45
It’s the year 2054 and my grandchildren are exploring the attic of my house. They find a letter dated 2004, along with a CD-ROM. The letter claims that the disk contains a document that provides the key to obtaining my fortune. My grandchildren, understandably, are excited, but they’ve never seen a CD before—except in old movies—and even if they can somehow find a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How to read my obsolete digital document? Within fifty years the only directly legible thing will be the letter.
JEFF ROTHENBERG
46
But between the Spanish municipalities of Albacete and Almería, linking two deserts of beige-white stone (separated by a wide, fast-flowing river flowing from north to south), there is a little-traveled motorway featuring nothing but a gas station whose signage permuted from CAMPSA to CEPSA, and which was built to exploit the relocation of the town after the swamp rose and flooded it. A station wagon has just pulled in, just about the only vehicle that’s been seen all week. Fernando, bowl haircut, Adidas Saigon, Dacron trousers, approaches the car: How much? But they confuse euros for dollars, and they don’t make any sense. They being three blond girls with surfboards on the roof. Fernando chats with them and, in a Mexican Spanish, they tell him they’re headed to the International Surf Festival in Tapia, a town that, as Christina is pointing at it, is in the south of the peninsula because the map is upside down. No! he says, righting the map and smiling, that’s in Asturias, next to Galicia! We’re carrying out our girlfriend Kelly’s last wish, they say, to compete against the Chinese. The Chinese? says Fernando. Yeah, they say, they come from southeast China, they’re the best in the world. Oh, right, he says, slotting the hose back into the pump, which in turn says the words, Thank you, have a good trip. Leaning against a Wynn’s advertisement, his left hand shading his eyes, he watches them drive away, and the dust cloud they raise. They suddenly brake and begin reversing, the cloud now moving the opposite way, and he thinks, I need you, Kitt! With her elbow out of the window, the girl in the passenger seat points at the print on Fernando’s T-shirt, SURFIN’ BICHOS. THEIR NEW LP PHOTO FROM THE SKY, OUT NOW. Will you sell us that? And he, without a second thought, replies, I’ll give it to you, I’ve got others. Now he watches them actually drive away. The same dust cloud rises up to the height of his bare chest, and it’s beige like the desert. He sits in the hut and gets the guitar out again, a black Les Paul with a white pickguard. Strumming absentmindedly, he pictures the surfer girls crossing into the swampland, where in these drought days the top of the bell tower is always peeking out, where, according to divers, fish make their homes in the trees that line the streets, and seaweed hangs from the branches, and where the gas pumps still contain that very thick Super, the DNA of the tar that fascinates him, the planet’s protein. A few chords drift from the hut, no obstacle in the wide flatness to obstruct or muffle them. “The Petroleum Diaries,” he thinks, that’s what I’ll call this one. Seeing some scrunched-up pieces of newspaper the size of beach balls tumbling along in the distance, he smiles, watching them as they go.
47
In 1971, a group of hippies took over an abandoned military base in Copenhagen, Denmark, proclaiming it the free state of Christiania: a micronation. After grappling with the Danish government for a period of time, in 1987 it was finally recognized as an independent micronation. Among the 18 students who occupied the base that night was Hans, still a teenager then, and as he lay on the floor in a greenish half-light that, like a military effluvium, seemed to float between the paving and the skylights high above, he made the decision never to wear shoes again: his bare white feet a symbol of peace and nonviolence. Christiania’s present-day population comprises 760 adults, 250 children, 1,500 dogs, and 14 horses.
48
Description: all materials, all objects, everything we see, are clots—catastrophes that took place on the neutral, two-dimensional, isotropic plane coterminous with The Beginning. These are the so-called First Order Catastrophes. When a foreign agent alters the equilibrium of one of these objects, it breaks off on unpredictable tangents, dragging behind it other objects—whether near or far—in a kind of domino effect. This we call the Second Order Catastrophe. The desert, given its flatness and isotropic nature, is the least catastrophic place. That is, except when the silence is broken by a scarab beetle dragging a stone along, or when in some fold in the land a blade of grass emerges, or when a poplar finds water and grows. Then a gas station attendant in the Albacete desert kills time by scrunching up the pages of newspapers into boluses the size of beach balls and throwing them onto the flats on the far side of the road. It will be more like the American desert this way, he thinks, with its tumbleweeds. Clots of paper, information roving erratically around, recipientless, sketching varying theorems, their dissemination governed by the wind. And this, it goes without saying, also counts as a Second Order Catastrophe.
