Infinite Ground (9 page)

‘Would he shout – for the other passengers, for the driver? What would he say? And what if the man, the attacker – and it's not his fault, remember, none of it is – what if he doesn't go all the way to the back of the bus? What if he simply takes a seat near the front, waiting, presumably, for the victim to get up and leave? What is he supposed to say to the driver then? Because this other man – the hunter – is only sitting in his seat, quietly; he hasn't done anything wrong as far as anyone can tell. The victim can't stay on the bus for ever. At some point he has to get up, walk down to the front, past him. And he has to do it sooner rather than later; he doesn't want it to be just the two of them left as the bus comes into the terminus. But he also knows that, if he does get up to leave, he'll be followed. You see? That's what's so funny about it! It's impossible! It doesn't mean anything. It's a game and there's no way out.

‘The guy sitting at the back, he's feeling all right now. His adrenalin's seeping away. His heart rate's returning to normal. He's starting to wonder if maybe he imagined some of it. It's so strange, surely it's not real. And this is the point when he opens his eyes.'

The inspector knew neither for how much longer he could continue like this nor why he was even trying. He wanted to confront Mengano: ‘Are you saying you are a murderer? Are you saying you have killed someone, is that it?' That must have been the reason he was still with them – he needed to ask. But he had his hand clasped to his chest, his lungs struggling for air.

It wasn't particularly rare, this kind of bravado. People, especially young people, liked to try that around police, mocking them, hinting at crimes, while remaining careful not to state anything that might count as an admission of guilt.

‘Are you ready, Inspector?' One of them put a hand on his shoulder. They'd stopped.

‘This is it. We're here. This is the room. Everything you need to know is on the other side.'

He leaned on the corridor wall, put his other hand out, wheezed.

‘Perfectly all right, Inspector. Gives me time to tell the part of the story I forgot. The beginning.'

‘The most important part,' Beltrano continued. ‘It could even come in useful, who knows?'

‘True. What I meant to say, right at the start, Inspector, is that no meeting happens that is not preceded by a sign. An error. Something gone wrong – a single white flower placed on an other­wise clear path; an old woman walking backwards through a crowded street; a clock suddenly leaping several hours.'

‘Gather yourself, Inspector. You don't want to be humiliated in front of your peers, do you? This is a big opportunity. Come on.'

Beltrano opened the door and the inspector pushed himself in. He hit a rush of air and was immediately refreshed. He breathed in deeply. He couldn't hear them behind him any longer. He wanted to go out further into wherever that air came from. It was completely dark in the room. He couldn't see anyone. Some game, some experiment, he thought. He wanted to enjoy the oxygen, but as he walked out into the room he felt a different surface under his feet – a thin mesh metal floor. A cage. The noise echoed out against something. A light turned on, ­dazzling him a moment before illuminating the space – it was the rear of the hotel, the refuse stored and ­collected below. Beyond that, the roaring wide river and a flash of forest.

He turned around, stepped back into the corridor. The men were out of view.

Comparisons to burial and grave memorials in other societies are inevitable. The six-foot depth cut into earth is a similar practice, scaled-up. There is the same belief, often, that the vanished person may return. In cutting six feet in, the approximate height of the figure is inscribed, the length cut also. The born person has been cut out of the earth, made of its materials; preparing burial re-enacts the life-giving, as if in bringing up turf, topsoil, rock, animal, the others are collecting substances with which to make the deceased living again, or to make another of him.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 117

‘Hello?'

‘Isabella? I'm sorry to be calling. Is it late? Of course it is, yes. It's just that I was wondering. I know it's been a while, but could we maybe go over one or two things? I mean, I wanted to run something by you. Is that okay?'

‘Inspector?'

He thought he heard something on the line, an object being moved, perhaps a door being closed. Laughter, hushing, another voice.

‘Yes, well actually – but no, now's fine, we can talk, of course. How are you?'

