Infinite Ground (15 page)

The decision was made: he would leave with them on the flight the day after tomorrow. Enough had been found to justify a comprehensive and fully funded search of the whole area. Alberto struck the inspector as a dependable, capable man, consistently responding to enquiries helpfully and succinctly. He appeared sympathetic to the case, willing to help in any way he could. They would come back together. He and Alberto would lead a specialist team, bringing adequate transport – a helicopter, perhaps – substantial supplies, a variety of professionals, hunting dogs. Forensics, even. Isabella's help would be invaluable and she was hardly likely to turn down a chance to visit the forest. It was the sensible option.

He felt himself relaxing. He ordered at the bar that evening and joined Alberto and the team at their table. ‘The nature of this work is very solitary,' he said. ‘I can't tell you how grateful I am to have your help. All of you. Even talking is a relief. These weeks have been difficult. When I'm back,' he said, ‘I'll need to make some changes.'

They smiled and nodded politely, except for Luis, who was frowning in front of his open laptop. Luis, an intern, wasn't being paid. A couple of days ago he had described his digital recordings to the inspector, the ‘making of' featurettes which would appear at the end of the film. This was his own project. The inspector felt uneasy when Luis had shown him. What he saw was surely obtrusive optical and audio equipment along with their operators (young men and women in faux-military fatigues) as they filmed their footage, at times closely interacting with animals. It looked dangerous, reckless.

But such scenes, far from being casually taken from actual feature-filming, Luis said, were scripted pieces produced afterwards, on revisiting the site. They were popular because of the flowing, unrealistic nature of the dialogue – viewers were ­supposed to enjoy ‘behind the scenes' access while maintaining the uncanny suspicion that the featurettes were just as worked at as the main productions (and that the real authority might remain inaccessible). According to Luis the featurettes were an ingenious way of exploiting suspicion, extending the intrigue of creation. By appearing to offer full transparency over the means of making them, but actually only deferring the truth, the films, he explained, became more popular.

If he were to believe Luis, then 20–30 per cent of any one production was ‘stock'; that is, taken from archives of classically satisfying general material. This stock, used to varying degrees from one film to another, was not original to any one film, but worked rather like cliché in language and in art. Just as a painter applied certain background styles to frame the focus, producers and directors filled out natural history films with stock dynamic waterfalls, hazy canopies and wide deserts. Whole features – series even – might be composed entirely of recycled footage, old material reapplied in new arrangements. Identical animals had been located in features thirty years apart or more, apparently unchanged in time, as if cloned without a single copying error.

From features – new narratives – made entirely of old and unrelated things, the inspector reasoned, it wasn't such a leap to producing so-called documentaries made up of scenes animated artificially from the start, pixels generated that bore no real relationship to what they purported to represent. A script could be written without restraint – anything could be said to happen, as anything could be produced. Some of the nature scenes might never have happened, being computer generations from the start, dreamed whimsy of isolated, burdened, over-worked producers in offices.

‘Are you looking for the thin man?' Luis now said, interrupting the conversation at the bar table.

‘Thin man?'

‘Yes. You'd see him at night, in silhouette. Preparing food in his room, standing by the window.'

‘Who, sorry? What room is this? Do you mean—?'

‘In your room. The room you're in now, I mean.'

Alberto stepped in. ‘Luis, you're mistaken. The inspector's staying on the other side of the hotel. What you were seeing was Miguel.'

Luis looked steadily at Alberto for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Sure, right.' He turned his attention back to the screen and began typing. He stopped again. ‘But the photographs, Inspector. What if it's not what you think? Did you consider that? What if this person doesn't want to be found?'

‘Why would he not—?' The inspector broke off. He couldn't be distracted any more by philosophical questions. He had a job to do. He instead finalized a few details about departure times and then went to settle up at the bar. As nothing could be left to chance, he reserved rooms throughout the whole of the Terminación, anticipating the arrival of a large investigating party. Miguel required a deposit to be paid – no problem, he said. They would most likely be arriving on the evening of the 24th, departing early the following morning, and they would require provisions.

He looked forward to the occasion, the feast they would hold. He wanted Miguel's and Maria's help coordinating everything. They would eat well, lavishly, making the most of the opportunity, before going further on into the forest. They would gather up their strength and enjoy themselves. Eat and drink till late, fill themselves all the way up, their laughter drifting out into the sounds gaining on them around and above the settlement buildings.

On his last afternoon, he went for one more coffee at Maria's.

For the first time, really, in all of this – apart perhaps for the forensic work with Isabella – he felt he had support. They had evidence, in physical form – Carlos's image recorded, a range of approximate coordinates within which he could be found. The time had come to step back, change perspective, call on wider resources. The department could mount a comprehensive search of the area, after which there was no doubt that Carlos would be found.

