Ship of Fools - Chapter 2
The Collector
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
[Go to the Table of Contents.]
Welcome back to Ship of Fools and thanks for reading!
In Chapter 1, we met Liz Dare as she covered the Conspira-C Cruise. Both she and Lonnie Ester kept referring to a story of hers from last summer, one that jarred her sense of herself as a hard-headed debunker. Now we’re in a flashback to that summer, as she travels through the desert to meet the source for that story.
THE CAR coasted down the slope of yet another range of craggy, arid hills into yet another desert plain, nothing but creosote bushes and ATV tracks and solar panels stretching to a horizon undulant with yet farther mountain ranges. Inside her glass and chrome enclosure, Liz gazed out at the bleak landscape with a mixture of tedium and dread. It was hard to accept the existence of such an expanse hostile to human life. But it should have been no surprise, the planet having become measurably more hostile to life in recent years. The car’s thermometer read 110, about average for such a summer’s day.
She should have flown into Las Vegas for this assignment, not LA. The little town of Tecopa was just an hour and a half from that one-time gambling mecca, out past the red rocks of Red Rock Canyon State Park and the legal brothels in Pahrump, then over the state line into California and the southern borders of Death Valley. And not that far from Area 51, as she’d noted when the source contacted her and gave his location for this meeting.
But she’d wanted to visit her mother in Los Angeles. If she was going to travel this far anyway, the extra drive seemed worth it. Sid, her editor, had approved the additional mileage, and it would be her first visit since her mother had moved from Michigan, seeking a respite from slushy winters and muggy, mosquito-infested summers.
Great time to retire to the coast, mom, when most people were heading the other way. But her mother could afford it, with her university 403-b and the killing she’d made on her Ann Arbor house. Property in Rancho Palos Verdes was coming down, even if the price for water was stratospheric. Mom had found a house high up on a bluff, far enough back from the cliff face that she needn’t worry about it slipping over the edge during her lifetime. She could sit out by the empty pool and watch the rising blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean for hours.
After a weekend sipping gin and tonics under a shade umbrella on her mother’s deck, shopping in nearly empty malls, and eating what she suspected was third-rate Mexican food at La Casa de Amigos, Liz headed out early that morning, a Monday, her eagerness for the adventure quickly quashed by the ruin of LA, the abandoned housing tracts and shuttered, nameless factories of the eastern basin, the foothills with their ranks of empty warehouses and vacant parking lots surrounding boarded-up big-box stores, a few tattered plastic bags clinging to the resurgent sage scrub and chapparal. Los Angeles, the metropolis built on stolen water, then ended by it when the climate, not to mention surrounding states and autonomous zones, had grown alternately stingy and profligate.
And then hours crossing the desert to the hamlet in the middle of nowhere. She’d even spotted a mirage, the shimmering heat waves turning the desert basin into a vast, blue lake. Just another trick of the mind and the physics of light, yet she had to consciously push back the urge to redirect the car toward that water. How cool it would be! It looked crystal clear and pure from here. She resisted those thoughts, took a sip from one of the two water bottles she’d picked up at a convenience store before getting on the freeway, adjusted the window tinting a shade darker, and opened her notes on the source she was traveling to meet.
Ben Himmelstein. His wiki had him as an assistant director on B-movies in Hollywood in the 1950s, so he must be pushing 100 now. When his directing career fizzled, he’d become an archivist of films and related memorabilia, working both independently and for organizations like the American Film Institute. According to contemporary articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Cineaste, he’d developed a reputation as the man with all the right contacts, the one who could get his hands on any piece of memorabilia imaginable. There was even a rumor, never confirmed but important if only because the cognoscenti found it believable, that he’d procured, for an undisclosed buyer, the panties Marilyn Monroe wore in that famous scene from The Seven Year Itch.
More important for the piece she was writing — the piece that Himmelstein had pitched to her — he had been close to Kubrick and had curated shows focusing on 2001, Dr. Strangelove, and The Shining. All the reviewers had been impressed with the level of detail, the range of film artifacts, and the stories behind them. Yes, there was no question that Himmelstein was well placed to provide the evidence that could back up his outlandish claims. Not that she knew exactly what those were. Something to do with the moon landing “hoax,” and Hollywood’s involvement in it.
She’d had no choice but to take it to Sid.
“This is great!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “The guy’s probably gone round the bend, but think of the human interest angle.”
“Human interest. Great. It’s what I live for.”
“Come on, Liz, we do need to sell the section sometimes. One article like this will earn you ten hard science reports. I know you won’t treat him too harshly, with your trademark gentle irony. And look where he lives! Just a short hop in a flying saucer from Area 51.”
