He could direct the cast in reverse, beginning from the moment they first realized Carlos hadn’t come back. It would be therapeutic. If done well enough a sufficient number of times it could even establish itself as a viable alternative to history.
So far it was all going well. He arranged the meeting in the night, so he could lead the client through in the dark and they wouldn’t have to observe the dirt, the decay, the ruin on the edges of the estate. He illuminated the office and everything seemed up to scratch. They exchanged long blocks of corporate information, nodded and drank their coffee. Getting up to offer a parting handshake, the inspector froze – a rat had moved diagonally across the garage, clear in the light against the fresh blue carpet. He winced and moved into the handshake, imparting a compensatory firmness against the obvious fact that the set had fallen down. The performer smiled, didn’t miss a beat; but the inspector had been humiliated. The frailty of the set had been made all too apparent and he knew he had to work harder.
He drew further plans of the original office. They’d taken detailed photographs of the desk surface, additionally using thermography in darkness and recording what came up. Fine carbon powder, poured over certain areas of the desk, also brought out artificial textures. This was where Carlos had rested his elbows and lay down his one coffee mug. A trace of a circle represented a pause in activity, the beginning of a period of reflection – the setting down of the mug.
Each faint ring left on the desk had a direct mental correlative. He knew the significance of the artefacts. What seemed erratic and inchoate contained its own routine and order inside. Carlos would drink and think differently as the working week progressed. The coffee rings were testament to this. The mug was covered, sealed, theoretically keeping heat throughout the day. What Carlos did with it, how and when he lifted, sipped and set it down was an indication of his changing state of mind. It provided an opportunity for the inspector to authentically reproduce his character in the duplicated office. It was an exciting moment.
He went to grasp and lift the mug with both hands and thought, as Carlos had, how strange the simplest things were. He slowly but firmly took it and drew it in towards his lips, sometimes placing it down again without having drawn liquid.
These days, when he happened to be outside, the inspector wore a surgical mask. He was seeing little of his friends. Isabella had been calling. Others from the department, too; messages about leads, developments in the case. The inspector thought, sitting at the desk, that he might as well get on with it, drink the coffee. He placed the mug down, looked at it, considered the size and limitations of the room, a perspective on himself from outside – by the doorway, from the ceiling, from outside the warehouse via the window – and tried to apprehend it, get on with it, but it was difficult, and so it took him some time, particularly on Mondays.
On Tuesdays there was a greater degree of regularity, there was the reflexive training of the prior day’s actions, his better preparation in the task of being there, at his desk, even if much of that time was spent fruitlessly trying to apprehend the day, attempting and all but failing to get on with it. He had doubtless suffered on the Monday from the emptiness behind it, the two-day lull and quiet, the weird ill-discipline of a body given no direction, sitting back with less than optimal posture and looking at screens.
Tuesdays were easier. By Tuesday he had been given at least a little of what to expect, what to do without thinking that he was doing it, just doing it, working. On Tuesdays he would be almost working. He would not catch himself doing what he was doing as often on Tuesdays as he would on Mondays, and so this was easier, and so he would drink the coffee at a slower rate, and not cause further anxiety in the course of trying to alleviate it, as he had done and would do again on Mondays. Tuesdays were easier.
Still, things were problematic.
Moving, getting up from a sitting or reclining position, waking oneself with the aid of a set alarm and a resolve to heed its noise (though ‘waking oneself’ was an odd way to phrase it, he always thought, being impossible really), channelling oneself about a room or through corridors and halls and out on to streets and roads and other buildings, was, he supposed, something that you had to start and stop, and so you were sort of making it happen, although often during it, it would be the last thing on his mind, filled rather with incidental things such as passing shop-front signs, the speed of other pedestrians (an irritation or a challenge), expressions, musical refrains, rudimentary numerological patterns that he scanned and played out silently and had done deep into childhood, as far back as he could remember – must have been, he assumed, some nervous tic or other – constantly drafting the list of things he needed to do: food shopping to last him at least the next several days, appointments to keep, books he had always been meaning to read, etc., and not actually thinking about what he was doing at all; certainly he had never included ‘walk’ in the list of things that he must do.
He at least, if he concentrated, could condition how he walked, go slower or faster, softer or harder as he chose, and he could stop it entirely – although always temporarily – whenever he wanted.
Breathing wasn’t quite so clear.
Again it was something he could modify and, with an effort, condition, and again it was something best performed without thinking. It always unsettled him when he became aware briefly of how he did it; he would immediately be convinced the inhalations were too shallow, the chest too tight and that now, in his misguided attempt to watch himself, he was inevitably changing what was happening, somehow intaking only malodorous, dead air, insufficient to support his metabolism, his heart contractions and the circulating of his blood, and he would wish he had never started on this, throw up his hands and wonder how on earth he was going to turn off all this watching and let it all just happen again.
