Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  68.

  All I can recall of the following week is a pain suddenly springing up in my chest and trying to conjure an excuse. Really, there were more than enough excuses I could have used, I was just too much of a coward to put any forward. Perceiving the outline of your fear is one thing, doing something about it quite another. I wrestled with the idea, hardly able to sleep: the days slipped by, and the nights, and as Wednesday turned to Thursday I finally plummeted into deepest sleep. It was after midday when eventually I awoke, and I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on a bench in Parque Progreso. Later, home once more, I stepped into the shower and, standing beneath the cold stream, succeeded in condensing the anxiety, depositing it in a single point up on the green grouting between the bathroom tiles. The pieces inside my head, placed side by side with the patchwork puzzle of limescale and damp-riddled corners, finally seemed to fit. He’d come back, Morgan. Like an apparition. The unease that had taken up residence in my solar plexus abated, to be replaced by the low-level bodily memory that amputees say takes up residence following the loss of a limb: a dropped-ballast sensation, yet one of such pressing urgency that it then becomes impossible to suppress the tingling, prickly feeling, confirmation that where once there was a weight there is now only this empty nothing; but what’s worse, this confirmation, as it were, not of the loss but rather of the former possession, manifested too late in the spiritual baggage of my adulthood, because having lost part of something I hadn’t been aware of, I could now see that it was only a matter of time before the body, my clearly autonomous anatomy, once more became accustomed to the presence of this now intermittent pinprick that was Morgan—that Morgan the pinprick, the previously unappreciated prosthesis in my existence, was going to become a given in my life once more. I went and got on the bus, preoccupied with the heavy feeling a prosthesis projects into the contiguous zone where once there was (and is now!) flesh and bone (a meaty void), a force I thought had been buried, the sensation of another time, nagging, a bitter tinge to your gums, spreading to your throat and nasal cavity … The bus driver was playing a disk of old dance numbers, the kind Grandma used to love. Have I talked about her? Oh, probably. She could be another beginning—a whole territory of other beginnings. At around nine that evening I got off the bus outside the stadium. The bus had taken just about the most circuitous route possible, though it’s quite possible that I knew it was going to do so, which at least meant I could skip the undercard. I’ve never liked boxing. To me it’s like the antithesis of Vakapý, no other aspiration than to be a weary fuck-you to any and all interpretations by intellectuals, and by unintellectuals, and by everyone in between, a pastime utterly resistant to being anything other than what it simply is: a couple of brutes punching each other in the heads for the entertainment of another set of brutes who, unlike them, have money. And yet this clear memory: the sensation that came over me as the first bell rang, one that I’m certain had nothing to do with my own blood rising. It came from some far-off place, some isolated locale, fleshless, a-visceral. Morgan’s fight was one of several, of numerous different weight classifications, on the evening’s interminable card. And yet, and yet, the lights looked different when it came to him. The lighting, which until then had been a mad latticework of roving spotlights, now gave way to a strobe sequence. Morgan was the first of the duo to emerge, flanked by a trio of underfed cheerleaders, his trainer, and the guy with the ice bucket. The sequins on his shorts were pale blue, matching his boots, which had similarly shiny tassels and two-tone laces. The emcee, in tones as vain as his hairpiece, announced the boxers’ respective weights, reaches, and records. Clang, clang, clang, went the bell, and within a couple of minutes Morgan was stumbling into the ropes, his face a bloody mess. And me? I tried to hide my smile. Was this it, had I found happiness? This dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach, so similar to a settling of scores. There, among the braying public, the lights, the haze of cigarette smoke, the drink and snack vendors, a combination that in my mind represented the lowest echelon of human existence: there I suddenly found contentment, a sense of completion, while at the same time feeling somewhat for the recipient of that awful blood-shower of a beating. Not in eight rounds did he lay a glove on his opponent, a wiry black guy from Dos Bocas with abnormally long arms and an alarmingly low center of gravity. He took three steps to every one of Morgan’s; he feinted, danced, and mixed jabs and hooks such that Morgan looked at least a hundred pounds the heavier. I ought still to point out that in spite of all, Morgan never threw in the towel, and he didn’t hit the canvas once. Round eight, the ref stopped the carnage. Morgan, his legs completely gone, carried on swinging at thin air in slow motion, his manager and the ref keeping him upright as best they could. He looked desperately out into the crowd, trying to identify an imaginary opponent, but somehow his gaze slipped straight across me. That evening was the end of his time as a boxer, W3-L14, and it was back to days and nights down at the docks for us. Our old carpentry teacher got us apprentice positions in a workshop not far from the docks. The pay was terrible, but still it was hardly the worst job, basically goofing most of the day away, plus we made a little on the side selling sawdust to a local chinchilla breeder. But then Morgan set his eye on a table saw and a semifixed router and roped me in to helping steal them one night after closing time. The owner didn’t even bother to investigate: we were both sacked the next day. Morgan had found buyers beforehand, and we split the profit, which it took us less than a week to spend. Not long after that, the bodies of the first children were found down by the canal. The Department of Hygiene announced a massive recruitment drive: if you were young, had finished school, were looking for a competitive salary and the opportunity to take your career in public health to the next level, you should get in touch.