He had earned time off, he thought, now that resolution was in sight. This, he decided, would be his final investigation. Surveying the last thirty years, this would count as one of the great restitutions. Missing persons cases were like fissures, breaks in the Earth, and there was no greater feeling than a resolution, correcting the error, restoring the identity back to its place. The family could eat again, one day, at La Cueva. Whatever strangeness had caused this could be settled, the old order restored.

He made a note of all the things he would need to do once he was back home, the friendships he had neglected, the upkeep of his apartment. He would sort out his diet, eat with a greater focus on his health. There were many opportunities. He had been meaning to look up some old friends. He looked forward to resuming his regular life.

He continued thinking ahead. Once they had recovered Carlos, he would personally make the call to the mother. Although it wasn't advisable, or even feasible, that the family would come to Santa Lucía, he imagined it that way – Carlos being led out of the boat on the jetty, the relatives there, waiting. There would be hysteria, disbelief. They would want to touch him. They would admit that they had thought him gone, dead. Despite their claims, they'd believed there was no hope. But there he would be, helped out of the boat, dazed, thin, concussed, alive. They would tend to him on the flight back out, supply him with water and salt, maybe feed him through an intravenous drip. Arriving back in the city, he would be brought directly to the hospital, where they would thoroughly examine him, check for internal damage, any indication of possible long-term trauma caused by a blow to the head. The question of what exactly had happened to him, how he had come to be there in the forest, thousands of miles from home, wouldn't be raised until later. Not until his convalescence was complete and he could walk, digest food on his own, speak for himself.

The first person to hear the full story would be himself, the inspector. Everything would be confirmed to him privately, before being put on the record. All of the suspicions, rumours and the links would be settled.

He took another sip of coffee and looked briefly on to the ­settlement's facing edge. The huge ferns dipped and swayed; they were colossal, but each one also looked like a single leaf, diminishing him and the meagre buildings around. Not for the first time he wondered about scale, an error of perception. There was a lightness in his head and a turning, lifting sensation in his stomach. The coffee, the eggs – Maria brought him a glass of water at room temperature, quicker to digest. Composed, he looked again to the edge. If anything it appeared marginally closer – he must have shifted position slightly in his chair, leaned forward a little.

He reconfirmed, with both Alberto and Miguel, the schedule for the flight departing the following morning. He considered his experience on the outward journey, his almost manic state, and was amused by the difference. He had felt, coming in, a tremendous sense of excitement, a feeling, he had to admit, that he had never quite experienced before. It wasn't knowledge. Everything, at that stage, was being done in hope, in promise. But there had been, as he flew out over the grids of his home city, out past the part-constructed industrial estates of the suburbs and into the surrounding mountains, an extended sense of extraordinary anticipatory pleasure. And, he told himself, his instinct had been right. They had found Carlos. This was it, he said. This was the end of the investigation.

1. A cargo of chemical supplies – carbon, antimony, ruthenium, lithium, oxygen, silicon – stored on a vessel. The crew unaware of the purpose of the shipment or the nature of the organization listed to collect. A thirty-five day crossing. Individual birds sometimes seen at dawn perched on the bow. A line of vast green turtles moving east below the translucent sea surface. The nearest shore – a single tiny, all but barren volcanic island – 1,800 miles from the current position.

2.
CARLOS:
A sharp rise and dip, a venture just beginning, eagerly and with high expectations, before dissolving into failure and regret. The shape of the mouth opening widely, as if in astonishment, contracting into the low ‘o' shape, sound and silence.

3. A free man. A man at liberty. A man who has come free of his moorings.

4. A temporary euphemism hung upon a large amalgamation of disparate biological material, memory and feeling. The name attached as a country is assigned to a stretch of land and water – nobody is expected to believe that it is real.

5.
THE INVESTIGATION:
an indulgent and morbid fantasy created by a man in middle age in grief for his dead wife.

6. The playing out of the investigation, beginning with the first interview conducted by the inspector in La Cueva, was an elaborate production performed by an experimental theatre company, the large cast frequently changing, the performers aware to differing degrees of the artifice, ranging from the inspector, who knew of some of the fraud but was beginning to suspect more, to the workers in the office, fully aware, and terminating in Carlos, who had never existed.

7. Carlos was collected in a box in La Cueva on the 24th by two company representatives. He was taken out of the building via the emergency exit. The box was placed in the rear of a company car, driven eleven hours to port and loaded on to a container ship. The terminus was a mid-ocean island rich in minerals but having no resident population; quarry workers present three months a year. The box was placed inside the quarry. Rain was due in twelve hours and would degrade the lock on the box, allowing Carlos finally to get out. And it would fill the lower third of the quarry.

8. Among the products funded by the corporation was a partly synthetic bacterium that produced in its host an overwhelming desire for escape. This may or may not simply be a symbol representing the crushing effects of corporate life. Carlos killed himself in the bathroom of La Cueva; everything since is mythic sublimation and fantasy.

