The Masters of Atlantis (30 page)

More fishermen passed by them, tramping across the sand with rods and buckets, heading in for the day. Hen nudged Mr. Jimmerson and again they laughed. The laugh was on the fishermen. Earlier in the afternoon a noisy party of these surf casters had walked heedlessly by, passing within inches of the magisterial feet, but taking no notice. Hen said, “The silly billies don't even know who we are. They think we're just two old turtles out here sunning ourselves.” Then he and Mr. Jimmerson could not help but laugh at the innocence of those men who would never know of their close brush with the two world Masters.

The two Masters did not go to the beach every night to look at the stars and strain to hear the Pythagorean music, so very hard to pick up over the sloshing noises of the Gulf, and all but impossible if the wind was up—if the wind was up you could pack it in for the night, as far as listening to the music of the crystalline spheres went—and Mr. Moaler did not go to the beach at all. The sand sticking to his wheelchair tires, the salt spray smearing his eyeglasses—this was not for him. What Mr. Moaler enjoyed was a good long game of dominoes, a series of games, with a little chat along the way about Atlantis or the Three Secret Teachers or how ancient peoples might have moved their big blocks of stone around, though not so much chat as to interfere with the flow of play. He liked steady play, with a short break at 10:15 P.M. to catch the weather report on television, and a longer one at around 1 A.M. for coffee and banana pudding. Mr. Moaler did not have cymbals on his wheelchair but he did have a bicycle bell, a thumb bell, and when he rang it three times play was ended for the night.

Hen and Mr. Jimmerson regarded all such games as a waste of time and of one's vital powers but Mr. Moaler was, after all, their host, and so they agreed to humor him and sit in on a few of these sessions. As their play improved, as they became quicker at adding up the little white spots and more adept at sliding the bones around, their resistance gave way and they came to look forward to these games. They too became keen on dominoes, on the variation called Fives or Sniff. Mr. Jimmerson said he didn't know what he had been missing. Hen said, “I think Pythagoras would approve. He tells us that everything is numbers and this is certainly true of Sniff!” Soon they stopped going to the beach. Almost every night the three elderly men could be found in the trailer, playing dominoes and talking until the early hours, with Babcock or Whit Gluter or one of Mr. Moaler's local friends making a fourth at the table.

Babcock welcomed these invitations to the big trailer, as he welcomed every opportunity to escape his own dormitory trailer. Life in the Red Room had been odd but trailer life was odd too. The built-in furniture was fixed in place for all time, welded or nailed into place, so that no woman without an acetylene torch or a crowbar could ever rearrange it. Just going in and out was odd. One moment you were altogether outside the trailer and the next moment you were altogether inside the trailer, with no landing or foyer to soften the passage. Once inside there was the smoke to contend with, from Maceo's cigar and from the cigarettes of Ed and Esteban and Lázaro, who lay about like Chinamen in an opium den, puffing away, watching game shows on television and listening to droning Mexican polkas on the radio. Ed, if that was who he truly was, was still lying low, as Ed. He did no work, he slapped on things to the beat of Mexican accordion music and he laughed and egged them on when Esteban and Lázaro shouted curses at one another. There was a running quarrel between the two that sometimes flared up in an ugly way. At other times they could be great pals, very playful, as when they teased Babcock and locked him out of the trailer and made grotesque faces at him with their noses and lips pressed against the windows.

Such conditions made it hard for Babcock to concentrate on his studies. Work on the new autobiography had bogged down. He had trouble finding essential papers and books. These materials were now all jumbled up outside in a big pile with the Temple furnishings. There was no place to store the stuff and it remained on the ground where it had been dumped, and heaped up into a mound about eight feet high, and covered, after a fashion, with clear plastic sheets. The sheets were anchored all around with rocks and books but they had a way of blowing loose in the night and flapping feebly over the summit of the Temple goods. It was a pyre awaiting the torch.

