Infinite Ground (11 page)

He could not help imagining the continued journey of the vehicle, its movement through all of the other built things and its arrival, at some point, on the threshold of the real, a place where all the sets came down. His brain swarmed. He was filled, he knew, with the craziest ideas, the kind of ideas that, if he admitted them, would have his friends haul him off to hospital.

The rain fell endlessly, determined to push in further to the earth, break the surface, flood more. He let out a short laugh as he closed his eyes, still walking, enjoying the different awareness of his body. He was sketched in water and sound. He heard and felt with the rain his shape and size come back at him. If it rained for ever and he kept his eyes closed, then soon enough he would see by it, would feel and know what was around him.

Opening his eyes, he saw parallel lights over the pool rising in the road and he had to jump backwards so the car didn't hit him. Only after it passed did he register the sound.

He tired; he had been walking an incline for some time. He was far from his own district and unfamiliar with the street. The identifying details of individual streets had, anyway, he noted, been sheared off. It didn't matter what the name was. He had enjoyed the feeling of the rain and the exertion of the climb enough, and he felt, maybe, that he had got somewhere in his analysis of his dreams – he was due a stop, a drink even, time to relax and dry off a bit. There was a reasonably large building ahead, lit up and apparently open to the public. He shook his head vigorously, ran his hands redundantly through his hair and stepped into the entrance of La Cueva.

He hadn't intended visiting the restaurant, although it was hardly a surprise that he had ended up here, he supposed, given the amount of time he had spent in it recently.

They recognized him at the door, handed him a towel, a fresh shirt, asked if he would be taking his usual drink. ‘A meal,' he said. ‘Steamed fish.'

Both floors were full; he sat for the moment by the bar on the second. He closed his eyes and dried his face again; the ongoing sound of successful parties continued around him. The percussion of cutlery on plates seemed louder than usual, so too the chorus made from the many conversations.

He and his wife had always eaten together in the evenings. They established early on how important it was that they made time for each other, despite their irregular work hours. Dropping in, one of them would leave a note, a suggestion or prediction, something they might eat, a time they might be expected home. The notes developed and she would shame him into acknowledging his own lack of talent by the things she drew: individual pasta shells, shaded into depth; sprouting asparagus plants; herds of moving animals; big-eyed fish.

They'd both liked to cook. He would have the radio on and, although he claimed to barely listen, he'd always find himself surprised by her sudden touch on his hips, her hand on his shoulder. She seemed always to come from nowhere, walk right in through the walls. He maintained, to her loud protests, that she was as light as air; she would roll her eyes, hunt for the corkscrew, put on a record.

The height of La Cueva, and the spectacular bay windows, had a dramatic effect on a storm night such as this. The festi­val aura of the rains encouraged people to drink, talk, feast. Quite discreetly, he turned around, so that he could face the diners and the windows. As usual, almost as a reflex now, his eyes settled on the long table by the east-facing window. This was where the family had dined on the night in question.

The rains were fading for the moment, the sky clearing. Although it was surely not long until darkness, the evening was peculiarly, almost artificially lit in the electric charge. Looking out, you could see, tonight, a distance of many miles. He wasn't familiar with the long perspective, despite having visited the restaurant several times in the past few weeks. Perhaps it was because of his now slightly elevated position, seated by the bar, in combination with the storm-light.

He left his stool and walked towards the long table. Would you mind a moment? he said quietly, as he ushered the middle-aged woman out of Carlos's seat. He looked straight ahead, over the meals and conversations, the half-empty glasses and the cooling meat, towards the window. Quite clearly, framed almost geometrically by the light, was a forest patch. It didn't belong to the scene, next to the reflected interior and the many painted faces. He assumed, at first, it was a picture, a reflection of a painting held inside La Cueva, only it wasn't. It was an image beyond the city normally too distant to see. But post-storm, and presumably momentarily, the forest was clear and sublime.

Carlos had sat here. He would have to confirm the details of the weather on the 24th, but he knew what he would find – a storm, earlier that night, an odd, late light scattered across the city. Carlos had stared straight at it. It was hypnotic – he was seeing it for himself. This is what had been disturbing him recently, affecting his sleep and his mental firmness. He had sensed a significance, a correlation between La Cueva and this forest, and he had been playing it over and over in his subconscious. It was why he had left his apartment this evening, the reason for arriving at the entrance to La Cueva. Leaving the subway, winding through the streets by unknown design. He had been waiting, night after night, for the exact meteorological conditions present on the night of the disappearance, and now he had seen why. Was there any reason, any reason at all, why a man, upon washing his hands in the bathroom, would not walk directly out of the building, past his family, and aim straight for that image, beyond the glass and the artificial frame – into the forest itself?

