Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  Infection was especially fraught in the case of animals that might be carrying a fetus. Jane complained persistently about her own health, and I wondered, in my tent, in the late evening, trying to wipe down what I could, conscious of my smell, which I inhaled gladly – damp sweat, light, pleasant tinge of urine from my shorts, sulphur from the bites I’d dug out, small punctures glowing orange and red on my arms, legs and even on my neck – checking the seal on my collection of notes, whether my unsympathetic reaction was driven from a sense that Jane was articulating something I feared myself – namely, that I might also be seriously ill. The smell again. I felt a mixture of pride and pity for it, something that accompanied me – a record of the things I did – and something that was me.

  The rains, in the brief slivers of direct light, gave a silver, lucid aspect to the vegetation, which seemed to grow out wilder in real time before us, to become, in effect, a single indistinguishable mass, everything around us in the forest interlocking, feeding on itself, gaining symbiotic nourishment and taking on, as it often seemed, an outsize, giant aspect. It was difficult not to be intimidated, overwhelmed by the scale, which seemed even grander in its deceptive uniformity. In its adaptation to the rains, to the power and excess of them, to the relative lack of light and to the new patterns of behaviour in all orders of animal, the forest seemed to become transformed. Fungus attached to scale insects clamped sucking the life from stalks and leaves, parasites on parasites. Giant junglesop fruits appeared, an abundance too great for the animals in our subgroups. Half-eaten specimens were scattered through the foliage, quickly consumed by the legions of ants emerging the moment, as if anticipating it, the rain ceased. Jane, understandably, was overwhelmed with work. Mushrooms shot up every day, every hour it seemed, in new places. Every time we lifted one the resultant absence, the cup-shaped hollow in the earth, produced an instant sucking sound, the hyphae seizing on the new direct access to surface rainwater. The whole of our camp began to smell of her collections, strung out in her tent and in the kitchen area under the simple roofs we’d improvised, and I even started to dream of their texture, of the fine, dense patterns both in the head of the bulb and everywhere beneath us, around us, in the ground.

  The growth, the activity of the fungi, was astonishing. In theory there was nothing in-built that would limit it. Single fungal organisms could, in the right environment, grow out perennially, indefinitely, infinite lines webbing under the ground, bubbling up as brief instances of leathery fruit. Some had lived two thousand years. They emerged in such quantities they must surely have been eating up the forest. And yet the forest itself grew, too. As soon as the bulbs emerged, they withered and decayed. The mushrooms right in front of us actively recomposed the ground. The hyphae ate plant and animal matter and recycled it as their own fruits broke and their spores fanned out, lifted in the new turbid streams created in the rains.

  Living insects were swept into the mouths of rapacious plants as larger animals were eaten up into the great lengths of hyphae in the soil. Even Alice appeared impressed next to this torrent of activity, the stuff of superstition, the beginning of stories, these transformations around us that might seem too great, too vast, too inexplicable to put down to a natural order. I thought of the fat bulbs growing out in the moonlight. Jane described accelerated rates of bodily decay in certain climates, at certain times of the year, seeming to imply movement in these dead things, an occult reanimation breeding new mythologies, curses, monsters invented from malign forces we can never understand and can do little or nothing to appease.

  Immediately the rain stopped there was this dripping near stillness, a hazy silver effect, a light sheen of mist revealing threads of fibre apparently hanging directly on the air, endless knots of impossibly delicate line glinting in refracted light and supporting ever enlarging globules of water, fat like pearls or eyes and bursting open as they fell to the ground.

  We hadn’t heard from the gates in six days. Loss of communication in the storms. Alice had anticipated this and on her advice we’d been careful with food, leaving a surplus from each day’s rations so we wouldn’t be stranded if there was a delay with the food drop. We’d been in the camp for over two weeks and, not knowing how much longer we’d have left, we woke with renewed urgency and set off earlier in the day before conditions deteriorated further. We’d worked quicker than anticipated, with only six animals left to sample, after which we could think about packing up.