  69.

  I had lots of siblings, then not so many. Like any good Chrysalitđ devotee, Grandma spaŵned every five years on the dot. They were more or less like shadows in my life, most of them gone before I had a chance to meet them. Those who stuck around soon started making themselves scarce. They left their vaccination cards in a box along with the odd shoe. We lived off handouts, it’s true, but a better sort of handout, never having to resort to shoelace stew or any other abject practice of the truly desperate. Grandma did her best, also true, and yet they all left her in the end. She made sure we had the basics of Vakapý, got us on the charity’s books, saw that our childhoods were overseen by nuns and monks: that was how you made good men, good citizens. And out of nothing, as though fermented by the absence of air and the heat given off by the electrical resistors, made they were. Before leaving school, several of my siblings already had kiosk jobs lined up. One of my many brothers (too many to count) even rose to become a councilor on a cross-party ticket in one of the towns on the border. It was in the paper. Our neighbors brought Grandma a garland of lilies in recognition of her formative role. An afternoon of songs and festivities, and a suckling pig slaughtered. We got to take the leftovers home (snout and cheeks), and those rounds of applause rang in our ears for quite some time. We are the prosperous types, as anyone can see: we come from good stock, for all that paltry ambition plagues us. All my other brothers and sisters felt the call of success and one by one cleared out, until it was just me and Grandma. We never saw any of them again. I personally never learned the knack of missing them, unlike Grandma, who sometimes took out their old IDS and vaccination cards, proof of our immunity to polio and other ills, which she would caress and coo over for a while. I was the last of her spaŵn; after I came along, she attended church only for services. I always somehow knew that, unlike the others, I was destined to stick around.

  70.

  At that time I was getting up more or less with the fishermen, taking a bus to ĦQ, putting on the hazmat suit, and heading underground. It had ceased to be a question of simply piling up the bodies and burning infected buildings. In its second phase, the job consisted of clearing the tunnels of rats, eliminating them. In and out: quick as yo
u like. Except … the problem, they said, was that the creatures had taken up home in the pipes along which the telephone wires were laid. This was much worse than having to sand vast pieces of wood at the workshop, not only because of the ridiculousness of saving telephone wires in a deserted city where nobody was going to be calling anybody, but also because tight spaces become even more cramped if you throw infectious disease into the mix. Pest control on this scale is a question of patience: you install the traps and the poison, and you wait. You learn a few tricks along the way. Like fumigating the traps, smudging them with a brush dipped in something like aniseed oil, for instance, to take away the smell of humans. But the fundamental thing is patience. You have to know how to wait if you’re going to become a genuine exterminator. Down in the tunnels, time becomes a burden. In the dark, when all is silent, we could tell how numerous a colony was from the scratching and scuffling of their claws farther along the pipes. Morgan and I could spend up to twelve hours at a time beneath the earth, putting out traps, swimming around in shit.

  71.

