Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  75.

  From the notebook:

  “Our design for the lift tower left us with a vast blind wall of in situ concrete. There was thus the danger of having a dreary expanse of blankness in that immensely important part of the building. A solution had to be found. The great wall space would provide an opportunity for a gesture of thanks to the people of Jakarta; a stone would be placed in front of it. And, instead of standing in the shadows, the Stele of the Measures would be brought there also. The wall would be divided, by means of softly worn paths, into doors. These, varying in size from the very large to the very small, would have different colors and thicknesses. Some would open, some would not, and this would change from week to week, or from hour to hour, or in accord with sounds made by people standing in front of them. Long lines or tracks would run from the doors into the roaring public spaces.”

  76.

  The stone shows us a very clear picture of a night when the exterminator from the Sierra took a screwdriver and tore off his own fingernails, having become convinced the Ź-Bug, in defiance of his security measures, had taken up residence underneath them. He spent the next couple of days with his hands in bandages, howling in the infirmary after mealtimes. Then back to work. Hey, you guys, he said. Hey, Atlantikans, I saved your lives. Right? I saved your goddamn lives. Laughter from all of us.

  77.

  People want to know about the explosion. What gave way first, they want to know: our sense of hearing or our sense of sight? Or both at once? Or did one go and pull the other down after it, like in an avalanche when the snow plummets down the mountainside, effectively becoming frost, wind, and rain at the same time? In fact snow is appropriate in a way: the way it is prone to avalanches, and its redness. Blindness is by all accounts a redness: a snowy expanse, no horizon. What, they say, so the noise came, and then you couldn’t see? The back of the skull picked up the rumble before any other part of you? All right, okay, fine: after being given the all clear by the medics, Morgan was put before a Brigađe tribunal. The only answer he gave his interrogators was to repeat the same story he’d told us in the tunnels a few days earlier, concerning a clutch of lark eggs, the sun, and a herd of cattle that briefly stopped chewing their cud. The story had nothing in it about any human beings. A large number of rats died, more rats than men, it’s true. That was what he said. He said nothing about the explosion, not what it was like, nothing about the gunpowder smell that accompanied it or the packed earth that came pouring down on our heads. Those eggs, on the other hand, he described in loving detail: completely intact, and dun brown with little wisps of a darker brown flecking the surface. The tribunal ordered him to be discharged, stating probable brain injury. They never once considered the possibility that Morgan was having them on. It could also have been one in an endless series of explosions, a series with neither beginning nor end, or just as possibly a one-of-a-kind tremor, utterly uniform everywhere it was heard because it never encountered any obstacles: this was part of my opening statement when I was called. The first thing was the absence of sound, next a shrill buzzing in our eardrums, a tiny drill inside the heads of that squadron of the damned, then the blast. Hardly believable, I know, because light travels faster than sound. And yet, and yet. I tried to tell them about Kovac’s mute cries, tried to paint the picture of him cowering in the rubble, and completely blind: first his hands went to his neck, like he couldn’t breathe, his legs gave way, he tore off his hazmat suit, including his rat-tail belt, and once all of that was off, his hands, in their fingerless gloves, went to his face. One important detail, dear tribunal members: when I say they went to his face, I mean he started rubbing or even yanking at his face, with such force he seemed sure to take out his own eyes. Not important, in fact, said one of the tribunal members, some big shot: their kind always have an aversion to the light. Another of the members, a bootlegger in former, calmer days, quickly asked how it was that I could be so sure about the reaction of Ź-Brigađier#317, also known as the Albýno, given that I had already stated—a sworn statement, if I didn’t mind him pointing out—that the explosion had robbed me of my sense of hearing. But that’s exactly why, I said: his mouth opened and closed, and although (because) there wasn’t any sound for me at that point, the bulging tendons in his neck, close to bursting, made it clear how loudly he was screaming. Mr. Tribunal Member shifted uncomfortably in his seat. And the fact I remember his reaction at all, gentlemen, suggests just how violent it was, given I couldn’t hear anything at that point. And I could still definitely see, unlike Comrade Kovac, whose lightaverse retinas had already been fried. I saw other things too, I said. Like what? asked another of the men before me, a former pharmacist, fat and silver haired like the rest, though in his case he’d applied rather too much hair gel, very youthful. Like for example Comrade Morgan, I said, protecting his head and narrowly avoiding a falling joist. Like for example Comrade Serrano, I said, not narrowly avoiding a huge chunk of concrete, being pulverized. You watched him die, then, Brigađier#496? For example. It took a little while, I add. And we can see from the medical report that you yourself came away largely unscathed, a few bumps and bruises; what would you put that down to? Luck, sir, though I still don’t know whether good or bad. Less of the riddles, 496: speak plainly. Oh, plain as the nose on my face, sir, clear as you like, and after that, dark, dark, dark. I could see, then I could see fuck all, then, a little while later, they came and pulled us out. And the buzzing noise? said another (storekeeper). Still there, sir. On and off, if you know what I mean. How long was it before you regained consciousness, 496? Couldn’t say exactly, sir, but the rescue guys say they think I was out for twenty-four hours, possibly forty-eight. And was that when the hallucinations began, 496? Could be, sir, could be. And those comrades of yours who set the explosives, acting, we believe, with no ill intention: would you describe your attitude toward them as one of resentment? No, sir. Does anything lead you to believe that they could have acted out of malice, or that they may in fact have known the whereabouts of your unit? Nothing at all, sir. The explosives guys were just following orders, sir, doing their duty. (Their orders, their duty, their overweening fear, their empty stomachs, their months without proper sleep, their innate incompetence—AKA the principal defining characteristic of my compatriots.) Further clearing of throats, hushed voices. Then the head honcho, toupee, bushy mustache, raised his wooden, ruby-incrusted hammer and brought it down: Time to come clean, 496! he cries. What, exactly, is your relationship with the Noble Empire of Jakarta?