  Jane told us more than once there were fungi inside us, there always had been, something I tried to forget as the growths bloomed out rapidly after the long rain, large blotches, wounds erupting on the trees, appearing, I thought, like graphic interpretations of the alien levity, nausea and sickness I was intermittently still experiencing. In the built hollows of the trees, the long excavations drilled by social insects, were dazzling honeycomb designs, fungal agriculture, fields and gardens painstakingly grown out by the ants, used to feed and fatten their insensate young. It seemed that everywhere we chose to look, something fascinating was happening. Every inch of matter, if approached slowly and carefully, seemed to fold out infinitely, to inflate rapidly, and I imagined pulling on a line, a thread, spooling it out and never reaching an end. The density of life here was such that every niche, every single pocket of space, was appropriated, developed its own rhythms and sequences, contained its original relationships and novel behaviours, producing, in total, an unfathomable variety. Each pocket was key, every action initiated a chain reaction, creating a dizzying array of nested hierarchies, and it was the quiet, autonomous, undirected nature of this total effect, the fact, broadly speaking, that ecology worked, that was the most humbling and interesting detail of all.

  Now that our supplies had dwindled, and we had no means of finding out if or when replenishments would arrive, we had to improvise, to walk out further, to start taking things directly from the forest. In this, and given that as much as conditions allowed we had still to follow and observe our sub-groups, we took on aspects of the bonobos’ diet ourselves, gathering surplus fruit after the animals had moved on. In sub-group C I observed two adult males carefully inspect a termite mound that was breaking apart in the rain. This cathedral mound, originally several metres tall, was now partly exposed on two sides, revealing the packed networks and channels of its air-conditioned interior. Though the vast majority of the insects had evacuated, the clumps of fungi they had planted still remained; the apes alternately pushed inside with a finger, scraping out the contents and bringing fungus drizzled with drowned insects to their lips. And while we didn’t eat from fungi raised inside trees or in mounds – it was perfectly safe, but the fact it had been planted, been tended to, been raised by beetles, termites and by ants, by the fact, that is, that in this sense it was partly synthetic, seemed to put us off; I was aware this was contradictory as in our day-to-day lives, in our homes, in our cities, we routinely ate foods that had been subject to similar levels of care and husbandry by animals, it somehow not seeming to matter, not to occur to us, in that context, but the three of us were in instant, silent, automatic agreement that we shouldn’t eat what had been grown – we did, under Jane’s instruction, fry bulbs blooming wildly by the edge of the stream.

  Losing myself in long investigation of a single tiny burrow produced in the soil by an upturned stone, a rotted fruit or by the prints of something moving, I eventually pulled myself back, lifted myself out. It took a moment to acclimate to the wider picture of the forest. For that moment, looking flatly to the trees and vines and the outline behind them of the valley we were in, I didn’t see any of those things, wasn’t aware of them, wasn’t able to conceptualise them. Instead I saw something like an infinite series of distinct, studded iterations; a vast aggregate of separate pockets, each one unique, original, harbouring living events, microsecond by microsecond, that had never happened before and were never to be repeated again. I had convinced myself, at least, that I could see like this, see the area not as a single field but as an arra
y, a patchwork of individual points whose multitudes seemed, in this moment, before my nervous system failed and gave up and it all became familiar again, to have dizzying, awe-inducing, even cosmological implications. I saw – I thought I saw – the vast energy and effort expended simply to sustain life from one moment to the next. A structure billowing out, unfurling exponentially, and in the same instant contracting back to zero, a complex, reiterative, non-linear growth – the creation of the universe – something over nothing – again and again. As I gazed at it time seemed to suspend, and in that one elastic moment I felt a sense of possibility and immensity that shook me with its force, brought me almost to tears, being really aware, for what felt like the first time, of the silent expanse of living, feeling matter all around me. Before it could mean something, before I could truly consider notions of privilege, responsibility, shame, the forest built itself up again, appeared to actively, visually reconstruct itself, fluidly reforming into unity, and there I was inches from a piece of felled and rotting trunk, Alice scraping the ladle against the sides of the pot, my knees, separating out from the ground where I’d crouched, creaking stiff and sore, the smell of the soup activating my hunger and reminding me there wasn’t long until dark, and what I had experienced – the ongoing evaporation and consolidation of the forest – was only residual, was difficult to put into words, was undermined by doubt over its authenticity. I wiped the sweat away – we really weren’t getting enough food – and I got up, stumbling on the first step I took.

