The Masters of Atlantis (22 page)

It was late at night and once again Popper was sitting before the fireplace in the Red Room with a proposal for Mr. Jimmerson. Three fifty-pound bags of grapefruit, a gift, lay at his feet. He showed photographs of La Coma with its palm trees and little oxbow ponds. There was a dim picture of Mr. Morehead Moaler in his wheelchair, holding what appeared to be a basketball in his lap. Babcock was tending the fire and listening intently, as in court, without looking at either party, his face impassive. So this was Popper. These were his words. Trucks were blatting on the freeway and at intervals Ed could be heard laughing in the kitchen. He, Maceo and Esteban were back there watching television.

Mr. Jimmerson said, “Pletho tells us we should all sleep in our own beds.”

“Beds, yes,” said Popper. “He says nothing about reclino chairs.”

“I just don't see how it can be done, Austin. I don't see how the Master can leave the Temple.”

“By simple decree.”

“But isn't travel largely nonsense?”

“Travel is total nonsense. It's a great fraud. Our old friend Zeno tells us that motion is impossible—and proves it, the Greek scoundrel! Well, I can't go that far. I can't go along with Zeno all the way on that, but I do know that travel is one of the greatest hoaxes of our time. But look here, sir, what I'm talking about is not travel as such. We're not going on a sightseeing tour. What I'm talking about is a new life in the sun.”

“No, I'm afraid it's too late for me, Austin. I don't see how I could ever leave the Temple. There's too much work left here to do.”

“Excuse me, but I don't see a Temple. I see a shell. I see red silk peeling from the walls. You're buried alive here, sir, in the world's noisiest tomb. How can you talk of work with those trucks out there going like the hammers of Hell? Look, our eyes are watering from the fumes. The very air is evil. I don't think you realize what's happened. The Telluric Currents have shifted away from Burnette and nothing can prosper here. Look at Bulmer Avenue. Do you remember how it used to be? Now it's a street of bums and juvenile bullies. On every block you can see a twelve-year-old boy holding a six-year-old boy in a headlock. No, sir, I respectfully beg to differ. I can't see a Gnomon Temple.”

Popper's homecoming celebration had been subdued, at his own request. He told Mr. Jimmerson and Maceo that he would take it as a favor if they would not press him closely with questions about the recent past, his memory being faulty and a source of continuing embarrassment. But Mr. Jimmerson did ask him about Meg. Popper said he had never known a woman of that name and was pretty sure he had not been married. Would he not recall such an experience? Nor could he remember any trip to Rainbow Falls. Had he actually been here in the Temple since the war, the big war? Incredible! Not just some astral projection? Amazing! He couldn't recall any such visit.

Mr. Jimmerson brought him up to date on
Hoosier Wizard
and the Jimmerson Lag. Popper made a great fuss over the Lag, praising the grandeur of it, and at the same time expressing surprise that the numerical value of this cosmic slack should be so small—only six-tenths of one percent, and a little more.

They talked of bygone days. Popper fell into a confessional mood. “I haven't had a drink in five years,” he said. He spoke of his shame and his wasted years as a drunken bum. Since the war he had drifted aimlessly about the country, a burden on society, guzzling rum when he could get it. He had been in and out of jails and hospitals. He had been on the road living a life of stupor, filth, irregular meals and no certainty of shelter from one night to the next. Pedestrians in many cities had been obliged to step over him as he lay curled up on the sidewalk wearing four shirts, three sweaters and multiple layers of verminous trousers, the cuffs bound tight at the ankles with rubber bands, so that he was sometimes taken for a downed cyclist. Five years ago he had found himself in a charity hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. The doctors told him he had collapsed in a city park with a heart attack and had been brought gasping to the emergency room by a kind policeman.

