Infinite Ground

by Martin MacInnes

  He was still reacting to the changes in his diet. He suffered flux. His thoughts seemed to go on for longer, single ideas stretched out. The sound in the new forest was louder without words. There was less of him and he scouted for parts of the new vegetation reminiscent of his character. He hunted for his loyalty, his lurid sentimentalism, irritability, the blind and contradictory optimism he never understood. Those places, if he found them, may have explained the nature of the substitution, the logic of the depopulation. They would show him where he was going. He searched for the chemistry outside, evidence of his family line and all his memories, stained in the leaves, but the little shelter he had improvised, a kind of nest of ferns that he rolled up in, implied only his shape, despite the hours and hours that he had lain there, dreaming.

  Nothing distinguished the buildings from the forest. The world continued. He abandoned sheet and cover. His boots had rotted and splashed off. His body was cut and stained and he was uncertain if some parts were clothed.

  He had to twist and cut vines above and below just to move. He couldn’t see sky. Nothing was familiar. He had no indication of direction. East and west, interior or coastline. It didn’t seem to matter. He ought to have been stunned, he thought.

  The repopulation would fail. They had waited too long. Wherever they were, whatever had happened, there was no way of ever coming back. And it was his fault.

  Now he dreaded the return. The worst thing that could happen was for the community to attempt to come back. He had cut a thin tunnel east, but the forest filled it every day. There was no way for any of them to come back. He lay listening to all the noises of the night, terrified at the suggestion of slow footsteps, at the thought of their return. Branch ends slicing them, tearing up their clothes and skin. Animals gorging on open wounds. The community, only the faintest trace of life left, crawling through the forest floor, their hair alive, their throats stuffed with earth. Arriving finally at the site, the place where they had lived, they would see that everything had gone. Their space had been removed. There was no room, any longer, for any of them to live.

  They would look to him.

  It was so stupid of me, he would say, you’ll never believe this, but I actually thought you were all gone! You really had me convinced! I don’t know how you did it. At first I was sceptical, naturally enough, but after enough time I turned. You really did it. You had me convinced, you know – each of you – that you had gone to the forest and I would never see you again. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I know how bad it sounds, how quick I was to turn, to give in. I thought it was just me left. I really thought you were gone, that you would never come back.

  I should have been faithful. I should not have turned. It’s just that so long had passed, so much time, that I thought I had no other option. All I could see around me was the forest. Even your things had gone. Despite my best efforts to preserve everything, to be a custodian, I was inadequate, and in time everything vanished. The forest reclaimed it all.

  What I am about to say is the worst thing I have ever been guilty of. But there came a point, in fact, when I did not want you back. When I dreaded nothing more than your coming back. So much time had passed, you see. I wouldn’t know what to say, any more. I wouldn’t know what to do. Besides, everything else had gone. The space and the objects. I can’t believe I’m saying this.

  I used to imagine you coming back, looking for your chair, looking for the table, looking for our bed. And finding nothing was left. Finding there was no room. I would think when I slept under the sheet and heard branches snap that you were coming, looking for space. You were confused, seeing the ruins, seeing how changed and overgrown all this was. I imagined you finally making it through – your face, your skin, your shape all but destroyed by the effort. You approached me. And I was terrified, after all this time.

  She put a fingertip to his mouth to quieten him, then turned away, thin blue rags hanging from her last dress. The inspector himself was torn, his hands lapping blood. He was a storm of liquid. His wife crawled away, she did not turn her head back, she moved further into the forest, and he fell.

  X

  It worked itself over, damp and wide with different surfaces, many voices. Came in, came out. Pieces fell off into the ground, pieces were added. Breathing, nesting.

  Singing in the night and in the morning, making more of it, working itself over, stretching on and webbing out. Breathing, nesting, singing together, falling and being added. Light touching at the top. Matter feeling broad light and bursting, seeing, becoming eyes. The sunrise, the steam of breath breaking, the forest emerging.

  He came down from the trees and raised his head. He put forelimbs on the ground, pointing forward. His hindlimbs bent at the midpoint, lifting the posterior slightly. He moved like this and the loose bones stood. He remained in place. He ate and slept. He saw light, then colour. He continued sleeping in trees, a new one every night, as a precaution. He could smell himself, how strong it was. He wrote this code throughout the forest, for any living thing to read. He went to water where he could, but was unable to rid himself of the smell.

  He enjoyed water. He ate more, still and moving things. He heard them call: distress, alarm.

  He reached with a forelimb for a fruit. The angle and height of the branch required him to lift his head to take it. His other forelimb had naturally raised in a parallel. His spine was close to vertical and, although his calves strained with the weight, he held and stood.