A second thunderclap, the breakthrough he needed, the release of all this tension at last. His mind stilled, the noise stopped and he could focus. He relished the air, a verdure he could taste. He enjoyed what seemed like his first full inhalations in a month. He was calmer; he knew what he needed to do. He cleared his apartment, organized all notes and testimonies in his office room. He arranged immediately for an initial forensic survey of the forest perimeter, convinced that Carlos had gone this way. This was no great forest, rather a suburban reserve, but the perspective from the seat, looking through the window in La Cueva, post-storm, was dramatic, alluring. The reserve was only seventeen miles away. On foot, Carlos would have reached it before the morning.

He supposed he had been hoping to find evidence of some recently abandoned, makeshift camp. Assuming Carlos had been here – he still hoped Isabella, once she arrived back from her current project, would be able to confirm – he must have seen quickly that it wouldn't do; the place was trimmed and neat, the trees planted at an unnaturally regular distance from each other. More than a forest, it was a garden – with a car lot, a small perimeter wall, a pond. Carlos would have felt embarrassed leaving unannounced like that, disappearing and making a scene, hiking in his formal clothes towards what was really a picturesque and sentimental destination. Why would he have stayed? Nothing would have kept him in that place. If what had changed him, that night at La Cueva, had been the picture of the forest as seen in the frame of the restaurant window, then the real forest lay behind the image and he would have had to keep on walking. He would have had to go on further.

The inspector turned, scuffed loose gravel. That way, south-east, that's where the forest was, two million square miles of it. It would take him longer than a night to get there.

He was receiving potentially useful information, but was having trouble identifying and validating the sources. Broadening out his search, hunting a pattern, he found several allusions over the past two years to sightings of distressed individuals in formal attire, incongruously placed in the rural interior. A middle-aged woman, both shoes clasped in one hand, bent over a river edge, lapping at the water. A locked briefcase spotted near a forest track leading the farmer who had spotted it further in: on the valley beyond, emerging out of a stream, a man stood, dripping, in red braces. To the inspector's frustration, but hardly his surprise, he found no one had pulled these sightings together. Nothing, beyond a curt transcription of the initial calls, had even been written up. The calls had come in from anonymous individuals: small-hold tenant farmers, long-haul truck drivers taking timber. If they had approached the disconnected individual, whose clothes were invariably described as faded, stained and cut, then they didn't get far. The individual, making his or her way through the trees, did not want to be contacted; the reports described an expression of panic, the sound, after an attempt at calling, of branches crashing, a river splashing, thick leaves falling.

Games, his colleagues said. Corporate initiation rites, pre-­wedding penalties, that kind of thing. They had a point, he conceded; if there were anything to these reports, really, then wouldn't the relevant families have reported the individuals gone?

Things started to make sense with the new information from the forest. His intoxicating dreams the past few weeks became instructive, as did his inability to concentrate on anything except the suspicion that none of it was real. His devastating, wholly frustrating sense of loss and opportunities not taken, the maddening certainty that he was failing to wake up to something utterly clear and surpassingly important all around him, could now be explained in reasonable and cogent terms. He was, as it happened, and to his great relief, not lost. He hadn't been infected. He wasn't ill. He still had his mind. The events of the past few weeks were simply mechanisms used by his subconscious, which had picked up, from somewhere, the key to Carlos's disappearance. The key was the forest, and time spent in the city was wasted.

Isabella had named the gut and brain habitats, said it as if it were nothing. He went back to his dreams, some of which he had noted down, placed among the other documents relating to the case. The office worker, the heart attack. A parasite escalating in species, a fat and eyeless grub growing. Momentum, propulsion. One leaf and a forest; a single cell and a human being. Rampant expression, complexity through local repetition, and there it was, all that life made. He thought of the dun colour of the missing office worker's eyes and the piles of sticks reported on the floor the morning following the disappearance. The small forest framed by the window of La Cueva, and the bigger place beyond, the greatest concentration of extant life there is.

Carlos, openly expiring in his chair, was missing that life, even as it exploded across him. What could he do? He could walk, the inspector thought, and breathe, and needed nothing more to take him to the forest.

