The arrival of the hamburger extended the ellipsis. Cassio prayed that Max wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t pronounce it out loud, because he’d already made it clear: Cassio had chosen a life that was an insult to his brain, to the homunculus in whose true heart resides the vital notion of dignity. The drinks were no longer wetting his throat—it felt like he was suffocating. Max let mayonnaise drip methodically onto his plate beside his French fries (“Honestly, mayonnaise is intolerable except in the company of potatoes”), and after a few large, calm bites, he continued:
“It’s as if no one really understands what’s happening or what’s at stake”—he lowered his voice—“when you’re dealing with technology designed to transfer and analyze information on a level and scale that can’t be replicated any other way. There’s a race going on between technology and politics, and it’s obvious which side is best equipped to win.”
He couldn’t say much more about the Project, not yet, but it was clear to Cassio that Max was in command of some new technology that was both exciting and entirely unknown to the rest of the world. Cassio wasn’t used to working with live tissue, but from an engineerable perspective, the Project opened up a unique research space, with a quantum leap’s worth of advantage over other analytical ventures. In Max’s words, it “could redefine all existing relationships with information.”
He had convinced the Balseiro Institute, which was part of the Bariloche Atomic Center down in Patagonia, to let him use their laboratory. Balseiro owned a very small stake in Max’s company, had no real veto power on the board, but their involvement was helping to accelerate the whole process. He admitted that what he really wanted was to set up his own lab. It was crazy to have to depend on the university system or the state; he’d rather associate himself with some sadistic idiot, though that was basically the same thing. Serious technology should be built somewhere free of all outside demands, he said, so that innovative potential was the only thing determining what made it into the portfolio of priorities.
Max broke off, began humming, tried to peel the label off his latest bottle. This one didn’t come off so easily. Cassio understood perfectly. Max had had to move fast, which is why he’d cut a deal with the center—there was no need to justify anything.
“We’ve got an advantage of a year or two, no more. The odds are bad. But it’s possible.”
They kept talking until the bar closed, then walked through the dark streets to El Galeón, a place down on Santa Fe y Gurruchaga that was open all night. When they parted ways at seven a.m., the doormen were out washing down the sidewalks. It had been a while since Cassio had last seen a sunrise or smelled the odor of damp clothing that results from alcohol in the blood dehydrating the brain. A very light breeze parted his bangs, one final whisper of fresh air; the solid heat of summer was gathering force above the city, and its arrival was imminent. A subterranean current of new blood was flowing beneath the asphalt. In the early light, objects seemed to be covered by a sticky patina, as if the terrors of the world had been appeased, sprinkled with color, and brought back to life just for him.
His sense of unease had completely disappeared; he felt lucid, at peace. When he entered his room, Harpo the turtle lifted his snout; lately his movements had slowed considerably. Cassio caressed the glass and emptied a little packet of food into the morbid water. He knew that little turtles didn’t live very long. He couldn’t take Harpo to Bariloche—the laws of the province prohibited the entry of foreign pets. He imagined a greenish cloud of tiny turtles rising above the rocky shore of Lago Gutiérrez, finding new life in the nearby trees. Harpo swam a little, then floated in place, hovering there in the water. Maybe Cassio could take him as contraband, put him in a plastic tube like the ones architects use to transport their blueprints.
He closed the blinds in his room, leaving it completely dark. He took off his socks and lay down on his bed. From the far end of the bed, his toes appeared to be looking at him, awaiting a reaction on his part. He took up his laptop, opened it on his chest, and bought a one-way airplane ticket to Bariloche.
Cassio took charge of organizing the research group. Focusing on a new passion infused his body with the tension of well-being: the challenges were vast and complex, right at the level of his neural ambition. The fact that the technology’s potential hazards were still impossible to quantify—these were new, violent, devastatingly specialized techniques for approaching the data—made the job feel like a return to the simple and beautiful things life had to offer, things that didn’t require intricate abilities such as talking to people, participating in society, or smiling.
He’d arrived alone in Bariloche. Located near the southern end of the continent, surrounded by mountains and the blue mirrors of water, it had been the destination of choice for his earliest camping trips with his brotherhood of nerds. Cassio had spent the best summers of his life pushing deep into the swamps, advancing through the silvery conifers, swimming in cobalt-blue lakes, being eaten alive by horseflies, and taking respectful ownership of the immensity like some creature from Tolkien. Back then, everyone wore bermuda shorts, and no one shaved or cut their hair. Bariloche was a male arcadia bustling with sports—snowboarding, rock climbing—that he aspired to learn. Here were his most highly valued memories, his moments in the shadow of a shining, distinctly masculine life: striking out, fishing for trout in the lakes, offering soliloquies to the mountains, and investigating the darkest corners of his mind—the best ecstasy dealer he’d ever known.
And now he was working at the Balseiro Institute. If he hadn’t fallen under the Venusian spell of cryptography, he would have loved to study here. The fact that his lab belonged to the Balseiro was for him a hero’s badge: Balseiro was the closest to a romantic dream of academic life, but the fact that he was here to work on a secret disruptive technology project was the cherry icing on the nerd cake.
