Infinite Ground

by Martin MacInnes

  The server called his order number.

  III

  In other societies, sitting is the dominant body position. Sitting on furniture the body is set into three straight lines of near equal length with right angles on the lap and beneath the knees. From here it is easily folded into its smallest possible shape, the knees pressed to the face and the heels to the posterior. In this folded position, the body is transportable and readily fits inside a small box. This encourages people to stay indoors and travel in vehicles. The mechanical formation of the body in a sitting posture, with minimal pressure, strain or curvature, the rods flatly expressed via the joints, matches the expectation of completed tasks, and its tiered expression resembles steps or stairs, most explicitly when viewed in profile, implicitly endorsing existing power structures and habits.

  TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 42

  He’d expected something grander. The use of acting staff, perhaps, had done it, suggesting a firm priding itself on innovation and experimentation, alert to the power of appearances.

  From the outside there was nothing to distinguish the ­corporation’s offices at all. One building appeared to drift into the next, a row of high, frosted-glass structures. At ground level it was almost empty, a holding room, a pre-corporate zone. Anyone, it seemed, could walk on in. It was no cooler here than outside, warmer if anything. Lack of entrance-level air-con would count as a more unusual deterrent to walk-ins. He imagined the front doors rarely used, people coming in early, as Carlos had, via sub-level parking lots and elevators.

  Up on the sixth floor, in the preliminary waiting room he’d been shown to, the surfaces gleamed. Wood panels and chrome finishes added to the pristine appearance, which he found very impressive. He was no longer aware of the temperature, which must have been perfect. Altogether, a very well-maintained operation, after all.

  Entering the office zones, he’d naturally speculated on who, among the people he saw at the desks and by the copy room, entering and exiting the bathrooms, the kitchen area and the conference rooms, was real (i.e., a legitimate and authentic office worker) and who was simply paid to look that way. He’d imagined there would be something more fluid in the way real people went about their work, something natural, an ease from having practised the same movements time and again. Obviously the performers would take their cue from the mannerisms displayed by the authentic office workers, but he remained confident he’d be able to tell them apart.

  People who really looked like office workers, the ones who seemed distant, committed, perhaps exhibiting hints of stress and short temper – those, that is, who lived up to his general expectations of what an office worker is – they were the ones he would have to be wary of. Though perhaps the performers would be reluctant to exaggerate their actions for just that reason. They may have been the quiet ones, the ones he didn’t notice, those in light shirts almost blending with the whitewashed walls.

  He had been left waiting for some time now. He rubbed his eyes. He was tired, no longer used to the rhythms of a working day. He was able to excavate quantities of sleep from his tear ducts: golden, odorous, granulated matter. Hitting on a fertile area, he dug for more, picking out pieces between forefinger and thumb.

  He needed some air.

  Standing up, he went to the nearest window, but the latch was merely decorative; he couldn’t get it open. To the right of the window, framed on the wall, was a series of photographs, figures in suits standing solemnly in rows. He absently went over the tiny faces. He might have recognized one. He isolated it, leaned in close, but was unable to identify it, to assign a name. Male, mid-thirties, dark hair firmly side-parted; nothing to make him stand out from the others. Trace of a smile? Each time he looked, he saw a slightly different expression. And though there was little to distinguish it, he was increasingly sure he had seen it before, and more than once.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he called as the door briefly opened and he caught sight of an arm. A moment later it reopened and the employee entered, asked if she could help.

  ‘I think I know this man,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him before. Could you remind me of his name?’

  She put on her glasses as she approached the photograph. ‘I’m sorry, which one?’

  He pointed slowly, careful not to blot the face with his finger. ‘Right here.’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean I think I’ve met him, but I can’t say for sure. He certainly didn’t work here long, I can tell you that. Chances are he was a contractor, outsourced. Not a full affiliate. None of us would have known him, really.’

  ‘Is there someone else, do you think, who could give me a name?’

  She paused for a moment. ‘I’m afraid not. I’m the longest serving of the current staff.’

  ‘Okay. While I’m waiting, do you mind if I ask a couple of other things?’

  ‘I didn’t really know him, I mean… That is why you’re here, right? To interview the others about Carlos?’

  ‘Yes, but I have a few questions that aren’t about him. I’d like to know more about company land. It’s proving difficult, locating information. Particularly regarding land in interior regions.’

  ‘We maintain various interests, of course, across the country and beyond. For a time we had holdings over the interior, but most of those have long since expired. You’ll find little activity in any of them.’

  ‘Where, precisely?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The holdings, where were they?’

  ‘The problem is that they weren’t named places, rather forest sections, so I can’t tell you, in so many words, where they were.’

  ‘Well, how were they accessed? There must be roads, stations, outposts.’

  ‘Of course, there were roads, single track; they’re probably not usable any more. The company would fly wherever possible. I can fetch you the names of the nearest settlements, if you’d like. Though the concessions were such a distance away, and besides, I wouldn’t imagine anyone lives there now.’

