Jakarta
Page 5
25.
It happened two months ago. I came back after two nights straight at the gaming station. It’s like that when you’re on a roll, and even—sometimes especially—when you aren’t. In closed matches there can be over a thousand bets laid, and that’s before you take into account those from other divisions. The key is to pick matches with the maximum amount of data to study, and then, of course, it’s down to your ability to judge and interpret the possible fallout of each play. Not everyone’s got it. The smallest movement, down to the flick of a plaýer’s wrist, can generate a further series of digits that affect the bets, and can in turn themselves be betted on. The modern game no longer has human bookmakers; computers have stepped in to calculate the odds—a computer, in fact, originally developed by the War Institute to analyze ballistics trajectories but that has wound up as the sole administrator of the impulses and bad luck of your average Atlantikan betting addict. You need very little in order to gather and send out the data that will then be aggregated and classified via the hundreds of thousands of cables and wires running from the official franchises, all the tens of thousands of stationery stores, taverns, and kiosks. So it must be, according to Vakapý competition laws: any establishment with a properly calibrated gaming station and a banking terminal has the right to register bettors and become an official partner in the Department of Chaos and Gaming syndicate. Vakapý is an easy game to learn, hence the appeal, hence the huge number of addicts. At certain intervals two numbers are assigned: 10 for the favorites, who then play in blue, and 9 for the challengers, who get put in red. In the rare cases when each side comes into a match on an identical winning or losing run, and on equal points in the league, the kits are assigned according to whichever team’s name comes first in the alphabet. The odds are announced a few minutes before the start whistle and constantly update on the basis of bets placed and the ever-changing in-game stats: shots, service, sacks, activity zones, ground pickups, number of errors per game, shots from plaýers’ stronger or weaker hands, average velocities, carambolas, use of the walls: minute by minute, every variant reduced to chains of numbers whose sole function is to prolong the deep pleasure people take in throwing away their money, whether they be first-timers struggling to keep up with the plays or inveterate high rollers laying everything on the line, one last time, again. There are nearly 750 different kinds of plays you can bet on but no limit to the number of calls you can make at any given point, which makes it a rare thing indeed for any person to sit down to a game—even someone who “doesn’t really care for it,” or the supposed “take it or leave it” types—and not stay put for days or even weeks, and furthermore usually have not a single Cređit to their name by the end. I came back to the room late in the day after a particularly punishing stint and found Clara taking a rest on the mattress, under a thin sheet through which her prone, sweating form could be seen. At that time Clara could still find rest after her sessions with the stone. Her bones still had some flesh on them, and she sheened with the recent discovery of the stone’s capacity to keep out noise, a scintillance that ran over her shoulders and down to the tips of her fingers, less restive and claw-like than they later became. She spent long hours trying to decipher her incipient enthrallment to the stone, to understand its properties and the way it behaved, and would later subside onto the mattress with a low groan. The springs of the mattress would barely register her arrival. The evening in question unfortunately found me in a good mood. Señora Albýno#2460 had treated me well—no sexual favors, there hadn’t even been any touching of hair, but she’d looked after me all the same, lifting the heavy cloud that had installed itself after a succession of woeful bets. When I came in Clara got up and returned to her task. I apologized for having been gone so long but she barely seemed to hear. My mind had been full of Señora Albýno#2460—how sad her pink eyes made me, how bleak her absence of melanin always seemed to me—but in an instant the stone honed in on me and emptied my mind of all thoughts. I quietly crossed the room and crouched down beside Clara. Within a couple of seconds I couldn’t move. And a short while later—I couldn’t say how long precisely—I began to see them: they were tiny and made their way across an area whose edges were faint and stippled, like the tracings on a map. No taller than my pinkie finger, just like el Chino Okawa’s pet bedbugs. A building appeared, half transparent as well. I rubbed my eyes, could I be dreaming: the plan of a building, some place containing a massive trash heap, possibly, or a Vakapý court or a factory, or all three at once, superimposed; the framework, pillars, and concrete pilings with netting around them, the skeleton of the original building indistinguishable from the one, or ones, that would eventually replace it. The contours overlapped without blocking each other out, and above them stood another phantasmagorical edifice, directly atop the blackened, red-brick walls (red as the driven snow). And to one side, infinitesimal, the boys—walking around, all puppy fat and prepubescence. While the vision lasted I was able to zoom in and out on any detail I chose by dint of some oiled cogs presented to me on a kind of crane spar. But I still found it impossible to date the footage and its conjectural perspectives. The summer before the novice? A couple before, or even the one after? Our faces were intermittently visible, and as the vision grew darker in color and the contrast increased I was gradually able to tell the boys apart—at first they were little more than blurry, shifting shadows, all much alike, little more than hasty lines strewn across overexposed graph paper, a cluster of whites, or even some kind of white boat docked in between the zinc tiles, the contours of the building, or its foundations. But it was them. So small, so fragile. I watched for a long time as they wandered around looking lost. Then, in single file, they turned and went inside the factory. Clara studied me, or she looked through my flesh, supervising or inspecting the levels, brightness and contrast. And everything bathed in pinkest light.