He longed, every day, for the end of the day. The meaning of his work was concentrated in its finishing. What he was doing he was doing so that it could no longer be done. When it was absent it was at its best, when there was nothing left of it – that was when it had been perfected. When you couldn’t see it, when there was nothing left of it – that’s when you saw how important it was. It was all about not being there, he saw. The work was there so that it could be destroyed; he was there so he could be somewhere else, in theory.
He was used to the days, used to not even counting on having days, used to there just being days always, because what else could there be if not days? But he was also used to the idea that days were about reversing them into nothing, making, so to speak, non-days of them, about running them out of themselves. That this was the thing to do, then, running the days out. That was his work. Turning the day seamlessly into another day. Which was a notable achievement, of course, there being so many things to attend to, and all at the same time – it was a marvel, he thought, that any of them managed to do it at all, to get from one day into another, to keep everything going just like that.
Was it really possible that this was what had happened to Carlos? That as he had made the days into nothing, so he had made himself into nothing? That some agent present in his office had accelerated the process, that in the weeks, even the months preceding his ultimate disappearance, Carlos had steadily diminished, maintaining only the coarser processes of living and working, but with less of him available in every passing moment? And nobody had noticed?
He looked up, back out over the duplicated office, and felt a lurch of panic. The structure of the room, the nondescript, identikit furnishings – everything took on a sinister character. The room appeared carnivorous. A person – an employee – consumed here? Absorbed by immediate habitat? He pictured Carlos sitting where he sat now, the mouth opening and beginning a long exhalation, delivering over everything inside him and finally the surface too – the skin, nails and hair, the eyes – until the process was complete, he was gone. Silently, anonymously engulfed by the world.
His
short lease expired. He wasn’t sure how the exposure to Carlos’s situation, the details present in the office, had affected him. He wondered what would happen next. It was difficult to think about, to consider in any way that wasn’t grossly reductive. It wasn’t just metaphor, not necessarily. He had researched Isabella’s speculations, the reports in journals linking bacteria and obsessive trains of thought. It was possible that the origin of the thought – an infection, something picked up in the office – became what the thought was about. Material into symbol. Substance. You were driven in circles. The brain was stuck, running up against its limits. Tidying the desk. Checking the lock on the door again and again. He read about a girl consuming her house, literally eating it, beginning with the walls. What was Carlos’s single thought? The transmission of a strain. Infection. Invasion. The single idea dominating, returning again and again.
Carlos had done nothing so stark, so brilliant as consume his own walls. Although walls had been important to him: they had found prints on the entire office perimeter, every centimetre. He pictured Carlos running his hands along the walls, sceptical of the room’s integrity, repeatedly checking the boards that maintained, for the moment, his private space. Even the Inspector could see the parallels between the wall-like organs of his body and the places where he lived. Their analysis of the empty office was the ultimate intrusion: it was as if Carlos had seen it coming all along.
X
In time, the missing outgrow their houses and become part of the wider environment. This is one of the reasons the community is respectful to animals during hunts, and why it rations the amount of materials taken from any one part of the forest, not wanting to destroy matter indirectly related to the person they had loved.
Following signs of a vanishing, loved ones examine light for imperfections. It is far more likely that light has only subtly changed, concealing the missing person, than that this person has been voided. Objects too will be found to have disappeared, and plants, animals, fresh skin. The afflicted individual, the one whom no one, for the moment, is able to locate, will be amused and unable to affect people, other than through atmospheric impressions.
Light readings are made daily, variations noted; on some days, usually close to darkness, sudden changes in light momentarily reveal a full feature of the missing person, such as a limb or a facial expression. One such sighting is sufficient to rejuvenate the family concerned for several months.
TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 148
His head started to hurt. He felt a young man’s pain in his gums and teeth. The whole lower part of his face, in the restless periods between night and morning, seemed in flux. He wanted to retreat into a more secure and solid area and rest there, but was unable to detach himself from the ongoing physical process. In these liquid periods he dreaded facing his new appearance in the morning, his altered proportions, the higher or lower setting of his jaw.
He was presently the least qualified person imaginable to solve and bring about a conclusion to the case. He was too tired – the years, this heat – to think much, to give shape to his theories, to notice anything he had not noticed before. He was looking straight ahead out of habit, seeing nothing at the edges.
If Carlos were the subject of an unusually virulent infection, something connected to his position in the corporation, then he couldn’t be the only one. Where were the other missing persons? That there was no indication of any connected spread of missing workers should have been enough to put the inspector’s mind at ease, professionally and personally. This wasn’t an epidemic. He wasn’t, himself, at risk. Any symptoms he imagined were just that. They weren’t real, they were inventions, possibly stress related. Wash your eyes, Inspector.
He started again. Opened a file at random: 17337. Carlos’s employee number. He began doodling with his pen, cross-referencing, seeing what he could find. The number equalled the approximate net salary of the caretaker in the corporation building. It was a little under five hours in seconds, half their corporate working day. The typical number of steps taken daily by a non-sedentary worker. The number of heartbeats in a healthy, middle-aged male in four comfortable or three anxious hours. Close to the distance in light years to Omega Centauri.