By remaining here, in the city, he was postponing a necessary confrontation, and he had struggled to live with that. He had woken guiltily and gone through his days hazily, apparently constantly hung-over, prone to isolation and to long spells when he failed to recognize anything around him, and to other brief, stunning moments of transparency.

He wasn't sure what he expected to find there, but the obvious thing was to follow the corporation's trail. The contingency sites, from the start – he had been right. He went over everything. São Vicente, he read, had been totally abandoned. No road, no means of transport at all, no buildings, no population. But Santa Lucía remained active; he might even get a place on the monthly flight. He speculated again on possible links between the flora rife in Carlos's body and the great wildernesses and biological eruptions in the continental centre. He had no conception of what bacteria looked like, instead picturing their shadows while great, vast herds of them stomped and grazed in the forest. The two zones matched in a way that intuitively pleased him – it felt right to go there. Where better, he thought, to disappear?

1. Amateur ornithological associations tagged carrion birds as a means of tracking their feeding and mating behaviours. In the project's ten-year span several spikes were noted – short periods when unusually high numbers of birds congregated in the same area. Many of these events were found to correlate with the timings of unexplained disappearances of light aircraft.

2. Balloonists prepared a cross-Pacific journey, documenting every step of the process online until the official launch date. A period of silence followed, lasting between two and three months, after which it was announced that the flight had not yet begun. Adjustments were made to the original reports, explaining the delays to the expedition launch. In the drafts of the documentary record, discrepancies emerged relating to the number of people believed to be taking part in the ascent – first six, then three, then finally one. The record continued to be revised over the next several years as further, more ambitious expeditions with new balloonists were planned and then deleted. Each time, in the run-up to the scheduled launch date, all reports confidently stated that the balloon would now ascend. Numerous blog posts were posted along with media interviews, photographic journals and short films explaining the technical operation of the flight. Doctors and dieticians described what would happen to the body at each respective height, how it would be replenished and stabilized against the changing pressure and temperature of the atmosphere. Marine geographers explained in detail the nature of the water crossed and experts in rainforest ecology described the life present in the canopy terrain of South American and Asia, which comprised the planned launch and landing sites. As every new launch date approached, the problems affecting previously scheduled balloon flights, forcing multiple postponements, were laid out in some detail, and hired actors read confidently from scripts ­prepared by technical staff stating clearly why now, finally – this time – the balloon could be airborne, the crossing would take place.

3. Rumours were spread on in-house message boards by coders in Guyana and encrypted into economic predictions by financiers in Brasilia, relating to the practice of ‘urban marches'. Administrative workers in middle age walked alone out of the office at midday, carrying only basic supplies – sandwiches, pasta, sliced fruit, half-litre bottle of water, suit jacket. They were to walk as far as was possible into the interior of the country, avoiding all use of public transport and organized accommodation and eschewing any human communication. Men and women known as exiles modelled their journeys on sixth-century monks who drifted for thousands of miles on rafts, directed by ephemeral voices, whale song and atmospheric pressures, possibly discovering archipelagos and whole continents hundreds of years before any government missions did. They drank river water and ate fruit, insects and birds' nests, walking further into forest and marshland. Sedentary colleagues alluded to their journeys in impenetrable legalese and in long financial reports that would never be read. Large sums of company money were invested betting which individual would achieve the greatest distance and who would be the first to make it out the other side, past the interior, rather than ultimately retracing their outward steps on the long homeward journey. In-house, these extended leave periods were referred to as ‘performance improvement sabbaticals' or ‘stress-related time away'. Returning exiles quickly ascended to senior corpor­ate positions and generally established a family, including a stay-at-home wife and at least one mistress.

4. Over 6 days and 10,000 square miles of rainforest, 46 reports were made to emergency services, local media outlets and churches regarding visitations of saints and angels in trees. The epicentre was established as an agrarian commune, and a quarantine was established. The previous day all associated livestock had died, having shown no prior signs of disease. The surrounding flora began to dry, degrade, fold and collapse; epidemiology experts discovered that all insect life in the commune had ­disappeared, the vegetation dying as a direct result.