26.
Today the Anguĵa counts as one more ghostly presence in our architecture of abeyance. Its sturdy, rectilinear facade is divided up by columns, at the center of which is a loose semicircle of transparent vitroblocks bearing the building’s name, written in fluoride—still discernible in spite of the layers of graffiti, the ingrained soot and mud, and the great forest of bindweed that has grown up after so many decades of neglect. The west stand, once decorated with enormous protruding concrete disks, steel, and double-paned glass, has been demolished. There was a time when the circular structure functioned as a rotating cocktail bar, split into three parts, each of which turned in opposite directions; nowadays all that remains of the machine at the center of the gaping hole is its exposed terminal and a rotor blade from a family car, corroded and completely stripped of functional parts, semiconcealed behind a trio of wire fences erected by the police in a long-ago effort to stop people from coming in. Some of the greatest, most brutal Vakapý matches ever took place in the Anguĵa, but now its crumbling walls give sanctuary to the Magnetiźed. I don’t know when they first arrived, but it would have been a similar story to all the other places they have colonized over time. The government does nothing, adjudging them a minor threat at most: they’re on the electoral roll, they don’t cause trouble, they keep themselves to themselves. It has been the same in all the many cinemas and theaters, which, having stood empty, become the homes for multifarious factions unresistant to occasionally being gathered up by government forces and bused to polling booths. Faith, after all, is a natural filler for multiuse venues. The only one with a greater capacity than the Anguĵa is the old mill. The geometric designs, with the xolo-monsters and Anubis-like dogs eating their own tails, seem directly inspired by Mayan and Egyptian iconography, though now these have been torn down and replaced by welded brass effigies depicting the miracles of magnetiźation. Only one or two people still alive in the neighborhood around the Anguĵa can recall its heyday. It’s one of dozens of ruins whose hulking forms, half-destroyed or half-built, stud the shoreline, and a place where people apparently used to flock on a daily basis, from the
great and the good to those who aspired to greatness or goodness, and everyone in between: in the VIP boxes, they called out their bets with the same vulgar ferocity as everyone else in the stadium, the only difference, except for their smart outfits and the hideous plastic surgery of the wives and girlfriends, being that they were intent on losing not only their own money but also that of the people they were supposed to represent in the corridors of power—the clerks, delegates and subdelegates, boxers with cosmetic reconstructions, impresarios, builders, stars of screen and big top spread out below them, and those below them also, the anonymous tourist class, a dark sea of heads, hunters of favorable odds all—taxpayers all—writhing like fish in the whorls of steam rising from the sweating, polyester-clad bodies. Such were the scenes in the Anguĵa. And because cement, whatever pretty designs one may wish to embellish it with, will never lose its binding, synthetic properties—will never stop being cement—the Anguĵa has been able to serve as both sports field and temple, and could just as well be a prison or an anonymous, multipurpose events space. It has never been fully demolished for the same reason no one is ever going to properly restore it. In this city nothing ever materializes in full, just as nothing ever truly goes away. What would be the point of rebuilding something destined only to remain half-finished, whose completion dates are bound to enter the twilight of endless deferment? No one was ever willing to take on the lease, thus the cement structure fit itself to the combined flows of time passing and generalized indifference. So it goes, and to oppose it would require a kind of responsibility-taking simply not part of our makeup. It sounds harsh, but isn’t really: the moment cement dries, we in turn fit ourselves to whatever shapes it’s been made into. Hence why in Atlantika we always choose to live among ruins rather than face the immeasurable trepidation of open spaces.
27.
The heat makes us see things. Things that aren’t there, and never were. Like: the pinkie finger of a small boy whose body I found in a pile of trash, when we were out gathering the infected corpses one day. A fraction. The tiniest portion. A pinkie finger, among all that death—emphatic, categorical, large-scale death. What gives it such weight?
28.
