Infinite Ground

by Martin MacInnes

  He learned that, unlike the apartment, which now housed a young, polished PR consultant, Carlos’s office had not been reoccupied, and employees remained prohibited from entering. According to the original reports, anything of real substance had already been removed. Although it was detailed that the computer remained on the desk, it was a shell: the hard-drive, containing all the reports Carlos had contributed to, the total record of his emails in and out, his work-time diary, the various projects he was working on at the time he disappeared, had gone. His login had been disabled – a reflex action that kicked in, the inspector was told, after seven days of unscheduled leave. Retrieving the hard-drive, and the associated physical evidence of work – paper files, reports, folders – was proving inexplicably and confoundedly difficult. The secure storage facility used by the police department claimed no record of the items. Corporate representatives responded to his telephoned enquiries in automated tones, assuring him the necessary authority would investigate his requests and contact him at the earliest opportunity.

  He wondered whether Carlos had been involved in fraud. It would explain why the work records had vanished. It might offer a partial explanation for his disappearance: a desertion, a flight.

  The inspector had little experience of this kind of duplicity and had kept his time in the financial district to a minimum, but he knew he had to follow wherever the case led. He borrowed an unmarked car from the station and joined an artery heading east.

  The traffic was interminable and everything was made of glass. He failed to understand the thinking behind it. Was it as literal as wanting to appear transparent? A corporate confidence trick? The last thing you could do in daylight hours was look inside, the sunlight blasting back from the surfaces. Other glass was dark, tinted, frosted. It was difficult to think clearly. He continually adjusted his sunglasses, rubbing the infernal itch across the top of his thick black hair, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, cursing under his breath, the damp spreading under his arms stopping him from removing his jacket.

  At the front door of Registro Mercantil the caretaker had him show identification and complete a series of registration forms and an additional survey. He waited almost an hour for a clerk to appear, before being taken to a small basement room lined with rows of tall grey cabinets. The archives amounted to only a percentage of the transactions covering the years he had requested; for anything else he’d have to wait. Clearance could take a while, the clerk said, and left him to it.

  The main indicator of large-scale fraud was records of unlikely purchases. According, at least, to his half-remembered training. The problem in identifying evidence was the impenetrable legalese. He could see himself spending hours fruitlessly scanning through the minimal paperwork. Were he to be rigorous, trace the nature of every significant outgoing payment, or, say, only those whose purpose remained unclear, he would have to leave aside virtually everything else in the investigation. At this early stage he couldn’t justify limiting his remit to such an extent. Technically, nothing linked the disappearance to financial irregularities or even to the corporation at all; the process of requesting assistance, the loan of an officer better versed in fraud, for example, would itself be too time consuming and ultimately to the detriment of the case. So he really was, as he saw it, on his own. He would comb through the records as quickly as he could, not wasting longer than a single afternoon.

  The corporation moved money around. That, at least, was clear. He came across some highly unusual claims. A protest group had launched a civil action, claiming illegal occupation of land in the interior and the resettling of tribal communities. Information was scarce – much seemed to have been deleted or redacted and it had inevitably come to nothing, the parties arriving at a settlement. The individuals concerned were impossible to trace. Some of the original reports suggested violence on the part of the protestors, but the full extent of the allegations had subsequently been erased.

  He had to leave the basement more than once in search of coffee and air, neither of which gave much relief. He went blindly, hopelessly, through the reams of printed information, drifting off only into the most indirectly related speculations, catching himself much later seeing the hands had still been working, the pages parsed, and he would resolve to focus more firmly on the task at hand, stay on track, but the same thing happened again, the pattern repeated, he’d go outside.

  It might have been easier if he could append the pages, score through anything obviously irrelevant, highlight any patterns of potential interest, but the signature demanded by the clerk prohibited him from duplicating any records. The camera focused on him from the south-west corner of the room. He continued.

  He found the corporation paid a significant monthly amount to a ‘performance agency’. Considering the use of an actor to represent Carlos’s mother, it was a lead of sorts. He pushed himself back from the desk, took out his mobile phone and began ringing around. Eventually, he sourced a number and was put through to one of the directors. She was disarmingly open, admitting they hired out ‘performers’ to fulfil various ­capacities at the corpor­ation. They would prepare and send men and women to act as low-level employees; it was especially helpful, she said, when the corporation was entertaining prospective ­clients, engaged in a series of meetings and wishing to give the best possible impression, displaying an appearance of optimal efficiency and hard work. She admitted it seemed counter intui­tive at first.

  ‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘they appear much more convincing in the role of hard-working, busy employees than such employees do themselves. It’s more common that you’d think. Of course, some of the hired staff are working so hard at appearing to be working hard – filing, checking reports, making urgent phone calls and demanding to speak to so-and-so – that there’s really nothing inauthentic about it at all.’

