Infinite Ground (19 page)

He tried to recall the breadth of the continent. He judged the time past as conservatively as he could, but even then, he estimated he couldn't have much further to go. He thought he was beginning to see signals, stopped, studied them for hours, read the information every way he could. Although he was very careful, when he pushed away the last of the mushroom body it was still possible he destroyed something inside it, covered. He'd thought he had found cloth – he even thought the shape indicated a shoe, something discarded and now wrapped in thick fungal coats. But he couldn't get at it. Whatever was there had split, crumbled into powder in his hands.

He practised his story; there was pressure to get it right. But as soon as he started on it, he tired, looked for distractions. Although he was getting better, his diet had been so poor, he reasoned, for so long, that it would take him some time to function properly. He was too weak to enjoy thinking of the beginning of his story. All of the details necessary to fill out the scenes he might imagine – starting with the setting, the levelling of the trees around the perimeter of the coastal village where his audience would be; the strange, suspicious looks of the first people to see him; the structure of the homes these people lived in; the physique and facial appearance of the first person he talked to; the drinks they gave him on a tray when they heard how hoarse his voice was; the clarifications they demanded almost as soon as he began, requests for earlier, ‘missing' scenes, repeated expressions of incredulity, pity – were an enormous drain on his reserves, when he needed all his energy just to maintain himself.

The quantity of information he would have to tell them, once he reached the village, was getting to be a burden. There was too much of it. Instead of being pleased, excited at the thought, he started to picture it in volume, the amount of space it would occupy. He looked at strips of his story, its information. He did not see how there would be room for it. It was harder for him to breathe. He imagined laying out even a brief description of a scene from near the beginning, after the evacuation, telling, broadly, how it happened. He was immediately overwhelmed. He felt new pressure on his gut and in his head. Just one frame of memory had led to this excess. By tricking himself, admitting memory only in flashes, he had been able to walk, travel a signi­ficant distance through the forest. But now he was thinking of presenting them, the memories became real, solid, a fibre in his head.

He hadn't been able to imagine the village where the story would happen. There was the light, the details of the surrounding environment. He would have to conceive of how people would react. There would be a meal, that was important. They would all eat together. He would have to imagine what type of food they prepared and at what point his story would be set aside for it. He wondered whether he would then, later, when he got back to it, have to start all over again, or whether a recap would do and where he would start with that. At the same time he had to consider the food's preparation, the length of time it would take to boil the fish stew and whether it took place outside, perhaps in a covered but open domestic area, or inside, in a distinct and furnished room. He had to imagine how high the roof was and what it was constructed from. Was there smoke in the room? Was the fish preserved and prepared this way, blackened over coals? The fabric of each person's clothing would have to be imagined as well as their hair, their eye colour, the way they moved their head and what it was that had distracted them, some worry, some anticipation, some long-held doubt. Were they all sitting on the ground? Directly or on mats? He had to think of the source of the water used to thin out the juice of the tomatoes, whether it had come from a well or a river – most likely the village would have been founded on a river. He wondered how long the whole process of preparing the food had taken, and during it what and whom the women had ­discussed, how many children had got in the way, how healthy they were, what was the nature of the relationship between the siblings, who pro­tected whom, who was the leader, the adventurer, and who hung back, stayed closer to home?

The bigger problem was where to begin. In choosing one particular event he would appear to be prioritizing it above all others, saying this was the source of it, even when that wasn't the case at all. It was all equally important, every detail. If there was some way to present it all indiscriminately, simultaneously, he would do that. That was the only way the presentation would be sufficient.

He had a large investigation to present. He wanted to leap to his feet. He could barely comprehend the idea that he was on the cusp of giving it all over. It was even possible – although he had been gone a long time, and admittedly it had all happened quite a distance away – that at least one person in the village would have some knowledge of the disappearance. There had undoubtedly been several expeditions in the preceding months – years? – of parties sent to the site. Enquiries had been made, surely, after the loss of Santa Lucía, in every settlement around the interior. Chances were that someone in the village would recall his own disappearance, visits made by his colleagues, friends from the department flying in.