‘Well, you know, one or two things… I thought I was on to something for a while, the case – I really did. But I must have been mistaken. Things got confusing. I don't know. I think it's this heat. I can never really see clearly, outside. Anyway. Not to worry.' He paused. ‘How are you? You know, didn't I see you the other week at the hotel, I…'

‘A hotel? Me? No, no, you're mistaken. But I've been meaning to call you.'

‘You have?'

‘Regarding Carlos. He'd been reporting to a physician for several months – you did know that? I don't have the records, but access shouldn't be a problem. Naturally, I'll be curious to see them myself.'

‘That's really helpful. That's interesting. May I take the name, the details? I'll share what's inside just as soon as I have the file.'

‘Already sent. Well? You wanted to ask something?'

‘Yes, well, I've been playing everything over, so to speak, the theories, what happened to Carlos. Honestly, I think I may have to start questioning my judgement. Some of the ideas… I mean, there was a time when I was genuinely considering the possibility that Carlos broke apart, that something happened to him, molecularly, so to speak. Beginning in the office, I mean. The form finally giving way that night in the restaurant. It's absurd. But did we really discuss that? I mean, I can see now you were being figurative, it's just I haven't been feeling so well myself recently, there have been certain worries…'

‘Worries?'

‘Obsessive trains of thought, the same thing again and again, and it really isn't like me. And then, just the other week, a bout of mild poisoning, something I ate, resulting in some flux, sweating, vomiting. Nothing unusual, I shouldn't think.'

‘Inspector, see a doctor. As a precaution.'

‘Really? I will. But I would like to ask… what I would like to ask regards the outbreak of illness. In Indonesia – the parasite—'

‘
E. endilicitin
.'

‘Yes. The article you gave me.'

‘Listen, clearly that was a mistake. I want to be quite firm about this: there was no trace of a parasite anywhere in Carlos's office. The microbial disturbances uncovered there are of a different order, a different scale entirely.'

‘Okay. Of course. I was just thinking, I haven't perhaps been quite myself recently. I mean, I wasn't well and then I got really sick. Not that I really believed it, but… But I wasn't myself for a time. Could I have been exposed to something in the office? Some strain, some transmission aided by the heat? And I wondered if you weren't suggesting a parasite, actually, in bringing the article to my attention.'

‘Firstly, you're doing too much. And I'm concerned. You're working this, as far as I can tell, completely on your own. Are you even seeing any other people? You're putting too much pressure on yourself. It can't be helping. I'm going to insist you see a doctor, for the food poisoning. It can't do any harm. And the article, Indonesia? I thought you'd be interested, after the reports, the sequencing. You seemed interested, but I'll admit my enthusiasm can sometimes get out of control. Did you know that other kinds of bacteria – green algae, for instance – have eyespots? That they can discern light and move towards it? So you can understand if I get carried away. Anyway, I thought you might have an academic interest in the article, that you might be curious. If I implied a direct link to the case, then I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention. I hope I haven't wasted any of your time.'

‘No, no, no, not at all. And I am interested, I really am. It's just it was all a lot to take in. And then an old case came up – I thought there may have been a link. Just a theory. And the thing with all these theories is that none of them can be proven, of course. What happened in the office? What kind of illness was this and where did it come from? Are the colleagues in any way complicit? What happened to him? Where did he go? Isabella?'

‘Yes?'

‘Aren't you scared? Isn't it terrifying?'

‘What?'

‘What you were describing, with the reports? That he may no longer have been himself. That a minor physical change might do that to someone.'

Isabella paused. ‘You've seen your share of beatings. You've seen the head struck, haven't you? The head on the ground? Do you think the same person gets up from that?'

‘It is easily changed, then. Easily affected. I don't know how it can go on.'

‘Inspector, if you have any specific worries you should tell me, in strict confidence. I'm here.'

‘Yes.'

Silence.

He breathed slowly, audibly, controlling it. ‘Sometimes I wish,' he said, ‘I could get out of this city. Not right now, that's not practical with the case ongoing, but still. From here, I can't even see outside it. I can't even see the sky at night.'