“Gee, Sid, you really know how to sell me on this. That only makes him more likely to be a crank, and me less interested.”
“But look, you can fly into Las Vegas, play the slots, have a good meal — I hear Morimoto has half-price deals on Thursdays — maybe file a report on the water situation while you’re there. Then hop over and interview this guy, write up a piece with a lot of local color. There are even hot springs there. Sounds relaxing. Come to think of it, maybe I should go.”
“Hot springs in summer in one of the hottest places on Earth. Sounds fantastic.”
Seeing no way out of it, she’d negotiated the days in LA, a move she continued to regret as the desert miles stretched on. By the time the car made the turn to Tecopa, and then turned into the wide gravel space in front of Himmelstein’s home, she felt thirsty and light-headed and slightly deranged. Something about all that desert space.
An ancient Isuzu Trooper rested in the shade of a ramada next to the house, a prefab affair. She was glad to see trees, even of a sort she didn’t know, with dark bark and tiny green leaves casting the most shade she’d seen in hours. She resisted the urge to run straight into their cooling embrace as she got out of the car, pulling her briefcase after her.
Now, out of the shade and into the glaring sun came Himmelstein himself, moving with quick old-man baby steps, his ancient Birkenstocks scuffling across the gravel.
“Ms. Dare, how nice to…” Then a pause as he got a better look at her, her hand outstretched to shake his. “But you look done in. How about you come in and have some lemonade.”
Rarely had she been so glad to see a fellow human being.
“Are you feeling better?” Himmelstein was seated across from Liz at an antique Formica table in his small kitchen, his brown, leathery arms resting on its edge, hands clasped in front of him. He wore his wiry gray hair long, pulled back in a ponytail. Above a nearly white beard, lively deep-set eyes regarded her with concern.
“Yes, much, thank you.” She’d downed a pint of water right away and now nursed the promised lemonade. She’d been dehydrated, that was it. “How can you live out here?”
“In the desert? It’s not for everyone, I admit. But the light, especially in winter, it’s like no other place on Earth. And the far horizon — I start to feel closed in with too many buildings or trees or people blocking the view. And the air is clean, good for my lungs.”
“And it’s close to Area 51?”
The hurt in his eyes revealed her mistake. “Ms. Dare, I would beg you not to treat me like some sort of nut. It’s beneath you, judging by all I’ve read of your work, which is most of it. It’s why I approached you in the first place.”
She apologized, chagrined. Usually, she was careful to avoid such missteps. The drive and dehydration must still have been affecting her. “Why don’t you tell me how you got into the industry in the first place?”
“Ah, that’s a long tale, and you must be hungry. Can I make you a sandwich? Turkey or pastrami?”
He told her about his life as he puttered around the kitchen, Liz occasionally getting up to help him reach something either too high or too low, and continued as they ate at the table. It was a conventional tale. He’d grown up in West LA, loved the movies, and got a job in a studio mail room when he was 15. “I was an assistant director by the time I was 30, but then I got stuck there. I think there was a whiff of McCarthyism about it. I was never charged with anything, or even brought in for questioning, but some of my friends were, and also being Jewish… At the time, it seemed the only explanation, or maybe it was just a lack of talent I could never admit to myself.”
“So how did you hit on archival work?”
“I already had a good-sized collection of memorabilia. People in the industry would be over at my house and gawk at my collection, and at the care I took in cataloging and displaying it. So they began just giving me stuff they didn’t want. And then sometimes an actor would fall on hard times and need to earn some money. They knew I would connect them with the right buyers, ones who were discreet and weren’t just going to turn around and sell it for as much as they could get. In fact, I only sold to collectors with the same passion for film history I had. I ended up getting their collections back when they passed or grew tired of them, or arranged for a donation to an appropriate museum. I told them, ‘You’re only renting that bit of movie history’.”
“You were known as the man with all the contacts. How did that come about?”
“My devilish charm, which you already may have noticed.” He gave her a broad wink. “No, I was just gregarious, and not that ambitious. No one felt I was going to stab them in the back. And the actresses felt safe with me because they knew how devoted I was to my Ruthie, may her memory be a blessing. And then as time went on, I’d gathered quite a few stories of Old Hollywood. Industry types ate that stuff up, even the tyros like Scorsese and Coppola and Spielberg. I wasn’t above playing that part at parties, and so my network grew.”
“And Kubrick. How did you meet?”
“Stan?” He seemed distracted for a moment, as if wondering what prompted the question. “Oh, I see why you’d ask that. Hmm, let’s see. I don’t even remember, probably at some party. But as to the matter at hand, I can assure you, Stan didn’t have anything to do with the moon landing, fake or otherwise.”
