The Insurance Building
Atop the Beanstalk
Spine emerges through the hole that the beanstalk tears in the sky. The whole time he spent climbing, the stalk grew longer and thicker beneath his hands, as if drawing sustenance from his contact upon it. When it finally rips out the bottom of a cloud that turns to wood and foam as soon as his head passes through, he knows his climb is over.
He plants his feet on the foam-covered boards of an ample cloudscape, relegating the entire sphere below to some muzzy basement fugue he can tell it will now behoove him to forget all about. He glimpses the ape that was supposedly climbing the beanstalk lumber off into the distance, but when he looks away and then back again, no such presence, or even absence, remains.
“Good riddance,” he says, dusting himself off. In place of that ape, he now intuits an aura of Spine. He can feel the presence he first noticed in the woman’s garage at the bottom of the beanstalk, still attenuated up here but growing stronger, closer at hand, a pre-storm pressure thickening. The idea that Spine created the world below—the world of Berkshire, ravaged by Mr. Derekis’ rage—as a massive animation project in which to trap his former mentor so as to steal from him the Secret of Art, imparted by Leopold in prewar Zagreb, feels like the thinking of a bygone era. A naive worldview whose maintenance, up here, would serve only as a sign of incurable infantilism.
Just as this thought occurs to him, he looks down through a glassed-over hole in the clouds at the whirring and clacking of a great many animatronic machines on a dusty factory floor, as if arrayed to illustrate the point he just made. He sees sculptures of himself and Spine at an outdoor table beside a canal, lingering over beers and fries, discussing, surely, the films of Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway. When he falls to his knees and puts his face to the glass for a closer look, a wire hand reaches up and screws a steel panel into the aperture, blotting out the scene.
***
Humiliated, Arp rises and proceeds into a landscape that takes on dimension and vividness a little at a time, seeming to respond to his presence just as the beanstalk did. Soon, he’s roaming a lonely highway punctuated by overpasses and minor accidents, then a bridge over a wide, icy river, and then a series of exits that all lead to the parking lot of an immense mall. The mall where, he remembers suddenly, Spine’s mother took him at the end of every summer to buy all his clothes for the coming year.
The mall across from the shabby office complex that Spine repeatedly referred to as The Insurance Building, an eidolon of his earliest youth, a building that no one appeared ever to enter or exit, and the marker on the highway between Near and Far relative to Spine’s home—the point where, on any outbound journey, the possibilities of the genuinely new first became tangible and where, upon return, the anticipation of security and relief replaced them.
The burning light in my bedroom window, guiding me up the darkest part of the street.
Arp can hear Spine saying exactly this, though he can’t place where or when, let alone why. Nevertheless, the thought kindles a light on the uppermost floor of the Insurance Building, all the way in back near the dumpsters, and this light pulls Arp across the highway, through grinding traffic that effortlessly, though narrowly, avoids hitting him, and then he’s in the Insurance Building lot, approaching on foot a structure whose only function, until now, has been to appear through the window of a speeding family station wagon.
He doffs his hat as if he were entering a cathedral or a funeral service, and presses his way through the revolving door, not quite on its hinges but still functional enough. The lobby is abandoned save for a sign pointing toward the elevator banks with the words “Truth & Reconciliation” printed in childish handwriting.
He rides the elevator in total darkness to the topmost floor, where the light he saw from the highway greets him as soon as he’s released onto the tobacco-stained carpet. He follows it down the hall and into the only open office he can find, in which a surprisingly dense though silent crowd awaits him. He takes a number from a woman with a roll of raffle tickets, and waits his turn.
When his number is called, he proceeds to the folding table at the front, bows his head while another woman stretches a medal over his shoulders, moves his lips without speaking when she says, “This committee thanks you,” and then reaches his hand into a bowl marked “Truth & Reconciliation Records” and pulls out a sweaty envelope clasped shut with orange wax.
He moves to open it but the woman who gave him the medal whispers, “Not here,” and motions toward another door on the far side of the office, more of a closet than an exit. He lets himself in and nearly trips down a steep staircase, almost a ladder, that leads into a space too dark to describe.
***
Clutching his brief in his mouth so as to grip the banister with both hands, he climbs through silence and warm dusty air until the grinding of machinery greets him from below. Though part of him wants to reverse course and climb back into the Truth & Reconciliation room, he knows it’s too late. No one up there would thank him again.
So he spills out from the ceiling and onto the factory floor, where Spine wheels over, grabs the brief from Arp’s teeth, and wheezes, “Now, let’s see what part you played in the War that forced me to do what I did.” He picks off the orange seal, pulls a letter from the envelope, and takes it to the table where Spine & Arp sit eating fries and discussing the films of Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway.
“Gentlemen,” he says, placing the letter on the table between them, “your bill has been tallied.”