38.
From Morgan’s notebook:
“And the Syphilitic and the Lepers scaled the mountain on all fours and once their most weary limbs had reached the Summit, they diligently cleaned the Altars or did whatever task was given to them. These unfortunate souls, truly little more than Skin and Bones, did wash themselves with great carefulnesse and were not minded to change their Condition (a state they had long ago accepted as deserving and Innate) but rather sought to prevent the worsening of it. It was, then, the habit among them to keep their skin of utmost cleanliness, above all because this same Idol to which they commended their cankers and sores was believed to be the One to smite them bodily should they fail to venerate this Devil.”
39.
In a way our work was pure potluck. We were dependent on so many things, from the toxicology tests to the weather, to ambient noise, to the strictly demarcated zones within which we were authorized to carry out our searches, and to agonizing assessments and analyses based on sheer coincidence—on strings of numbers that, though random, would soon repeat or seem to match up with something or other and immediately be given the label “data”: you could, if you stared hard enough, discern hazy correlations or similitudes of some kind, and, real or not, at least they gave us something to go on. Because when we were down below, blind luck and its manifestations trumped logic every time, and we flipped a hell of a lot of coins. All of which meant, down on our bellies in the murk and shit, we did everything we could to refine our intuitional capacities, particularly if it was a day when luck didn’t seem to be on our side, and that was most days. At first we worked along the same lines as conventional fumigators, dipped pieces of bread in milk and rat poison—hours we spent doing that, making that milky-arsenic mush. It’s a minor outbreak, you morons, they said. Evidence negligible. Patterns of activity? Dream on. So get to it: dip that bread. Dip it, and go gather dead bodies, they said. That was always the line. Nothing to worry about. We’ve seen worse. Remember ’58? And we did remember, impossible not to, for all that many of us weren’t even born then. Our bug, the Ź, proved resistant to most of the poisons we tried, but obviously we had to try them first. An antidote was cooked up, and the bacteria shuddered in response. We trusted in the approach until it became clear, all too clear, that the situation was more complicated than our betters had realized. In normal cases, your average infestation, the poison takes awhile, but the job’s a clean one. Barium carbonate: ninety centigrams does it, though patience is still a must. They can smell it, so you have to starve the fuckers first: starvation is the only way to truly take them out. The young are easier to trick—accustomed to the mother’s teat, they haven’t learned to be as wary, and they’ll eat whatever they come across. The mother is a harder nut to crack. If she does take the bait, the poison goes to work only gradually, and while she’s on her way out, the little ones are likely to go snuffling around for food—bingo. It isn’t rocket science, but you do need to learn how to wait. Sometimes, when the pink light becomes too much for my eyes and I am forced to momentarily look away from the vision, or when Clara breaks off for whatever reason, to cough, or because a fly crosses the room, landing on some spandex item of clothing, or on a bra, or on whatever forms have manifested in the room over the course of afternoon and evening, leading to a break in the transmission, the thought comes: that it was they who were being patient with us and not the other way around. Good old rats. Or patient old rats, at least, which if you take everything else into account should probably be a sufficient substitute for actual goodness. Go on boys, the rats were saying, you’ll be heroes, they’ll name streets after you, and we’ll still have the run of our kingdom underground. Patience, though, whether exhibited by humans or other species, always runs out in the end. It is finite. At some point, and nobody can say when it’ll be, all the sanguine logic in the world must also give up. Kovac was right. There was a point at which they stopped acting according to the simple causal chains to which it is possible to reduce all plagues. There weren’t any more mother rats, there weren’t any more of their offspring, there were no litters, nests, or colonies at large beneath the streets of Atlantika; a point came when they were nothing but small, unaffiliated furies, flying where they would.
40.