  The new height of the head, as he walked, took him away from most of what he ate. He was not so quick and the plane of the world was distorted, but he could see better. He was no longer living from the centre. When he moved he couldn’t see his body, only a smear of skin over his nose, some dirt collected near his eyes. It felt like when he cleaned himself in larger pools. It felt like he was weightless, floating on water. He was unsafe, his position less secure. He had to be very careful, especially with his nose weaker and further from the ground, but also because he was less adept at sensing the world behind him. He was vertical where earlier he had been distributed, his head raised, but the bulk of his body extending horizontally. Like that, the hair on his hindlimbs had been sensitive to changes in pressure indicating noise or breath. Like that, he had felt things coming and he’d remained alive.

  He got better with forelimbs. He didn’t need them to walk, so he carried. He took good plants. Then he carried branches that helped him forge ahead. He still heard things moving by the way the quicker air rose from the ground up through his feet, and he turned in time. He was better at hunting, using his hands, his sticks. He ate larger things and felt less tired. He was starting to think about things that weren’t this, here and now. Good things that had happened before, and warnings. He had to focus – smell, taste – so he didn’t float away into old things and imagined rewards. Dreams. Everything was bigger, wider and amazing. He saw details and colours clearer. He had to focus to see through excess. When he looked, there was what he saw, but also what it might have been before and could become.

  He wanted protein. He wanted more of life.

  When he saw things that weren’t there he grew hungry. He had a taste for eating life. His shoulders were stronger and broader, helping him look up. He repeated actions that led to pleasure and avoided those that hurt.

  When he rested he saw lots of things. He always woke hungry. He understood that he had been hurt. He had lived in trees and moved on all limbs. It had taken a long time. He felt more comfortable floating. Particularly when he rested, he saw things indirectly. He saw lots of pictures he didn’t understand. Big things walking slowly, resting with their backs up and legs out in front and singing like birds into each other. He didn’t know why they were singing like that, like birds, close into each other. It must have been helping them stay alive, receiving that breath. It looked like reward, pleasure. Not a thing to fear. He saw one of them more than others. Around them were too many
things he no longer knew. He sometimes saw the face of one, at night, when he rested. At other times he saw only the arms, held out before the eyes, reaching towards him, a skin that he could almost smell. He put his own arms out, but nothing was there.

  He heard loud sounds directly over him, thumping, pulsing, vibrations shaking through him. He was in danger. It was better to be still and small in the trees until they passed. They pressed on the ground, moving as he moved, without forelimbs. He saw them: tall things expressing birdsong through their mouths, like the things he saw when he rested, only these ones did not feel safe. They would smell him where he lay. He breathed shallow breaths down into his chest and was calmed by the dark extension of his body into the trees.

  They called and called. Their voices and their limbs waved the trees, the branches, the leaves around and covering him.

  I thought I saw him. I thought we had him. He was right here.

  Hello?

  Wait. Let’s sit here. We have to wait a while.

  You saw him? You’re sure?

  Yeah, I think so. I saw something, heard something, and then it was gone.

  XI

  Ants moved in a line like sound. When there were lots of them together they had been told something. They heard through vibrations above their bodies that felt good or bad, then they moved in reaction. He picked them, had them moving separ­ately over his palm, and listened to lines of them moving on his tongue.

  When he woke he felt difference, origin. Light on him, information, warmth on his skin. Something that drifted away with the forest and came back in strange clarity every day. It was not constant. He ate before it went again. He looked for water, drinking what he could and imagining enough of it that it would be all he could see, covering the forest, drowning the trees and everything in them.

  He thought of stepping into, then becoming almost weightless in the water. His own head breaking the water surface, covered by thick leaves and painted leaves, water that flooded his ears and his nose and open mouth and which he dreamed of every time he woke, every time it came back. Sometimes when it was getting dark he could watch the forest disappear and look up; he imagined a great and unobstructed distance and knew that he had felt it before.

  He was remembering a little more each day. Something had happened and he had almost died. Every day he felt different. He was hungry and there was somewhere he needed to get to, somewhere outside the forest. There was something he needed to do.

  His skin felt dry and unhealthy and his gums bled. His teeth were loose. He was grazed by the arms of trees and when he swam he was lit ablaze. He sensed ripples, disturbances in the black pool of stagnant water, so he got out and continued. He had been walking since the morning and the light was fading, the growth around him was dense and renewing, working itself over again and again. He smelled the rot turning, the old life engulfed, converted, raised.

  He stopped when it was dark and he couldn’t see his hands, and then he lay by an enormous tree and was surprised how quickly he tired despite the sound of the insects’ horn and the birds’ clamour. In the morning he ate leaves and drank from the river. Again he felt something moving in it, so he left, trying to follow the direction of the first light, the place it came from. He knew this was right, good; he should listen to whatever it was that woke him, follow where it came from.

  He walked with a stick held out to point, move straight always in the direction of the light source. But he came against pools he couldn’t cross and banks of earth he couldn’t climb. He stopped, looked back. Nothing was different, he couldn’t see himself anywhere.

  He went back, sometimes far, tried for another way through, trying to picture the light source, go on in a new direction. Everything was green. He saw the same places again and stopped, looked back, looked forward. He lay in the sticks; everything would go away. But when he did this he remembered waking, the light source, and felt bad about stopping.

