34
Russ Stevenson, the owner of a bar-steakhouse in Ely, while flipping the meat with a three-pronged iron fork, declares: Take what you need, some people buy new shoes just to put in the tree without recognition, or they swap them for other ones they prefer, a little while back a hitchhiker, he had shoes so worn out with holes he had blisters on his feet, and he took a pair of boots like the ones we used to have in the slaughterhouse, and he left behind his old trainers. He turns and makes a movement with the trident aloft: it orbits through the air. His 120-kilogram bulk also turning about his waist, a spinning top movement: he beckons the first clients of the evening.
35
Everyone knows that to write is to have died. Only death makes a clean copy of life, and it is only death that, at such a distance, can rewrite it. This is why to be a writer means relating the world of the living from the world of the dead. It was raining already, and the day they took U.S. Route 50 the 4 blond surfer girls didn’t know they were going to come across a man sitting on a blanket in the middle of the highway. Christina managed to control the skid, but even so the swerve took them into a large pothole, which in turn sent them flying through the air. By the time they got out of the station wagon the man was walking away, toward the east, backpack on his back; he’d left the blanket and a small, lit stove behind. They shouted after him, but he soon disappeared in the rain. Since traffic was unlikely, they took their time changing the flat, out in the middle of the two lanes, more sensed than seen. Kelly, when she had fallen to the floor as the vehicle took off, had noticed a very intense pain in her leg, perfectly situated at the back of her right femur. When Kelly thought about death it was in the following way: she wanted to die surfing, trapped beneath a wave and conscious that the half a minute or minute that she’d be able to last underwater was going to be the last of her life. If you don’t know you’re dying, if one day you go to bed and fall asleep and don’t wake up again, what was the point of life, she thought, it would all have been nothing but a dream. And now she’s been diagnosed with a sarcoma in the right femur, the arborescent tumorous structure showing up on a CAT scan, very advanced. When the end is near it makes sentimentalists of all of us: “It’s like a bit of algae in a sea of flesh and bone,” she writes in a notebook.
36
How much information is required to describe the entire universe? Could such a description be contained in the memory of a computer? Might we be able to, as per William Blake, see the world in a grain of sand (or as Borges said in The Aleph), or do these words require a certain poetic license to be true? Recent developments in theoretical physics provide answers to some of these questions: the answers might be important milestones in the quest for a definitive theory of reality. The study of black holes has led to the deduction of the absolute limits, the outer edges, of the information that may be contained in an area of space or in quantities of material or energy. These absolutes, and inferences based on them, suggest that our universe could in truth be “written” on a two-dimensional plane: the universe we perceive in three dimensions could, that is, be a hologram. Our ordinary, three-dimensional perception of the world would, in that case, be nothing but a deep illusion. Perhaps a grain of sand cannot encompass the world, but a flat screen might.
JACOB D. BEKENSTEIN
37
On the northernmost cape of Denmark there is a salmon factory. Salmon brought in from across the country are chopped, wrapped, and frozen. Seeing it from the final hill before you reach the sea, you’d never think so. Nothing about the place says hygiene or food. It looks more like a nuclear plant in the process of being dismantled. Hey, you’ve got to be superskillful not to cut yourself on the filleting saws; in that moment the frozen animal is totally this glass fossil, it’s perfection. And, as always when Hans made this comment, Adolf replied: No, not glass, crystal, which is more perfect than glass, right? Hans didn’t respond, also as usual, keeping his eye on the turning saw and on the sawdust of frozen flesh kicking up in every direction. The 7:00 p.m. shift had just come to an end. Night had nearly fallen. Once the handover was complete, he took the broom and began sweeping up all the frozen salmon sawdust flecking the floor, until he’d made a mound in the center. This he placed inside a bag, before walking down the road alongside Adolf, who stopped in a bar to have a beer. Hans, set in his ways, didn’t stop but went directly home. He left the plastic bag on the kitchen counter, next to a row of knives arranged smallest to largest and with the words “Medley and Sons Slaughterhouses, Nevada” written on the handles. Inside the bag the ice crystals had melted by now, forming a pink puree of fish and water. He performed his ablutions, then used an ice-cream scoop to remove a bolus of the paste, which he seared on a griddle pan. He flipped it, and flipped it again. When the salmon hamburger was done he placed it between two rashers of bacon in a round bun with cheese, onion, and ketchup, and with the third knife along in the row cut the whole thing diameter-wise. He sat down to eat at the kitchen table. Before doing so he switched on the radio and opened a 1.5-liter bottle of water, drinking straight from the bottle. Set in his ways, Hans was in bed at 9:00. At 9:05, he switched the lights off.
38
The second example happens in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. Melanie Daniels has stepped out of the school building and sits down close to the playground to smoke a cigarette. Unnoticed by her, several birds begin to gather on the climbing bars located on the school playground.
The playground is framed in full shot, while a progressive succession of closer shots of the girl are spliced within that master shot. The scene is played completely in silence, and runs roughly like this:
Full shot. A lone bird arrives and lands on the climbing bars.
