Infinite Ground (6 page)

Marks in the ground assert the person has unquestionably been alive. He has made contact with the earth. Whatever else may be in question, this is not. He has walked thousands of miles. The deep marks cut in earth in tribute to the departed imply the cumulative erosion caused by a single pair of feet. If done continuously and in the one place, this causes fire and breaks the skin. Friends, family, others who had known the person may cover the hole in the earth as they pass it during the course of their day. When the holes are filled with water, and then the water drains, the life of the absent person is shown developing and evaporating mysteriously, and not once but many times, until eventually there is no hole there, no mark even, and the rainwater rushes by. The person is gone.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 114

‘I'll have a fuller report for you soon,' Isabella told him over the phone. ‘I'm still identifying some of the flora.'

‘It's taking longer than you expected. Aren't you leaving soon? I don't mean that it's taking long, I—'

‘I have found something interesting, though perhaps not significant. Several of the species usually exist in symbiosis with the fluke
dicrocoelium dendriticum
. But you won't see that in humans.'

‘Ever?'

‘Only extremely rarely. It'd be difficult to consume it. You'd basically have to swallow an infected ant.
Dendriticum
is a parasite. It moves up through the food chain. The interesting thing is that it actually changes the behaviour of the animal hosting it – it puts it in danger by engineering opportunities for predation.'

‘Really?'

‘Several species do it. I can show you some reports. And we're finding new ones all the time. One species, we think, actually leads the insect to the sea and bursts open the head there.'

‘So, wait, he might have had this in him? Carlos might have had some parasite? Because there was something his colleagues kept saying, something developing in him…'

‘As I just said, humans don't get infected by
dendriticum.
It just doesn't happen, statistically. But say he did somehow have
dendriticum
or a related species – it would be largely incidental. On a macro level he wouldn't appear different. The intestinal disturbances I've discovered are various and local. It's not a case of a creature moving around in his head, Inspector – you haven't really thought that, have you? And besides, I didn't find
dendriticum –
just traces of it. I'm seeing microbiota that appear new to me. It's likely an identification problem. As I said, give me a day or two.'

‘But I was thinking,' the inspector said, ‘couldn't someone manipulate these organisms? You know, alter them. What's the word you used?
Engineer
what they do?'

‘Yes, I'm working on one right now. It inhibits naive reductionism in laypeople… What do you think? I mean, sure, you could play with the genome, given enough money, but could you do anything meaningful? No. We're looking, with Carlos, at something else. If the evidence I'm seeing in his office relates to a contagion – and I'm not saying it does – then the source is something wider. Causally, we'd be looking at an environment, not an organism.'

ENDROHYPERIUM ENDILICITIN

A species of microscopic parasite recently discovered in diners at an exclusive restaurant serving wild hog in Jakarta, Indonesia. The parasite dug through the intestinal tract and explored the host body. Diners reported symptoms including nausea, desperation, severe headache, a sense of hopelessness and a dry throat. The illness was quickly traced to infected pork, the restaurant being the first link common to each of the patients.

Biological discovery was late due to several statistically unlikely behaviours eventually leading to mammalian infection. The sequence of hosts in the parasite's life cycle is as follows: salamander faeces – ant – fish – salamander liver. It is disseminated across each predator's body as its ex-host, the prey, enters the digestive tract. In a standard life cycle
E. endilicitin
develops from egg to maturity, but in the case of the human infection the developmental process was extended.

E. endilicitin
appears as a different organism according to its respective host environment. The first stage in the pre-life sequence is in salamander faeces deposited in mangroves. The ant relies on this as a regular protein source. Once settled, the egg begins to grow, drawing on internal glucose to develop in size and break into the nervous system. This stage is coterminous with a change in the ant's behaviour. The infected ant, at dusk, deviates from its normal path: instead of returning to the colony it goes to the water's edge. This is the stage at which
E. endilicitin
most frequently ceases; the anatomy of almost all of the ant's predators is not conducive to the parasite's continued growth.