  ‘Had he, perhaps, at any time, had any involvement with these holdings?’

  ‘Carlos? Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

  She left the room. The inspector drifted back to peer at the face in the picture. He didn’t forget significance and it was odd he couldn’t place the detail. He was known for his attention to it, the quality of his memory. He had been successful, throughout his career, at entering people’s homes either to plant surveillance equipment or to go through all their things, their cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, clothes, beds, the total contents of their premises, knowing, at the end of it, when he had got or done all that he wanted, that he could restore everything to its original state. Others couldn’t do this, instead video-recording the disarrangement of the home contents, then slowly playing the video back; one operative, the most verbally confident of the team, describing the backward crawling of the action, piece by piece, directing the others so that they could negate everything they had done in the building, return each item to its resting state and make it as if they had never even been there, their presence, if it has been done competently, impossible for the lay person, at least, to detect.

  ‘Okay, okay. São Vicente, Santa Lucía, those were the stations furthest east,’ she said on returning. ‘Anything else?’

  He noted these down. ‘One thing. Could you tell me about your contingency sites? Were these also located in the interior regions?’

  ‘Our what?’

  ‘I’ve read they’re quite common. Prepared, empty offices built outside the cities. The idea being that the company reverts there in an emergency, say post-war.’

  She really did, he thought, appear incredulous. For a moment he doubted himself. He remembered he had no real proof.

  ‘I’ve heard nothing of those places. But even if we did have them,
which I’m not saying we do – they are just a series of empty rooms, right? What could possibly be of interest there?’

  IV

  KANDINSKI: Average. I don’t know. How are you supposed to describe someone’s voice? I guess he spoke quietly, but that’s not what you mean, is it? Are you asking about pitch? Flat or musical, degrees of depth, that kind of thing? It’s difficult to say. I didn’t talk to him often. In fact… The best thing would be to talk to his clients, those whose meets he was involved with, though of course they remain off limits. The way he spoke – do you mean words or sound? The way he formed them, or just his choice or range of vocabulary? Average, as I say. Wouldn’t stand out in a room.

  DIAS: Yes, quite. There was never any question of a dip in his performance. If there had been, then, of course… But the work was exemplary, as always, never late, never in need of correction.

  KANDINSKI: We noticed that he’d severely cut his hair and beard. Exposing, you know, that, on his forehead… I don’t know how we hadn’t noticed it before. It would have been indelicate to ask. It was unclear if it came from birth. Some of the women said there was no hair on his arms. They thought that was weird. Like he was a baby, born every day. Carlos did his own thing, we didn’t want to get in the way. I thought this waxing and shaving might have been helping him in his work – we all have our odd habits, our continuation-ensuring techniques. I see now he was engaged in a different project. It’s always easier to see the total form of the threads in retrospect. He was trying to expose himself, of course. That’s what he was doing. He was trying to show us who he was, removing excess layers so that we could see him clearly.

  DIAS: Liquid would pour from his eyes – I don’t mean crying, he never cried, not that I saw. More than tears, sort of lines of water, almost fibrous, hanging. I used to wonder how the world would look that way, seen in water. But then, of course, it is already.

  VASQUEZ: I saw him straining his fingers, examining his hands, pointing them out to himself. I didn’t realize. I wasn’t aware. You think I should have intervened? I just thought it was disgusting. And it was also mean. As if he was doing it to upset us. You see, he went, each time, to take away his mouth. That is what it amounted to, I’m telling you. He tried to dislocate his jaw, remove the mouth, throw it away like a used tissue. Isn’t that strange? I mean, isn’t that particularly strange? That horrible little O shape. When I saw that I would do all I could to leave the room. I knew exactly what was coming.

  KANDINSKI: His nails were cut extremely short. One day they were gone. I may have been mistaken. I called out to him; he turned away. Was he trimming himself? He became more slender. In dieting, lessening his body, perhaps he thought he could limit the influence and spread of whatever he believed it was. We’re all trying to get to the bottom of this thing, right? To work out what happened. As I see it, his projects were some response to what a part of him saw was happening inside him. And these response-projects were crudely physical: dieting, manic shaving, hiccupping, hanging upside down, cracking his jaw and contorting his face, arms held wide, as if simulating flight.

  KANDINSKI: I heard him sneeze – I had heard nothing else like it. It was extraordinary. You know Carlos is a slender man, not much of him anyway. Well that just made it all the stranger. The lack of noise when he landed. You’d expect a man, when he jumps like that, to make some sort of impact. He didn’t. He just landed with his shoes on the tiles and barely a tap. I just saw this flash of dark and a sort of vertical jerking in one of the bathroom mirrors. It took me a while, still looking in the mirror, to place the sound that he had just made. I was fascinated by the grimace on his face. I still hadn’t turned around; I’ll admit it, I was a little afraid. He appeared to be stretching the orifices of his face. He cracked his head down and to the side in a diagonal thrust each time he jumped. He was launching himself into these sneezes, and, I’ll tell you, he looked disappointed every time he landed.