Full shot of Melanie Daniels smoking.
Full shot. Several birds on the bars. Another crow arrives.
Medium shot of the girl. She smokes.
Full shot. New birds arrive.
Close shot of girl. She smokes slowly.
Full shot. More birds join the crows already gathered in on the playground.
Close-up of the girl. She stops smoking and turns her head to the left to look off-screen.
A lone bird flying in the sky. The camera framing it in long shot follows its flight from left to right, to show how the crow joins the ranks of birds now fully covering the metal construction on the playground.
Close-up of the girl. She reacts frightened.
DANIEL ARIJON
39
Ted sent a happy new year message out via his internet modem, addressing all internet users in the world, but most especially those who, like him, lived or worked in a micronation. The most famous micronation, the precursor to the other current-day micronations that dot not only the face but also the upper regions and the depths of the earth, is Sealand—the Principality of Sealand (www.sealandgov.org). In 1967, Roy Bates, owner of a pirate radio station in England called Radio Essex, along with 240 other people took possession of an abandoned British World War II military base. A platform half the length of a soccer field, it rested on two cylindrical cement-and-steel pillars that rose vertically up from the greenish gray English coastal waters. The platform is bare except for a small number of sheet metal constructions, heavily rusted, tiny in the overall space. Aside from the 185 “macronations” with their nuclear capabilities and their UN memberships, and the 60 nations without that formal recognition, there are dozens of overlooked micronations. The website http://micronations.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_micronations lists more than 100 micronations, each with its own currency, flags, capital cities, founding fathers, and legal systems. Ted, who is currently 200 feet beneath the Nevada desert, installed in a large hall—once the government’s Radioactive Waste Management Center—uncorks a bottle of champagne and toasts his 177 fellow citizens of the Isotope Micronation. Although, the toast has two motivations today, because they suspect there’s been a death. Isotope Micronation can be described as a large subterranean cube, 250,000 square feet in volume: a ceme
nt intestine that, if laid out flat, would be almost 400 miles long. A couple of micronation pioneers acquired it from the government, which had failed to get rid of it in an auction, due to people’s reticence, bordering on the irrational, when it comes to anything to do with radioactivity. They’ve modified the stretch of desert at the surface so they can keep cattle; the variables of the small ranch are kept under constant control using a computer program they themselves developed and installed in the so-called Agriculture Hub, down in the depths of Isotope: mineral levels, photosynthesis rates, the stress levels of each of the beasts, insemination schedules. There’s also an old helipad on the surface, a large expanse of solar panels for their energy, and a small hut like a gunner’s nest that gives access to Isotope Micronation’s true, below-earth location: the school, restaurants, and living spaces, the shops, water deposits, and electric transformers, et cetera, spread throughout hundreds of halls and galleries of all shapes and sizes, from 0 to 300 feet in depth. So vast is the oversized subterranean cube that the 178 inhabitants can go as long as a month without seeing another soul, and then when they finally do it’s an excuse to really catch up. When the day comes that one of them dies unexpectedly in transit between the halls or galleries, they know it will probably take a while to find out, but this is yet to happen: the micronation is barely ten years old and, from this point of view, for the time being, this makes immortals of them all. One of the micronational entertainments, controlled by the Microstate Betting Module, an offshoot of the Economy and Revenue Hub, is a bet on who will die first. Sheets are printed each week with tick boxes next to the names of each citizen. Over time whoever puts the most X’s beside the name of the first unfortunate person to go will be the winner, and as their prize they get to take on all of the dead person’s assets. Everyone is constantly on the watch for sickly children, adults engaging in high-risk activities, or the smell of the soup at the fast-food place in case they suspect the waiter of having placed x amount of X’s beside their name.
40
Being a man of few words, and due to the lack of knowledge, locally, in matters of geography, the exact origins of Hans, with his fair hair and clear complexion, was never very clear in the minds of the inhabitants of Carson City. Between Denmark, Iceland, and Poland, they were never sure which one to go for. Russ Stevenson, who worked the same saw as Hans at Medley & Sons, once said that what he was was a Redskin, a real savage. But he wasn’t savage, just precise. Without any assistance, in a 10-hour shift he could wield the cattle prod and skin and chop up 6 cows. He came in at 5 a.m. and left at 4 p.m., with an hour for lunch. At the time of year when the sun was up by 5, the red early rays reflecting off the desert floor and entering through the wide windows, tracing large grids on the ground, that was when Hans would think of the cathedral in Copenhagen, and then they’d fire up the saws, and the noise frightened away all the animals that had come out to hunt at dawn. At lunch, Hans, set in his ways, after devouring the bovine hamburger he cooked on an improvised grill, always took out the same book, from the same pocket in his overalls, before settling down to read:
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvellous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint … I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away. The activity has transformed and has moved onto a higher plane. This is the concentration one must follow in every activity, however mundane it may be, in life.”