Teresita's trailer, the smallest of the Moaler fleet, was dark and quiet and would have been ideal for Gnomonic study but for the Gluters, who had been assigned sleeping quarters there. The old lady, Teresita, kept to herself, licking her trading stamps and sticking them into booklets. She went out in the morning to feed her two geese and to sweep the ground outside her door, this last business being almost involuntary. Something in her Mexican blood drove her, sick or well, to make those choppy broom strokes against the hard bare earth. In the evening she fed her geese again and tended her two flower beds, enclosed within two car tires. She glowered at Babcock but asked no questions. He found he could work in her trailer tolerably well, until the Gluters moved in. After that there was no peace.

A guest bed was available but the Gluters chose to sleep on the floor of Teresita's little sitting room, on straw mats that they carried about with them, rolling them out at night and rolling them up again in the morning and stowing them away in their ancient suitcase. The Gluters were drawn to the floor. All their counseling sessions, they said, were conducted with everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the afternoon there was more of this tatami rolling, when they had their naps, followed by sitting-up exercises. Adele directed the calisthenics. All through the day they were in and out of the trailer, with Adele's pigtail bouncing, and in and out of their big suitcase, forever buckling and unbuckling, with Whit, in a snarl of belts, trying hard to please but often getting things wrong.

It was an old black leather suitcase of crinkled finish, on each side of which was painted, with little skill, their name, thus: “THE GLUTERS,” in a green enamel that did not quite match the fine patina on the hinges and fittings. Babcock wondered about the quotation marks. Decorative strokes? Mere flourishes? Perhaps theirs was a stage name. Wasn't Whit an actor? The bag did have a kind of backstage look to it. Or a pen name. Or perhaps this was just a handy way of setting themselves apart from ordinary Gluters, a way of saying that in all of Gluterdom they were
the
Gluters, or perhaps the enclosure was to emphasize the team aspect, to indicate that “THE GLUTERS” were not quite the same thing as the Gluters, that together they were an entity different from, and greater than the raw sum of Whit and Adele, or it might be that the name was a professional tag expressive of their work, a new word they had coined, a new infinitive,
to gluter
, or
to glute
, descriptive of some new social malady they had defined or some new clinical technique they had pioneered, as in their mass Glutering sessions or their breakthrough treatment of Glutered wives or their controversial Glute therapy. The Gluters were only too ready to discuss their personal affairs and no doubt would have been happy to explain the significance of the quotation marks, had they been asked, but Babcock said nothing. He was not one to pry.

The Gluters annoyed him in many ways, not least with their insinuations that Hen stood just a bit higher in rank than Mr. Jimmerson. They dared to speak to the Master in a familiar way. They presumed to comment freely on the Telluric Currents, or on anything else. A nuisance, then, these Gluters, but Babcock could not in fairness blame them for the present state of things here at the new Temple, where nothing was going forward.

The Master never looked anything up these days and he kept putting off work on the new book. He seldom spoke of the Lag. There was little mention of Pletho. His only interests seemed to be dominoes and his afternoon cone of soft ice cream and the nightly weather news on television—the actual weather did not interest him, just the news. Each day more papers blew away from the Gnomon pile, lost forever, so many papers that the blizzard was remarked on by golfers out on the links who found strange pages stuck to their legs, and by other residents of La Coma, a town notable for its blowing paper.

No, the blame lay with Hen. It was Hen who had put a chill on things with his shrugs and smiles. Gnomon talk bored him. He professed not to understand the Jimmerson Lag. He treated these matters in a jocular, dismissive way and could not be engaged in serious discussion of any subject other than that of fresh fruit and goat's milk. He said over and over again that he no longer bothered to write books or, a much greater release, read them. “So very tiresome,” he said. “Such rubbish. Even the best of them are not very good. Far too many people expelling gas in public these days. Don't you agree, Morehead?” He seemed to suggest that Lamar Jimmerson and others would do well to follow his example.