The blades have stopped turning. It’s hot, and they’ve stopped, the fan has given up, possibly it’s falling to pieces, but certainly it isn’t working. Even though it’s hot. Terribly hot, terribly stopped. The dust has become encrusted on the blades, liable soon to be so thick it reaches the wall. The stone is currently showing an old advertisement for Mirasol bracelets, with a slogan so cloying that it survived for generations and eventually, thanks to the power of nostalgia, attained cult status: a couple in their thirties, very sexy, in sporty clothes, in a big house, big garden out back, hammock out front, clean car out front, clean dog, clean kids, pastel shades, everything bright and shining. The bracelets that make us happy, the bracelets that fill us with pulsing life. Mirasol bracelets. A great gushing surge of good fortune and happiness, manumission and serenity in all their guises; bibelots, bijou, and every kind of X-L, expendable curios: UltraComfort™, organic skin, extendable, reversible, most traditional kind of rubber ever, studded with tiny shards of magnetic stones. The company eventually shut down after false advertising claims stuck. They “guaranteed” good health, plus the ability to heal your loved ones, through the use of magnetic holograms, which created a bridge between certain natural bodily frequencies and those in the environment. They also had the most infuriating, unforgettable jingle—it used to blare out endlessly from the tinny speakers of sales carts down by the docks, the unmistakable sound of a large corporation trying to sell tat to the needy. I don’t know exactly when the miracle product began to be taken literally as some kind of fragment of god. When was it that a general alteration took place in people’s prayers, and instead of asking for the Bug to go away, or for its terrible consequences to subside, people started prostrating themselves before a greater evil, one whose consequences were truly sudden and fatal: the Bug that would once and for all allow us to rest in peace? Those of us who were children in those days all had one, without exception. Birdface Helguera’s stepfather worked for Mirasol, so we all got one through him. If our bracelets did engender miracles at any point, or indeed if we managed make large metal objects come toward us with a flick of the wrist, I’ve somehow forgotten.
41.
This: the exterminator will not succeed in eliminating rats merely by catching them. Their screeches will attract others. You have to be patient, calm the impatient body. Can you hear the way they screech? So not yet. Wait for the whole group to gather, then you go in. So Morgan taught me.
42.
My occasional sorties to the stationery shop are the only break in my routine. My life is not what you could call social. I worry that these deviations from my usual course will catch me away from the room, completely vulnerable. That I’ll come back and find Clara sprawled on the carpet, husk-like, or like the stone of some fruit, the flesh completely devoured, and her corpse already stinking, the whole building stinking, all the buildings, the entire city, and then our neighbors will come and start asking questions, and everything will fill up with questions and muttering and sounds that are not dissimilar from the sounds of dogs. And there will be no way for me to explain the stone. How to tell people that in fact Clara hasn’t gone but, on the contrary, she’s transformed into a different kind of matter altogether, a substance somehow even more alive than you and I? They won’t understand, and nothing I can do will make them. All they’ll see are her dead eyes, and my dead eyes, and they’ll go on looking—for answers.
43.
Dogs were the first to contract the Ź-Bug, and the earliest sign would be their fur falling out, followed within a matter of days by the claws and teeth. Soon their bones would begin to disintegrate, and within a week they would be little more than sacks of sagging skin. The response in cats was different: they could carry on
as normal for quite a while. The problem came when the rats got into the grain stores, decimated them, and moved onto the mill. A new strategy had to be devised, given that starvation is well known as the best course: places in which there is an excess of foodstuff pose the greatest challenge to the exterminator. At that particular time I had been assigned a short-haired dog, half terrier, half mongrel. It had been one of the best when we were working in residential areas and stables, but at this point it became little more than useless. A meeting was called, untold options discussed, no solutions found, and it was decided, for want of any satisfactory course of action, to put the dogs back in their kennels and try something different. We returned to the mill and found the colony ten times bigger than a few days before. They had set up in the walls, the whole place was alive with the sound of them. Kovac shut his eyes and focused his attention, but his methods—poor DIY methods inside his head, little more than an attempt to