Infinite Ground (12 page)

As he broke the surface his vision fizzed. The light slowly drifted back into sense, form and specificity and he saw his family sitting together at the table and apparently enjoying a meal. They looked at him in some confusion. He was struck by the details of the objects in the room. Plastic white cutlery separ­ated neatly into Tupperware containers. Foam-backed seats set directly onto the earthen floor. A table made from differently coloured fabric stitched together, supporting his family's heads and elbows. He had seen every one of these objects uncountable times before, but as they had been the last things he expected to see, hundreds if not thousands of miles from home, they were amazing. Somehow all of this – the family scene – had been extracted, lifted and transported to the land edge. They were there to meet him as he emerged, and it was the last thing he expected. There was a knock on the door and a community leader entered. She explained that the family, over generations, had charted a significant area of forest, but that rather than leading due east, as they had intended and as they had started out and believed they were continuing, they had actually traced what had become a perfect circle, unconsciously following the apparent direction of the sun and inevitably returning home. What is more, the community leader informed them: ‘There is no reason for you to do this underground. You are more than welcome to attempt such an escape on the surface. It will be safer that way. None of us will stop you. Rest assured, you will not be watched or hunted. Nevertheless, we are confident that you will ultimately choose to return here, the place where you belong.'

Another explanation for what happened to the missing aircraft was that the corporate identities taking hold of the controls deliberately crash-landed over particularly dense coverage. The cruising speed, altitude and fuel levels were calculated to optimally facilitate a ‘soft crash' – a particular form of mechanical free-falling in which the aircraft and its cargo are not immolated or otherwise entirely obliterated on contact with the ground.

Typically less than a third of the cargo survives and the injuries are substantial. For months individuals may subsist high in the trees on leaves, insect larvae and rainwater. Others suffer multiple fractures and amputations on impact with the ground. Significant trauma-induced amnesia, combined with dramatic physical injuries, at times recasting the whole anatomy of the living human, puts the identity in a state supremely suggestible to environmental and imaginative cues – anatomical displacements enabling increased flexibility, lesions on the brain causing curiously adaptive psychological disturbances. Ex-academy anthropologists were quoted stating heterodox opinions on the viability, under such extreme conditions, of a ‘reversion' to pre-linguistic modes of living: shifts in diurnal settings leading to the development of nocturnal hunting behaviour; landing impacts on hip and spinal areas forcing quadruped locomotion, arboreal sleeping and increased communion with animals; loss of medium- and long-term memory causing disintegration of self-hood and abandonment of narrative and time. Pictures were drawn of survivor communities existing in a state of flux, pre-cultural, rapacious, successful. There were stories of these people, formidable hunters, working less and less in tandem with each other, favouring a voiceless, pre-cooperative method of society, meeting only periodically, seasonally, to copulate in mass events. Men began experimenting with other organisms. Some emerged as ‘guest' members of smaller primate troops, accommodated for the advantages of their unusual dexterity, but ejected, usually killed and eaten, because of the severe, war-like and proprietary elements structured deep within their behaviour. The ex-humans also, occasionally, activated the larynx and diaphragm and made strange, loud, prolonged nasal expressions, which frightened the other animals and disrupted their hunts; these episodes occurring exclusively in the night, when they were forced down and the salted emissions were licked from their faces.

The tourists swapped stories of permits and inoculations, the many weeks of waiting while the paperwork was processed, the rigorous interviews and thorough (some claimed intrusive) medical examinations, the injections producing temporary lesions on the upper arms and a thankfully passing state of nausea and light-headedness. He nodded repeatedly, doing his best to move the conversation along.

He'd been horrified when he identified the travel party. The T-shirts and baseball caps, the loud voices and English words. Immediately, he thought, the pedlars would appear with their Amerindian crafts and wares, and the previously sleepy community would light up, touting for business. But things had actually worked in his favour. It was proving disarmingly simple. Of course he could go upriver. Of course he could meet remote communities. He was welcome to join them, so long as he paid. He told Knut, the group's tall, red-faced, blond leader, about what he had read in the book at the hotel, the anthropologist and the tribe. Knut hadn't heard any of this; it must have been a long time ago. These aren't the people we're meeting, he said. This isn't the tribe.

‘How do you know?' the inspector asked.

‘Because these people are original. They have not met us before, any of us. They have not met anyone from outside. This will be a real experience, a genuine first contact.'

He did not like it that the guides carried guns.

‘A precaution,' Knut said.

He imagined they weren't loaded, that it was a detail added by the tour company to ratchet up excitement. From the way the local guides carried theirs, they certainly believed it was real.

They had a busy few days planned, one activity after another. On the first excursions, even though they weren't going far, they should still, Knut stressed, remain vigilant: it was an area of wildness. They should be mindful of snakes, stinging insects. It would be unusual for cats to be active during daylight hours, but it's not unknown, he said.

Whistles, approving sighs.