49
What’s certain is that, in spite of crossing the Mexico-U.S. border every 37 days, until he discovered that dead Mexican in the consignment of black beans, Humberto had never considered trying to set up in the U.S. It wasn’t an easy decision to make: the truck, property of the Mexican company he worked for, would first be assumed disappeared, and then stolen, and a search and arrest warrant would be added to the already considerable difficulties faced by a person without papers in the U.S. Unlike his fellow countrymen who head for populous cities and try to blend in, Humberto’s logic was the opposite: he’d buy an identity on the black market and head for the most inhospitable place in the West. People in towns and villages, though more malicious to begin with, once you win their confidence can be relied on for their unswerving nobility, he said to Bart, an American coworker at the veg warehouse in Salt Lake City. Bart mentioned an almost uninhabited area in Nevada, where he had some family who might help. And so, once he’d gotten rid of the truck at a used car place, and having secured documentation from the Mexican Mafia, whom he paid with the truck proceeds, he took the bus to Ely, arriving after nightfall. Ron, Bart’s cousin, was waiting for him at the bus stop, and he said straightaway, Don’t worry, Bart told me everything, I’ve got a job here that’s tailor-made, I’ll set you up in a room at the back of this secondhand clothes place I own. Via a series of roads and tracks they came to a house-cum-warehouse, more horizontal than vertical, set in a barren scrubby stretch of land. Opening the metal shutters and turning on the lights, they found a large array of boxes open on the floor, overflowing with jerseys, shirts, pants, and coats in total disarray, and a counter at the back. Without himself saying a word, Humberto was pointed in the direction of a side door that led directly through to his future residence. Solidly put together, and featuring a bathroom, kitchen-dining area, and sleeping area, it seemed far more than he’d been expecting; there was also the fact that he could use the same heating system that warmed the shop. Before Ron left, Humberto asked: Is there really any call for all these secondhand clothes in a bleak place like this? What are you talking about, hombre, Ron said with a laugh, this is all for Mozambique! Plus, what do you mean, “bleak”? Humberto let it go, and Ron, after lowering the metal shutters, drove off honking his horn. Humberto sat on his bed and listened to the way the distance (a sponge came to mind) absorbed the sound of the car. He took out the one or two items he’d saved from the truck and placed them in the closet: a change of clothes, his overnight bag, a couple of photos, and a few cassette tapes of Mexican rock bands, which he placed on top of one another, making a column. Before eating the sandwich Ron had brought for him, he put on the first thing he found in the warehouse, a woman’s wool coat with a collar of fake fox fur. He then ate, chewing his dinner slowly, eyes fixed on the cassette tapes. He felt like listening to that killer DJ Camacho tape but had nothing to play it on. He took a black bean out of his bag and put it in an empty glass, which he placed next to his alarm clock.
50
Leicester, United Kingdom.
