Infinite Ground (14 page)

He was still waiting for the records. When he needed him, Miguel seemed to go missing. He didn't see how it was possible in a place this size, this cut off, with nowhere else to go. The settlement was like a ship, an island, a theatre. You passed seemingly the same people always, in the same limited space.

He eventually found Miguel, who claimed to have been in the hut all along. Miguel threaded wires while he talked, his words small and conservative next to the fluency of the hands. The inspector was unable to identify either the different machine parts or their condition. He couldn't tell if one half of the room, for instance, represented a different state of progress compared to the other. It may have been the case that the room moved into order, that Miguel had separated out the parts that way, according to progress. He couldn't tell what was being built. The inspector was not so adept with machines and repairs. It had been a frequent source of gentle teasing. It still amazed him, really, that anything could go. That these lidless boards and lead-acid batteries could be fitted into a boat shape and you could step on it and trust and it would take you. He was careful not to ask any more questions about the work.

‘I'm afraid I have some bad news,' Miguel said. ‘They're gone. All records, gone.'

‘What do you mean – you lost them? They've been stolen? There's been a fire, what?'

‘They've gone through all my ledgers. You can see for yourself. It's all ruined. This is bad news for me. How am I to explain this to the authorities? For tax, and what have you?'

‘Who did? Who went through everything? Bring them to me. I want to interview them immediately.'

‘What? No. The insects.'

Often, in afternoons, the inspector retreated to his room. The draining light, the feasting insects, the manifest frustration of life on this tiny, blank outpost. The children took to laughing at him, parodying his gait and walk, a slow and high-kneed stride, pointless and mechanical, like a puppet, they said. He hadn't been the least aware. They laughed, called at him, threw pebbles at his room, disturbing him as he tried to read back through his case notes or dictated notes on the little progress he had made.

His room was small. Noise from the bar filtered through the shutters. Doors rattled, laughter broke. He was certain someone knocked, but it must have been another door. Guests came in and out – they'd nod when they saw each other, without making introductions. His net wouldn't attach securely to the ceiling, so he woke tangled. The mattress was damp and grey. Something smelled.

Shortly after settling down for the night, he'd spent twenty minutes debating whether his bladder could hold, but it had now become painful. He scrambled out of the net, untucking a corner from under the end of the mattress, crawled to the floor. With the shutters closed, the only light came through the door. The bathroom was ruinous – mirror stained and cracked, broken pipes exposed, holes in the floor and walls. A pair of bright blue flip-flops had been helpfully provided. A thick, fuzzy ant line emerged from a fissure; it looked like hair shaved from a face. He squatted over the drop hole, just in case. As he returned to bed, he checked the lock on the door. It held, barely. For some reason he then opened it. The corridor was empty. He could go back to sleep. An object caught his eye. It had been deposited between his room and the next on his left. It was dark. He shouldn't leave his room as he wasn't dressed and didn't want an embarrassing encounter, a trader stumbling back from the bar. It might have been an item of clothing, perhaps a hat. He leaned closer and it seemed to move. But it was just a gathering of dirt, a pile that had been brushed there for some reason. Mud, stones, mainly small sticks, trailed in by someone who hadn't wiped down.

The doors rattled with the barest movement – a breeze, another door being opened or closed, someone coming in or out. A few more times he thought he heard someone and, once or twice, voices and even footsteps running away – the kids, he guessed.

He determined, the following morning, to put a stop to the incidents during the night, the banging on his door, the laughing. He couldn't get any work done in these conditions.

He found Miguel returning to his hut and explained the situation. It wasn't acceptable; the man really had to keep a tighter leash on his children. The conditions in the room were far from satisfactory. ‘And why is it only me, Miguel? Why do they bang on my door?'

‘I don't know. Some foolishness – I apologize profusely. It won't happen again.'

But it did. A pattern repeated. He'd finally, after some delay, get off to sleep, when he'd hear the banging, the laughter, the footsteps running away. So close, especially the voices, he could have believed they were right there in his room. He'd scramble out of bed, dismantling the net, run to his door as quickly as he could, but find, on throwing it open, that the corridor was empty. Then he'd wait. He knew they'd come back. Only somehow they anticipated him. They waited not only until he'd left his vigil, but for him actually, and miraculously, to fall asleep again. Then the knock. Another. Repeating until he gave in, jumped up from the bed, ran to the door, saw nothing in the half-light.