  78.

  The rats scurried over us and between. Can you hear what they’re saying? asked Kovac. But everyone just ignored him. Nobody wanted to listen to old Albýno Kovac. We had quite enough to deal with, heads stuffed with the competing smells of shit, blood, and rotting meat. It was dawning on us, as we lay there in the rubble, that the rats weren’t the problem. We couldn’t see them, but we felt the weight of them through the suits. Big fuckers. Succulent, you might almost say; the stench around us had done nothing to stop our hunger. The ground shook every now and then, shifting the rubble. We assumed from the continued explosions that we were being looked for, so they gave us a certain hope, but at the same time we knew that each explosion might only have meant we were being buried deeper and deeper. Kovac reckoned it shouldn’t take them more than a couple of days to get us out, because of how close to the treatment plant we were. How did he know how close to the treatment plant we were? The rats. It was the rats, too, who told him when Serrano expired. Kovac, as if in payment for the information, let the rats have free run of Serrano. He ordered me to get the suit off. Yes, I mean it, he said. What does he care now? Am I wrong, Serrano? At least that way the little fuckers will give us a rest, at least for a while. Serrano took his time dying. More than once we thought he’d taken his leave, not a peep for hours, days possibly, then suddenly he’d pipe up again, a low, broken whimper reminding us he was still there, that his half-crushed brain was still clinging on. You, he’d croak, you Atlantika f
uckers, I tell you I need a drink. Followed by a very weird noise, cracked in more ways than one—made me think of a bird of prey calling out, having strayed into some unfamiliar territory. I’d reach my sleeve over to him and squeeze out a few drops of the mixed urines and oxides that the pipes above had been dumping on us from time to time. After one of these, Serrano stopped talking for good. Hard to admit, but what a relief for all concerned. Morgan was trapped beneath a joist, only the top half of his body was free. He clicked his tongue to let us know he was still alive, till one day he blurted out something else instead: Asunción. And I, muscle twitch–like, came back with: Paraguay. Castries, he said, and someone else, a voice from somewhere in the darkness: Saint Lucia! Stanley, I cried, and the walls sent back a ghostly, Falklands. Honiara: Solomon Islands. Tarawa: Republic of Kiribati. Siukville, said a voice from somewhere in the depths. And again: Siukville. To no answer. Where the hell is Siukville, I wailed eventually, and, since it wasn’t possible for Morgan to laugh with that amount of cement and earth constricting his body, he gave a tired few tongue clicks instead. Click, click, click. I did manage a laugh, though the echoing cavernous spaces around us turned the laugh to something pained, a lament. I couldn’t have cared less and went on making the same sound, same lament, louder and louder, more as a way to override the buzzing noise than wanting to fill in gaps in our geopolitical knowledge, because suddenly it was as though the ancient nun had appeared among us, calling us by the names she never learned, could never be bothered to learn, calling out from the depths of some body of water, very deep, very still, that rose occasionally—only very occasionally—so that we were nearly engulfed.

  79.

  It’s close to midday. Birds, waves. Clara can’t stand the light, snarls at me to shut the blinds. She still has the ragged bra in her hands. Again with the fabric, the elastics. And the click, click, click. In Clara’s mind, extreme hunger is the way of the ascetic, a path leading to a certain kind of order. As though the density of you, and the grime, have to be gotten rid of before you can disappear. Before the stone crashes into the earth, cracking open its molten core: before I can get up and go out, thrusting open the door. But lo, Clara, the way she’s breathing, her dull, untidy plaits, all tell me she’s mislaid something she doesn’t believe in: she’s lost nothing, a portion of nothing, a unit of nothing, like the grimy nothing-coins scattered across the room, the nothing-dogs and their nothing-barking, like nothing-China and the nothing-vases it produces. I watch her going on, in silence. Then something comes into my body. The echo of something breaking, or barking, though bearing in mind the stone, it’s sure to be nothing. I’ve got to go. I don’t run, I push the door carefully the rest of the way, just about avoiding making any noise. Shut it behind me. She doesn’t even ask where I’m going, because she’s sure I’ll be back. And the sound of the door clicking shut could be the sound of anything. But the stone takes the sound into it. It swallows it up.