“I think it was really more of a head attack,” he said. “I wasn't exactly off my rocker, but my memory, feeble enough before, was now shattered altogether. They said I wasn't getting enough oxygen to my brain. Just the odd bubble now and then, as I understand it. Well, not shattered altogether, because I knew my name and there were certain dim but familiar figures that kept appearing in my dreams—not least yours, sir, though I couldn't place you nor understand the significance of your conical cap. But on the whole all was a merciful blank. They were very good to me there in that hospital, pauper that I was. The doctors got me back on my feet with blood-thinner pills. My blood was like tar and I thought I was down for the count. They told me to lay off the Crisco and stay away from salt. Did you ever try to eat mashed potatoes and gravy with no salt? A mule wouldn't eat it. But those doctors got me on my feet, God bless them, and then the nurses put me on to a group of recovered alcoholics. More good people. They took me in and introduced me to their methods. The doctors grudgingly admit that those methods work, where their medico methods fail, but the spiritual aspect bothers them. They don't like any system that doesn't involve pills and injections. But credit where credit's due. First the doctors saved my life and then those people saved it again. I haven't had a drink in five years. They restored my selfesteem. In six months I was a new man, wearing a clean shirt and holding down a good job selling bonds over the telephone from a boiler room. I discovered I had a knack for selling things, a gift for hopeful statement combined with short-term tenacity of purpose. But I wouldn't stay hitched. I had a comfortable life and yet something was lacking. I jumped around a good deal. I tried my hand at real estate, selling beachfront lots out of an A-frame office in a patch of weeds. I sold used cars. ‘Strong motor.' ‘Cold air.' ‘Good rubber.' Those were some of the claims I made for my cars, or ‘units,' as we call them in the business. I bought fifty-weight motor oil by the case. Then for a time there I had a costume shop downtown. It was seven feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet deep and poorly lighted. My stock was army surplus stuff and little bellboy suits and Santa Claus suits and animal heads and rubber ears and such. I had more uniforms than Hermann Göring and sometimes for a bit of fun I would wear one myself out on the sidewalk to attract attention. Go through a few drill steps. ‘Jackets, bells and Luftwaffe shells!' I cried. ‘While they last!' Then I saw another opportunity and sold out to an Assyrian. They like to be on Main Street. The lighting is not a big thing with them. He beat me down on the price but I left a few surprises for Hassan in the inventory. That's when I set up Bigg Dipper, a little operation dealing in oil and gas leases. Small potatoes, you understand, but my own show. That's when I bought my motor home, which is not a luxury but an important business tool. All this time things were coming back to me. No flood of light now, don't get me wrong. I couldn't arrange these events in a consecutive way, and still can't, but I was getting back bits of my past. Little vignettes. Here's an example. The worst block was the 1950s. I had lost that entire decade. Ten years of murk. President Eisenhower? You might as well ask me about John Quincy Adams. Then one morning there at sunrise in Corpus I had a vivid 1950s memory. It was another ocean sunrise in Miami. It was the summer of 1956 and I was in a car with another bum named Dorsey LaRue. Some bums have cars. We had nothing better to do and we were on our way to Detroit to see about getting an advance peek at the 1957 De Sotos but we never made it. We never got out of Miami. Dorsey took his eyes off the road to get a better station on the radio, or maybe to tune in the one he had more clearly, or even to shut it off altogether, I don't know, but he lost control of the car and we smashed into a twenty-four-hour laundromat, scattering night workers and early risers. I remembered that brief motor trip and I remembered James Wing in San Francisco and how kind he was to me. What a gentleman! A hard worker too but he was never really able to get oriental Gnomonism off the ground. I remembered playing fan-tan with James Wing and Dan Soo and Ernie Zworkin. Ernie was the last man in the phone book until Victor Zym hit town out of the blue and nudged him back a space. I remembered riding across the desert stretched out on that long seat at the back of a bus. That was before they put a toilet back there in the corner. There was a newspaper over my face with a headline—I can still see it—that said PREGNANT MOM WITH BAT SENDS 4 PUNKS PACKING. I remembered stealing a banana and getting mixed up with some left-wing women, and then later with a three-hundred-pound doctor named Symes who was trying to put a book together called
Slimming Secrets of the Stars
with a writer named Polton and two promoters named Constantine Anos, unfortunate name, though apt enough, and Dean Ray Stuart. Dean, I should say, was his given name, and he was never, to the best of my knowledge, the chief officer of a college or cathedral, and neither was he connected, as far as I know, to the royal house of Scotland. I doubt if Dean Ray got through the sixth grade. With that bony ridge over his eyes and his mouth ajar he looked like Java Man. He was a publisher but he confided to me once that the only book he had ever read through to the end was Polton's
Billy on the Farm
, as a special favor to Dub, and even there he skipped around some. And his breath. How could I forget that? It would have killed a small bird, I give you my word of honor. You had to fall back a step or two when Dean Ray was confiding. The usual rotten air but with a fishlike tang I've never run into before. What a crew! And the Ivy twins, Floyd and Lloyd, with their matching outfits, always laughing, at the least little thing, and breaking into laughter at the same instant, a dead heat. They looked at each other when they laughed and they opened so wide you could see those little pink flappers at the back of their throats. They were inseparable, I'm telling you, Chang and Eng, and great laughers. Those simultaneous peals haunt my dreams. What a gang! The past, you see, was coming back to me. Now this brings us up to last September when the brain circuits really began to crackle. I was at my luncheon club in Corpus. We meet on Thursdays at the Barling Hotel. Before we sat down to eat I was introduced to the speaker for that day, a state legislator. It was Senator Morehead Moaler, Jr., or ‘Junior' Moaler or ‘Big Boy' Moaler. Some call him one thing and some the other. Buys all his clothes at the big man's shop. Well, that name rang a bell, or no, it was more like a detonator went off in my head. Suddenly I remembered you, sir, and Maceo. I saw you here in the Red Room. Squanto was up there on the mantel listening to us in his customary attitude, one of perplexity. Bits of my Gnomon past came to me and I saw Gnomon words swarming visibly before my eyes like bees. I remembered that Morehead Moaler had led our strongest Pillar in Texas and I said to myself, Texas is a big state but how many Morehead Moalers can there be here? Well, at least two as it turned out, for Big Boy was the son of our own Morehead Moaler of La Coma, Texas. I was in contact again! I saw what was lacking in my life. I had been cut off all those years from Gnomonism and the Jimmerson Spiral. I sounded Big Boy out and found he didn't know the first thing about the Gnomon Society, and had no wish to know. He was not a friendly man. When I told him I was in oil he said his first guess would have been grease. But he did arrange for me to meet with his father and I went down to La Coma to pay my respects. What a grand old man! Such pep! So full of fun! He was in his wheelchair and he was wearing his Gnomon sash when he received me there at his beautiful estate. It's right next to the La Coma Country Club, just off the eighth green. Oh, he spoke highly of you, sir, and he was kind enough to remember my work for the Society in the 1930s, which was more than I could do. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘My life is an open book, Popper,' which was more than I could say. So many chapters better left sealed. We recited the Gnomon Preamble together. I faltered badly but that wonderful old fellow was letter perfect. Do you know what Mr. Moaler thought, sir? He thought he was the last Gnomon. Can you believe it? He thought we were extinct fauna, you and I. His own Pillar had dwindled down to just himself and he feared that you had either passed on or become unhinged. He said he had heard nothing from the Temple in recent years. None of his letters had been answered.”