The vast quantity of ants originally infected, however, means that at least some parasites are able to reach maturity in being eaten by fish with a favourable internal environment. These fish, under the influence of
E. endilicitin
, become increasingly slow and sluggish, spending uncommon amounts of time visibly on the water surface, leaving them particularly vulnerable to predation.

In turn, large salamanders – omnivorous and amphibious – consume the fish. The parasite is now 10,000 times its original size. In almost all cases this is the fullest extent of
E. endilicitin
's life, eggs being released into the salamander faeces. Remarkably, however, on several Indonesian islands, and due to a geographical quirk, salamanders, rarely preyed upon, are consumed by forest hogs at a stage in which
E. endilicitin
remains alive. Forest terrain is the typical habitat of both salamander and hog, although the former favours coastal edges; normally, therefore, the two species do not cross. But the inland rivers identified have unusually high saline content, caused by mineral deposits; effectively, the area simulates the sea edge, theatrically misleading the salamander. Following consumption of the salamander, the hog harbours
E. endilicitin
, prolonging its mature status. This unlikely series of events facilitates rare growth in
E. endilicitin
, leading to the emergence of a highly developed, outsize adult creature, and, in at least one case, to a raft of infected adult humans.

The inspector began to suffer from increasingly vivid visions of an office worker destroyed at a desk. He had read a short newspaper report on a middle-aged employee rotting behind a partition for three days. Heart attack. According to the line manager, ‘due reports were automatically submitted via prompts set up in his account. We had no reason to believe he was not present and well; as far as we were concerned the work was being completed, and to a reasonable standard. There was no reason to query anything.'

He kept thinking about this. He forgot the name. He couldn't help but see the man as Carlos. He imagined how it could have happened, and dreamed, over several disturbed nights, of the details of the process.

The employees taking naps of five to seven minutes, heads nestled in one of the loops of their crossed arms. The deceased ordinarily the first to get in and last to leave. The quip going, off-record, that he was in line for a promotion.

The worker, dead at his desk, having felt unwell for some time. A manic form of claustrophobia. The land edge frustrating him. What, from a distance, seemed a smooth line being a mass of inlets whose true course he could never chart. Nauseous, he considered the folds of brain-maximizing surface area, the simi­larly fractal organization of the respiratory, lymphatic, nervous and circulatory systems.

The worker had wanted out. Only a total tracing of the world edge would compensate for work's effect. Then he would be neutral, like when he was born. He would sleep on beaches, parking lots and gardens, and he would register atmospheric changes and anomalies in the world's axis caused by the close appearance of an asteroid, and as he slept the sky would not be a fixture or a limit but a shimmering transparency.

His calves thrummed a walking impulse that was suppressed by the desk. Every time he got up, his coastal expedition was frustrated by a mundane task: filing or faxing over a new copy of a contract. He made the same twenty metres progress only, infinitely.

He had tied his laces in a different rope knot every morning. He inserted paragraphs into reports where the initial letter of each word combined to form the Latin name of extinct sea species. His productivity rose and fell in approximate accordance with the nearest tide. The changing pace and confidence in his cafeteria and bathroom walks were consistent with the force of lapping seawater. He sweated more, and it smelled like crab.

The deceased worker made amendments to the office structure. He surveyed the strength of the walls and measured the amount of sunlight that filtered through the east-facing window in the morning. He could taste salt on his tongue. His anxiety was a shell secreted like calcium carbonate.

The full quantity of his blood – a gallon – passed through his heart in under a minute. He lifted his left arm and put the heel of his hand against his forehead, supporting himself as he always did, holding himself up. A fixture of blood totally conveyed sixty times an hour. It kept setting himself up to be doing something, he thought – all that work, all that preparation. He drummed his fingers along the desk edge, looked to the floor.

He continued filing and reporting. His skin began to decompose. The air filter was turned up. His colour was put down to an unusual effect of the internal lighting. His voice was no longer capable of emitting anything other than a single long note, which was perfectly sufficient for the completion of his tasks.

He declined extra-corporate invitations. Air moved through him, but not breath. The light sent and reflected from the moni­tor screen bypassed his head chasm.