  Staff weren’t hired only to populate the office at such times, she went on; sometimes it’s the opposite, hired so that they’re not needed to populate the offices. ‘Certain personal obligations, understandably, conflict with the necessary fulfilment of corporate duty. The corporation, and increasingly many other institutions, will pay for outside performers to stand in for their own staff’s daily lives. This is easier to do if the obligation is based on viewing something – say a son or daughter’s partici­pation in a concert or a sporting event – when the hired staff can be visible at a distance and report back with the required information. It’s at the employee’s own discretion, of course, but the majority are only too happy to brief outsiders on how best to stand in. We suspect some staff invent or exaggerate work, so they can hire performers to cover personal obligations. It is enough, most of the time, that you’re represented; it doesn’t have to be you. Caring for elderly parents becomes especially trying, so in addition to housing them in permanent leisure communities, performers from agencies such as ourselves stand in on visiting days. This is not immoral or duplicitous, Inspector. In almost all cases the relatives are not only quite aware of what is going on, but also relieved at how smoothly the encounter goes, how their son or daughter appears to really listen, to be genuinely interested. Besides, it naturally speaks very well of the parents that they have brought up children who have gone on to be so successful, working in the kind of institutions that can pay for the courtesy of ersatz personal encounters.’

  The longest-serving false employee had been with the ­corporation more than four years and had become so adept at appearing to be effective that the gap between this and actually being effective was invisible, arbitrary, and she was in fact deemed essential to the smooth running of the business. Seeing her so confidently and authoritatively appearing to do her job was instructive for the other office members, who could watch and learn from her and see how to do it themselves.

  The limits of what the agency people could be expected to do were not clearly defined, but it appeared likely, the director said, that they had been used to build an aura of gentle festiv
ity on workers’ birthdays and to insert morale-boosting moments of ambiguous flirtation when certain team members appeared to be feeling down. It was even possible there was some truth in the rumours reported, including that one office member had been seen receiving detailed tuition from another, presumably an actor, on how to sneeze better, i.e. in a way considered more acceptable within the industry – quieter, more professional and controlled.

  They sent employees out on public transport and in adjacent cafés on workday mornings, looking brisk and ready for the day ahead, helping others in the industry approach their work in an optimal frame of mind. They were deployed by the coffee room at typical low-sugar periods, ready with promising and uplifting slices of anecdote and gentle conversation, which employees could look forward to resuming and developing at a later date. They waited in the car park in the evening, so no one real was the last to go home; they took exactly two minutes forty seconds to return from bathroom visits and they produced particularly purposeful rhythms punching keys even on slow, midweek afternoons.

  She insisted, however, that the corporation continued to legitimately function – it was unusual, for instance, on any given day to find the ratio of real to representative office workers fall in favour of the latter. The corporation maintained its operation and made money; it was a self-supporting, autonomous system, because if there ever came a point when the corporation ceased to be profitable there would be no funds left to pay the agency and the actors. The fact that they remained there was proof ­positive that things went well.

  She had no record of Carlos. They had not, to her knowledge, engineered any performances in his professional or personal life. He thanked her and ended the call, before continuing his search of the files.

  The door opened and the caretaker told him the time was up. He hadn’t realized at all how late it was. Clearly he’d been talking on the phone much longer than he’d thought. He gathered his things and followed the dreary figure upstairs.

  He had his bag searched, then sighed as he removed his jacket, put his arms out to be patted down.

  ‘This weather, huh?’ he said.

  The caretaker said nothing.

  He thought things over on the drive back. He’d need, of course, information from the corporation itself regarding the performance agency. It explained the mother – presumably a complementary service offered in sympathy and support to the real Maria, who still couldn’t bear to talk.

  The easiest thing, of course, the inspector thought, the least disruptive and the cheapest, would have been to put someone from the agency in Carlos’s seat the moment he’d gone. ­Colleagues were taking on his work and doubtless extra staff had been brought in to help, but they only replaced his product, not his presence. The vacated office remained off limits and it would continue to be so, treated as a site of potential evidence, until the inspector declared otherwise.

  When the caretaker had interrupted him, he’d been cross-checking bulk orders of office supplies. A circuitous route towards locating Carlos, he would admit, should any updates from his seniors be demanded. It had been reasonably interesting, perhaps only because the items were listed plainly, and also, he supposed, because of the familiarity of the content. He could fool himself into thinking he was being efficient and capable, when really he was just relieved at having understood something.

  The orders could be broadly categorized under worker and machine supplies. So in addition to ink cartridges, data sticks, copier toner, replacement hard drives and memory, there were 5 kg coffee tubs, quantities of anti-bacterial gel, paper towels. What had seemed slightly odd, the only thing really, after the performance agency payments, was that in the last several years these costs were constant, despite the slow, steady expansion of the business. The growth of the corporation’s estate failed to match its supplies.

  Fairly minor, he imagined, but something to look into.