He sealed the open office window as soon as he noticed. He tested the lock three times, then traced the edges of the further two windows, checking for any airflow. The atmosphere had turned over. It didn't seem possible that somebody could have been so blithe, so ignorant as to have done this. Carlos, he thought, had been lost anew, all remaining evidence gone.

He left the office, closing the door behind him. The employees appeared oblivious, habitually absorbed in work. He wasn't sure who to approach. Nobody would admit culpability. He would be passed from one department to another, simply wasting his time.

He returned to the empty office. The keyboard was meaningless now. The carpet, the chair, the windows and the desk. Whatever had been left in the vacant office was gone. For the first time he sat directly on Carlos's chair. The rings from the coffee mug were just perceptible on the desk. He wondered how long the window had been open. Although it hadn't rained, the corners of the carpet were damp. Detritus had blown in. Something was present on the edge of the desk, too far to reach.

A bloom, soft, blue, no bigger than the nail on his smallest finger. Rather than pick it up, he leaned in to smell. It should have been dead, neutral, but the odour was as strong as the colour was bright. Carlos's desk was narrower than the model used in the other offices, only just wider than his extended elbows. Carlos had requested it, perhaps brought it in himself, requiring the assistance of a friend or colleague. He would ask Vasquez. A horizontal board weighed it down, doubling as a footrest. The desktop little more than a slab, a butcher's block. Standing over the table, bearing the instrument down and splitting the animal carcass.

Now the evidence had gone, he was clear to run his hands over the table. He was surprised at how uneven it was. Damp patches. The midday shadow cast by the open computer screen only just failed to hit the flower on the edge.

He blew onto the desk. The bloom reacted, but remained in position. He looked closely and saw that it was rooted there. A single wildflower blooming in the damp desk.

He woke up. A weak sun lit the room; the dream receded. Mosquitoes had stripped his back in the night, leaving blood on the sheets. It had hardened into crust, but when he washed his back fell fresh open. He sat on the edge of the low bed, his feet on the soft wooden floor, his hands on his knees. He was too warm. The fan barely moved. He tried to slow things down. He had to decide on a course of action.

The thick odour of the flower in the dream was fixed to the back of his throat. The pungent smell he had noted earlier was now much worse. An awful smell. It was there on the blood-stained sheets. Was it him? He left the room and went to investigate outside. He saw the lights of a labourers' camp down by the river. They were constructing a new bridge. He could smell burned incense from their tents. They were trying to isolate themselves, ward off the source of that same stench.

It wasn't excrement. He went around the back of the building. The wall beneath faced the forest, away from the settlement. Vines climbed it, smeared in thin dark splashes. Was this where dead animals went? So close to the community, the hotel?

He went back to his room and closed the shutters, sealing them with tape. Somehow it got worse. It was the smell of holes opened in the ground. Endings. He pressed his hands to the top of his head. Unbroken. He wiped sweat away. He had imagined a blade put against him, planing down his head, shavings like sawdust around him on his shoulders. Pulped tissue and nerve. The smell of his own brain. Scent and sense, matter and memory.

He relaxed at the small hotel bar, continuing with
Tribes of the Southern Interior
. He found himself reading the same few pages several times, losing the thread, unable to make much progress. He put the book aside.

There was a new, rather conspicuous group at the bar, youngish and particularly thin, the men with three-day beard growth, clothes uniformly dark and torn. He nodded and waited. When one went to order, he introduced himself. Alberto – tall, pale, red-headed – cut an unusual figure in the forest.

‘Bad timing,' Alberto explained. ‘We're just back. Five weeks' filming. We had our own boat, but it was arranged back home.'

‘I've been here nearly two weeks already. I should explain – I'm with the police. I'm looking for information relating to a particular identity, an individual reported missing seven weeks ago. I believe he may be in the area somewhere to the east of here.'

‘What, kidnapped?'

‘I can't say, for the moment. But I need to see if I can pick up the trail.'

‘Like I said, bad timing. Wish you all the best.'

Alberto turned to go. The inspector saw the knuckles of the man's spine through the loose shirt.

He kept to the periphery of the conversation. The team had worked on nature documentary films, gathering footage from the forest. They set up 24-hour recording stations and planted motion-sensitive photographic triggers next to samples of rotting meat. Having gathered sufficient material they were leaving Santa Lucía in three days' time, the next scheduled flight out. In the interim they'd trawl through digital footage and develop analogue in dark rooms. ‘And drink,' Alberto said. ‘We intend to drink.'