  XV

  They were building their house. That’s where he had been when the attack happened, waking days later in the bedroom in the cottage, emptied out, uncomprehending. The cottage was temporary. The unfamiliar objects, the cupboards, the drawers, the wax raincoat, the steel-capped boots, they belonged to friends, colleagues of Shel’s, who had let the place and would be coming back. Their own things were in storage; they’d brought essential items only. He recalled the radio playing from the cab as the movers tipped their flat into a truck, Shel wrapping her favourite books and jewellery in bubble-plastic, anticipating the tight corners on the road. Everything now was stacked in pallets in a warehouse by the sea. Shel grew up by the sea and even locked inland she tried instinctively to stay on the tidal side, crossing roads, choosing one restaurant over another, still miles from water. Now the inside of their house was stacked there, vulnerable to the mould spreading in the fog.

  The doctor knocked, standing formally as usual on the steps, waiting for John to invite him in; he led him to the kitchen. He had done his best to conceal the fresh wounds, washing the blood from his scalp and pulling on a high-necked jumper. The doctor couldn’t know what he was doing, washing the sedative down the sink each evening, determined to stay close to the memories of Shel while he slept. Not only did it seem inappropriate to share these memories with the doctor, it felt dangerous too, as if exposing the stories might jeopardise them. He remained vulnerable, a little unsure of things. Whole periods were still missing – of the attack he knew only that he was visiting the building site, that he had sensed something and a sudden impact had smothered him. He retained no recall of waking, either at the hospital or at the site.

  The doctor wasn’t the only threat. Every day the fresh spread of the mould astonished him. It was as if the more he remembered – the more he thought he remembered – the more the fungus grew, taking nourishment from him, drawing strength from each lived moment and expanding. Again he sensed how vulnerable his memory was, how easily it might be brushed away. He had been hurt; his recall was taken from him. And now that he sensed it returning, he perceived the danger around him, on the walls and ceiling, growing in from the window frames, waiting, ready to prey.

  ‘John? John, you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You appear upset.’

  He let out a sigh, shifted position in the seat. He pressed his temple. ‘I’m worried about the stitching. I think it’s come loose again.’

  The doctor told him to bow his head. The inspection didn’t take long. He stepped back and rubbed his hands. ‘John, it hasn’t come loose by itself, has it? You’ve been scratching at it. You are still taking the medication? You realise how important it is? The skin around the wound is becoming inflamed. If you continue like this an infection will take root. Look, it’s time for me to go; I’ll check on this again tomorrow.’

  After he had seen the doctor out, promising he would continue on the course of sedatives, he wondered whether he should contact the university and have them pass a message to Shel. He could keep it brief, tell her he’d been involved in an accident and had been to hospital but was recovering well, recuperating from home. He tried to look at it from Shel’s perspective: was it in her own interest to know this? She was far away on work, in difficult and challenging circumstances – a message coming from him, relayed through her employers, possibly distorted, would at best inconvenience and alarm her, at worst bring her out of the project. He couldn’t risk such a misunderstanding. He’d wait until he could talk to her himself. Besides, how could he even contact the university? He had been told to stay in the house, away from the light, and driving was still off-limits. The router blinked red; he was without his phone, his contacts list.