This city has two great enemies: its inhabitants and the viruses they transport. Though the constant wind drives people out of their minds, and also carries viruses around, in no way can it be said to represent an evil in itself, for all its unpredictably and indeed the unpredictable effect it has on different people’s temperaments. It springs up in some faraway location and brings sudden atmospheric changes, a panoply of electric charges, abrasions, and erosions. People say that the viruses would have no reason to exist if it weren’t for humans, that they originate in our bodies and survive thanks to processes of intradermal decomposition, or through other cellular mechanisms they latch onto and finally begin to drive. Or if it weren’t for the brain: that they arise in the brain of the person who fails to understand the parasitical paradise that is the body. The slightest chink and it begins—a sneeze, an itch, a damp patch; anything can be like a red carpet for devastating infecting agents like the Ź. And this city has always been a gateway to the continent for such bugs. The Albýnos were the worst offenders. The chroniclers from the times they first hove into view—as slaves on the invaders’ boats—speak of a virus that decimated the populace; the natives, whose dark bodies would be painted shades of copper and violet, were alarmed at these vivid white arrivals and made it clear they were not in need of new neighbors, thank you very much. The virus, AKA the Á-Bug, AKA the invaders’ greatest weapon; their smartest move was to simply wait for it to spread behind the enemy stockades. Really the damage was done the moment their pigmentless captives set foot on our beaches: vitamin-deficient and glowering, carrying their own shackles and reeking of rat piss, awash with cankers and ulcers. Even the little subcutaneous nicks, even these were enough once they had made their pact with the tropical heat and its consommé of diphtherias, brackish water, and humidity—oh, treacherous humidity. These little microarmies, too, jumped down from the ships and waded through the warm shallows, abandoning the snowy expanses of their hosts and seeking refuge in the virgin expanses of us. Then all the invaders had to do was wait. We could look at how closely packed together the native dwellings were, though the custom of maintaining a strict bathing regimen, whether in good health or otherwise, was certainly also bad news: much as the mestizos nowadays love to trumpet the virtues of regular ablutions, these supposedly hygienic practices were in fact the perfect opportunity for the Bug to spread. We read about it in The Short Account of the Catastrophe at San Jacinto Itzcuintlán by Don Bernardo Giménez de Ademuz, one of Fish Hook’s absolute favorites and the man whose face adorns our fifty CRĐ bill: “Very many lost their lives and those who did avoid the full mortal Fury of the Illnesse were left as cripples and placed inside colonies alone, removed from human Contact for Tens of Years.” It was the Á-Bug that laid the natives low, but the conquistadors went home as heroes all the same. Those who stayed on, the idiots who fell for some local beauty, or for the climate, or, worse, were transfixed by an old-world idea of prosperity, may have eventually become wealthy in these latitudes but mostly ended up losing it all anyway. So it went, a story or history (as you prefer) that began in the same way any entity covered in pustules is a beginning, and in a place where dead and rotting bodies soon stretched as far as the eye could see. Like this story. Like all stories. Johnny or Juan “Progress” knows what I mean: Ź-brigađiers gathering bodies among the rocks. Men with plumed helmets having their wicked way with them. An all-too-heady mixture of fear, shamanism, and a lively trade in trinkets and precious metals.
29.
Clara takes me by the hand. I feel like we’ve been here before, many times. Like I talk about it, and then it happens again: like it happens while simultaneously I am talking about it. Her hands are bundles of stripped wire, the protruding veins a clear representation of what little energy remains in the battered resistor of her. It’s today, then. Look, she says, her voice wavering: Pay attention. The vase is made of china, not thousands of years old but rather mass manufactured at some point, and later exchanged for a rice bowl; the dog is a dog with short legs, small, low to the ground, so insignificant as to barely be worth thinking about. And that, I think, makes it more dangerous: a beggar for affection. Its belly almost drags on the ground, like the very lowest of creatures. The coins on the table and those inside the pocket could be omitted but something makes them shine, like brilliant points of light on the wooden tabletop. Then Clara’s gums, red on black; her small white teeth; and after that her trembling hands. And I look. I look carefully. They seem welded together, the lines: no more stippling now, now we’re seeing a far clearer picture. A burst of blinding light comes from the stone, directly onto Clara’s forehead. It seems to make her skin duller than before, to add depth to the lines of her crow’s feet and furrowed brow, all the blemishes and marks that fossilize old looks and expressions. Vulture light. The disappearance of the world, according to the stone, or according to our interpretation of its message, will be unremarkable in every way, a mere matter of processes—slow, rather orderly processes, one part of which is us agonizingly waiting our turn. I see myself leave the house, but the house as part of a spatial realm only, not temporal: so clear, so seemingly concrete. It is no easy thing to see yourself and in the same instant to be asking: Is it really me walking along like that, all knock-kneed, like I’ve spent too long riding horses? It seems so genuinely ridiculous that I don’t even feel I can take issue with the way I’ve been rendered, the thin head of hair on the projected me as he goes down the street—as I go down the street—in the direction of the docks, on my way to see if it’s possible to find the final hiding place of my former comrades.
30.