He wanted to see how the darkroom was built. They let him come along the following morning. He heard them mention ‘la cueva' and thought he was hallucinating, when someone ­clarified, said that's what they called these places – caves. They tried various spots: vacant hotel rooms, the café and a back room in the bar. Each environment seemed too unstable and unpredictable – people kept coming in and out, doors opening and closing. They couldn't rely on this dark, so they had to make their own. They found a level spot by the river to the south of the hotel. In eight minutes the tent was up. Then they lined it, on the outside, twice in thick black tarp. It held. Inside there was real dark. They split the space in two – one half dry, one wet. Attached wire hangers to the roof poles, set up a fold-out counter and a two-foot-wide plastic tub. Marguerite monitored ambient temperature; one of the biggest challenges developing in the tropics, she said, was the heat. ‘Changes conditions. Develops quicker than we'd like, emulsion gets softer, more ­susceptible to abrasion.'

‘How does it affect the film?'

‘More likely the images will come out scratched. Rougher. With less developing time it's harder to judge how much agitation to apply – too much and we destroy it, not enough and we'll have silver bromide streaks all the way across.'

The scale effect was strange when a light crept in to what had seemed a darkness, the line on the still-imperfect seam spreading over the fabric, appearing just for a few moments like the sky at the transition stage of an eclipse.

They had piles of stock. He hadn't anticipated so much. He was disappointed by the images, which they found amusing. ‘What do you expect, action? Animals leaping out in focus?' Unfortunately, explained Luis, the youngest of the crew, the camera was not perfect. Sometimes it was too sensitive – things like a falling branch or even a wind-blown leaf could trigger it. But they had got some life.

They hung the drying sheets on wire lines between the trees and watched the monochrome forms come out with the afternoon. The atmosphere was drowsy and he dozed on a hammock. He imagined them drawing Carlos up and back from the few things found remaining in the ground. The pools of his blood collected in the insect clouds, the fractionally altered consistency of the groundwater on the spot where he had fallen. Concentrating very hard, as if what was required was partly or even primarily an act of imagination.

He got up, walked indoors and poured some water. Miguel, emerging from his hut, stopped him, asked what was going on, what the crew was doing.

The confusion was partly the inspector's fault; he couldn't have been clear enough. Immediately he had mentioned the caves, Miguel warned against them and against the journey inside. The inspector eventually explained that they were referring to photography, hoping to gain an image. Miguel mentioned real places, cave formations he had visited a couple of times. ‘Years ago,' he said. ‘Even tourist groups went.' It had since become unstable, too dangerous to visit, and access anyway, he said, had likely become impossible simply due to the vegetation. It wasn't the caves themselves, he said; bats flew out in clouds at day's end; there were strange hidden pools inside, walls and roofs spectacularly carved by erosion and minerals; and there were the paintings. He had seen only the ones closest to the entrances; he hadn't in any of his journeys witnessed what was said to be the more spectacular art further and lower in. He had no idea of the age. Animals still used the sites; he remembered beaming his torch onto a strange scene, dozens of large peccaries in a sequence on the wall, flowing into each other according to the broken lines, and seeing, when he went to shut off his torch and continue with just his headlamp, a mass of two-toed prints on the ground, around him, all but fresh. A guano smell and mammal faeces.

Alberto interrupted, walking urgently towards them. ‘Inspector, there is something I think you should see.'

The photograph was monochrome on a landscape A4 sheet. At first it was difficult to make it out – a thick mesh of dark strokes, little light. It wasn't easy to establish depth. The area had not been cleared; it appeared relatively untouched. Examining the scene further, he saw the camera faced an embankment. High up in the trees was a patch of white artificial fabric.

He looked at the second photograph. This image was close, blurred, white. From this perspective, despite the distortion, it was clear the fabric was inhabited. There appeared to be a human crown slashed several times and dripping black ink. A light fuzz of hair only. The face looked down, remaining unclear, but suggesting shame, resignation, perhaps death, he thought. The shirt was soaked, torn, partly stripped. Some of the liquid would be blood. The limbs seemed splayed awkwardly, as if the figure had fallen into position. But something about the pose, the relation of the man to the surrounding forest, made him think he had been put there.

They split into three separate teams to develop the rest of the film in caves. They hadn't the time, he insisted, to wait for night. ‘Couldn't do it then, anyway,' Marguerite said. ‘Insects are attracted to the chemicals and torchlight.'