All twenty-three members of the commune were imprisoned and interrogated, suspected of collusion in a pre-terrorist plot. The site was meticulously searched for evidence of the toxins responsible. The commune members maintained innocence, until their respective pain thresholds were met, at which point they invented what they hoped would be a plausible story. The stories were mutually incompatible, bearing no coherent thread. Flashes of white light were reported near the upper-­canopy around the time the livestock died. Noting the absence of birdlife from the area, government advisors rerouted the flight paths of all aircraft due to fly within a 300-mile radius. In a 400-page report, subsequent to a spontaneous wildfire destroying the entire commune, administrators avoided using the words ‘non-terrestrial pathogens' and ‘site of awe'.

5. NASA-sourced heat-imaging technology floating on balloons over the forest revealed inexplicable concentrations of unknown mammalian forms. Given the nature of the recording equipment it was impossible to identify the beginning and ending of bodies, and so the warm life-cloud, moving in an approximately homogenous manner along the ground, could not be identified by species. It was estimated that if the bodies were human, then the number was 200. Tracking body heat, the movement was seen to be regularly slow with infrequent bouts of extreme speed. No communities were recognized as existing in the area. ­Government-sponsored ‘tribal reconciliation' missions had previously charted the adjacent land to significant distances in every direction. Trusted cartel representatives assured ministers of their ignorance – products were harvested and hostages maintained in clearly defined and officially sanctioned areas. Such was the density of the canopy, satellite and drone-supplied images were rendered redundant; nevertheless, all footage was exhaustively examined.

Tracking all records of activity in the area, a technician noted a missile launch centre abandoned 120 miles north-east of the heat cloud's present location. The site had trialled experimental, non-petroleum fuel sources and innovative propulsion technology, but the results had been insignificant and any equipment worth less than the cost of extraction was left to melt into the roots, vines and animals of the forest floor.

In the sole survey of the site, biologists had noted moderately unusual rates of floral growth, as well as several newly discovered and endemic symbiotic relationships. The identity of the mammalian forms was never established.

6. Automated checks on flights missing, believed crashed, over the forest in the past two decades brought up statistically unlikely repetitions. Of the nineteen flights still unaccounted for, sixteen carried men and women flying on return tickets that chronologically contradicted their journey. The return journey, in the case of one person on each of these flights, was scheduled to take place while the outward flight remained in progress. The age of these passengers ranged from 27 to 42, origin was local and ethnicity Caucasian, and the stated purpose of travel, every time, was ‘business'. They all worked for a series of small corporations linked to a larger umbrella unit whose remit remained unknown. It was proved, in thirteen of the sixteen cases, that the passenger in question had at least some experience of piloting small aircraft.

Independent enthusiasts investigated these figures and the circumstances of each missing flight. Rumours spread and people became suspicious of briefcases carried on small planes scheduled to fly over the interior. It was advised to dress in informal clothes. Increasingly elaborate and outrageous rumours circulated. Online forums proliferated; for every one taken down another three sprang up. It was claimed that a mechanized belt, eleven miles long, was built into the forest and covered in inauthentic, permanently preserved flora. When activated, the belt moved backwards, revealing a long strip of runway. The figure – the affiliated employee – on each flight allegedly forced ­command of the aircraft and landed on the artificial strip. Possible reasons for bringing the flights in were various and disputed: it was the material contained in the suitcase; it was the identity, rather, of another of the passengers, who worked as a foreign operative and possessed valuable information relating to a new technology, which would itself then be built in the forest, using the materials of the dismantled aircraft, under the supervision of the interrogated and re-educated foreign operative; it was the aircraft itself, kept hidden under the forest belt, used to spray experimental poisons over small and unsuspecting indigenous communities; it was the passenger cargo, freely incarcerated deep in the vast forest, monitored remotely as they attempted to come to terms with their situation, remaining sedentary or planning a long escape, isolating themselves or forging alliances, making peace with the strangely impassive captors or waging futile war – they were placed, members of the passenger cargo, into artificial situations, put into uncomfortable domestic and dramatic arrangements, offered rewards or punishment according to how naturally they played along. The more aircraft that were taken, and the greater the number of conditioned ­passenger cargo, the quicker the newly landed adapted to forest life. Some of the first to be captured, who had reacted violently and rebelled for years, became among the most valuable of those present at the base, playing a key role in convincing the ­newcomers how fortunate they were to be there, how exciting the project was. Generations of people were born in the sprawling campsite, raised with only specific, planted ­knowledge about the ‘outside world'. Many situations were run, in the camp buildings, constructed from flat-pack materials contained in the suitcases and from everything that had previously composed the aircraft, from the wings to the headrests, the toilet seats to the trays the reheated food had been presented on. The idea was that the camp would in time run organically, autonomously, as the younger generations, those who had been born in the environment, grew to maturation and learned to command. New arrivals came periodically – the rolling out of the eleven-mile belt and the landing of the unfamiliar object were built into the community's mythology. The reality behind the situation – that this was an artificially constructed community illegally planted in the forest, that none of them belonged there and that the scenes of their lives were scripted simulations – became only one among many of the fantasies popular with the younger and idler camp members. Other fantasies entertained included that each member of the camp had come there via water, swimming a period of approximately 4.58 billion years, this being only the second leg of an even longer journey largely involving darkness, sudden rapid and inexplicable inflations and the serial arrival of massive, spinning light bodies. They were very tired after that journey, but at the same time exhilarated, both jaded and anxious to begin, and in the tension between these states they each lived for approximately sixty-seven years.