Significant floral and faunal interaction was established. He remained present in nearby trees, traces of his hair and skin found in nineteen birds' nests of various sizes. Faeces from newborn birds implied his digestive ecosystem. He was partly consumed in the course of his walks, and there was evidence of his de-fleshing in the grasses.

He tucked in his shirt and tied his sleeve ends with rope to stop organs dripping out while shaking hands with prospective clients. He kept his mouth closed to contain fly clouds. Larvae ate his bloated, purple gums, sculpted his tooth enamel.

A drawn-out process first of marbling, maceration and finally putrefaction took place, while he maintained a consistent level of activity at his desk. Self-produced corrosive enzymes slowly digested the gastrointestinal tract. He postponed indefinitely weekend plans. First the skin was imbibed in water, then the blood vessels turned dark. The skin organ was a loose sheet capable of slipping on or off and he found it harder to meet deadlines. Inside was a set of organs deflating and a system of billowing gas. Being the chamber below the neck and above the abdomen, containing the heart and the lungs and acting with regards to the latter as a bellows for air-filling, the obliteration of the thorax definitively removed any lingering fantasies of reanimation. The office remained active and open for business all through the night. Only bone, cartilage and desiccated soft tissue remained, all edible material having been consumed.

The inspector, finally, woke up.

The substance ingested is believed to evoke secrets contained within the individual. During the ejection, surprising meanings emerge. Detailed descriptions of ancient life are recounted. There is much laughter, partly as a technique used to relieve awkwardness felt from being around something so intimate, and partly because many of the details are absurd. Predictions are made regarding future events and, subsequent to what is revealed, the community may be lifted from its current site and moved to a safer location.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 119

Wash your eyes, Inspector
. Was that what she had said? He should wash his eyes?

He had not previously realized that eyes are a common infection route. Hands on an unclean surface rubbing against them and bringing in a strain. A speaker, he imagined, might transmit an infection directly to the listening eye. Was it better, safer, living looking at the ground, maintaining distance in conversation and spending a disproportionate amount of time alone?

He was uncomfortable with the idea that his eyes had taken on an infection. That every time he blinked he might be pasting it more firmly to his body, pushing in deeper whatever it was. His vision, which he had always thought of as an isolated thing, turning against him.

He didn't feel any different, wasn't noticeably infected by anything new. But then there were the recent disturbed nights, the strange dreams. He thought back to the amount of time he had spent in the sealed office. This could be an incubation stage. He wouldn't necessarily feel it. More likely he had misunderstood the nature of her warning, Isabella in fact talking figuratively. Telling him he wasn't seeing things clearly. He could pick up the phone and ask her – she had been thoughtful enough and sufficiently interested in the case to offer him her home number. But he wasn't quite sure how he would boil down his unease into a direct question. And anyway, she was working on something else now and it was late and, what was it, Friday? She would be busy, his call would not be well received. There would be plenty of opportunities to clarify the matter at a later point in time.

She had given him an idea, though. She might not have appreciated the credit, but he was energized. What she had demonstrated was an impossibility: results from a desert office. Out of invisible microbiota decaying on a keyboard he was presented with an identity in crisis. Together, extrapolating from the data – combining the lab results with information gleaned from family, friends and colleague interviews – they were in the early stages of reconstructing Carlos. The inspector's imagin­ation had been so affected by the environment that he saw the whole project biologically: they were attempting now to regrow Carlos. Not Carlos himself, but a replica: a clone of the missing person. The more comprehensive the replica became, the more susceptible it would be to interrogation. Discovering Carlos, discovering at least what had happened to Carlos, may come down to their ability or otherwise to establish a reasonably complex and faithful simulacrum.

The thing with clones, especially in popular entertainment, was that they missed out the maturation process and went straight to a fully formed identity. Really you had to start earlier, the new identity had to be born, then age in the world. Strictly, then, in cloning Carlos they might have to wait twenty-nine years to find out what had happened… He was both frightened by and attracted to the idea that a clone maintained absolute fidelity to the original life. They could watch the individual from birth, a team of them, from a distance, conducting the experiment under approximately natural conditions, only the clone unaware of his origin. They would monitor him growing, record reams of apparently innocuous data hoping that a code might be expressed, clues preceding his ultimate disappearance from the family gathering that night at La Cueva.