He asked if he could help, but they declined the offer and so he watched them building. Across the terrain of Santa Lucía-south multiple caves went up. They used black sheets borrowed from the Terminación to drape around tents. Inside them was to be the appearance of nothing, so they could then develop something. He saw the chemicals blend and swirl like smoke, imagined Carlos, as an image, a form, briefly coming together before breaking apart. The process was primitive, ritualistic. He imagined murmurs inside, low, focused chanting; Carlos called up from the air, from the ground, and disappearing. The ground turning over, rising in layers, the mountains lowering, the water levels rising. Each ­discovery seemed to reverse the progress it suggested: building up a picture, they saw someone in a state of decay, shapeless and disordered, hurt. He felt the same combination of excitement and dread that he'd had on the verge of the forest – any one of these photographs could, in theory, present an unobstructed image of the face.

Luis was almost certain that another photograph had been taken later of the same spot; in this one the figure was absent.

‘Meaning,' the inspector said, ‘he is alive.'

‘Or has been taken.'

While they worked on exposure, the inspector pressed for all the information they had. They'd covered a wide area, setting up two dozen filming posts, and no one was certain of the exact coordinates of the shot. Alberto drew a map, marking each of the posts – the nearest eleven days out by boat.

‘We put rotting meat on site. The idea was to attract animals. A man wouldn't come to this.'

‘I don't know. Say he had been walking a considerable time, six weeks or so, and for most of that had been without substantial food. He wasn't himself, he was desperate. It's not inconceiv­able. Was the camera completely concealed? Maybe he noticed it. Maybe that's what he was aiming for. Contact.'

He was aware of time and opportunity expiring, the force of the pressure. Things were moving too quickly, he felt a little passive, swept along. There was a chance he was missing something, a piece of information that might have been integral to the success or otherwise of the case. The crew was leaving in days and there was still so much to do. They had more to uncover. He was frustrated: he couldn't achieve the necessary speculative distance.

He went over, again, the photographs discovered so far. Each time he took them out he expected resolution, proof, this time, that it was Carlos beyond doubt. But the turn of the face and the position of the body were perfectly arranged, engineered as if to evade personal identification. Initially, thinking the position looked artificial, he had posited the involvement of a second person. A standing figure, tall behind the automatic camera focus. Did the figure appear to be turning from someone, deliberately facing away? The inspector willed some evidence in the picture, anything to increase the likelihood that he was still alive.

Something remained in the figure's arrangement across the seven photographs, something he hadn't yet identified. A significance related to the contrived nature of the stance. He read it again, again. He was always drawn to the face, although it had turned and said nothing. A fragment of the open mouth was revealed in two of the pictures, but he couldn't make it out. What call it made. The words were mute, like the hummed melodies remaining in the ground surfaces of nightmare-weathered teeth.

He watched the fingers, visible on the left hand only and which he saw, for the first time, were held in a loose grip. He noted a slightly unusual and, hopefully, unnatural proportion in the distance between each of the fingers. He then studied the neck, the violent stretch and sideward twist of the bowed head. Proportions, relationships. Holding a body, artificially and in front of a lens, was an opportunity to communicate information. The figure, he thought, may even have been wittingly expressive in the photographs. The significance almost floored him, almost distracted him. Assuming for the moment that the individual wanted to be found, then the most likely content of his information regarded his location. What could he say, through the fingers, the empty clasp of a hand, the wrenched neck?

The inspector sketched angles and proportions. Drawing out all avail­able spatial information, he mapped the body every way he could. He was flooded by possibilities, theories relating to the language intended in the figure. Morse, a binary communication – slow, heavy, expensive – at most speaking a single word, and what? His distinction between major and minor, regarding the angles of the expressed body was, he knew, fairly arbitrary, and the message he drew out contained nothing intelligible.

Perhaps he had the wrong scale. Did the body contain coordinates? Did Carlos – the anonymous figure, he corrected – have knowledge of his precise position and the ingenious ability (suggesting prolonged captivity, the resources of tedium) to express his coordinates through digits, the angles created by the gaps across his body?

He spent twenty minutes trying multiple ways of extracting numbers from what the body did, but again got nothing intelligible. He needed assistance, a second professional opinion; he was certain then that he would unscramble the body's expression. He put the photographs back into the sealed plastic folder and went to return to his room. In the alteration of his blood movement, his airflow, his heart rate, and his moving perspective of the forest, he noticed something. Environment, landscape. The body as environment itself, he thought, not encoding one, not charting it in numbers, but being a landscape. He needed only to confirm with the photographs, but he knew it: the body drew a picture of a particular location. The figure, Carlos, mimicked the arrangement of the rocks, the precise bend of an adjacent river. He was communicating in his apparently unconscious expression his exact location in the forest.