Infinite Ground (18 page)

It worked itself over, damp and wide with different surfaces, many voices. Came in, came out. Pieces fell off into the ground, pieces were added. Breathing, nesting.

Singing in the night and in the morning, making more of it, working itself over, stretching on and webbing out. Breathing, nesting, singing together, falling and being added. Light touching at the top. Matter feeling broad light and bursting, seeing, becoming eyes. The sunrise, the steam of breath breaking, the forest emerging.

He came down from the trees and raised his head. He put forelimbs on the ground, pointing forward. His hindlimbs bent at the midpoint, lifting the posterior slightly. He moved like this and the loose bones stood. He remained in place. He ate and slept. He saw light, then colour. He continued sleeping in trees, a new one every night, as a precaution. He could smell himself, how strong it was. He wrote this code throughout the forest, for any living thing to read. He went to water where he could, but was unable to rid himself of the smell.

He enjoyed water. He ate more, still and moving things. He heard them call: distress, alarm.

He reached with a forelimb for a fruit. The angle and height of the branch required him to lift his head to take it. His other forelimb had naturally raised in a parallel. His spine was close to vertical and, although his calves strained with the weight, he held and stood.

The new height of the head, as he walked, took him away from most of what he ate. He was not so quick and the plane of the world was distorted, but he could see better. He was no longer living from the centre. When he moved he couldn't see his body, only a smear of skin over his nose, some dirt collected near his eyes. It felt like when he cleaned himself in larger pools. It felt like he was weightless, floating on water. He was unsafe, his position less secure. He had to be very careful, especially with his nose weaker and further from the ground, but also because he was less adept at sensing the world behind him. He was vertical where earlier he had been distributed, his head raised, but the bulk of his body extending horizontally. Like that, the hair on his hindlimbs had been sensitive to changes in pressure indicating noise or breath. Like that, he had felt things coming and he'd remained alive.

He got better with forelimbs. He didn't need them to walk, so he carried. He took good plants. Then he carried branches that helped him forge ahead. He still heard things moving by the way the quicker air rose from the ground up through his feet, and he turned in time. He was better at hunting, using his hands, his sticks. He ate larger things and felt less tired. He was starting to think about things that weren't this, here and now. Good things that had happened before, and warnings. He had to focus – smell, taste – so he didn't float away into old things and imagined rewards. Dreams. Everything was bigger, wider and amazing. He saw details and colours clearer. He had to focus to see through excess. When he looked, there was what he saw, but also what it might have been before and could become.

He wanted protein. He wanted more of life.

When he saw things that weren't there he grew hungry. He had a taste for eating life. His shoulders were stronger and broader, helping him look up. He repeated actions that led to pleasure and avoided those that hurt.

When he rested he saw lots of things. He always woke hungry. He understood that he had been hurt. He had lived in trees and moved on all limbs. It had taken a long time. He felt more comfortable floating. Particularly when he rested, he saw things indirectly. He saw lots of pictures he didn't understand. Big things walking slowly, resting with their backs up and legs out in front and singing like birds into each other. He didn't know why they were singing like that, like birds, close into each other. It must have been helping them stay alive, receiving that breath. It looked like reward, pleasure. Not a thing to fear. He saw one of them more than others. Around them were too many things he no longer knew. He sometimes saw the face of one, at night, when he rested. At other times he saw only the arms, held out before the eyes, reaching towards him, a skin that he could almost smell. He put his own arms out, but nothing was there.

He heard loud sounds directly over him, thumping, pulsing, vibrations shaking through him. He was in danger. It was better to be still and small in the trees until they passed. They pressed on the ground, moving as he moved, without forelimbs. He saw them: tall things expressing birdsong through their mouths, like the things he saw when he rested, only these ones did not feel safe. They would smell him where he lay. He breathed shallow breaths down into his chest and was calmed by the dark extension of his body into the trees.

They called and called. Their voices and their limbs waved the trees, the branches, the leaves around and covering him.

I thought I saw him. I thought we had him. He was right here.

Hello?

Wait. Let's sit here. We have to wait a while.

You saw him? You're sure?