‘What's so good about the night sky, Inspector?' She sounded suspicious.

‘Well… the stars, I guess—'

‘Ugh!'

‘Isabella?' He wondered if something had happened, if something weren't wrong; she would be talking to someone else now, someone present in her room.

‘We spend too much time looking at the fucking stars! I'm sorry and I don't mean to shout, but I just hate it, I do. I hate it. That urge to look to the transcendent. This idea that life is suddenly magical and incredible because of astronomy, the story of where the matter has travelled. Honestly, give me grandeur, give me my feet. Look at your feet, Inspector, at what you stand on. No, really. Forgive me, I'm being serious. I am. Yes, yes, you can laugh. We are generally, I think, so prejudiced when it comes to scale. There is enough in a simple glimpse of the ground. More than enough. The earth surface is an infinite mesh of bio-trails. You work on it, too, at a slightly different scale – of course you do, you inspect it. The mesh of lines is constantly renewing, but so are we. If it were up to me I would spend my whole life digging up the lost civilization of a single vanished person. There would be no end to the project, Inspector. No end to what may be discovered.'

Several seconds passed. When he didn't know what to say, and when something was expected, he undermined himself. He hated this. Why couldn't he just stay quiet? ‘You're a scientist, Isabella. Of course, your perspective is limited to substance. Sometimes the rest of us need something… more.'

‘Can I be direct with you, Inspector? You know what else I hate? I hate it when people give me my perspective. When they describe my perspective for me. Apparently, I believe we are
just
this. Human beings, I mean. That we are merely this. All the time the emphasis is negative. We should be ashamed for being only a collection of materials. What we are is not enough. Et­cetera, etcetera. But it's nothing but a verbal trick. Listen, I am not saying we are
merely
this, in the pejorative sense. I am saying we are
exclusively
made from this and that there is nothing more extraordinary. Believe me, I am the last person to set limits on what we are capable of. But I am stunned, routinely, in my work, to discover again and again how precarious this life is. It does not take much, Inspector, to knock this balance. And yet…'

She trailed off. This time he kept his silence.

‘I grew up in a small fishing community in the south, Inspector. People used to wait on the beach the morning after a boat was lost. It wasn't uncommon. But they weren't just waiting for the boat: they were waiting for their loved ones to be remade. Children would gather slop from the edge of the shore, keep it in a pale, inspect it every morning to see what had grown. Weird thing is, it's more than just madness and consolation, isn't it? Because the information that expressed those lost came originally from the sea, where it was now deposited. It is still there. That is a fact. And I am amazed, still, every day. I am amazed and I just don't know what to do.'

It is well known that animals see a different light, plants too. No one in the community would believe that because they cannot see their loved ones they are gone. Hunting dogs bark in bursts for no apparent reason and ants gather on patches of land as if they had a focus. All of the missing, it is believed, are present in different sizes, densities, and at different points in the light spectrum. The missing continue to be involved in essential processes such as breathing and eating, living simply on a different scale.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 201

The problem was that he had lost the name of the hospital, and although he had approximate directions, he didn't know the exact address. It was a private medical practice and, according to what he had heard, it didn't look like a hospital exactly, at least from the outside; it was a modern construction similar in appearance to any of the dozens of corporate buildings in the area. He would never have been able to park at this time of day, so he had taken public transport and was walking what was supposed to have been the last part of the journey. It felt, if anything, even warmer, although he didn't see how that was possible. He had just got out; already his shirt was damp, the air felt blocked, something against him.

His interview with Carlos's doctor was for 3.30. There wasn't time to go back to his apartment, retrieve the address and make his way to the hospital, and he didn't have his phone. He couldn't miss the appointment; the doctor might have significant information. Some insight into Carlos's condition. He felt, or imagined that he did, his own brain, as he walked, scraping against the dry grooves of his skull, as if it were no longer insulated by the necessary concentration of fluids.