Mr. Jimmerson said, “Well, I don't know what to say to that, Austin. Maceo tells me that the boys sometimes steal mail from our box. But I can't say. I may have his letters back there somewhere. Maurice is helping me catch up on my correspondence. I always wanted to meet Morehead. If only we had had a hundred Morehead Moalers.”

“You can and will meet him, sir. Wait till you spring the Lag on him. I want to be ringside for that. Let me tell you about him. So gracious! His gentle humor! His keen glance! We had lunch on the patio, just the two of us, outside the big house. There's a big house and then all around in back there are guest houses. We ate our shrimp salad and strawberry shortcake and listened to sweet little voices raised in song. There were small children out on the grounds having a picnic and when they saw Mr. Moaler they came to their feet and sang to him. After lunch I rolled him around over the estate. It's like a resort, with palm trees and tropical flowers. Did I tell you he made his fortune in sand and gravel? We fed his ducks. I've never seen happier fowls. We had a long talk. We began to confide in one another. He asked me if his son, Senator Junior Moaler, had not struck me as a swaggering moron. Well, what was I to say? After some hesitation I agreed that he had struck me so. A test, you see. Mr. Moaler was testing my honesty. My answer pleased him and he chuckled there in his delicate way beneath the rustling fronds. It was a light note, but not, to my way of thinking, out of place. You see what terms we were on.”