William arrived home after a 14-hour shift in the knitted goods factory. Spending the day in contact with fabrics in general and knitwear in particular tends to have a domesticating effect on the soul, which is sensitive to everything that happens at skin-level, where it senses—like a sixth sense—the textures and smells of the weave. But, not knowing any of this, William hated his job. When he came through the door he was confronted with the sight of a mountain of unironed clothes on his bed, and it struck him how much he’d like to iron clothes while also rock climbing, his favorite sport. The following Sunday, he and his friend Phil, dangling from a rope slung horizontally between the peaks of two mountains 125 meters up in the air, ironed clothes on an ironing board, including, also attached to this rope, the laundry load that had been waiting on the bed that day. Thus Extreme Ironing was born. From there the phenomenon spread over five continents, federations and rules were created, and both Phil and William begun traveling the world to compete against other duos. Skiing in the Alps, suspended from a moving truck in London, windsurfing in Los Angeles: these are just a few examples. They took chargers with them for heating the irons, and certain teams won sponsorship deals, with brands like Rowenta and Tefal, who in turn began producing sets of different weights and sizes, like golf clubs. But Phil and William were no longer in the best shape; younger, stronger, and more skilled teams had started challenging them, and they had fallen down the world rankings. The day William decided to give it up definitively was in a competition in the Black Forest—a year ago. The challenge consisted of ironing in midair, the contestants attached by harnesses to the same tree. It wasn’t long before William noticed that the Moulinex team was ahead by three shirts and a handkerchief, at least; no way he was clawing back that lead. Feeling fatigued, he let himself relax, and then it suddenly happened: he saw the scene from the other side, as though from a vantage several meters above the tree—the same height as the other contestants and his vision moving left to right across the irons. With every push of the iron an inevitable hiss emanated from a tree branch, giving a spongy, kinetic tone to proceedings. Nature at its most conspiratorial, he thought, surrendering himself to the vision of a living, mutant organism. For a brief moment he thought he’d seen the same scene before; more than that, that he’d been seeing it for the last 10 years, 8 hours a day, in the rocking motion of the threads as they wove together on the loom and in the multicolored balls as they hung down.
51
Micronations have their own science—micronationology—which was created by L’Institut Français de Micropatrologie, now defunct. There are still numerous forums dedicated to discussing and developing this science, and one of the people who maintains one of these sites is Ted. As a networks expert and an obsessive, he can talk for hours about ways to strengthen a link without sacrificing any power in the transmission, how to destroy a principal hub on a network like Inverse Power, or how the network of the biosphere, the network of the internet, and the neuronal network each possess the same topology, and can therefore, in certain situations, be considered isomorphs. He runs one of the principal servers, numerous distributors base their activities on him, particularly in the U.S., Central America, and Southeast Asia. Tonight (though, technically, it’s cycles rather than days and nights that apply on Isotope Micronation) he dreamed of an information network where the organic and the inorganic interbreed, one from which, as though it were a tree, the stories of the inhabitants of all the micronations on earth hang: the Micronation Hypernetwork.
52
Sooner or later our coasts will be barren. Over the course of the centuries hundreds of kilometers of cement will crumble and become overgrown with brambles and nettles. Excruciating howls will fill the nights. Enormous tracts of this country will become the refuges of criminals, pirate manufacturing plants, the headquarters of mafia from the East, illegal textile workshops, gathering points for Slavonic rogues. The yellow shadow of this ruin and horror will lengthen across certain places where, in times past, like in Lebanon, the most costly roulettes in the world were spinning as slender, barely pubescent actresses sniffed laudanum in the company of future suicides.
FÉLIX DE AZÚA
53
Relevant physical constants
Solar Mass = 1.989E30 kg
Solar Radius = 695,800 km (1 R)
Distance to Earth = 1 astronomical unit = 149,600,000 km
Speed of Light, c = 3.00 × 108 m/s
Planck’s Constant, h = 6.63 × 10-34 J·s
Gravitational Constant, G = 6.67 × 10-8 cm-3gm-1 sec-2
Electron Charge, e = 1. 4.8 × 10−10 esu
Boltzmann Constant, k = 1.3806488 × 10-23 m2 kg s-2 K-1
Electron Mass, me = 9.10938291 × 10-31 kg
Hydrogen, Atomic mass, ma = 1.00794 ± 0.00001 u
Earth’s Radius, RE = 6300 km
Lunar Radius, RL = 1700 km
One Solar Year = 9.3 × 1017 cm. The distance covered by the brain of a human being in the moment a click, barely audible, indicates that an antipersonnel mine has been stepped on. The distance a fetus covers in the time between a mother’s heartbeats.