He had thought he recognized the street, but when he turned north – what he assumed was north (the tall buildings blocked sight of the sun) – he was confronted with another scene, not at all the one he was expecting. Looking back on the apparently familiar street, he realized he hadn't recognized it at all – it was modelled on the one he had been thinking of, a duplication; although the street he did know – the one he had been thinking of and that he had thought, just a moment ago, he was actually standing in – was itself a duplication of a marginally older one in the same area. The superstructures were all alike: ­shimmering light columns, generic and difficult to identify. They didn't brand themselves with names and they seemed particularly inaccessible; literally so, as in many of them there was no obvious entrance, people getting in, he assumed, underground, through high-security parking lots.

He stopped, closed his eyes a few seconds. The only place he could identify with any certainty was the building immediately behind him, which, according to the text embossed on the glass front, was a regional embassy. The region it represented being distant, he was, of course, no closer to working out where he was presently.

Several of the adjacent buildings were also embassies. When he stopped to ask someone where he was, they looked suspicious – wasn't it obvious? He smiled, to reassure the stranger he was perfectly aware of this, but that that wasn't exactly what he meant. He wanted to know where they were physically, he supposed – what this place
was
. He couldn't say it like that, but it was closer to what he meant. He went out of the shadow and the high sun made everything more difficult. Already he wanted to be done with the day, to be home.

He always had a problem admitting he was lost. Generally, he would keep walking, as if the unfamiliarity of the environment was an illusion and the real place, the place he knew, was bound to come out from under it eventually. To get lost in your own city was something a child did. It certainly wasn't acceptable for someone in his position. So he invariably coasted on, attempting to allay the raising heartbeat and void the ridiculous images in his mind: bewildered conversations with doormen and shopkeepers; non-meetings with pedestrians and office workers on lunch breaks, moving briskly past him as he asked them for a moment of their time.

There was something dreamlike about the isolation. He remembered Maria's phrase – or was it the actor's? – about feeling as if you were in a foreign country, surrounded by a ­language you couldn't hope to understand. He was tired. His sleep had been interrupted ever since the night of the hotel. Not insomnia exactly, sometimes quite the opposite. At times he felt he had never been so far away, he was in the midst of such a great ­comfort that he never wanted to leave. Other times the sleep was shallow and he almost reached out, as if swimming just under the surface of a crystalline sea. In these latter spells he was aware of something ongoing in the room. People moving freely about all around him – he could hear their footsteps, their words, even their breath – and he would finally see to it just as soon as he was fully awake. He would just sleep a little more first. Then he would stand up, discover what was going on and banish the strangers from the room.

He was dazzled sometimes, stopped completely in his tracks, by the sense that he was letting everything pass without apprehension, and it hurt him.

He would wake, suddenly alert, poised and set to go, aware of an inordinate amount of time having passed and with the sense of being released. Then there would be a small interval of conscious activity and he would be asleep again. The periods of time he was not aware of, the time he didn't consciously experience, seemed to be longer than the time he was awake. Opportunities were brief and quickly passing. Life raged past, a great and inconceivable expiration he faced with nothing but a yawn. He had to be getting on with things, if he could just put his finger on what they were.

He walked for several minutes in one direction and turned back. The uniformity of the buildings and his impatient attitude in retaliation to the hard sun made it difficult to establish whether he wasn't, in fact, heading back towards where he had come from. The embassies had disappeared. The traffic moved fluently and quietly, interchangeable dark cars, not a single bus or a taxi he could flag to bring him back to a place that he could name. He had missed his appointment, the day wasted, and still he was walking.

Circumstances were dragging him further into despondency. He was out of his depth in a case he couldn't understand and would never resolve. This aimless walking was the most honest thing he'd done in a long time. He didn't know where to go or what to do.

There was something there at the end of the street, something different, incongruous. Getting closer, he saw that a crowd had gathered; he lifted a hand to shield his eyes and see. No doubt a feud, some escalating disagreement. He needed to intervene. There must have been forty, fifty people huddled together, ­spiralling round towards the dead end. Approaching the outer edge of the crowd, he excused himself and tried to push in, but they were so focused on whatever it was they were watching that no one paid him the least attention. Eventually he had to push quite firmly past the middle-aged woman next to him just to make any kind of inroad at all.

