. That’s about as low as you can go.”
Ma Kennywick’s laugh went heck-heck, and Mr. Haddy said he had never heard of cheese squirting out of a can.
“Like shaving cream,” Father said. “Comes out like Reddi-wip. Disgusting. The ozone layer? It eats it up. And there’s four things wrong with it—the processed cheese itself, the squirt, the can, and the sandwich.”
He was still hammering the boiler.
He said, “I never made anything that did not exist before in a similar form. I just chose something, or part of something, and made it bigger—like my valves and my Metal Muscle and my Self-Sealer. I got the idea from human anatomy—heart valves, striated muscle, stomach lining. Listen, I made gas tanks punctureproof! But it was just a question of scale and application, and—let’s face it—improvement. I mean, doing a slightly better job than God.”
Whenever Father mentioned God, the people in Jeronimo glanced at the sky and looked very guilty and ashamed, and squinted as if they expected thunder. Father saw this and changed the subject.
“People talk about the invention of the wheel. What’s so wonderful about the wheel? It’s nothing compared to ball bearings, but there are ball bearings in nature—you’ve got a rudimentary one in each hip! The development of lenses? All optical inventions are plagiarisms—of the human eye—though I admit the human eye is pretty inferior by comparison.”
Mr. Haddy said he had guessed that before. It was all eyes and noses going by different names. And the cranes and derricks on the pier at La Ceiba were the same as arms, except bigger and roustier.
“You’re getting the idea,” Father said. “And what’s this?”
He had finished hammering the boiler and was dragging it inside Fat Boy.
“That is a spearmint,” Mr. Haddy said. “And you ain’t catch me in there.”
“It’s a human’s insides,” Father said. “Its entrails and vitals. Its brisket. Digestive tract. Respiration. Circulatory system. Fatty tissue. And why build it? Because it’s an imperfect world! And that’s why I do what I do. And that’s why I don’t believe in God—stop looking up, people!—because if you can make improvements, that doesn’t say much for God, does it?”
But no one replied, and no one dared to go into Fat Boy alone. It was dark and too cool and full of iron pipes. No windows, the insulation made it clammy, its darkest corners muttered.
“It’s nothing to be scared of." Father said, looking at me. I knew what was coming. He buzzed a rivet at me. “Charlie’s not scared. Want to see him climb to the top?”
The faces in the clearing flashed at me like clocks.
“He wunt get out alive,” Francis Lungley said.
“That’s an ignorant remark,” Father said.
Clover said, “Dad, why is Charlie shaking like that?”
“Charlie is not shaking.”
So I had to obey.
I had been working the bellows. I dropped it and wiped my hands and looked at all the clock faces. They were saying three-fifteen with their worried squints, and I wondered why. Some were fixed on me, others on Father. If they had not looked so flat and fearful I would have felt better about going into Fat Boy. But they worried my guts.
I said, “Oh, rats,” and went in.
Father banged the door after me and cut off most of the daylight. All I could see, through the floor joists that had yet to be planked, was the sun shining dustily down between the cracks in the hatchway door.
It was like being in a monster body, under the cold lips of its stomach tank. Iron pipes rose sideways around the walls. Greasy with sealer and smelling of fresh welds, they had the egg stink of fart gas and meat turned to mud, and the slippery look of human waterworks. Where the cracks of sun lighted some rusty pipes, I could see how these reddened blisters looked like flesh. The smallest movement of my feet made a booming belly echo. Organs was a good word.
A week before, I had scaled the outside with ease. But this was my first time inside, alone, with the door shut, in the dark, making for the top. I gulped my panic and looked up—the way up was the way out. I started climbing the pipes, through the midsection, from the tanks Father called kidneys, across the rusty gizzard, to the steel tube he called the gullet. The only sounds that penetrated the walls were Clover’s and April’s yells as they played with the Maywit kids—in the sunshine.
There was no fluid in Fat Boy’s pipes. Because of the echo, it was like being in something gigantically dead. The shadows were cool twisted pipes that creaked as I climbed. I swung myself to a prickly grid that Drainy Maywit had made with his teeth, and crawled across it, finding my way with my fingers.