  He got up. He smelled something strong and found an animal body. Part of it had been torn off, but it hadn’t rotted yet. He looked, watched the direction of the leaves, smelled the air, listened for another’s breath, felt for heat. He folded his hands inside the animal and dug in to reach its softer parts. He scooped them and ate, but his head was loud in blood. He didn’t have time. He lowered his head and put it inside the animal, pushed his hands against the outside for force. Tore with his teeth until he had no air, drowning in blood, and forced himself out, scent covered. He ran, exposed. Branches breaking, leaves sweeping aside. Footsteps? Breath? All he had to live was fear. He continued running, thought of his own body being torn, longed for the water, the river.

  The rain fell. He had no breath to run. The blood and scent came off him. He went as far as he could and collapsed. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, wide. When he could stand he took leaves and folded them together into a shape like his resting hand and brought it with him.

  He stopped frequently, drinking directly from his cup. The rain undrew the land, pools rose on the ground and the animals became more abundant, slow, woken things on the trees springing, uncoiling, oblivious to him. He hurried on, moving slowly against his volume, fearing the languid parade of the cat, the claws that would bring him down, the open mouth vaulting through air towards his face, removing it in one sweep.

  He didn’t sleep that night. He looked for eye-light in the clumps of solid dark. The rustling of trees, the soft padding of feet on the ground. Other lights, noises. Calling sounds. Something moving right in towards him, exposing him where he lay.

  XII

  He woke with water steaming off the land. Light and fog. He was cold, he held himself, watched the land peel open from the haze. He had laid a mark in the ground, a direction to resume, but couldn’t find it. Several marks, none he was sure of. He didn’t know which way. The light was unclear, not coming from any certain place. He had no route. Not long after setting off, he lost his footing and fell into the humus.

  It took a strange effort to get up. Something was wrong. It was dry after the rain, but more water came off him than before. He had to stop again, he drank from his leaf container, but it came back up. All the undigested animal came out and then he opened below in thin gushes. Under the chest the stomach was a small, hard ball with nothing good in it. The rest of him was wire, frame. A ball of sickness under his chest, sick from animal. Each time he expelled, he tried to crawl a little away from it. The smell of him broken and reversed. He saw things move in his pools and didn’t know whether they were his or not.

  He continued in flux, but the smell disappeared. He was rotting off, losing senses. He didn’t know where he was when he woke. How much more could there be, he thought, of him, to give, and of this? He felt so sore it wasn’t over. There would be more, itself, himself, all of it left to go, everything gone until he was nothing, and he was very frightened, lying down in the loud dark.

  He expelled everything, the leaves too, but he kept eating them. He realized he must have been hungry again, after all this time, and also that he had a voice. The next day he lost nothing, ate more. He dug up roots and bit into water. He pushed himself to a gap he had spotted, a place where something big must have fallen, and he woke in it, in clear light. He saw the direction of the light. The early sounds went with it, other life. Routine after chaos, shape out the dark. He looked around and saw detail, a radiance in the patterns of the leaves and the colours of the insects.

  He managed to stand, leaning on a vine-wrapped tree. He could easily fall, but he was careful. He walked as something strange and new coming forward. The head was an odd size against the neck and the shoulders. He rolled it round. The other things he’d seen had a different proportion. He found berries, ants, water, and felt more substantial.

  He set himself a clear routine. Identify the light as it came, fix it in memory and slowly track the place, as directly as he could. He couldn’t be misled by the way the light was passing w
hile moving. He was clear on the importance of the direction of the place it came from. He knew he was not restored. He was thin and weak, the blood of animals hung from him, he had to be careful. He had to make things, like the cup he had used and lost. Make something he could carry and put over him when he rested, to hide him, even block a little of the smell. Keep the morning direction and its detail, follow it. Mark it in the ground before it disappeared. The place it came from, the place, he realized, he was going, was the first to vanish every day. The last place visible should face where it was he went to. Mark the direction in the night, and if the morning confirmed it, then it gave him something, it meant he was moving. Build finer shelters in the last light, places deeper between the trees, spaces he could burrow inside.

  He began counting, separating one day after another, but soon gave up. He drifted as he walked, and enjoyed it. A slow, natural continuation. He realized halfway between morning and night that sometimes he was just walking, and other times he was walking and asking things. Questions and walking encouraged each other. He got out further and asked more about what this was, what had happened. He wasn’t sure. Little things came back – sounds, faces, shelters. At first he drove it off, but he slowly took on the information, day after day, week after week of walking. He must, he realized, have been going for months. What was he walking out from? A place that had disappeared.

  XIII

  He woke up thinking of Santa Lucía; first the words, the name, then the place, the people. He stopped, weak from the information, and settled on the ground, better supported. He spoke aloud, all the names, kept turning around, made marks with a stick into the ground. He tried to draw, he thought, Santa Lucía, which had been lost. But as it was so ridiculous he threw the stick. He couldn’t believe this, any of this. He laughed. Where would he start?