First stop: a crash site. Eleven miles upriver, followed by a three-mile hike. A sixteen-seater Cessna carrying missionaries came down nine years ago with no survivors. Authorities collected and extracted what they could. The crash was of ­particular interest to the inspector, as one of the fatalities listed on the manifest had sat, at the time, on the corporation's board of directors.

The tourists nodded gravely, lowered their voices. What had happened was tragic, it was agreed. They would respect the dead as they entered the site. Still, they might as well be useful while they were there, Charlie said. There was no good reason why they couldn't have a look around. Perhaps they would even find objects, possessions they could take back with them when they left the forest.

Knut gave them gloves and plastic bags.

They would return any objects to the authorities, who would then distribute the material to the families.

Naturally, someone affirmed.

The inspector said nothing. The motor caught and the boat took off.

From the river to the site they didn't hack at bushes once. It had all been trimmed. Clearly they weren't the first group to visit. The hike barely stretched two miles. Still, in the humidity, he was finding things difficult.

The site itself had all grown over. They would have to use their imaginations, Knut declared.

Reconstructions suggested the aircraft had ignited and partially broken up before hitting the canopy. It was likely some passengers had jumped.

‘Is this really it, here?' The inspector noted an almost embarrassed air of anticlimax. They continued looking around for something.

‘The noise, the light, the heat…' Knut's voice trailed off.

‘Maybe we'll find a wedding ring.'

‘From a plane of nuns?'

‘The pilot?'

The Inspector began to feel a little ill.

Some of the things they were meant to be looking for, he supposed, included black habits, simple shoes, eyeglasses with cords, photographic magazines, pages from paperback thrillers, toilet paper, waste, intact teeth, mercury fillings, inflatable headrests, flesh-coloured tights, strings of matted hair, half-filled notepads, rosaries, pictures of relatives, modest nightwear, sheet sleeping bags, nets, Plexiglas, milk-moons at the bottom of fingernails, axions and dendrites, low-reaching thin white socks, hand-fans, earplugs, return tickets, around $900, hymn books, the deceptive floor, a shattered roof.

They went off alone, prodded and pushed through branches, pulled back vines and looked up in hope. There appeared to be competition over who would be the first to mention the possibility of survivors.

‘But how would they know? How could they have been certain none remained?'

None of it existed any more – it had been unmade. Glimmering things – reinforced glass from windows and mirrors, alloy wheels – were used by birds for display, internal wiring from the engines and communications systems swallowed and regurgitated as glue for nests, food for young.

He pictured analysts in the forest sampling the leaves, the ants, the birds and mammals of the area, reading matter and blood and fibre, scanning for toxicity in altered mineral levels, identifying in the spread of the new life exactly where the plane came down. Leaked heavy metals in the soil were absorbed in plants, then escalated via insects, fish, mammals and the people who ate them. Lithium, from the downed plane, now producing ecstatic visions, dreams of suicide. A sketch of the plane and the cargo drawn finely over the area, invisible but still, for the moment, recoverable. Rapid generations reproducing the information, in body and behaviour, the sketch drifting further away as the effects of the crash levelled out and the event, in time, disappeared.

What was this cloud, he thought, that they walked through?

He imagined, as he pushed past branches, suddenly seeing an intact torso, amber preserved. Even if what they were doing was fictional – say, this wasn't an authentic crash site, that they all knew that, really – the exercise, nonetheless, induced nausea. He didn't want to be there. He couldn't for the moment hear any of the others. Who knew what they might claim to have found? He wanted to be back in the settlement, around voices, other faces again, reading, enjoying a beer.

They ate lunch together at Santa Lucía. The tourists had been nearly everywhere, they boasted. Right to the top and right to the bottom. He had made the mistake of introducing himself in English and had expected brightness in the eyes, a flurry of questions, routine requests for useful information as they tried to exploit any opportunity, but, strangely, it hadn't happened; they had all but ignored him.

They walked in a group very uniformly, all together with their red caps and jackets bobbing up and down. They didn't have the shrill buoyancy he'd seen in other tourist groups. This one was quiet, solemn even, and there was something mechanical in the way they jerked their limbs up and down to make them walk.

Later they swam in a natural pool. Knut had judged the air and pleased the men by declaring he ‘wasn't certain' how safe the water was. Flesh-eating fish, deceptively enormous constrictors, near invisible insects that would enter any orifice and tear you up inside. They went slowly through swamp water, thick, green liquid up to the level of their chests and chins. Waded slowly, suspiciously, looking around for something that was surely bound to happen. Each had their left hand extended up into the hanging vines, carrying aloft a small leather bag or purse, additionally wrapped in plastic, containing passport, ID card, permits, money.

They came out disappointingly intact, dried at the side on cleared land they knew better, by now, than to ask about. ‘Most likely formerly used by the tribe' – it was becoming a refrain.

The inspector, watching, continued to ask about corporate compounds, ruins in the forest.

‘There's nothing,' Knut said, more irritated every time. ‘Anyway, tomorrow we leave on our first contact expedition.'

‘Where's Charlie? What happened to Charlie?'