New languages were developed, old ones filtered out, and on each new landing the incomers, when they opened their mouths, were treated with righteous, furious disgust: their words were a disease and their mouths would be broken and re-set.

Speculations over the ultimate purpose behind it all – the corporate involvement from the very beginning, the bringing down of the aircrafts, the willingness of sixteen men and women at least to overhaul their lives, leaving families and friends behind, and taking more than a thousand individuals forcibly captive in the forest, the huge expenditure involved in the operation, the meticulous planning and the enormous energy invested from the start – were similarly various. Many of the theories centred on the commercial advantages likely to be gained by the company ultimately responsible, the usefulness of the vast amounts of anthropological data gathered in watching how these people lived, day in, day out, in situations that were prompted and invented by those ultimately in control. The commercial bene­fit of insights gained would be incalculable – in research and development, in marketing strategy, in product design – and in one sense, this may have been deemed enough for establishing the simulated society with all that it entailed.

A closely related group of theories claimed a religio-corporate remit for the establishing of the artificial world, the compound being prepared as a new beginning, ready to step in after the inevi­table implosion of larger, linked urban areas. After running for a thousand years, having utilized materials collected from increasingly sophisticated aircraft, and after a sufficient period of silence, the corporate compound would move outwards to the coast, build satellite communities, cross water, establish an increased rate of reproduction and ultimately colonize the world.

Those in positions of authority dictated domestic arrangements, work routines and available leisure activities. Apparently indiscriminately, people were removed from their everyday life and transplanted into another building where they lived with a new family, worked a different job and were called by an alternative name. Children were raised according to alternating philosophies, a first-born being told that they were a frail organism decaying at an increasing rate, and a second believing that experience, folded into memory, is endless. People tried to escape in new ways. Smoke balloons, their fabric stitched from tens of thousands of small patches torn from clothing, lifted children no more than seventeen miles from camp, at which point they returned for food. Several generations of a single family, some of whom had never met, worked together on a narrow tunnel leading west from beneath the front room in their home building. In order to reach a significant distance, a single individual was required to live underground, tunnelling, for extended periods, which involved considerable practical difficulties. To provide food and drink, one male and one female white mouse were tethered together on the end of a two-foot stick – the tunneller utilized their high reproductive yield as a source of milk and meat, consuming many generations of a direct familial line. The generations became increasingly tame and docile, living with limited freedom and in the dark, subsisting on black beetles and ants. In eleven generations the rope used to tether the mice became redundant, as they were now programmed to move in line with the human tunneller and to provide them with the necessary meat and milk. Their brains reduced in size accordingly, unnecessary energy expended on maintaining obsolete functions deemed too costly. Relatives of the tunneller currently chosen would take turns, on the surface, impersonating the missing, so that the extended period of absence would not be noted. Each tunneller would typically spend one year digging east, before crawling backwards through blood, faeces, urine and expired mice, and exchanging places. After forty years' tunnelling, when it was finally decided to dig upwards and emerge, the twenty-nine-year-old man currently occupying the role looked around him in some surprise. He had been confident, as he rose, that they had built a route going so far from home captivity that he had reached some kind of edge – perhaps the ocean. In the tunnel aural hallucination was common, but he was certain the concussion heard above was really waves. He would fell a tree, use vines as twine and sail to a port to contact the world, the real world, the bigger world, and the whole artificial construct that he and his family and everybody he had known were brought up in would collapse.