  She would be angry with him, later, for not telling her, for not finding a way, but this trip was too important. It was the culmination of her professional work so far, maybe even the culmination of everything she’d devoted her life to since she was a child. He saw her childhood home, a village of two thousand on a slope facing the sea. Catherine and Ivan – her parents – worked with film and TV crews, leasing out landscapes. The village gave tax breaks to the crews who came to film by the castle, by the sea. The beginning of Shel’s fear of cameras, of being caught in a composition. Cameras and mics roaming through the streets. Shel hiding in her room, wearing a disguise, peering over the wall at the end of the garden. The large black parasols on summer afternoons, planted on the beach, visible for miles, ominous, beetle-like, as if emerging upwards through the sand. Worrying the tents would be swept away at high tide. That they wouldn’t get out in time. Startled, distraught, coming home from school seeing nothing remained of them, no trace on the beach. Stirring in the rock pools, unresponsive and alone.

  Her parents provided plants for filming, managing to convince producers they couldn’t work with artificial varieties, that it had to be the real thing. Real and consistent for the film’s duration. Tending to the plants, looking after them, a lot of work. Showing realistic development of plants across the time-line depicted in the film, the consecutive seasons. And the crews might need to build a foreign set, something that doesn’t grow naturally in the climate. We can take care of that, too, Catherine said. Shel riding home in the back of the pick-up, holding on to her favourite plants, hugging them to her knees, retrieved from a film that had ended, a landscape, she said, that had collapsed.

  It was, ironically, in thinking about the techniques of memory training that he recalled the nature of his own profession. He had been sitting at the table in the kitchen, the empty bowl from dinner still set next to him, when he realised the process of visualisation the doctor encouraged was a tool he used all the time. As a software engineer and coder, he would walk through each data structure he wrote as if it were a real place. The larger programs he coded, hundreds of thousands of lines each, were like cities, every part of which – every paving slab, every alley, every street – he knew intimately, exploring the topography day and night. Shel said his work was disappointingly non-dynamic – he never seemed to be doing anything, just sitting there, stretching back or leaning in, never the rapid blur of hands skimming keys that she’d imagined. Only a fraction of work actually involved setting down code; most of the time you were visualising it. Rather than architects, coders were more like urban planners, occupied less with the elegance of a single building than with the efficacy of a huge, sprawling city. Does it work? Are the necessary fundaments – plumbing, energy, t
ransport – in place? How does each area of growth affect everything that preceded it? It wasn’t that he was naturally cynical – coders had this wariness driven into them, they had to anticipate errors everywhere, flaws could arrive in the most unexpected places. A short shell program written years earlier could inadvertently counteract a new structure, creating a loop whose endless vibration brought the whole system down. So he was constantly watching for this, simulating the effects of each new line, each command, each character.

  ‘Who has arranged all this?’ he said to the doctor as he was leaving. ‘Who is paying for it, these home visits? Is it work?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, John. It’s your employers. The cover is in your contract.’

  He watched the doctor from the doorway until he disappeared. He wondered who among his colleagues had been told what had happened, and how much they knew. Had the information been passed to his friends? Did they think he was still in hospital? How many messages had he missed? He felt a warm glow at the thought of their concern, a concern exacerbated by his inability to respond, and he looked forward to seeing everyone again, to returning from this dramatic isolation.

  He was excited by the progress he was making, becoming integrated once again in the world, feeling the freshly collected content of his life. How much more was there? What was he still to recover? This sensation of expectation, of anticipating unlimited stories, his stories, was inexpressibly strange; he wondered, nervously, what would happen if the stories felt unfamiliar, if he had changed irreparably and the memory no longer fit. He felt conscious of himself as a place, a physical expanse. He imagined, awkwardly, the data implications, the impossible volume of a whole life’s return. How could it happen in a finite amount of time? One memory after another, piece by piece returning? Wasn’t there too much, always? Boundless information upon limited space? He worked harder, hungry for more, inhabiting the memories, considering the perspective and wondering what it looked like facing the other way, what was behind it, where did this street lead to, and then this one, what would happen if he pushed it this way, then that way, rotating the globe. Pushing the images around, he imagined he was imprinting, etching on a space. He found that instead of simply trying to recall something, trying to remember what happened, he was simulating it, imagining alternatives in parallel forward lines, generating binary trees and nested interrelations that appeared to have no end – first his desk, his terminal, then the office, the projects he worked on, the clients he met, the colleagues he drank coffee with, going further and further, the fractals radiating out.