Yeah, I think so. I saw something, heard something, and then it was gone.

Ants moved in a line like sound. When there were lots of them together they had been told something. They heard through vibrations above their bodies that felt good or bad, then they moved in reaction. He picked them, had them moving separ­ately over his palm, and listened to lines of them moving on his tongue.

When he woke he felt difference, origin. Light on him, information, warmth on his skin. Something that drifted away with the forest and came back in strange clarity every day. It was not constant. He ate before it went again. He looked for water, drinking what he could and imagining enough of it that it would be all he could see, covering the forest, drowning the trees and everything in them.

He thought of stepping into, then becoming almost weightless in the water. His own head breaking the water surface, covered by thick leaves and painted leaves, water that flooded his ears and his nose and open mouth and which he dreamed of every time he woke, every time it came back. Sometimes when it was getting dark he could watch the forest disappear and look up; he imagined a great and unobstructed distance and knew that he had felt it before.

He was remembering a little more each day. Something had happened and he had almost died. Every day he felt different. He was hungry and there was somewhere he needed to get to, somewhere outside the forest. There was something he needed to do.

His skin felt dry and unhealthy and his gums bled. His teeth were loose. He was grazed by the arms of trees and when he swam he was lit ablaze. He sensed ripples, disturbances in the black pool of stagnant water, so he got out and continued. He had been walking since the morning and the light was fading, the growth around him was dense and renewing, working itself over again and again. He smelled the rot turning, the old life engulfed, converted, raised.

He stopped when it was dark and he couldn't see his hands, and then he lay by an enormous tree and was surprised how quickly he tired despite the sound of the insects' horn and the birds' clamour. In the morning he ate leaves and drank from the river. Again he felt something moving in it, so he left, trying to follow the direction of the first light, the place it came from. He knew this was right, good; he should listen to whatever it was that woke him, follow where it came from.

He walked with a stick held out to point, move straight always in the direction of the light source. But he came against pools he couldn't cross and banks of earth he couldn't climb. He stopped, looked back. Nothing was different, he couldn't see himself anywhere.

He went back, sometimes far, tried for another way through, trying to picture the light source, go on in a new direction. Everything was green. He saw the same places again and stopped, looked back, looked forward. He lay in the sticks; everything would go away. But when he did this he remembered waking, the light source, and felt bad about stopping.

He got up. He smelled something strong and found an animal body. Part of it had been torn off, but it hadn't rotted yet. He looked, watched the direction of the leaves, smelled the air, listened for another's breath, felt for heat. He folded his hands inside the animal and dug in to reach its softer parts. He scooped them and ate, but his head was loud in blood. He didn't have time. He lowered his head and put it inside the animal, pushed his hands against the outside for force. Tore with his teeth until he had no air, drowning in blood, and forced himself out, scent covered. He ran, exposed. Branches breaking, leaves sweeping aside. Footsteps? Breath? All he had to live was fear. He continued running, thought of his own body being torn, longed for the water, the river.

The rain fell. He had no breath to run. The blood and scent came off him. He went as far as he could and collapsed. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, wide. When he could stand he took leaves and folded them together into a shape like his resting hand and brought it with him.

He stopped frequently, drinking directly from his cup. The rain undrew the land, pools rose on the ground and the animals became more abundant, slow, woken things on the trees springing, uncoiling, oblivious to him. He hurried on, moving slowly against his volume, fearing the languid parade of the cat, the claws that would bring him down, the open mouth vaulting through air towards his face, removing it in one sweep.

He didn't sleep that night. He looked for eye-light in the clumps of solid dark. The rustling of trees, the soft padding of feet on the ground. Other lights, noises. Calling sounds. Something moving right in towards him, exposing him where he lay.

He woke with water steaming off the land. Light and fog. He was cold, he held himself, watched the land peel open from the haze. He had laid a mark in the ground, a direction to resume, but couldn't find it. Several marks, none he was sure of. He didn't know which way. The light was unclear, not coming from any certain place. He had no route. Not long after setting off, he lost his footing and fell into the humus.