‘Right here!'

Finally they were off. The boat was filled at one end with bags of rice, tinned fish, nuts, salted meat, dried biscuits, black bread, water skins. The motor made a distressingly loud noise. He couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed, aware of how incongruous they were. Still he attempted excitement, leaning forward from the front of the boat, willing on adrenalin.

From an initial burst, they moved at a gentler speed, at times cutting the motor and paddling through thick river. He lay against a rolled tarpaulin, too tired for English.

He brought out
Tribes of the Southern Interior
, which he'd picked up at the hotel. Despite the title, the book focused on a single community, population around two hundred, based at an unspecified point south-east in the forest. There seemed pieces missing, whole chapters ripped out. Even he could see it was short on data. Relations with other communities, analysis of language, diet – simple, foundational areas had been omitted from the book. Instead he read prolonged interpretations of mythology, confidently rendered in grand, formal prose.

He let himself be amused by some of the claims, even copied out passages into his notebooks. He'd draw from them later. A chapter on the dietary habits of the community was the biggest omission. He wanted to learn about their health and medicine. The mythology, at least in the translation he read, was fixated on the idea of missing persons. He read this as a suggestion of poor health in the community – perhaps the writer had been present not long after a period of disease. Therefore knowing of their diet would be instructive. The rhetoric on departures acted as a form of consolation, an accommodation of unbearable hurt, a system set up to formalize something chaotic and inexplicable. He wondered, naturally, how much of this was the invention of either the writer or translator. Many of the stranger parts of the book could be explained by simple, ordinary grief. He imagined the bereaved European making, from observations of the community, a whole system to complement his internal crisis. The period spent ‘in the field' could even have been planned – an exile, a physical escape from loss. The material in the book he read, then, would be interesting primarily biographically, but revealing, as was usually the case, very little about the lives of those it purported to represent.

The pace of the boat was pleasant. Most were occupied with binoculars and cameras clamped to their faces and pointed high up. He fingered the leather pouch attached to his waist, which contained his own set of optical lenses. A gift from his wife, ­several years ago. He didn't take it out. From the river, the trees seemed too high. He didn't see anything, he never did. That was the thing about forests, Knut was now telling them: it's very difficult to see big life. That wasn't on the brochure, Charlie said.

They camped near a stream. Essential, Knut said. Various reasons. They had a lot still to do before the dark.

It looked cleared, as if used regularly.

‘That will be a tribe using it,' Knut said, uncertainly.

Around them the guides were hacking bush. They had the use of a clearing already, and in relatively flat land; the ­inspector watched to see why they were cutting more. What they came away with, after hacking and splitting, was a series of thin poles, each several feet high. Without needing to say anything the three guides began posting them into the ground, marking out corners and mid-points along the perimeter of the clearing, several feet or so in from the beginning of the bush. Knut told them, explicitly, what was already clear: they shouldn't step beyond the border. Rope-lines were put up, linking the poles and sealing the space they were to sleep inside. Nothing was above them except the distant canopy thatch. They would cook and eat here, lay down their mats and single-sheet sleeping bags and hang their insect nets. They would not go outside the rope space. Someone was laughing. Charlie was asked to speak up.

‘Yes,' Knut confirmed. ‘Obviously you will have to leave the space when you need to use the facilities, but that is the only time.'

They heard noise continuously around them. The inspector saw a couple – the Belgians, he thought, who always appeared as if they'd only just put on their clothes – approach the rope border. The man, Leo, in shirt, high socks and a broad hat, was slowly pushing his hand out past the line, as if gently, cautiously, testing water temperature. Leo suddenly whipped back his hand, his wife putting her arms around him, scolding him. He stared. The guides looked concerned and consulted with Knut, who stressed, again, the dangers of moving outside camp bounds.

Charlie was continuing to ask questions, offering unsolicited commentary on any topic. The inspector was careful to delay laying out his own mat, waiting for Charlie to make his move, so he could then position himself the furthest distance away. He was frustrated. Nothing at all had got started, and despite, as it seemed, being in a reasonably remote forest area, their group maintained a loud and festive air. It was reminding him of a coach party and it didn't have to be like this. They couldn't, it seemed, be subdued. The difference, he thought, the marked change in behaviour, had really begun with the setting up of the rope-lines. Everything was a game, anything happening beyond the camp just a distant source of entertainment, as indirect as television. Soon enough, he had to hope, they would be done for the night. They were scheduled to resume travelling before dawn. He winced. Any attempt to see this as legitimate investigative activity, an ‘expedition', fieldwork into the corporation, something that may even help him establish further information relating to the disappearance of Carlos, was undermined by the gossipy tones, the vulgar sight of money belts and spat-out toothpaste froth staining the mud white.

He sat up – people were moving about more purposefully. Tin mugs and paper plates: dinner was being served. The tourists unfolded their trek-chairs, while he sat directly on the ground. Charlie was next to him; he prodded the inspector on the arm and asked if everything was okay.