It was exhausting. The crowd was jeering now, some yelling in encouragement – there was no doubt that what they were watching at the centre was a fight. He had already begun sweating, even before he had tried pushing in, and now things were getting worse. He had obviously settled on the worst possible point of entry – he had tried several and somehow alighted on the least favourable. But he was in now, he supposed, and it would be more trouble than it was worth trying to get out.

He continued apologizing, redundantly excusing himself – he was yet to receive so much as a glance from any of these people, and it was not as if they were all of one demographic, some crowd of youngsters, say, that he could dismiss as ignorant. He had noted all types of people still resisting him, unconsciously, a tide of people repelling him: old women and infants, the finely dressed and the scruffy, bankers breaking from nearby offices and maintenance workers in hi-vis vests.

Soon enough he would know for himself what it was they were all staring at, which must really be something marvellous, he thought, the eagerness in their eyes, the concentration of their posture, their apparent obliviousness to anything other than whatever it was that was going on at the centre, and that he must – it was imperative – find out now for himself. There was more, he thought, riding on this than the satisfaction of curiosity – he had the feeling, now, that something significant was at the centre, a revelation or at least a clue that would lead him closer, for what was going on there was no ordinary scrap, drawing in all these different groups of people, mesmerized by whatever it was that was going on at the centre. Not even the best kind of street fight could result in that.

Please, I just need to get past, he said, in spite of all that he had so far learned. I just need to get a little closer, you see, he said, even laughing a little despite his discomfort. I haven't been able to see what it is yet, would you believe! I can't see anything, he said – would you tell me whatever it is there, at the centre? Honestly, I'm not joking. I just haven't been able to see yet. It must be my eyesight. It's been deteriorating steadily, most noticeably so in the last few months. I swear it's true. It's my sight failing me, that must be what's going on, that's it.

He barely muttered these words, in fact he may not have uttered them at all, spoken them only to himself. Certainly they weren't audible, not that anyone in this strange crowd would have listened to him anyway; he doubted it would even have registered to them what it was that he was doing – speaking, that is.

Finally, he was getting close to the centre, sweating profusely now in the struggle, and all this contact with so many people, strangers too. Still he hadn't seen or heard anything that could be said to be going on at the centre, despite the fact that he was so close now that it should be obvious what it was, and the thought struck him that children were at the centre, that was why he hadn't seen anything, they were small; but before he had even had any time to enjoy the relief of having come up with a rational explanation for this whole strange business, he was overcome instead with disgust for the fact that they were all, himself included – he had to admit he was party to it, despite his ignorance and his innocent intentions – they were all essentially exploiting children, that's what they were doing. It was disgusting, appalling, and he had to put a stop to it now, right now, just as soon as he could finally, and it wasn't far now, arrive at the precise centre.

He had to stop, and that was difficult now, for he was almost flowing with the people. He had to stop now, because – and he knew this was impossible, but it appeared to be true – he had passed over on to the other side, gone, that is, past the centre, which he hadn't even noticed, hadn't seen a thing, and now he was actually moving against people that were facing him, coming, as he was now, somehow out from the centre, and if he didn't stop, if he continued just as he was – although he wasn't willing anything, it was just happening by itself – then he would soon find himself on the opposite limit, the edge, and then he would be outside, gone, and he would never be able to muster the energy to get back in, the idea impossible and hardly worth thinking about; he would be gone for ever. He hadn't even noticed he was in the middle of it, that was the thing. He had not recognized the centre, had passed right through it and missed his chance, seeing and learning nothing, drifting through it, carried on the momentum of other people, people he didn't even know, and now what was he to do?

He walked away and took a taxi. Before entering he looked back and nothing appeared to have changed, the same excited jostling and commotion was ongoing, and he was none the wiser. What's going on over there? the driver asked him. Oh that, he said. That's nothing, nothing important really, and he gave the driver his address.