rationalize what instinct was telling him—didn’t help establish the movements of the colony in its current incarnation. They’d scurry out into the open, but so quickly you could be looking right at them and barely catch a glimpse, the barest trace lingering in one corner of your vision. Surplus of foodstuff: outright elimination impossible. The trick, we thought, was to put out some new kind of bait, one they hadn’t gotten used to: we tried fresh offal and fish heads. We thought about it, but so did they, in their way—in their possibly far more effective way. Real intellectuals, it turned out: they smelled a rat, and stayed exactly where they were. Staring out at us with those little shit-injected eyes, laughing at our efforts, the stupid outfits we wore, having a right old chuckle at our tribulations, our ruined city, our call center operators doing overtime, our brethren hooked on Vakapý—staring out at us as though trying to make sense of us. What kind of creatures were we, what was up with all of these great tracts of empty space we allowed to stand between us? Anyway, we waited eight nights for the new bait to stop smelling strange to their little twitching noses. And I tried to take it easy, tried filling my mind with thoughts of the past, tried to take comfort in memories of Zulaýma. But the hours went by too slowly. Even Morgan became dejected. I initially put his quiet despondency down to the amount of time we’d spent in the company of Ź-brigađiers alone by now, or the fetid air underground, or exposure to the rat poisons. I came across him one day sitting on his own in one of the loading bays. He’d stepped out for some air but was having difficulty breathing. He said something about being lost. Being lost and not knowing how to find his way back. Something about the novice—he was talking under his breath. I swear, he said: How was I to know? He pointed a finger, then changed tack and marked an x in the air. There. Did you see? Right there. First stop is Cambodia. And from there, on to Jakarta. We won’t get lost … I had no idea what to say to any of this—I never did when Morgan started with all of that. Then the inspector gave the order to let the dogs out.
44.
Zermeño kept the best pages in his own secret pavilion of ass. No amount of jacking off could ever be worth these gals, he’d say. A special place was reserved for those topless goddesses: Zulaýma de Garay, Pita O’Higgins, Nefertiti Magaña. Zermeño wasn’t much of a businessman: always getting high on his own supply. We never found out where he kept the stash but, well-hidden though it was, it became quite famous among the kids in the neighborhood, so famous that Zermeño spent great amounts of time squirreling away his goods as directed by bouts of paranoia, or motherly raids, or rumors of a supposed move by the Alanis twins and their Santa Rita underlings, a strike whose perfection was directly proportionate to its hypothetical status and was sure to strip him of his greatest treasure and his honor at the same time: those minxes with come-hither eyes and improbable contours. In his terror he also developed a steel-coated mistrust in his closest associates, us. Any time we were about to go into the ritual room (the jacking-off room) he would ask us to wait a moment. A moment that sometimes lasted several minutes. He’d bar the doors before setting up a rough and ready alarm system, dragging the bed from one side of the room to the other, slamming the wardrobes shut, opening the trunks and chests of drawers, and stacking the chairs in piles. Truth be told, I was never that interested in making off with his treasure trove. And it is the truth: people’s treasure troves have simply never been of interest to me. A treasure trove is something that comes to you, but that no one ever gives you. All I was able to think about was Zulaýma, everything alfresco, her chrysalis tail enveloping me, coming down upon and around me like a mother ship: Zulaýma de Garay, owner of the biggest, firmest breasts that I have ever had the chance to imagine nibbling on: Zulaýma de Garay, née Esther Rivas Calderón, a true Atlantikan in every respect, though she did leave the city after the great affront of a silver medal in a beauty contest organized by Atlantika Telekoms, vowing never to return, only eventually doing so inside a coffin whose final destination was the bottom of the sea. But there was no way whatsoever to equate the hiding place with Zulaýma. You would have needed to be incredibly innocent to believe that those luminous breasts, with the aureole grading away gradually into the rest of the flesh, could be reduced to the two dimensions of our hurried masturbations. Zulaýma I, Empress of the Noble Empire of Jakarta, belonged to another reality altogether, a finer one, never fragile but undoubtedly delicate. This was always very clear to me, in spite of the heat and the torrent of hormones directing our every move at that time in our lives. When all was said and done, that which attracted us had very little to do with Zermeño’s hiding places.
45.