With so little to do, Babcock took to lingering in bed under heavy medication, sunk in waves of smoke and accordion music that never died. And even there, in his own bed, he could not get away from Whit Gluter and his lank wife, Adele. There was an intercom system that connected all the trailers in the Moaler compound, and Adele used it frequently. She came on at all hours in a hissing blast of static, calling for Whit, telling Whit to report in, asking if anyone had seen Whit, passing on urgent messages for Whit. And, likely as not, Whit would be there, in the bunkhouse trailer, though he did not always respond to the calls. He would be talking to Ed or Lázaro or, at bedside, to Babcock, telling of the Gluter travels in Mexico—so many miles by bus, so many by train, exact figures, the bargain meals, the bargain rooms, the colorful villages, their names.

Whit's delivery was clear, for he had once been a movie actor before he married Adele and became a counselor, specializing in portrayals of informers, touts, pickpockets, eavesdroppers, treacherous clerks and the like, city sneaks of one stripe or another. He was a friendly fellow with a ready laugh, as became a counselor, but with his dark moods too. One morning, in a lull between bus stories, he began to squirm and dart his eyes about as he lapsed for a moment into one of his weasel screen roles. He said, “Uh, look here, have you been making eyes at Adele?”

Babcock could not have been more surprised had Whit suddenly burst into song. “No, of course not. What gave you that idea?”

“This, uh, note. Adele found it in her tatami.”

Babcock read the note, which ran:

“I didn't write this note, Whit. You can see that's not my handwriting.”

“Well, I didn't know. I couldn't be sure. I wouldn't want you to think you could break our marriage up.”

Later that same day Adele herself came by. She came to take Whit away for his nap. It was time to roll out the mats again. She stared at Babcock, already at rest. She stood over him, gathering her thoughts, then said, “You have no business looking down your nose at us. Oh, I know what you've been thinking. I'm not dumb. I know what you've been saying. The Gluters are silly. The Gluters are not refined people. I know what you've been saying behind our backs. You think I haven't heard it all before? From people like you? The Gluter woman is a hussy. Adele walks with too confident a stride. Even my gait is found offensive. Adele this and Adele that. Her hair. Her clothes. Whit is foolish. The Gluters are vulgar. Whit is henpecked. The Gluters could do with a bath. Well, what do you know about it? You know nothing whatever about our professional standing. How many radio talk shows have you been on, Mr. Know-it-all? You know nothing about the hundreds of interesting articles we have written or the thousands of successful encounter sessions we have conducted, helping people to expand and grow in many different directions and live their lives to the fullest, or even what personal goals we may have set for ourselves this year. Yes, and I've caught you ogling me, and let me tell you something, mister, you can just put those ideas right out of your head. I've told Whit about it and I've also complained to Sir Sydney. You think Whit is henpecked? It might surprise you to know that Whit sometimes spanks me with one of his sandals. How do you like that, Mr. Babcock? So you can just keep your love letters to yourself, thank you. No, we will not have an affair. You will never hold me in your arms. You and I, Mr. Babcock, will never go stepping out together and I want you to get that through your head once and for all. If you think you're going to break our marriage up you've got another think coming.”

This was Adele, roused. Babcock said nothing.

WHIT'S PHOTOGRAPHS of the reunion turned out to be dark splotches. There was to be a reenactment of the Masters' handshake, to be captured this time on fresh film, before the big dinner on Christmas day.

Popper came rolling in the day before Christmas, in a wheelchair. The chair was a windfall. His roommate at the hospital, an old man, had died, and Popper had bought the man's chair from the distraught widow. He gave her five dollars and said he would take it off her hands. There was nothing wrong with his legs, he could walk well enough, but he liked the idea of making an entrance on high spoked wheels. He would come home wounded in action. Esteban would push him up the ramp and into the trailer, and there he would sit hub to hub with Mr. Moaler, with a knitted shawl over his knees and his hands formally composed in his lap.

So he arrived, to warm greetings from Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Moaler. They plied him with questions about his injuries but showed only mild interest in his account of the Senate hearing, now such a remote event. Popper, sensitive to his audience, cut short the account, saying that the senators, after hearing the truth of the matter, had given him a unanimous vote of thanks for bringing Mr. Jimmerson to Texas.