Infinite Ground (10 page)

Skilled mimics simulate the sound the missing made. They blow into their cupped hands to make a distant percussion like the footsteps coming closer. It is a consolation for loved ones in the evening and seems to go some way to maintaining order and continuity in the community. It is also designed as a provocation, an appeal that might tempt the missing back.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 223

There was a problem in the production of where he lived – specifi­cally his apartment, but other things had been corrupted too, including his thinking, his skin and the wider area surrounding him. He didn't like to leave the apartment now, not since the confusion with Carlos's doctor. He remembered the crowd packed around him and it made him shudder. Although he could work, for the moment, largely from home, he still had to go out for supplies. And when he came back, he wouldn't recognize half the stuff. Sometimes he felt sure there was someone else living there, some transient waiting for him to exit before taking his place, living as himself. Those weren't his cups of coffee. He didn't make them. Didn't know whose food that was. The air was heavy and there wasn't enough oxygen, which made it difficult to breathe. There were smudges on his fingertips, soft blurring patches that felt strange to the touch, one on the other, that sunk in whenever they were pressed, much deeper than they should have, really. The sensitive parts of his fingers were slipping off and the identifying marks became fainter every day. He imagined the process developing across the surface of his body from the tips in, so that the rest of him became less real, not marked skin any longer so much as neutral flesh.

There were no photographs in his apartment; he hadn't had a camera in twenty years. He didn't like the frame. He was uncomfortable with paintings that had people inside – small, bent under skies, fields and mountains.

The air abraded him. And as he diminished, the sky fattened. The sun disappeared behind banks of thick black and purple cloud, heavier every day. The glare, the brightness had gone, but if anything the heat was worse, even more oppressive, a vegetal heat. Waking each morning he found his nostrils filled with hard black blood. The sunsets were sudden and irregular. The night had never been so close; without a hint of starlight the sky came lower, black vapour that soaked his hair, his back, his groin. He was waiting.

Where was the cloud coming from? Rolling westward every day. He gazed at the dark amassing in the sky and realized, of course, that it had drifted from the forest, an effect of breath.

A report on the radio, as he swirled a small spoon through his coffee: all schools in the district were to close for the week, in light of the weather. Problems with breath. Unprecedented. Official advice was conflicting: stay indoors, use fans and AC; conserve the use of AC to avoid a surge of the grid.

He didn't feel well. He could pick up the phone, call ­Isabella. Just a precaution. It couldn't do any harm. Unless she then brought him in… Diagnosis wouldn't help anyway, would it? Besides, he doubted it was anything as serious as that – it might even have been common, related to the weather – and he wouldn't want to waste her time.

He sat at the monitor on his desk, tried to refocus on the investigation. He searched online: ‘holdings', ‘Pérez', ‘microbiome', ‘Carlos', ‘weather'. He picked up folders, went again through the notes, the clippings, the testimonies. It was useless. He put down his papers, shut off his computer.

He picked up a book, sat on his most comfortable chair and prepared to be relaxed. A free evening, now, the street quiet, his living room nicely, encouragingly lit. Then he opened the book, a paperback, and winced. It was happening again; he thought he was rid of it. Whenever he opened a book, now, he couldn't help shiver at the fabric, the feel of the pressed paper and glued spine, the fluttering concertina of the open pages held upside down. He had an impulse to eat it. He felt the shivering irritation of chalk on gums, a cold, squealing unease across his shoulders and at the back of his neck. He heard the creak of the spine, felt the bend of the heft carried by his fingers, and knew it was impossible for him to enjoy it any more, holding a book like that and simply reading. Instead he was fixated on the idea of consuming the book, putting its dry paper inside his mouth and eventually forcing the thing down, his gums lined with reams, his teeth stained with ink.