  KANDINSKI: He would wear earplugs at all times, even during meets. He had to strain, leaning forward, to interact. He murmured something about ‘invasions’. About being ‘inhabited’. And he was clicking his jaw. This was perhaps the most minor among his symptoms, but it was oddly noticeable and grew the more so. It was a mild irritant, then a source of disgust. The clicking increased in volume and severity. First he moved his mouth into a small O shape, so that he might speak nothing, elongating his jaw. Then he would affect his bones somehow – from some centre – so as to arch upwards either side of his lower face. This gave a fleeting impression of imbalance and asymmetry, making him appear, not like two separate people welded to each other, but as two different expressions of the same identity or two postures from different moments over each other. It unsettled all of us. And then he cracked the shape, dropping that part of his face that was raised, so that it actually overtook the other half, affecting a dry, rapid wrenching sound as the bones moved past each other. He didn’t seem to feel a thing. He did it resting, playing with his features, grinding his mouth and its architecture into a constantly shifting variety. Straining forward, apparently trying to concentrate, but as if unable somehow to hear himself. The thing was – and this was the embarrassing bit, this is the thing we’re having to account for now – he continued to perform his job, to do so, indeed, with competence, and for some considerable time.

  V

  Ceremonies performed to mark transitional stages in individuals’ lives often involve the ingestion of toxic secretions gathered from plant-aphid symbioses, subsequently ejected from the mouth, along with bile and other stomach contents. The noise created during these expulsions is listened to by experienced tribe linguists, able to divine the hundreds of thousands of words compacted inside. In drier periods of the year, linguists express these stories day and night, and the community listens. Content in these stories varies greatly, and attempts to draw common tropes have largely failed. A slightly less than statistically significant proportion include references to seas, volcanoes and other natural phenomena not present in the community’s own environment.

  TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 57

  The inspector had taken the same subway train for twenty-five years. On the rare times he was late and on the 8.40 he was aware of the difference in the air. More of these people had cooked: it was on their massed breath. They’d spent longer on breakfasts. He’d learned to trust his nose. He remembered investigating the disappearance of a soon-to-be-married couple. Their flat was unusually clean, but this was contradicted by the air. Microwave stains suggested at least one of them worked late. The bathroom retained the faint lemon scent of shampoo. This was the closest, he knew, he would get to their skin. They had decided to leave together and cleaned their evidence, but they couldn’t get rid of the smell. He pictured them together on a yacht in the Pacific or heaped, broken, at the bottom of a disused quarry.

  Each inhabited room had its own ecology. He’d insisted, every time, on being the first officer on site and on entering alone. When the teams came in they broke the purity. There was a limited amount of time to gauge the air and it began expiring when he opened the door. From the effects of damp in the bathroom he could make a reasonable guess at how long the occupant spent looking in the mirror. More interesting, and more substantial, were the personal ecologies of cohabitants – couples, flatmates, families. The longer they spent, the stronger each ecology grew. There was a pattern to the way they ate, slept, washed. The amount of time spent in the place affected air fabric. He knew there were problems in a place that was fresh; people who worked so hard at it, cleaning, hiding, wanted out. More than once such freshness in a building had been an indication of murder.

  A clotted interior, by contrast, was healthy. Even after all these years he could appreciate a place that had been walked in. Each example was different. He would state that air is exceptional in a building that contained quick walkers. All manner of reasons. More efficient digestive system, so more adventurous meals. A more
varied spread of mites and spores from the draught made by the swish of moving feet. Kitchen objects returned to cupboards briskly, vibrating the surfaces of the worktops below. These people showered more, made love faster. They spent longer outside and came back frequently and briefly, opening doors at a higher daily rate.

  He remembered things from his own place. The smell of the yellowing pages in books piled high against the walls. Tea herbs fused inside from endless nights by the lamp. The mixing of tangerine skin and the sediment of oversleep, traces of each other retained under fingernails. The passing of time that led to the very particular stage favoured in the life cycle of fruit: ripe, heavy, almost bursting, bruised and fly-begun. Just the way they had liked it.

  He could estimate how much language had been made in rooms. It was intuitive, but he tended to be right. A room would be more hectic after language. Perhaps people who spoke more moved differently, and that was all. He used to think he could see language where it fell. The loads amassed at a particularly conducive right angle. It was one of the things that made a bathroom different – its dearth of words. Rooms affected more by language were softer, warmer. It was cold where no one had spoken for some time. All these tiny clues were significant when a person had gone. Everything previously invisible became amplified, enlarged. Each detail was there to be decoded; the key to understanding a collapsed civilization. And any one might bring them back.

  He remembered the little things. The asymmetrical accumu­lation of dirt in a vestibule, only six days after a vanishing. The new damp on the right angle where the cupboard met the wall, from all the water boiled in grief etiquette. The refuse left out. The mildew gathering on clothes left wet. The dank air of a room where sleep had repeatedly failed. A disrupted, broken ecology.