  No other country in the world distributes its centers of power across three different cities, said Morgan. So, like, South Africa, that’s probably ginormous, right? And so you’ve got to be thinking about a pretty tight system of governance: big country, varied vegetation, all kinds of different animals, you just can’t run that kind of show without efficiency. As we waited in the darkness, our minds filled with South Africa, its hypothetical immensity: a ripe medley of ideas, species, moods, and creatures. Meanwhile we were tuning in to the presence of the rats, honing our senses to be more like Kovac’s, trying to detect the slightest alterations in their emanations. We split the shifts up between three of us, taking it in turns to be on watch: sometimes when a colony was cornered, the rats would rush en masse to a different sector seemingly at random, obeying the dictates of an intelligence beyond us, a collective animus that also signified the Ź-Bug’s terminal phase. They knew they had numerical advantage, and down came the avalanche. Nothing for it but to hit the deck facedown, just let them roll over us. Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein. They’d take little nibbles of the hazmat suits as they went by: the teeth scraping the breathing apparatus, those long claws, and those eyes, thousands of eyes, which in the light of the dark lantern had the appearance of multicolored sequins. When it rained, the tunnels would flood, and a good number of them would be washed away—all the worse for us, since we’d be sent to unclog the hatchways. We took the carcasses to the laboratory, where the bacteriologists analyzed the swollen teats in an attempt to establish how advanced the Ź-Bug was. But for all the scientists’ efforts to classify the situation, they were a long way from having a handle on it. Nobody was thinking about the next day, or the one after that. Above us, on ground level, the new recruits were being sent out to count the dead, while in the universities, valuable resources were being squandered in the desperate attempt to draw conclusions. We went on filling our leather sacks with dead rats, taking them back to ĦQ, and rinsing them with oxygenated water and chlorine. We were paid per head. The Department pointed to this as a way of encouraging competitiveness—as necessary in the overall fight for survival, if not more, than the science—though it was also good for morale. But the Atlantikans up above, those hazy figures who were supposed to motivate us to spend days and nights swimming around in rodent excrement, trying to turn up the swollen teats of the zero agent, had mostly abandoned the city or expired, and those who remained were close to death, huddling together inside the overcrowded warehouses provided by the Department of Hygiene (buildings without running water, light, or medicine), lying on cots that at points in the epidemic had to be shared between two or three people. But none of that was our concern. We just focused on bringing in the carcasses. Once, 50 of them came tumbling out of my sack at the end of a shift. That’s a decent shift. I read somewhere that an exterminator in China did 40,000 rats in a single year—about 110 a day. There are all kinds of strange people in China; apparently they even eat rats. Fine, I say, you can have rat soup, have whatever you want, but those kinds of figures are truly insane.

  72.