Just as I said to myself Don’t look down, I looked down. And kept looking. I recognized what I saw. This was no belly—this was Father’s head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind, as strong and huge and mysterious. It was all revealed to me, but there was too much of it, like a book page full of secrets, printed too small. Everything fitted so neatly and was so well bolted and finely fixed it looked selfish. I could see that it had order, but the order—the size of it—frightened me. Like the human body, he had said—but this was the darkest part of his body, and in that darkness were the joints and brackets of his mind, a jungle of crooked iron, and paunchy tanks hanging on thin wires, and soldered-over scars, tubes like vines in monkey shadow, the weight of metal hoses forking to the ceiling, and everywhere the balance of small hinges.
It made me dizzy. I could not understand enough of it to feel safe. I thought, You could die here, or—trapped inside—go crazy .
I fought for the door at the top and pushed it open. Below the hatchway were straw hats. Someone—not Father—screeched up at me. They set a ladder against Fat Boy and let me down, and they all looked at my face pretty worriedly.
“He ain’t bawling anyway,” Francis Lungley said.
“You’re next, Fido,” Father said, and hurried Lungley to the door. “In you go! Take your time—get acquainted!”
One by one he sent them in, slammed the door, and made them climb through the pipes to the top hatchway, so they would not be afraid, except Mrs. Maywit, Mrs. Kennywick, and the children. They said they were willing, but Father said, “That’s all that really counts—willingness.”
He said he was sending the people inside so that they would conquer fear, and I believed him. But I also guessed that he wanted to amaze them with his Yankee ingenuity and give them a glimpse of his mind—the model of it inside Fat Boy. As for me, I did not mention this. I knew what I had seen. And I was glad Father had bullied me into going inside. He was making me a man.
Everyone compared the experience with something different. Mr. Maywit said it was like being up the bell tower in the Dunker church. The Zambus said it was like a certain slate cave in the Esperanzas, and Mr. Harkins said he had had a dream like it once, but when he tried to explain, his voice cracked and tears came to his eyes. Mr. Haddy said, “Shoo! It like some of these banana-boat engine rooms. Boiler and narrers." Hearing all this, Jerry fussed to go in, but Father refused.
“I hope you all admired that mesh over the evaporator lungs,” Father said. “That nice piece of work was Drainy’s doing.”
Drainy had fixed the mesh with his teeth, making it the way he made his wire toys, with clips and clasps and fastenings that he gnawed into place and pinned with his molars.
“And as you might have noticed, Fat Boy isn’t breathing,” Father said.
“That’s why I wanted you to see him now, before he’s got some life in him. Then he’ll be dangerous and off limits. He’s going to have work to do, and we don’t want anyone traipsing around his guts then.”
The smooth mahogany planks of the enormous icehouse caught the green and gold of the sun in the jungle clearing and glowed like skin.
“You won’t believe what this old boy can do.”
Father was proud of it and glad there were people here as witnesses. No one doubted him, or anything he made. He liked leading us around in the morning, from the pump at the river to the bathhouse and through the fields, pointing out how trim everything was, the water gushing and wheels turning and the hybrids shooting up and vegetables heavy on the plants. We walked along paths we had paved, past plants we had planted.
What Father had promised the first day in Jeronimo was now there for everyone to see—food, water, shelter. It was all as he predicted, but more orderly and happier than we had imagined. And on these early-morning inspections, he took Mother by the arm and spoke to everyone by speaking to her.
He called this notch in the jungle a superior civilization. “Just the way America might have been,” he said. “But it got rotten and combustible. Greed panicked the worst into doubledipping, and the best fell victim to the system.”
The Zambus didn’t know what he was talking about, but they liked the way he talked. He could make them laugh by shouting, “Rheostats! Thermodynamics! The undistributed middle!”
He said, “I was the last man left.”
But even when he was not talking for fun, I had to keep my head down or he’d say, “What are you grinning at, Charlie?”
Yet who wouldn’t grin at some of the things he said?
“We’ve got to keep our traps shut,” he would say, “or everyone and his brother will be down here on top of us, all the movers and shakers, opening gas stations and drive-in movies and fast-food joints. Issuing catalogues. Oh, sure, they’d strap a facility here and another facility over there. Sock a K-Mart next to Fat Boy and get the floating buyers. And you can bet your bottom dollar they’d find room for a Toyota dealership up on the Swampmouth path. This would be all parking lots from here to the hills. Facilities! They’d be ramming them down our throats.”