The number, if converted into the Latin alphabet, read AGCCG. This, he saw, was biologically meaningful as a DNA strand: adenine, guanine, cytosine, cytosine, guanine. It repeated in nucleotide transcription errors in organisms making transitions from land habitation to sea. The mutations were coincident with seaward movement and remained present in all mammalian descendants.
He was perpetually half-asleep at his desk at home, dulled but kept awake by the thick and all but stale odour of filter coffee. Transcripts, testimonies from Carlos’s friends, relatives; phone numbers, printouts of closed-circuit television frames, distant public-transport schedules beginning the moment of the disappearance and stretching on a day, a thick bundle of technical reports on the office; drawings, lines, ideas, many of which he looked at now and could think of no referent; theories, a nonsense logic he turned to occasionally in weaker moments; restaurant receipts, books, several coffee-stained mugs, pistachio shells, tangerine peel. The contents of his desk flickered in the otherwise ineffective fan breeze. The heat only made it harder to stay awake.
He slumped forward, nestled his head in the figure-eight of his arms.
He dreamed Carlos had been consumed. Dreamed of meeting a large man, 300 lbs, on the thirty-fourth floor of a glass building. The man had just finished eating when the inspector arrived. His shirt collar was open, his tie folded and hung over the back of the metal chair, a white cloth handkerchief spread over his lap.
He woke and immediately realized something was different. Something had developed. He was being converted, no longer himself – self-rejecting, turning inside out. He ran, humiliated and urgent; he burst out over the bathroom floor. He sat on the bowl, head in hands, the room solid with the smell of his excretions. As his stomach moved, he fell in and out of appalling dreams.
Hours later he showered, did what he could to remove the smell, all trace, drank quantities of water and ice, lay down on top of his bed and tried to sleep.
He couldn’t. He held the stomach, tried to still the shuddering cramps, delay it a while longer. Something nagged at him, although it was absurd that a thought, an insight, might come from this. He wanted to sleep, disappear. Still he couldn’t; something insisted. He grimaced, pressed the heels of his hands against the damp mattress, lifted up his frail carriage and looked ahead at nothing, a wall. He smiled pathetically, waited. White space, a wall. The wall in the offices, the corporation. The photograph. He knew where he had seen that face before.
It was an August, too, and almost as bad as this one. Garbage collections delayed, rotting in the heat. In the poorer neighbourhoods windows stayed open. Barbecues in parks and gardens. The smell of food lingered. Animal imprinted on clothes and skin. His wife washed down in evenings, too. He would join her, the cut of cold water like blades on his back.
The odd thing he had noticed on entering the building all those years ago was the sudden and dramatic escalation of the smell; a stench, the air clotted and difficult to breathe. He had taken a moment to right himself at the bottom of the stairs. The palm of his hand had covered his mouth and he knew it would be difficult to go on.
It was unusual he had been called. It didn’t sound significant. Just a smell. But he knew something was wrong the minute he passed through into the stairwell. This was not food. The murmur of a hive noise. Something rancid in the building. He couldn’t call for others yet. He would first identify the source. The apartment was on the third floor. The neighbours wouldn’t come out, not even the resident who had made the call. The smell was thick and heavy, taking over the stone stairwell. He had an idea what it was, but he couldn’t do anything until he saw.
He rapped on the door. No sounds from inside. He expected radio or a too-
loud television. Some background noise, at least. Quiet footsteps approached and then a smiling, healthy-looking man appeared in faded cords and an immaculate white T-shirt. ‘Come in,’ he smiled, and the inspector followed.
Inside it was difficult to breathe. He remembered how clean the white shirt was, and how compactly the man carried himself. The sound of the insects vast. A city’s power. He said it was an honour to receive him, a man of law. He was smiling, but not ironic. He asked the inspector if he would like some iced tea and he almost said yes.
He was not manic. He didn’t chatter ceaselessly or jerk angularly or wave his arms like a man who feels a great energy, having difficulty containing himself. He just seemed pleased to have the company.
‘Would you mind if I took a look around?’ the inspector asked. ‘It’s just routine.’ He tried to smile briefly. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘Of course, of course. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just an ordinary apartment. If I’d known you were coming I would have cleaned up.’
‘It’s better this way.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m just going to walk around. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be a moment.’
‘Wouldn’t you like me to escort you through the rooms?’
‘It’s not necessary, thank you. I’ll be gone before you know it. I’ll be out of your hair in no time. Thank you, though.’
‘You’re welcome.’
They were still standing in the narrow corridor. There was little natural light, the apartment placed off from the street and the windows western facing. The carpet was a dark brown colour. Nothing hung on the walls. Draped on the back of a wooden chair was a pair of formal trousers and an expensive white shirt.
He opened the door. Bathroom. Well maintained. Damp towel hanging on the shower rail. It would stay damp for days in the humidity. You couldn’t get anything done, everybody said.
Infinite Ground Page 7