That's enough, he said, clapping the book closed. Even if he didn't know where he was going, he still had to get out. He laced up his shoes, turned off the lights and thumped the door closed behind him. It was thin and the lock gave a little when you pulled on the handle. He tested it again, watched what his hands were doing. The key had turned; it was as locked as it was going to be. He had to get on with things. He lifted his nose – it was evening, why weren't his neighbours cooking? They never cooked any more. He never smelled them. Whenever he was coming up or down the staircase he would go slowly past their doors, especially between seven and ten in the evening, when he could expect at least some of them to be preparing food, but always the same – no evidence of lives.

He wanted distance. He took the first subway he saw and got off several minutes later. He set off walking in an unfamiliar area. He was enjoying walking with speed, tricking himself into the suggestion of purpose. Now he stopped and waited for the lights. On one side of the junction, to his left, the traffic continued. To his right the vehicles paused; several feet away a truck driver leaned forward in his cab, pressing his chest down on the wheel. The inspector waited, along with two dozen or so other pedestrians, more arriving every second. The crossing was technically clear, with little traffic turning in. Normally in these situations you could sense a frustration building; then one person walks onto the road and then another, until finally something breaks and a mass of pedestrians illegally crosses.

For the moment he seemed the only one affected. Those around him looked contentedly ahead, as if focusing on something further away. Composed, arms clasped or held to the side. He made a sound somewhere between a click and a sigh. The lights were taking an age. Nothing caught on. Stuck on red at least 120 seconds, almost certainly longer, given he could only count from his arrival. He wasn't sure what the procedure was should the lights actually be locked, how to begin to deal with it, a potentially volatile situation.

Three minutes now. He turned around, trying to establish eye contact, but no one responded. He scoffed, gestured at the lights, the traffic, the road. It was now absurd. The path was clear and no one took it. The day got hotter and hotter. He didn't see how patience could hold in a situation like this. It was quite clear that no one shared his concern. What he should do, he knew, was walk blindly onto the road.

A huge thunderclap and, at last, the rain.

The light turned green, the people dissipated and he crossed the road.

Tarpaulins were rushed out to cover the fruit laid at the front of the smaller stores. The streets seemed to clear and even the traffic was less intrusive. He didn't cover his head – already he couldn't get any wetter. Water ran in lines from pedestrians to the sewers. He had always enjoyed the rains at the beginning of the season, the celebratory effect of the new sensation and the blurred air. This was the beginning of the change. The streets were dark under the clouds, but new pools of light shifted in the intermittent traffic. His short-sleeved shirt clung to his thin chest and his jaw streamed hanging water.

He felt refreshed, newly determined. He stared at the people around him. There was something odd in the way they were behaving. All you had to do, he thought, to witness it was to stop and look at nothing in particular – it would just happen. Like the people at the pedestrian crossing. Or when he had gone to pick up dinner one time from Celeste Imperio and seen children running, stopping, then practising shaking hands for several minutes, trying to tell each other that they were expected to be doing this kind of thing for the rest of their lives, and so they should be getting used to it, and getting on with getting it right. They were laughing. Everything was done as if it were not quite real, some joke; and without even realizing it, at first, he had begun to play along, too, to walk a little less securely, pause an extra beat before opening a door, drag his words out just a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

He must look like one of those actors too, he now thought; it must be obvious just by looking at him that he was trying hard to do what he was supposed to be doing; that he wasn't quite at ease with it, any of it; that he was suspicious, deeply sceptical.

This kind of thing had been going on for quite a while. It was a problem of perception and it was linked to the dreams he had been having recently, the most vivid and affecting of his life, that left him sweating and shattered when he woke, more tired than when he had lain down – he couldn't believe the idea that this was to be the beginning of the day, the recuperation over. Every time he was running, struggling through what appeared to be an identical forest, furiously unvarying, never letting him feel as if he were getting anywhere, and precluding the possibility of an ending. This forest became a fixture in his life, a consistent passage between the thin and insubstantial days of his eating and working. The intensity of his exertions in the forest seemed to explain, retrospectively, the spectacular fatigue of the sleeps. He returned to the piles of sticks in Carlos's office, wondered if he had had the same dreams.