In certain places, the sky above the mountain range makes itself absolute, the clouds brushing against one’s very throat. Even Cassio could feel these sensations, and he’d developed a childlike ability to appreciate them. He rented a little apartment on Onelli Street, a block from the waterfront; from his armchair he could see Nahuel Huapi Lake stretching out like a languid blue animal. Eventually, he stopped thinking about Melina, though every so often he used her to boot up violent, abstract, haughty spasms in the shower. He decorated his room with a limited-edition poster of Chewbacca heading into the forest with his bandoliers of ammunition and his AK-47, a rousing portrait of the formerly tame beast that would accompany him from now until the multimillion-dollar sale of the company.
In principle, Niklas Bruun’s life has unfolded on its own terms. Initiated into his chosen science at an early age, his ventures into society occurred only in moments of necessity, his nervous system brushing more or less unexpectedly against the real world. A ground-skimming heir to tradition, he displays the innovative nature of those who excavate fundamental betrayals hidden amidst known feats of daring. His writing strikes a solitary tone; during the period in question, the words he writes are meant never to be read.
His journal entries are interspersed with sketches of creatures drawn from nature. There are images of extraordinary flowers, and elliptical chronicles of insects seen in the course of his voyages. At the time, however, there are never any people present in his journal, nothing that would imply any personal relationships.
According to the pens of his critics, the biographical record of Niklas’s mental life appears and disappears like a snake crawling through bushes. Though the thicket covers three continents in all, for a time there is only one. Niklas in Amsterdam, a vagabond, intoxicated on a blend of absinthe and frica (a first reference to the presence of the Tupinambá elixir in Europe). Niklas amidst crevices of cerulean ice, on a trip to collect purple orchids and lichen for a Slavic collector of whom no one had ever heard. Niklas arguing in a half-empty conference room in Madrid; Niklas in Lapland, stretching out a cold-num
bed hand to draw; Niklas hurrying out of the Lusitano palace, having refused to discuss anything that wasn’t hyperborean insects.
In his journal, he explains that the plants he draws seem to him to be “a reorganization of human eyes—of the entire human face.” His writings begin to fill with descriptions of strange specimens, ones that future naturalists will be unable to connect to extant vegetal species in any way outside of his journal; in the course of his nocturnal raptures (accompanied by his favorite apéritif, Valdemar, a bit spilled on the page), he comes to believe that he discovered these creatures in his dreams, where he has seen himself moving through underwater caverns, arriving at deranged islands where he is welcomed by mysterious breezes and ground-level clouds not found anywhere else in his writings. “The pools of black gall that await deep in the secret swamps preserve the most extravagant of species: excrescences that suddenly cease their crawling behavior and appear to become a motionless vegetal species, waiting to be ingested providentially, and once made part of the internal environment of their host, they regain their animal form; in this magnificent, fearless kingdom, unimaginable kinships are formed between one species and another . . .” Bruun dissects, composes small portraits; on nights when he is inspired, he works on his ode to Numidae Espora. And then we lose all track of him.
Most likely he is off collecting specimens for Tartare d’Hunval, penetrating the Amazon in a series of ten-day expeditions, returning each time bearing treasure in the form of new species.
Do you think that it’s alive? You would be surprised. The path of these plants runs between life and death; they aren’t of the world of the living, but it can’t be said that they have passed on . . . As you will see, they react furiously to the slightest of stimuli. Their appearance sometimes seems to indicate a putrefactive form, closely allied to fungi and other such beings . . . Their very nature leads them to the limits of their organizationless existence, and from that existential floor they lash out against their enemies. Do you see, do you realize what I’m saying?
His earliest contact with Tartare was related to a series of Crissia pallida specimens, which Tartare had obtained by calling in favors from his network of botanical spies. Tartare claimed that he was simply attracted to the beautiful, simple, black profundity of botany itself, but the tenor of Niklas’s research changed radically after he met Tartare. They were united by their passion for Crissia, and for the study of beings that are born and die outside the realm of all that we think of as real.
Like two ears connected by a wrinkled labellum: the bridge where the insects are lost. As if already condemned to death, they cross it in a state of stupefaction. Libidinous cavern, a paradise created for the depraved, the site induces changes within their bodies.
Tartare set his eyeglasses aside; they were damp with tears. Niklas stayed focused on the magnificent pearlescent creature, which seemed drawn from some epic he’d never read.
When the foot merged with the head, the labellum applied pressure to the sac, which began to fill with succulent aromas, and the axis was inverted: the root was now drawn toward the light of the sun, while a few late-growing bulbs remained near the rock that served as horizon, as watershed. Farther down, the two extremely white and meaty flowers defied architectural norms by growing toward the ground, burrowing down through the air, still bearing the now half-dead insects they had drugged. Sero te amavi, Crissia.
As for Tartare: it had been a malodorous, gelatinous caterpillar, Phobetron pithecium dhunvalica, native to the swamps of Madagascar, that had launched his scientific reputation. He had spent several months admiring them there in the mud; had led them gently into his glass bottles, had sunk into the muck with them, had observed them talking to him in his dreams. He had proposed the first scientific description of the caterpillar, removing it from its originary swamp, binding it to his lineage.