  We’ve spent all evening cońńected to the stone. The images are of my time in school. Some days they pertain to the origin of the Bug, others to my time in the tunnels. As for Jakarta, I go there alone: crossing wide valleys and, at the end, scaling the peak. The ascent is not easy. Most of the time the two cities, Atlantika and Jakarta, meld together in a ragged, overlapping confusion of sights and sounds. I go back to bed, stretch out my arms and legs. The fan keeps turning. The nun, wrinkle on wrinkle, calls out the register. Jakarta is almost worn out, worn to near invisibility, from all the folding and refolding of her sheet of paper. Ours is a school for the poor, by the poor: the source of all poverty. We don’t even have a globe: the world is revealed to us in each lesson when the nun brings out a rectangular piece of paper. Carefully rolling it out and pinning it up on a corkboard, she stands next to it, very still, like the confounded navigator at the edge of the flat, known world. One of the children, maybe Morgan, never being one for souls (but apparitions, yes, very much so), asked with a laugh whether the novice’s soul might be wandering around in the school, over the bumpy flagstones of the yard, past the tetherball post and the mini Vakapý court with its faded boundaries, the restrooms, the communal shop, the parent room, or even across this cheap print of the world with its incorrect scaling, all the coasts too long or too short: see, there’s our country, its dotted edges intended to correspond in some way with the realm we inhabit: It’s shaped like a horn, you say, a horn of great abundance, a cornucopia, you cry, whereas what I see is nothing less than a pistol, and not just me, we all think it’s like a gun, because that clearly is what it’s like, and not a horn full to the brim with tasty morsels: see, says Morgan, there’s the barrel, there’s the sights, there’s the black chamber, and I’d say the novice, dead or alive, could easily live in a ghost country such as that. But his voice cracks as he says this, he’s gasping, tears are running down Morgan’s face. The whole class looks round, incredulous. Or maybe it was me who put this to the nun, and Morgan was crying all along. Nobody knows what’s happening except that he’s crying, crying, the room fills with the sound of Morgan’s lament. The nun, impassive, says that such passing concerns are of little matter in questions of the soul: in metaphysical terms, political divisions and their cartographic representations are really all one. And is there, in the end, any difference? Maybe the falsehood lies not in representation itself but in the very thing we seek to represent when we resort to down or upscaling, to euphemism. Because as it happens this country isn’t real, nor has it ever been: it is a thing barely intuited, like a compilation of familiar imprecisions, like those that filter down to us through dreams: faces, smells, landscapes. The similarities between the countries on the map and the countries on earth are so great, by dint of existing in name only, that at times one has little choice but to ask: Which of the two do we inhabit and when did we cross the line? We jump from one to the other constantly, hardly noticing the borders that separate them. But to the souls of men and women, such things are not a concern. If the flesh is incapable of keeping them prisoner, why should concrete or granite be able to? This is a point on which the nun will not be swayed. She moves on to talk of immortality, and the means for attaining it, as though running us through a recipe for chicken pie. It’s hot: the blades of the fan, or just one single blade, flying around, infinite. I see my hands. The trembling dog outside the mill, up on Cordillera Hill, next to the dump: barking and vomiting and maybe also yawning, all at the same time. My hands are trembling too. The fan blades, overlapping, moving mandala-like. I remember that dogs keep themselves cool through the pads of their paws—this is known as evolution, I remember. I shut my eyes. The fan rumbles on.

  73.

  Grandma wasn’t buried and I didn’t let anyone cremate her either. I didn’t eat her remains. Nobody did. Though I never shared her faith, that would have be
en sacrilege, unacceptable. She manufactured a plastic bag for herself, climbed inside it, and waited for the end to come. We took her out to the lot and propped her up in one corner. I went by every day on my way home from Ź-Brigađe work: the puparium gradually diminishing, its color fading. Then one day they all hatched. Then there was nothing left.

  74.

  The plan now is to test the precise effect the heat has on the visions. Cases of Ź-Bug were spiraling, the hospitals were turning people away. The quarantine was announced: the Department of Hygiene had no choice. At the same time buildings were evacuated and droves fled the city. The Ź-Brigađes did not emerge unscathed, far from it: the infection was perfectly happy to follow us underground, and after six months, between desertions and deaths, we’d lost at least a hundred of our comrades. Even the ones who had shown courage and/or bravery, the psychos or those with no family and nothing else to lose either, began trickling away once we passed the ninety-day mark. Everyone feared infection. The fear got worse at night. One of the exterminators, a Sierra boy who kept to himself (and whom I therefore liked), would check his room ten times before getting into bed. Only once he’d peered into each and every cranny, all the air vents and even the power sockets, would he consent to lie down and sleep. All of which was pointless: someone would always start coughing in the night, or you’d hear the sound of retching in one of the rooms. You’d turn over in bed and lie listening to the shifting bodies, the creaking springs, the grinding of teeth. Your mind full of the toxins drifting around on the air. Every morning when the alarm went, we’d get up bleary-eyed, hardly having slept, legs aching from dragging the weight of those hazmat suits around. I believe Morgan was the only reason I survived the tunnels. It felt like wallowing in a mud trap, like we were slowly, slowly being submerged, and there would be no other end to it. One day our captain set the alarm even earlier than usual: Right, boys, he said, it’s the front line for us. Get your things; we’re heading to the earth’s core. It was then that the tunnel came crashing down on top of us.