It took a strange effort to get up. Something was wrong. It was dry after the rain, but more water came off him than before. He had to stop again, he drank from his leaf container, but it came back up. All the undigested animal came out and then he opened below in thin gushes. Under the chest the stomach was a small, hard ball with nothing good in it. The rest of him was wire, frame. A ball of sickness under his chest, sick from animal. Each time he expelled, he tried to crawl a little away from it. The smell of him broken and reversed. He saw things move in his pools and didn't know whether they were his or not.

He continued in flux, but the smell disappeared. He was rotting off, losing senses. He didn't know where he was when he woke. How much more could there be, he thought, of him, to give, and of this? He felt so sore it wasn't over. There would be more, itself, himself, all of it left to go, everything gone until he was nothing, and he was very frightened, lying down in the loud dark.

He expelled everything, the leaves too, but he kept eating them. He realized he must have been hungry again, after all this time, and also that he had a voice. The next day he lost nothing, ate more. He dug up roots and bit into water. He pushed himself to a gap he had spotted, a place where something big must have fallen, and he woke in it, in clear light. He saw the direction of the light. The early sounds went with it, other life. Routine after chaos, shape out the dark. He looked around and saw detail, a radiance in the patterns of the leaves and the colours of the insects.

He managed to stand, leaning on a vine-wrapped tree. He could easily fall, but he was careful. He walked as something strange and new coming forward. The head was an odd size against the neck and the shoulders. He rolled it round. The other things he'd seen had a different proportion. He found berries, ants, water, and felt more substantial.

He set himself a clear routine. Identify the light as it came, fix it in memory and slowly track the place, as directly as he could. He couldn't be misled by the way the light was passing while moving. He was clear on the importance of the direction of the place it came from. He knew he was not restored. He was thin and weak, the blood of animals hung from him, he had to be careful. He had to make things, like the cup he had used and lost. Make something he could carry and put over him when he rested, to hide him, even block a little of the smell. Keep the morning direction and its detail, follow it. Mark it in the ground before it disappeared. The place it came from, the place, he realized, he was going, was the first to vanish every day. The last place visible should face where it was he went to. Mark the direction in the night, and if the morning confirmed it, then it gave him something, it meant he was moving. Build finer shelters in the last light, places deeper between the trees, spaces he could burrow inside.

He began counting, separating one day after another, but soon gave up. He drifted as he walked, and enjoyed it. A slow, natural continuation. He realized halfway between morning and night that sometimes he was just walking, and other times he was walking and asking things. Questions and walking encouraged each other. He got out further and asked more about what this was, what had happened. He wasn't sure. Little things came back – sounds, faces, shelters. At first he drove it off, but he slowly took on the information, day after day, week after week of walking. He must, he realized, have been going for months. What was he walking out from? A place that had disappeared.

He woke up thinking of Santa Lucía; first the words, the name, then the place, the people. He stopped, weak from the information, and settled on the ground, better supported. He spoke aloud, all the names, kept turning around, made marks with a stick into the ground. He tried to draw, he thought, Santa Lucía, which had been lost. But as it was so ridiculous he threw the stick. He couldn't believe this, any of this. He laughed. Where would he start?

He was some kind of an official, he supposed. An inspector. And he had been working on a long investigation. He was tired. But he had to continue, because everyone had disappeared.

He became extremely sensitive to light. He knew how scarce it was, how little it could be counted on. The vast trees, looped and tangled, bent into strange and impossible shapes, wanted only the light, were sculpted out of competition for the light. He disciplined himself to wake in the dark and observe the faintest scrap of falling dawn. He collected it. Occasionally there were temporary light columns, strange, passing images with no substance. He fooled himself, thinking on three separate occasions that the precise area he stood in belonged to the past. He knew this ground. He was aware how unlikely it was; that he would know this place, of all places. That in the infinite forest ground he should go over something familiar, somewhere he had been before. It had all grown over, so it wasn't anything particular in the presentation that was the same, the thing he recognized. But it was definitely here, he thought. It didn't matter how illogical it sounded, he knew he was right, this was it, this ground.