Years later, deep in the Mongolian forest, Tartare had gone blind for several days, which he spent entrapped in the (quite reasonable) belief that he was going to die. For context: in that jungle lives a termite whose mandibles are so powerful that their workings are audible to the human ear. Back when Tartare’s powerful footfall was first heard in the zone, no one had ever heard of Nubia crisallis, and no one could have predicted the means by which the spore made its way into one’s brain. It had entered through his ear, made a pilgrimage through the inner passageways of consciousness much like a memory as described by St. Augustine, and finally reached the cerebral meat of its host. When Tartare returned to Amsterdam, he was unrecognizable.
He claimed that he had been possessed by a series of intuitions that were “completely foreign to the manner in which I had conceived the world,” as he would put it in his new book. Not only had he changed externally; his entire being was imbued with new vigor. He was sure that evolution à la Darwinienne was on its last legs, and in the new classification system that he was designing, certain species fit inside others; they invaded one another, arriving at a matrix of forms that couldn’t be reduced to the issue of mere survival, much less that of generations (an idea he found repugnant). Evolutionary change, he believed, happened much more quickly—within the lifespan of a single individual. Rather than waiting for reproductive cycles to silently select useful features, it occurred via mimesis, and as the result of unexpected contact.
Tartare opened his house there in Amsterdam to a series of scientific spiritualism sessions—trances in which the participants claimed to travel through different geological eras. At these parties, there was a medium who helped the invitees fall into reveries (encouraged by the ingestion of frica) that led them from the dawn of the Devonian to the migrations of the Cretaceous. Niklas would have taken part in these ceremonies.
As Torben Schatts comments in his memoirs, “Everything about [Tartare] denotes a highly refined man irremediably corrupted by his frequenting of actresses, ballerinas, and frica.” In fact, at the time Tartare had decided to content his appetites with nothing but writing and thought. He had promised himself that he would remain celibate until his next book, Orchidaceaen Dithyrambs, was published. In that text he portrays this stretch of his life as follows:
No longer was I that timorous man of yesteryear, the one who stammered the Latin names of the kingdoms under his breath. No longer was I content to hide away amidst my magnificent collection, which was already wholly known to me, and yet through which whole tomes of future natural history could be written. Disdain had given me a second skin, one that was impervious to the digressions of others. It no longer gave me any pleasure merely to crush their meager insights with my perfect erudition; I was ready to destroy their egos altogether with my nomenclaturical euphoria, much the way collapsing towers of stone will squash men like insects.
His Monographie des Termiten was one of the first works to be labeled “speculative botany.” It circulated amongst whispers, accumulating intriguing silences (“culebrin attacks,” in the words of Tartare) and raised eyebrows from those who were capable of raising them. He would later write that snares had already been set with him in mind, and indeed, the judgment of naturalia expert Giovanni Savonarola, creator and destroyer of naturalist reputations, was not long in coming:
The naturalist T. d’Hunval doubtless possesses a talent beyond the ordinary, but he exaggerates his stature as a man of science, and lacks any sense of criteria or rigor . . . and the same can be said of his Monographie. The divine language of Theophrastus as he presented the new field of study at Plato’s academy, and that of Linnaeus when he transformed the field to address secular needs, suffers cruel distortions in the hands of d’Hunval, ones that are frankly quite difficult to tolerate. One is reminded of Friedrich Vischer, who held that there were paintings whose stench one could actually see. Tartare d’Hunval’s book presents us with the horrifying notion that there are scientific compositions whose stinking breath one can actually touch. His naturalist legacy will likely be comparable to the lives of certain insects, be
st summarized as “a quick trip to the surface before sinking once more into the swamp.”
And then “the abyss, the abominable nothing, phantoms spilling over my name, over me” (Orchidaceaen Dithyrambs, 45). Tartare d’Hunval tries to console himself with thoughts of his destiny as a scientific martyr, and a possible life for his text as an obscure classic. He walks along the Herengracht in Amsterdam feeling like a haloed ghost, intimately protected by his intuitions, his unique visions of caterpillars having slough-bound love affairs with termites and orchids; he talks to himself out loud, tells himself that the only thing that matters is the truth. The aquatic labyrinth of the city leads him from euphoria to melancholy. Much like his caterpillars, he forms a close relationship with muddy water, though these swamps are only infested with humans; he is almost invisible within the walled-in underworld he inhabits. And he can no longer stand the city. In his journal he notes, “Incomparabilis nocta . . . Nictabo splendens,” and draws the profile of a flower that is an insect, its wings outspread.
Numbed by the indifference to his work, Tartare abandons all formal links to the scientific community of his time. He moves to Rio de Janeiro, capital of the Empire of Brazil, later writing that he’d “wanted to be devoured by pure, hard research.” This is the prelude to his most awe-inspiring project, and to the very night that brings us back into contact with Niklas Bruun and the vertigo he feels when in touch with “impure science,” as he calls the dark constellations working their way into the history of science of the Anthropocene.
Dark Constellations Page 9