  Back at his apartment, the inspector found that the company’s listings online contradicted the true nature of the estate as indicated in the records: between 10 and 20 per cent of property accounted for on paper led to nowhere real. Fundamentally, the corporation was smaller than reported. He was sure this would turn out to be an error on his part, financial naivety, something he had failed to understand.

  After a substantial time trawling the internet for clues to the discrepancy, he found a reference to ‘corporate contingency’ sites. It was common practice, he discovered, for larger corporations to rent additional office space in remote locations, typically on the outer edges of new towns. A single tall building catered for a dozen companies or more, lying empty most of the year. The offices were primed for work, fully furnished, connected and in some cases guarded by watchmen in booths and remotely surveilled.

  Post-disaster, the theory went, a corporation could re-­establish itself in one of these sites, continue as if nothing had happened. The assumption was that any attack would focus primarily on the city, so an alternative was needed, a contingency site. Several days each year a team was dispatched to prove it could be done. Before the taxi ride from the central hub, secretaries prepared packed lunches, coffee flasks and bottles of still water. The gates were opened, networks re-established and the team went in to work, careful not to look outside. In most cases, he read, staff hated it, couldn’t wait to get back to the real office. Too quiet. The days going on and on. No one went there more than once.

  He read it as an example of corporate anxiety. Their imagination of the apocalypse was limited and picturesque, affecting a distinct, geometrically precise land segment, allowing civilization to be transported elsewhere, uninterrupted.

  For the practice to be as widespread as it was, it had in some sense to be profitable. He wondered what statistics would show over productivity: what the difference in daily output was between employees who believed that everything, no matter what, was going to be okay, and those with no alternative workspace.

  He wondered if workers would go calmly about their daily work, more adept, in the knowledge of readied replicas. Idealize the unfilled places where, once settled, everything would run more smoothly. A microwave plate obstructed as it rotated; a door failing to close firmly on a first attempt; a sub-optimal phrase used in a rare group-meeting interjection: all those things could be smoothed, corrected, perfected in the parallel office.

  He was amazed and impressed by the colossal corporate arrogance, the stunning lack of imagination. The idea that all places – a forest, a desert, conceivably even seas – were really urban spaces in the preliminary stage.

  He had been reading for hours. He hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch. He took his wallet and went downstairs in search of food. Waiting for duck and rice in the Celeste Imperio he remembered something, a story told by a colleague at a bar – or was it, he thought, stretching on the red plastic chair, a detail he had read long ago, perhaps in an American novel? In the story an insurance worker had suddenly disappeared. Mid-thirties, married, father to two. No history of mental illness, no particular financial insecurities, no sign, his wife had said, of anything amiss. He had left for work at the usual time on that last morning, finish­ing his coffee as he pulled on his coat, kissing her on the left cheek as he stepped towards the door.

  He had never come back. He had not reported to the office. Had made no attempts to contact anyone, left his bank account untouched. She swore he had been killed. He had suddenly been made inactive, something impersonal had struck him. No body was found. She pressed several months later for a funeral in absentia, a ceremony to encourage the transition. The missing man’s brother arranged a detective to search. One day, six years later, the wife took the call. I have some news, the brother in law said. We have him. He’s here. I’m watching him right now.

  He’s dead.

  He’s not.

  He lived, they discovered, two towns down. He had switched across two letters of his Christian name. He had a wife, a son, a daught
er. He was rising through the ranks of a local insurance firm. The detective had watched him for some time. He cooked the same meals in a regular routine carried over from the first life. Continued to swim in a pool twice weekly, just as before. He had quickly amassed a record collection near identical to his previous. The wife drove with the brother and the detective, insisting on seeing the life. She thought, she said later, that she was dreaming or watching her own life as if from outside. The new wife reproduced her hairstyle and her gait. The children, though younger, enjoyed a power balance identical to her own offspring. There was a languor, a carelessness expressed in the lay of objects on the new lawn exactly as there had been on their own six years before.

  Could it be him, she said? It looks just like him, but it’s not, it can’t be. A twin? Removed at birth? You hear about these things, she said. You read about them. The amazing coincidences, the same choices, down to the smallest thing.

  Nothing had ever been explained. The man, when confronted, said nothing, offered no reason for his actions. The marriage had not been formalized and it proved difficult to bring a case against him, all but impossible to put together any charge more significant than wasting police time.

  The thing I don’t understand, she said, is why would he leave me if only to build exactly the same life again? Sure, it would hurt if he’d run out on me, left me for someone else – but at least then I could understand it, I think. But he didn’t do that. He did the same thing again, the same life twice.

  The inspector searched for the exact words of the phrase. He left and grew the same life again, a few miles on.

  He wondered now if this insurance company also used contingency sites. If the man had been encouraged, however indirectly, to build a duplicate of everything in his life, some blank and dull response to the possibility of ruin. More than once, everything again, towards a greater chance of preservation.