It was one of the few weeks each year they'd managed to get the same time off work. They didn't need to go far. They stayed in three hotels, each carefully picked out. Distant enough from the overpopulated coast, still accessible in a couple of hours by car. ‘I've salt on my back,' she said. They wanted to run. They'd walked in the hills just out of town, brought coffee, wine, oranges, bread, thick ham, sardines. Finding a level spot they laid out their things, ate in the breeze. Drowsy, they slept, curled together in the ground. He woke, vague, initially confused, stumbled some speech, impressions, and she laughed, pushed at his shoulder. He heard the breeze louder, their things rippling.

They were holding their possessions down in the wind, gather­ing in, packing up. Driving home. The present rolling on, the year gone already.

This wasn't it, he thought. This wasn't the same place.

The trees moved in the breeze and the light passed and he didn't recognize it any more.

The light did stranger things, especially near the end of the day. It climbed away like smoke; he could never reach it. It was getting dark, he was looking for a place to rest, make an interior of leaves, when he saw a fire glow ahead of him. Just a glimpse, not far away. He tried to walk towards it. When he realized it wasn't spreading, that it must have been inside something, he noticed a building around it made of stone. He couldn't get an absolutely clear view, barred by the trees, but the building was small, perhaps a single room. The roof was domed. Someone inside enjoying the hearth, maintaining the fire.

He put his stick out before him, determined to travel in as straight a line as possible to the building and the fire. It should have appeared closer by now, but the building had exactly the same dimensions. The image was constant, as if either he was static or the building, the dome, the fire was moving in tandem. He could get no clear perspective inside the trees. He was no longer surprised when he grabbed for things that weren't there. He had thrilled one morning, spotting through the mist several hogs grunting in the distance. His stomach cramped, flooded with associations and possibilities. He had marched forwards and, as a line of beetles strung on a silver web met his nose, he had realized his error.

He turned from the building. Another trick, an illusion. There could be nobody living here; no built things, no fire. He was adapting the objects in front of him and inventing scenarios. It was a rare bright flower, a bird, a frog in warning display.

He saw the building again several days later. He wondered if he was shutting down, generating new temptations for going backwards and giving up, lying in the leaves, into some consol­a­tion of for ever.

He called out when he found, suddenly, the river again.

He waded into the river, eyes closed, mouth wide and head bent back to touch his shoulder. Just the sound of the water could sustain him for years. The sudden change in temperature and state tightened every muscle of his body, sending a pleasure shock along each nerve, an electric wave ballooning in his head. It felt so good. He tried to be alert, but the water was extrava­gant and it lit him and he could stay like this. There was so much water, unlimited quantities under the earth. He could drop it all over him, down the fixture of his hair and his hurt shoulders. He took slow pleasure in drying by heat. He could smell it now – abundant life and where it came from, the sluice of minerals, the cold, faraway mountain heights. And the other way, the flow, a discharge down into something vast and inconceivable, the sea.

Climbing out, he saw marks on the river mud. Prints of a large animal leading from the water to the thicket. He measured his feet by them; they were only just larger, a similar shape. They weren't so different that they couldn't have been his. He wasn't surprised at mistakes any longer. He could have left the water earlier and forgotten. The prints running, extending slightly as the moisture filled them.

A small fish, still wet, lay on a stone on the river mud. It was unnatural. Something, he was sure, had taken it there, discarding it. He looked around again. It seemed contrived, too fortunate. No teethmarks visible on the side. He collected it carefully, turning it in his hands, and then held it up to his nose, the memory of the abandoned carcass making him wary. The stench was over him. He flung it back to the ground and he saw the rot where it fell. Fresh, gleaming, tantalizing, what he had seen laid on the rocks wasn't real, the fish had been surface. Small animals, a kind of micro-circuitry, organized themselves inside it. Soon there would be nothing left, no animal.

He was surviving well enough. He trailed the river for a mile or so, a safe distance, retaining the sound of it and making forays in at the half-point, daily. He was feeling better, stronger. Days later the river dwindled into streams, marshes he couldn't pass, and he had no option but to cut back, wait for morning, find a new route out on harder ground.