For the moment, despite all this excess of time, he didn't think in any detail about his resettlement. The construction of all the possible scenarios was ludicrously unfeasible. To imagine meeting his friends, relatives, colleagues again, after all this time, after everything that had happened, required many worlds to be built. He couldn't just cut directly to a celebratory reunion in a bar, dark, full of people whose faces were lacking in detail; it had been some time since he had seen any of them and they would have aged, naturally, every day counting. He would need some idea, first, of the steps that led down to the basement, the distance from the bar to the street, how close it was to the nearest metro station, whether parking was available, what kind of clothing the attendee wore and whether it was issued as standard or adapted to suit, where the fabric had originally been produced and under what kind of working conditions, the duration of any breaks…

Once he got out onto the street, then there were obviously many more details to take into account. An unknown number of people working, commuting, entering and exiting shops, cafés, offices, apartments, moving at various speeds, smoking, talking into phones. Some would be wearing lipstick, lip balm, depending on the humidity, the levels of pollution affected by the time of day and the correlating traffic intensity.

He did not feel prepared for this. The regularity of the peopled world would not come back easily. Even fundamental details were stark and shocked him. He could not move forward from one thing to the next. A single physical detail was excessive, it contained too much.

He tried to picture something that should have been simple, typical – a vendor at a news stand. Begin, move on. He aimed at a clear outline, but faltered, seeing newsprint on the tip of the man's right index finger and thumb; he thought of childbirth, of cupboard drawers in the poorer districts, lined with near germ-free print.

He didn't know where to look on the street. A single street. A bank of space. An overwhelming series of objects reflecting, refracting, obstructing light. He tried to imagine the sunlight, which meant first he would have to fix on a certain time of day for the reunion to take place, dictated by the schedules of the people most important to him, who would by now, it was only fair to imagine, have moved on with their lives; it may be, in fact, that his returning, specifically the reunion evening he was in the process of creating, was greeted with something other than unreserved joy. He tried to make it real, picture the roads, the pavements, the models and manufacturers of cars, the distances the parts had travelled, the nature of the automated machinery used to guide their larger construction, the litter on the ground, the footwear worn by pedestrians, the sounds of the surrounding city travelling as many as six miles or more.

Even then, it wasn't as if he could cut directly to that day, straight from the forest, all the details of the reunion celebration spontaneously willed into being. He would have to travel there, move his body along in a series of different vehicles; even when he had exited the forest and the interior there would be a long time spent with medical experts, physical and mental, evaluating his condition, judging his state and suitability for reintegration. As he was very ill, with all manner of infections, parasites, there would be a long time, weeks at least, he should think, spent in transit, in medical quarters. He realized, in addition, that even just procedurally, as a technicality, he might have to prove to them, the officials handling the case, that he was indeed the person he claimed to be; they would have to verify his identity either biologically or through an extensive series of questions.

He could not imagine what it would be like at the airport. Had he passed national frontiers already, in the forest? Would the embassy have to assign him a passport before travel, and what would that entail? Again there was the long, difficult question of verification, of meeting the stringent demands the officials would place on him. He couldn't think of the word denoting the material passports were made of. It seemed a laborious process manufacturing it, printing on it, laminating the pages, linking up all the details to other profiles on vast digital databases. That was the problem he was facing now, trying to distract himself from the flies on his nose, his cheeks, his eyelids and his lips. Whenever he tried to anticipate something different, something from the future, a new scene, anything ongoing, anything, in other words, that was not this, he felt he had to establish the smallest part, every feature of the hypothetical scene, or else it would fall apart. The effort seemed impossible. How could it be done? How could it continue?

Something different, he thought, around him in or through the trees, but he didn't name it. He went slowly, thinking more about his resettlement, about what might happen to him when he made it out of the forest. His seniors, the department, the friends and even before that, local officials, police authorities, representatives of the council… They were all going to expect something from him, weren't they? Then, of course, there were the relatives of the people involved in the disappearance – what was he going to say to them? He had not enough time, yet. He was anxious the more the light filtered through the trees behind him, late in the day. He had to think hard. Could he go back? Spend longer going over the forest, furthering his work on the investigation? Perhaps all the way back to Santa Lucía – to the place, he corrected himself, where Santa Lucía had once stood? Certainly, he wasn't prepared, he hadn't any useful information to give to them when he got clear of the forest, far less any kind of comprehensive dossier relating to the investigation.

The light continued to develop further every morning – there was nothing to accept but that he was getting closer to the end, or at least to a substantial clearing, suggesting a sizeable community. The forest around him now was different, had been harvested, even lived in at some stage, and he was confident, he was almost certain, that people lived not far from here, just a little further on. He didn't know what to do. He could still turn back, make his way into the thicker parts of the forests, which he had lived in, now, for months at least. Perhaps in the couple of days following, a hunter or some playing children from the village would notice his prints, see them as strange, and report on it. There might be an initial, only cursory attempt to locate him, but it wouldn't be anything that could threaten him, really.