9. Due to an unknown personal catastrophe only retro­spectively implied in analysis of his daily behaviour and performance in the workplace, Carlos decided to leave his family, his work, his city and embark on a pedestrian march to the centre of the continent.

10. The gastrointestinal infection implied in analysis of material found on his keyboard seized Carlos suddenly as he approached the bathroom door, arresting his heart and causing a fatal attack. The decision was made by the family, chiefly the mother, Maria, to refute the finality of his ending. Carlos's sudden vanishing was deemed temporary and an investigation launched with the express purpose of bringing him back. The mother did not believe that what was described in the initial survey of the scene – the death of her son – was credible, even possible, and so she challenged it. It was hoped, in the forest, that some sort of answer would be found.

11. Carlos shaved off his hair in a La Cueva cubicle with a razor and a handheld mirror. He hit his face repeatedly, puffing the eyes, nose and mouth to become unrecognizable, and walked away from his life.

12. Carlos remained sitting in his chair at the table in La Cueva, having never got up to leave for the bathroom. He was tied securely to the heavy chair, while everybody else – all members of his family, the entire staff, all other diners – left the premises, walking the short distance to a separate property owned by the Rodriguez family. The reproductions were already in place and all that remained was for the diners to carry their plates, glasses and knives. The sign was removed from the original La Cueva and placed in the new restaurant. Carlos remained sitting in his chair at the table in La Cueva.

13. Carlos never, in fact, disappeared. The disappearance existed only on paper. In reality he returned from the bathroom and was present at the table when the first officer arrived to begin interviews. It being assumed that the disappeared person was not currently present and in full view, even cooperating with the enquiries, the issue was never explicitly addressed.

14. Carlos had been poisoned by the food prepared by an inexperienced member of the restaurant's kitchen team. No­ticing him holding his stomach en route to the bathroom, the cook followed, retrieved the corpse and incinerated it on site.

15. Carlos never entered La Cueva, sending instead a male of approximately similar age, height, weight and complexion. The replacement took care not to hold eye contact for more than three seconds, generally keeping his head bowed. The replacement, leaving the bathroom, shook off the mannerisms he had so far affected, walking differently, holding his head to a new height. Appearing to everyone present as a different person, the counterfeit walked out of the front door.

16. Carlos was never born to Maria, the foetus being miscarried seven months into term. The night in question at La Cueva had been created by Maria, in development with members of her family, as well as with several councillors and her parish priest. Maria publicly acknowledged the tragedy and mystery of what had happened to Carlos, collaborating with police, media and other institutions in an investigation into absence.

17. The disappearance of Carlos was a simple matter of the Earth swallowing his identity whole, overcoming in one moment the whole person, making him nothing.

18. A funny thing happened as Carlos closed the bathroom door. When he made a movement, instead of carrying on into the new present, he preserved his whole body – kept it frozen in one place – and made another, very slightly different one. When the new body moved it did so by halting, preserving itself, building another. This went on. It wasn't just large, macro­scopic moves such as footsteps that resulted in preservation and re-creation; even small, infinitesimal frames like the twitch of a lip were copied, changed.

A footstep was made of 4,000 small frames. There were 4,000 new creations when he moved his foot. He realized all this must have been taking up a lot of room and that there must also be a vast amount of resources fuelling all the new versions that were built.

He was becoming aware of the building process in increasingly fine detail. It took longer and longer to do things. When he turned his head, neck and part of his left shoulder to look behind him, the process occupied around nine years. So many constructions had been made in that turn; he saw, in the corridor, a collection of mildly different identities each assuming a slightly changed shape.

There was little space for air and light – between all the bodies were only thin drags of different colour. Above the height of them was an ordinary layer of upper-corridor. It made him think of being in a low-roofed swimming pool or an aquarium – though this wasn't water, at least not any more. From a greater distance it might have looked like a museum or a slaughterhouse. This was all going to take a very long time; the planning, supply and construction of movement was so great it barely seemed possible. It was very unlikely he would be able to see a person again.

19. Carlos – his domestic life, family relations, work, relationships, temperament and interests – was the result of a series of deep suggestions planted in the mind of a permanently incarcerated man undergoing experimental consolation therapy. The disappearance of Carlos was coincident with the prisoner waking up, the ongoing investigation into his where­abouts the grieving of the prisoner for the life he thought he had.

20. Carlos's official disappearance at La Cueva, aged twenty-nine, was the culmination of a long wish granted finally to him by a loving mother, who constructed the evening with the express purpose of allowing him the pleasure of a vanishing. As he saw it, the action of walking anonymously out of the building was only a long delayed fulfilment of an agreement drawn up at birth – namely, that he didn't exist – and pretending otherwise, for the sake of appearances and certain administrative customs, had been a great strain on him.