The surpassing experiences of the forest might explain the oddness of everything else. He played with the old childish idea that the relationship between dreaming and waking life should be inverted, the experience of the former comprising the more significant, purposeful and major period. It felt like his journeys in the forest really had happened, and that as he ran or stumbled he had lost consciousness and been brought back to his room in his apartment. He surveyed the room silently each morning, sniffing the odd, neutral air inside, listening to the weight of his breath, examining the place for other signs of activity. He studied the walls of the rooms, tapping them, anticipating the sounds of a hollow. The more he examined the place the surer he was that it was unreal, not his original place at all. It had a smell of nothing, had no trace of life or matter. Somehow, and he knew it sounded ridiculous, he suspected the real place he lived in had been measured and rebuilt somewhere else, in a remarkable feat of craftsmanship. It was a marvellous reproduction of his apartment, he had thought, casting his eyes about the bedroom, walking in his bare feet through to the kitchen where he would pour a coffee. Everything was in its right place; you could spend almost a whole lifetime believing it was real. For whatever purpose, someone had engineered a thorough and comprehensive duplication of his living space, rebuilding the same foundations into the hole dug out of the earth, erecting a similarly sized and sourced tenement building filled with people looking and behaving approximately as those did whom he had previously lived among, at a more settled period in his life, and further had made out of the surrounding area outside, at least as far as the eye could see, a simulacrum of urban life, with all its rhythmic motions, its traffic and mercantile undulations and manic community.

Quickly he had opened his books, sure that they were just copies, holding only blank pages underneath their covers, but the few he happened to choose had been so thoroughly duplicated that it would have been difficult to tell they weren't real. In a cookery book, he even found marginalia in a perfect forgery of his wife's handwriting.

He thought it through again, watching the rain. The links failed. Still he was certain that this whole area surrounding him, with its neutral, dead air, its insubstantiality and transience, had been constructed over part of a much wider region of wild land. The forest remained on every side, around and even underneath this temporary place. The area he was presently living in was a stage and this was a passing performance. Somehow – it must be due to subconscious drives he had little control over – he was breaking out of the artifice, thrashing through the wild undergrowth in expectation of some other kind of encounter, but each time he was brought back to his room, where he lived, waking up suddenly and with a start.

The figures moving in his room at night, talking over him as if he were entirely passive, must be linked to this duplication. They would have been measuring the place, recording all the detail for the construction of the duplication, the place he lived now. He had been moved from a real world to an inauthentic and virtual location. He maintained at the same time the understanding that this
couldn't be happening
, that the duplication was an insane and impossible idea and that everything was, of course, normal, as it had always been, day to day, and likely always would be until it ended. And yet he still believed it.

It rained so hard he could barely see.

He took the conviction that this new, insubstantial world couldn't be happening as proof in fact that it was. Feeling that the unreal world didn't or couldn't exist was quite consistent with its properties, he thought. It simply made the experience stranger, more disturbing. He didn't know where he was or how it had been done. His sensible understanding that the substi­tution of this unreal world was impossible – it could never have been done, no one would ever have those kinds of resources, and even if they did, then what was their motive? – revealed a truth, he thought. Because everything had always been impossible, that's just the way it was, and he had got used to it. And now, for some reason, he had lost that easy relationship and was no longer accustomed to the place at all. He saw it as inauthen­tic, marvellous, unreal. The worktop in his kitchen, the railings on the fence outside, the wet tar in the too-warm air, all of it was fascinating, suspicious and strange. Somehow all of it had been built to replace the real. He sensed the industry as he slept and came near to consciousness and fell back down again. The figures moving and talking urgently, preparing the great duplication of the world. It was likely there were some sort of officials, men in suits, guards, perhaps, monitoring the inspector as he went about his life in the small area permitted him. The guard, drawing on a cigarette, pulling away in some anonymous vehicle, was like a ranger delineating the perimeter of a national park, maintaining its borders and ensuring that none of the animals crossed the invisible line.