But that was fantasy. Science fiction. His idea, a legitimate, practical idea, was to rebuild Carlos's office. He would find a suitable space and begin reconstructing it; the walls, the floor, the desk. He would render the simulacrum as faithfully as pos­sible. In duplicating the office he hoped something might emerge. Nothing fantastical – he didn't expect the man to re-materialize out of posthumously coated walls. It boiled down to traditional and routine police work: he was trying to develop an insight into the identity through a closer understanding of the environment. He would go into the office every morning and leave in the evening at matching times. Something might come through. Whether, in regrowing the original office, the same illness might bloom – the illness that seemed to have dismantled Carlos – was a thought he quietly ignored.

He found a garage to let in the dry-field industrial estate just out of town, one with the right approximate dimensions and an east-facing window. It took him three days to gather what he needed. He installed blinds, cut and laid a carpet, painted the walls. He brought in a desk the right height from Office Supplies and a monitor, a keyboard, an extra set of shoes and a suit. He played a recording of work-day sounds made at the corporation and played it on a loop.

The other lots were used for storage or by artists. He came in carrying a briefcase and a coffee and walked briskly, greeting anyone he met with a curt ‘Hello' or ‘Good morning'. He sat at the desk and tried to forget who he was and to live as Carlos had. Each time, to begin with, he broke off quickly and turned his attention back to the construction of the room. He believed the problem was fabric; the room wasn't built right yet. Once the duplicated space had been correctly established he could run an accurate simulation of the working day. To make the room feel used he rolled in it and ate lots and spoke nonsense monologues, anything really, the thing was just to get words out. The keyboard was new; that was a problem, but there was nothing he could do other than just be at it: there was no way of speeding that up.

The garage was damp and poorly lit. The noise coming in from outside was unreasonable. The harsh heat made him sweat at his desk. He couldn't imagine what it was the other occupants were doing in the places they rented. He heard people pacing, talking aloud to themselves. To block this out he turned up the office audio. He had arranged for the agency to send over several performers in the guise of colleagues and prospective clients. This was to help him feel the place really was a working office. He wasn't sure what the performers had been told. He gave his name as Carlos and no one said a thing, although chance had it that at least one was involved in an interaction at the corporation.

The possibilities afforded by the use of the performers were impressive. There was nothing, for instance – except money – stopping him from hiring a full cast who could then perform a successful resolution to Carlos's disappearance. It would be something very special indeed to be privy to the scene where Carlos walked back in. They'd all benefit from it. That kind of positive mental reinforcement was said to be tremendously advantageous.

He barely had time to consider one possibility when another burst in. Imagine a full reconstruction of the evening in question at La Cueva – they could script all of it, based on thorough interrogations of the extended family, the staff, the other diners, leaving to chance only the moment Carlos left the bathroom. Perhaps the actor, living for that night exactly as Carlos had, would begin automatically reconstructing his actions, intuiting them, that is, without even needing to be told. Watching him closely enough, for once – and wishing, too late, that they had done so on the night in question – they would at last find out what had happened.

They could re-enact the dinner scene with perfect fidelity, only when Carlos got up to leave something innocuous would change his mind and he would resume his seat at the table. They could repeat this particular, crucial scene over and over, until it seemed perfectly fluid and natural and bore itself into the hillside, into the earth.

He could direct the cast in reverse, beginning from the moment they first realized Carlos hadn't come back. It would be therapeutic. If done well enough a sufficient number of times it could even establish itself as a viable alternative to history.

So far it was all going well. He arranged the meeting in the night, so he could lead the client through in the dark and they wouldn't have to observe the dirt, the decay, the ruin on the edges of the estate. He illuminated the office and everything seemed up to scratch. They exchanged long blocks of corporate information, nodded and drank their coffee. Getting up to offer a parting handshake, the inspector froze – a rat had moved diagonally across the garage, clear in the light against the fresh blue carpet. He winced and moved into the handshake, imparting a compensatory firmness against the obvious fact that the set had fallen down. The performer smiled, didn't miss a beat; but the inspector had been humiliated. The frailty of the set had been made all too apparent and he knew he had to work harder.