21. Carlos suffered a sudden and giant molecular distortion. He became more fluid, loose, less detailed or recognizable. His hands were paddles, his eyes sewn up. He couldn't see anything, and gradually the part of him prone to reflection drifted further towards nothing, back inside the tree, deeper into the forest.

22. Carlos resumed his place at the table in La Cueva upon returning from the bathroom, and it was only after several minutes that he realized none of the people around him were the same. He had become disoriented as he opened the bathroom door and, despite the fact that La Cueva was a smallish restaur­ant, he had turned the wrong way, leaving his family out of his line of vision, so that even when he realized he had sat down at the wrong place he couldn't initially see where his family was. Not wanting to make a scene, he stayed calm, slowly looked to his immediate surroundings. The number of people in the current party was approximately the same as his own, the meals, he noted – even the drinks – seemed to be in accordance with what he could remember of his family. The clothes worn by the people around him were quite familiar, just a little bit different. There seemed to be the same number of adults and children, male and female. He surveyed their faces. This was confirm­ation that his instinct was correct and that none of the people were the same; he didn't know any of them, their faces were all unreadable and blank and he hadn't set eyes on any of them before. Soon enough he would remember how to get to his own group, but until then, he thought, the safest thing was to carry on acting naturally, as if nothing were wrong.

Before long, the cicadas and the bullfrogs bellowed and he realized it had got dark. All the food had been eaten, the wine drunk, and people were preparing to go home. Most people, in fact, had already left, he saw, craning his neck, surveying the tables of La Cueva. He had begun to feel at ease in the company of the strangers. He didn't mind spending the major part of the evening with them There had been a lot of drink, at his own party as well as in the strange one, and obviously that had played a part in proceedings – his family, evidently, had forgotten about him, and not for the first time. He wondered what had happened to the real occupant of his current seat, the person who was supposed to be there and who had originally ordered food and wine and begun the meal.

23. Attending to an urgent phone message received while Carlos was in the bathroom, the party left mid-meal, gathering all their things and exiting the building. As it was a busy night the restaurant staff wasted no time in clearing away all trace of the party, removing the plates, glasses, cutlery and half-empty wine bottles and in so doing knocking Carlos's jacket from the back of his chair onto the floor, where it lay unnoticed under the table. By the time Carlos had returned to his seat – seven minutes after he had first got up – a new party had not only been ushered in but had ordered their starters and begun drinking. Assuming he had become disoriented, slightly sheepish at doing something so childish, the kind of thing that would never have happened to any of the other men in his family, he made his way to the broad, front-facing window and turned back, inwards, hoping to gain a perspective on the whole of the restaurant floor.

He saw nothing, no one, just a sea of unknown figures making their way through their meals.

If he had turned the other way, however, and looked out of the windows of La Cueva, he would have seen, on the adjoining street, all the present members of his family leaving, walking away and carrying all of their things, talking animatedly. Past them – La Cueva was on a hill and offered interesting views over the city and on clear days beyond – he would have seen a suggestion of the surrounding mountains and thought how small and vulnerable his family looked in that landscape, and he would have run after them, calling ‘I'm here! I'm here!'

24. It took him some time, adjusting his eyes to the dense light of the room, but Carlos, having exited the bathroom, finally realized what he was seeing. Everything had been petrified. The interior of the food had collapsed; coats of fungi had generated and attracted blowflies. The red wine had dissolved into a thick, organic cake, writhing with moulting worms. The floor hummed with insects. Nothing could be seen through the broad front windows, meshed in larvae and web.

Dust fell in a slow, amber haze. The cloths draped over each of the tables had come apart, the material regurgitated.

Lastly, incredibly, were the bodies, to which he felt no kin at all.

25. When Carlos exited the bathroom he was stopped before he could find his seat. He had wandered absent-mindedly towards his table, only looking up when he noticed someone reaching out a hand. ‘Excuse me,' the voice said, ‘but you bear an extraordinary resemblance to a relative of ours.'

Carlos assumed his uncle was playing some odd joke on him, which was strange because the two had never enjoyed that kind of a relationship. But as he looked closer at his uncle, he realized that wasn't exactly who it was. In fact, he looked rather a lot like Carlos's cousin, Bernal, only considerably aged.

Looking out across the long table, he had the same feeling: these people were like decayed reproductions of his own family.

He obviously appeared confused, because the man smiled and gestured in an effort to demonstrate that the atmosphere should be light, there was nothing to worry about here. The man went on: ‘My cousin, Carlos, disappeared in a similar restaurant, in an occasion just like this, twenty-two years ago. You look a lot like he did then. Maria,' he went on, ‘I don't want to alarm you, but doesn't this young man look approximately as Carlos did, the last time we saw him?'