He was light-headed, and he kept hearing himself laughing, which was strange. It was all absurd, he thought, the whole thing. But would he not regret turning back, having trusted, up from almost nothing, up from just the ground, the light, moving east and getting there, finally, to the edge? Equally, could he really simply stop, as if it were finished, as if he had completed something, anything, when clearly he hadn't, he hadn't done a thing, hadn't begun any kind of investigation at all?

He swore he could smell it. The salt, the algae, the fish. The forest had changed, there were hints of quicker degradation on the leaves, perhaps from sodium in the air or from parasites, opportunists in the new space. He tried to scan for difference, a greater distance communicated in the bird calls.

He shivered in the cold nights, bundled in thick leaves and branches, wrapped in his rags and arms, looking up at the glimmering networks of ice-points in the terrifying sky.

He found tracks, rough sketches in the topsoil. He tensed his body, stopped and listened. Waited. A hammering, an engine, a calling out. His blood rushed and he seemed to feel, solidly, the entire mass of his head. Was something there? Really there? Had he heard it or not? He looked at the evidence. How old were the tracks? He couldn't see steps, individual prints. He searched for oil, industry, anything artificial through the leaves, then he stopped again. His pulse slowed, he became steadier, told himself to calm, continue forwards, same as always.

The forest seemed to grow over again. The thinning might have been temporary, freak, not evidence of habitation at all. The only sounds he heard were birds. In time the birds could mimic everything.

Through the undergrowth ahead he saw a light, a flash. The sun got in. He dug for the source and pulled out steel. A fork. He held it in his left hand, instinctively assuming a mealtime posture.

He walked at a slow pace until he heard it. A low sound, a drift rising in volume to a colossal roar, then a fall, a repetition. The sound so big and wide he was afraid. He was still. The forest ahead, but less of it.

The edge was sudden. He wasn't able to comprehend, at first, that the white through the thin bush ahead was the sky over the Atlantic. He went through easily, not like he'd imagined. Suddenly he had walked out into nothing, all this empty, staggering space and sun.

His first thought was to go the other way, turn back, find shade. His body – cut, thin, swollen in places, with sores across it – burned. Ahead of him was twenty feet or so of level ground, clear, then rocks sharply descending to the sea. He didn't notice much. He thought he'd notice everything. It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was nothing, just this noise, this roar, this heat.

He heard something, like crying, he thought, a long moaning sound coming out from the level ground before the rocks. He thought it must have been himself. Then he heard it again, the sound, strange in the wind, with the waves thick in it, a young, long moaning sound.

A dark shape moved on the edge of his vision. Whatever it was, moving, it wasn't alone. Close enough, he saw the animals, hogs. Seven of them grazing on the thin bushes, wandering freely. He couldn't tell if they were wild, abandoned.

He tried to think, but it was hard. He had almost nothing left. He felt the effort of thoughts building, dissolving in his head. But something went the other way. A shape developed on the slope down, a building coming into form. It didn't seem practical, even possible, on the steep slope, but it was there, it was real. He went closer to look.

More buildings suggested themselves out of the rock, simple, almost cave-like spaces cut into stone. By one he saw bright colours, blue, red, yellow, a line of clothes hung between the building and a bare tree. He heard the fabric move, flapping loud and empty in the sea wind. He saw a path, thin and barely there, a light sketch drawn on the pebbles.

He looked out over the water, stood in the raw air.

He was at a height now, fifty feet or so above the water. Only the loudness of it, against him, kept him upright. He had nothing to hold on to. He focused on the waves, their repeated rise and fall, afraid of looking or thinking any further. He could not comprehend it, the limit of a continent. He was unsure what it meant, now, to be here. His eyes were different in the forest, diverted, set to insects, berries, water signs and tracks. And now, ahead of him, was the vast arc of the horizon, the wide edge of an available world.

The waves shook his thin body. He watched them as a child would, thrilled by their momentum and promise, and stupidly, broadly stunned each time they broke and spilled. He reeled back on the boom of it. A thousand gunshots every time. He imagined the strange and large wooden ships populating the horizon, then saw them disappear.

He looked down at the path, which wound towards the first of the buildings, where the bright clothes hung. But it didn't stop there. It continued, past the building, coming out on the water. He thought he could probably manage the route. There, guarded by the rocks from the waves, he could swim.