THE BOOK OF ZEN BY CHUANG TZU
41
Imagine an urban network unable to supply water to all the shops and homes due to insufficiently long piping. This is very much like the situation we have today in the broadband network. Many thousands of millions of dollars have been invested in building fiber-optic networks to bring higher quality multimedia to domestic computers and professional services, and yet they come up short. In North America, for instance, efforts to reach 9 out of 10 companies with over 100 employees fall a little under a mile short. The promise is there, and it’s great, but it takes a long time to become reality: reduced buffering, quicker access to data libraries, swifter e-commerce, real-time videocasts, the transfer of images in clinical practice, networking between companies to enable job sharing … All of this is yet to get going. It lies buried beneath the paving and the sidewalks of the city.
ANTHONY ACAMPORA
42
Our first concern is looking after the cattle, Mrs. Stevenson says to the funeral agent, sitting at the entrance of her farm, with its 60 head of cattle, its 2 tractors, 2 combine harvesters, and hundreds of cultivated acres, where they also make honeys, jams, and meats for their own consumption. There’s the old tin smelter next door, also belonging to the family, which the day it went up was so large that it was clearly destined to fail. Mrs. Stevenson, seeing as your farm is situated in the middle of the state, the agent says, and seeing as there are only 10 cremation ovens in all of Nevada, we thought this smelting facility would be the ideal place for our furnace. She looks unconvinced. And if we were to discuss it with your husband? No, the farm is mine, the smelting plant, too, and anyway he won’t be back until very late today. On go the negotiations. The offers go up. She carries on saying no. Until, wearily, she says, Okay, sir, there’s something I have to confess. And she shows him through to the old plant. She points at the wall, at the open door to one of the ovens, the shape of an abandoned pipe, inside which, in among all the wrought iron, a tree has sprouted: its branches have molded in against the top and sides of the cylinder, with just one or two making it up and out through the chimney. You see it, that tree? Yes, ma’am, I see it. Well, this is the problem: in this oven, one winter when we were snowbound, we incinerated Grandmother (she had died suddenly), and there’s nothing in the world we’d destroy this tree for now.
43
Joseph Campbell assumed as much when he told a short parable about peering inside his PC. Campbell, who held that the major religions were all but obsolete and that modern myths were needed, was dazzled by the dizzy mandala of the computer’s microcircuitry. “Have you ever looked inside one of those things?” he asked an interviewer. “You can’t believe it. It’s a whole hierarchy of angels—all on slats.”
MARK DERY
44
Set in his ways, when he finished at the slaughterhouse Hans always went by Gregory’s Bar, his heavy work boots thudding against the floor as he came in the door. Careful, Gregory said every day, the door sign’s about to fall off! Who cares! Hans would say. He drank beer until he couldn’t any longer, and, if there was a chance, visited the brothel, where Linda was always on hand. Meanwhile, Hans wasn’t sure what to do with that 15-inch knife the slaughterhouse always presented to the year’s most efficient worker. He had 4 already. When I’ve got 5, he said on his first day on the job, I’m going back to Copenhagen. He displayed them in the reception room at his house, lined up in a vertical row, in genuine coyote pelt sheaths, the blades sheathed, the poplar wood handles in view. He looked at them and thought that, really, these knives weren’t good for anything but killing, but he didn’t want that, and Carson City didn’t, either. That
being the case, he said, why give them to me? Why do they desire death? He prepared it all meticulously. At 4:00 p.m. he’d leave the slaughterhouse, as always, and head to Gregory’s. He’d pretend to drink the usual number of beers, and he’d say, very loud so even the guys playing pool at the back would hear, that he was beat, that he was heading home to sleep. He’d go home, but not to bed, instead eating a large meal, cleaning the knives, and attaching 2 of the knives to his waist using duct tape, and the other 2 he’d strap to his calves. At 10:00 p.m. he’d head back to Gregory’s Bar—Gregory would be cashing up at that hour, and when he asked him for a beer he’d say, No, I’m shutting now, and then he’d have to stab him; perhaps in the chest, where he knew he’d had a Nearly Love tattoo done for him by a Mexican. Then he’d go to the brothel, where Linda would doubtless be attending another client, meaning he’d have to kill both of them, and if she was alone he’d still have to kill her, because doubtless she’d want to have a drink before going to the room, even though she knew how uncomfortable alcohol made him before making love. He’d then walk to the sheriff’s office, on the way asking for a light from Bob, the homeless guy who frequented the dumpsters on Washington Street around that time of night, and in the flare of the match he’d pierce the femoral and draw the knife upward to the stomach. And finally he’d go down to the sheriff’s office, throw the knives down on the table, and say, Mission accomplished, Chief. Looking for his boots, he runs through the plan again. It’s 9:45 p.m. He only just took them off an hour ago, while he was eating his dinner. He rummages through the drawers, looks in the bathtub, behind doors. Nothing. At 10:45 p.m., shoeless, he sits in the bed and stares for a long time at his bare feet, very white. It is at this moment that he decides he has to pack his bags and go away, leave North America. The boots he’ll never see again.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 4