“Or otherwise?”
“Yes, I’ve corroborated it independently of the material I am about to show you, and it never made sense at the time either. His movements in those years didn’t fit. And besides, if he had faked the landing it would have looked a hell of a lot better than what we saw on July 20, 1969.”
He regarded her for a moment, not in an unfriendly way. “Shall we turn to the reason you came all this way?” he asked at last.
“Yes, let’s.”
“Let me just clean this up.”
She helped him clear away the plates and then wiped off the table while he went into another part of the house. He returned with a manila envelope and stood across the table from her, holding the parcel up to his chest as if reluctant to reveal its contents.
“Tell me, Ms. Dare, are you at all familiar with the Borges story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’? Or the Lewis Carroll novel, Sylvie and Bruno?”
“No, I’m afraid I was too busy solving physics equations in college to study much literature.”
“Ah, well, suffice to say that both include the idea of a map that is itself as large as the landscape it represents. A scale of 1:1, in other words.”
“But…”
“I know. An impossibility. At once the most accurate map imaginable, and the least useful. It’s more in the way of a joke, pointing out that the map is not the territory. But just imagine, it would by necessity have to fit exactly over the territory it represented, like a film or transparent coating, otherwise where would you store it? And if such a map did exist, how would you know you don’t live on the map, and not on the territory itself? How would you know you’re not the map’s representation of the real you?”
Liz put her head in her hands. “That kind of solipsism always makes my head hurt.”
Himmelstein gave a wan smile, waving the envelope back and forth. “The story I have to tell represents just such a conundrum.”
She sat up straighter. “Wait. You brought me all the way out here to tell me a story? Something in the way of a joke? I came here looking for the truth.”
Himmelstein chuckled at that. “The truth? Or something I believed to be true, that you could then debunk?”
“Well, yes, if it came to it.”
“As it always does.”
“Yes, so far. But I like to think I can be convinced by facts and reason. Solid evidence within the bounds of plausibility.”
“Always in short supply on this sort of assignment, I’d imagine.”
“Unfortunately.”
“You’ll be glad to know that I have no skin in this story turning out to be true, or the opposite. It was brought to me by someone involved in the alleged events. It will be up to you to decide whether they seem plausible, whether the evidence is valid and merits publication. Or whether you come away with merely a piece of local color. ‘Loony ex-Hollywood personality and his desert retreat’.”
“You don’t seem to have lost your mind, but none of my usual subjects does.”
“I should hope not.”
“Why didn’t this person come directly to me, or another reporter?”
“Because he has been dead lo these many years.”
“Then why did you wait until now?”
“When he entrusted me with these documents and his tale, he made me swear not to go public until all the principals had passed on. He was operating at some danger to himself — he seemed rather paranoid, actually — and feared the others involved might also be at risk.”
“But Aldrin died several years ago. And the important NASA figures at the time, surely they’re gone too.”
“That’s right, but there was another man involved, the director of the entire charade, if you will. I’ll keep his name to myself for now, just to see if you can guess who it is by the end. He passed just a few months ago.”
“So you do believe it was a hoax?”
“I believe or disbelieve nothing, but if these documents are the real thing, then the moon landing was the most elaborately staged hoax in the history of the world.”
He paused to such dramatic effect, Liz wondered why he hadn’t made it as a director.
“Shall we begin?” he asked with an impish grin.
She nodded, and he undid the clasp on the envelope. “We’ll start with these.”
He withdrew three cards, each in its own plastic case and about the size of a standard business card. He laid them on the table one at a time. Three Screen Actors’ Guild union cards for 1962, printed on yellow card stock. There was the union logo at the top, printed to the rather blurry standard of the time. The dates and other personal information had been added with a typewriter, probably by an actual secretary, not the Executive Secretary, John L. Halen, whose signature was pre-printed at the bottom of the card.
The first card had belonged to Michael Collins, and bore his signature. The second, to Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. And the third: Neil Armstrong.
She blinked and looked back up at Himmelstein. His grin had only grown wider.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, please consider buying me a coffee or upgrading to a paid subscription.
I promised on Notes that this would be the most far-out piece of moon-landing denial you’ve ever heard. I hope I’ve enticed you with this first part, but the farther-out stuff all happens in Chapter 4.
Next up: Chapter 3, “Shills to the Left of Me, Wingnuts to the Right,” in which we’re back aboard the Anóitoi, this time with Sarge Marshall, whom we met in Chapter 1. The flat-earther and organizer of the Conspira-C Cruise is up to something.
And come back on Tuesday, when we’ll take a break from conspiracy theories with a post about how mystery and irony work together in fiction.