54
In the morning, Ted and his wife, Hannah, natives of Utah, put their son, Teddy, in the pickup and made their way to Carson City; for a little tourism, as they called it. It was a public holiday. Peggy raised the barrier for them, which rose like a scissor blade over their heads, and they crossed the border between Isotope Micronation and the United States of America. The route, a labyrinth of trails pertaining to the state of Nevada until it reaches U.S. Route 50, begins with a sizable crossroads that breaks off into numerous roads—where they end up, the inhabitants of the micronation do not know. The area is covered, as far as the principal highway, in high hawthorn bushes, perimeter fences, and tiny crisscrossing paths. They were thin and pale, and they had a good day of it, eating in the rotisserie restaurant and going on the rides that had been installed in the main square a week earlier. Their shoulder-length hair drew comments: it had been years since anyone there had seen families in wide Dacrons, diamond-patterned jerseys, trainers, and synthetic shirts. At midafternoon Hannah reminded Ted of the time in their lives before they had Teddy. In those days, she said, they’d have decided to stay on for the evening, they’d have gone to the bars, gone drinking and dancing and playing the slot machines, and then when it got late, on their way home from Isotope Micronation, they’d have made love under the U.S. Route 50 poplar, watching the sunrise from where they lay. He took her by the hand and said, It’s late, let’s go home. They’d filled the van with balloons and knickknacks for the other kids, and they drove along, weaving between potholes. They took the fork in the road leading down a poorly demarcated dirt track, and within a few minutes the road forked again and, between a group of trees a little way off, Teddy spied a bulk on the ground which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a suitcase made of brown hide. As head of the family, Ted was the one to go and open it, and inside it he found quite a collection, hundreds of photographic portraits. Only portraits. Don’t take it, Hannah said, it’s bad luck putting all those faces in the earth. You’re right, we shouldn’t, Ted said, it makes no sense to put one micronation inside another; the larger of the two would then cease to be one. Let’s leave it, Teddy said, the people in the pictures look old, they look dead. So they left it. The suitcase stayed there, its jaws wide open, and facedown on the earth as though it wanted to bite it. The photos are presumably dust by now, either that or they’ve blown away. (Or been eaten by coyotes, fascinated as they are by anything silver, that’s why their eyes shine in the night, as the cowboys and pioneers of yore claimed. The whole of the Nevada desert was also a single, dazzlingly colorful photograph to begin with, smooth and shining, and the coyotes devoured it, gaining the silver in their eyes but being forced to wander, hungry and alone, this dirty, dusty earth, which is the sum of their own excrement after that photograph passed through their digestive tracts.)
55
In the Albacete desert,
the sound of chords, always the sound of chords. They roll, unobstructed, in waves across the landscape. Like those monotone chords which, according to Benet, spread across Región, coming to a stop only when they struck window-panes. Or those slow but effective propagations in René Thom’s Theory of Catastrophes. The sound of chords, and Fernando sending them out: a chair placed between the two gas pumps, the guitar, the amp plugged in. His eyebrows, straight lines, mirrors for the horizon, above a pair of eyes that stare directly out, looking for the focus point. A recurrent idea: he’s never been able to get his head around a small object like a guitar filling such a space, forcing insects to come out from their hiding places, and children to hide. In the distance he sees a few newspaper clumps roll by, sooner or later they’ll come back, and sooner or later they’ll go back out again. He makes a few more from a wad of newspapers he has down by his left hand, throwing them into the road, too. Watching them, he goes back to aimlessly strumming the guitar. A black car pulls in, a line of lights on the front bumper lighting up from left to right. With cinematic skill, the ‘82 Pontiac Trans Am comes to a halt next to the pump. Putting the guitar to one side, Fernando exchanges a vague salute with the driver. What’s up, Fernando? Not much, Michael, not much—fill her up? Yeah. The pump starts up with a noise not dissimilar to that of a waste disposal unit. Michael gets out and leans with his elbows on the Wynn’s poster. Usually he’s three heads taller than Fernando, but today, with the new snakeskin boots, three and a half. Got a lot of work going on? says Fernando, frowning. Don’t ask, he says. Today I’m going around trying to find whoever’s been dropping all this newspaper, the desert’s covered in them, they’re everywhere and they’re scaring the sheep. I know, says Fernando, total bitch. Neither of them speaks again. Michael pays with a Law and Order Foundation check, they say goodbye with an identical hand-to-forehead gesture, Fernando wishing Michael luck. The Pontiac leaves an S in the dust as it pulls out. He picks up the guitar, fixes his sight on the horizon once more, and begins playing the Knight Rider theme song.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 5