My dog was in the mill for only a couple of hours. It came out with its muzzle smelling of almonds. It was the first to come back, possibly the only one. The sun was going down, Morgan was nowhere to be found, and the terrier mongrel suddenly appeared, hopping and skipping like a mad thing. Purple hops. It was purple all over: around the eyes, the nostrils, and purple the stream of mucus dribbling therefrom. It started vomiting blood. It didn’t bark at all but proceeded directly to blood-streaked vomit and purple mucus. The inspector refused to waste any ammo on it. He gave me a wink. We stood and waited for the dog to die in bloody purple agony, then called the Department of Hygiene. The inspector intended to request permission to burn the building to the ground.
46.
Morgan had a notebook, and sometimes he let me look in it. He’d pretend to have left it open by accident, before disappearing off someplace. I was fairly certain I knew what this was about. We needed to empty our minds sometimes, was his view. Sluice them out, turn them upside down. Look at things another way, let it be someone else’s voice claiming everything’s okay. But there was more to it than that. It was his way of putting forward, in other people’s words, what he himself could never say. Off he’d go, to the restroom, to stretch his legs, and there the notebook would be, miraculously open on his desk or on top of Grandma’s sewing box. Too tempting. Sometimes, when I was sure he wouldn’t be back for a while, I’d copy out the odd thing, sections of text that struck me as pertinent in that particular moment. This meant starting a little collection of my own, ancillary to Morgan’s. I sometimes think he planned that too: that my participation, me as his copyist, was actually an important part of his plan. The original notebook had plastic covers with hemp binding and our school’s emblem on the pages as a watermark. He used to steal them from the teachers’ office, taking them away and filling them with material personal to him: facts that spoke to him for whatever reason, newspaper clippings, statistics, the majority of it taken from secondary sources, including at times his own dreams, I suspect. A miscellany whose provenance was impossible to establish, making my notebook like a very minor tributary to his never-ending, and in a way never-beginning, watercourse. It was his project, he used to say. He said we were welcome to spend our time gawping over unattainable females, or Vakapý, if that was our thing. Then, licking his lips with that long, sharp tongue of his, he’d dive into the pages of his notebook once more, all of those pictures and smudges, all the marg
ins bristling with barely legible comments, the tiny letters crowding together.
47.
Zermeño’s house was in the center of town, two streets from the cathedral and right across from the Galician’s grocery store. The father’s barbershop was part of the same property, or the barbershop was a kind of plasterboard annex tacked onto the side of the home, constantly full of the fug of rolling tobacco, his clientele’s smoke of choice. Fishermen, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats alike, all whose moustaches needed seeing to first thing in the morning, or in the middle of the day, wanting a few minutes out from fish scales, tills, and ID checks, or indeed after nightfall when the freezing winds rattled in from the Atlantik, when the place became so packed that some had to stand with one foot in the room behind the annex, really only meant for customers requiring peroxide, a corrugated metal lean-to with a couple of those hairdryers that sit around your head like oversized helmets, and three pedicure stations, each with a respective pedicurist, so that on the other side of the false wall the menfolk would sit vegetating in a cloud of hair and talcum powder, flicking through the newspapers, lingering over the Page Three girls, the latest gossip about the imminent closure of the Anguĵa, or the Itzcuintlán Albý-Blacks’ hundredth draw in a row, keeping themselves to themselves, like masculinity itself had been made manifest in the curdled smoke, all waiting their turns in the mint-colored reclinable armchairs, one of the few perks of living a life in a place where all the houses are tiny and bare. Zermeño liked to brag that his home was the greatest, the most regal, of all the houses in the center, and that if you added the barbers into the equation, theirs was the best place in all of Atlantika. And he wasn’t far wrong, though it would also be correct to point out that, like almost all Atlantikan homes, the place was an unsightly monstrosity and was constantly having new bits added on and old taken off, constant architectural nips and tucks that were Zermeño’s mother’s weakness, in the form of ever-changing reception rooms, attics, sunrooms, porches, balconies, hallways, more hallways, always using the latest in construction technology, new high-tech insulating material, flexi-this, flush-that, flash-everything, and of course paid for by the father, poor affable Zermeño Sr., a man who would have loved nothing more than to spend his time far from the barbershop (laying a few bets) but whose conjugal commitments and inability to say no to his wife meant he spent most of it overseeing the building site or doling out cash to the construction workers.
Jakarta Page 7