He drew further plans of the original office. They'd taken detailed photographs of the desk surface, additionally using thermography in darkness and recording what came up. Fine carbon powder, poured over certain areas of the desk, also brought out artificial textures. This was where Carlos had rested his elbows and lay down his one coffee mug. A trace of a circle represented a pause in activity, the beginning of a period of reflection – the setting down of the mug.

Each faint ring left on the desk had a direct mental correla­tive. He knew the significance of the artefacts. What seemed erratic and inchoate contained its own routine and order inside. Carlos would drink and think differently as the working week progressed. The coffee rings were testament to this. The mug was covered, sealed, theoretically keeping heat throughout the day. What Carlos did with it, how and when he lifted, sipped and set it down was an indication of his changing state of mind. It provided an opportunity for the inspector to authentically reproduce his character in the duplicated office. It was an ­exciting moment.

He went to grasp and lift the mug with both hands and thought, as Carlos had, how strange the simplest things were. He slowly but firmly took it and drew it in towards his lips, sometimes placing it down again without having drawn liquid.

These days, when he happened to be outside, the inspector wore a surgical mask. He was seeing little of his friends. Isabella had been calling. Others from the department, too; messages about leads, developments in the case. The inspector thought, sitting at the desk, that he might as well get on with it, drink the coffee. He placed the mug down, looked at it, considered the size and limitations of the room, a perspective on himself from outside – by the doorway, from the ceiling, from outside the warehouse via the window – and tried to apprehend it, get on with it, but it was difficult, and so it took him some time, particularly on Mondays.

On Tuesdays there was a greater degree of regularity, there was the reflexive training of the prior day's actions, his better preparation in the task of being there, at his desk, even if much of that time was spent fruitlessly trying to apprehend the day, attempting and all but failing to get on with it. He had doubtless suffered on the Monday from the emptiness behind it, the two-day lull and quiet, the weird ill-discipline of a body given no direction, sitting back with less than optimal posture and looking at screens.

Tuesdays were easier. By Tuesday he had been given at least a little of what to expect, what to do without thinking that he was doing it, just doing it, working. On Tuesdays he would be almost working. He would not catch himself doing what he was doing as often on Tuesdays as he would on Mondays, and so this was easier, and so he would drink the coffee at a slower rate, and not cause further anxiety in the course of trying to alleviate it, as he had done and would do again on Mondays. Tuesdays were easier.

Still, things were problematic.

Moving, getting up from a sitting or reclining position, waking oneself with the aid of a set alarm and a resolve to heed its noise (though ‘waking oneself' was an odd way to phrase it, he always thought, being impossible really), channelling oneself about a room or through corridors and halls and out on to streets and roads and other buildings, was, he supposed, something that you had to start and stop, and so you were sort of making it happen, although often during it,
it
would be the last thing on his mind, filled rather with incidental things such as passing shop-front signs, the speed of other pedestrians (an irritation or a challenge), expressions, musical refrains, rudimentary numerological patterns that he scanned and played out silently and had done deep into childhood, as far back as he could remember – must have been, he assumed, some nervous tic or other – ­constantly drafting the list of things he needed to do: food shopping to last him at least the next several days, appointments to keep, books he had always been meaning to read, etc., and not actually thinking about what he was doing at all; certainly he had never included ‘walk' in the list of things that he must do.

He at least, if he concentrated, could condition how he walked, go slower or faster, softer or harder as he chose, and he could stop it entirely – although always temporarily – whenever he wanted.

Breathing wasn't quite so clear.

Again it was something he could modify and, with an effort, condition, and again it was something best performed without thinking. It always unsettled him when he became aware briefly of how he did it; he would immediately be convinced the inhal­ations were too shallow, the chest too tight and that now, in his misguided attempt to watch himself, he was inevit­ably changing what was happening, somehow intaking only malodorous, dead air, insufficient to support his metabolism, his heart ­contractions and the circulating of his blood, and he would wish he had never started on this, throw up his hands and wonder how on earth he was going to turn off all this watching and let it all just happen again.