  80.

  Nobody wanted to hear what Kovac had to say. Not even the rats. Kovac didn’t care: emotional diarrhea had kicked in. His only seeming concern was to make sure he lodged his final imaginings with someone, that someone being us. In the end it was he who took me back to the hillsides of Manaslu, speaking in hallucinogenic Sherpa tongues, apparently spurred into expression by the approach of death. I had been there before. Familiar to me, the temperate coastal places, the intricate metalwork, the palisades wrought from jade. All the while Kovac, my guide, gave me an encyclopedic rundown of more or less everything that had happened to him in childhood, the gross generosity of detail of a dead man: getting hooked earlier than most on Vakapý; son of a miner’s son; his first love; first heartbreak; the ’29 campaign; the year Ñandú III was crowned champion; seeing that his destiny truly was on the Vakapý court; Ñandú III’s “Sugar Aħaka” year, dubbed by the sports journalists of the day as owner of “the sweetest swing imaginable”; all the skirts he chased at that time, all the epic nights out; tabloid attention; Ñandú III’s sponsorship by a famous brand of matches with a dandy-looking indigene on the box; the matchboxes a collector’s item, moms, dads, Albýnos, and natives alike collecting them, everyone but everyone wanting a piece of Ñandú III; and later, in the same narrative loop he kept up for untold hours, slipping back and forth between digressions and facts and minor facts, his great yarn, he described his fabled debut in the Anguĵa: the frescos that used to adorn the Hall in those days, the Ovid-like scenes on the murals, the revolving bar, the queues for the betting counters, the winners demanding their money the instant it was won, the rusted locker-room doors, the open gangster involvement in the outcomes of matches, the just as open racism and discrimination, and finally a description of the season finale, which was decided by the swing of a lesser plaýer’s aħaka, a dark (in fact pigmentless) horse of Atlantikan Vakapý. There were gaps in his story, small chinks between which you could catch a glimpse of the high plains and plateaus, the small lake surrounded by smooth boulders, the covering of snow, the steepness of the slopes beyond, and the peak itself, high up in the clouds, impossible to make out with the naked eye.

  81.

  “As before: an exterminator does not eliminate rats upon catching them. When the trapped rats screech, it attracts more rats. You have to be patient, stay very calm. The whole world could collapse but you just wait. Hear them screeching? Not yet, stay put. Wait for more to gather, then go for it. That’s what Morgan showed me.”

  82.

  When I came to, Kovac was burbling—something about a labyrinth. I don’t know how he managed to get us to that place, or how long the journey took. The form formerly known as Serrano was by now about half the size. We had not died yet, of which I’m sure because Kovac’s story was so deathly boring: on and on it went, ungainly, full of pointless detail, of repetitions and half repetitions and sloping accumulations, so that the audience of rubble and rats and us, to all intents and purposes moribund—frangible, riddled with sickness, fodder for something—after seven days trekking through the snow had sunk down into a liturgy-like rhythm, a march, going on and on, but at the same time around and around, around in ever-so-slightly-deviating circles, veering out and in imperceptibly, crossing back and forth haphazardly over other contiguous circles, raveling, no stimulus other than the difficulty of making our way around or over or through that boundless geometry. As the possible paths multiplied, so the space inside our prison grew ever more constricted. Likely, very likely, we had all by now been infected. Kovac, yammering on. Gulping up our oxygen in one final diversion. We couldn’t bring ourselves to shut him up, but nor were we ready to take his place. He’d go on until he ran dry, or until his words had made shriveled husks of us. Even the dead ends he ventured down, as well as the rambling digressions that went so wildly astray that they lost all contact with whatever he had been saying immediately before, even these he found some way to prolong, skirting around any subject or notion of logical order that might allow us to orient ourselves. I now believe that Kovac, fever-mad and short on oxygen, had perhaps taken it upon himself to provide a condensed version of all the stories ever told, the nub, the rub, so that his own verbosity would become an end in itself, irreducible, and truly 1:1 in scale.

  83.

  So then, continued Kovac, the king of the Albýnos had ordered the construction of an underground labyrinth. A stone with which to kill several birds: creating a barrier with the aggressive southern tribes, for example, but also a legacy, something for people to remember him by. It was by no means a spur-of-the-moment idea: he also envisaged it as the most technically advanced creation in Albýno history, and the completion of such a monument a cause for celebration among his people and the envy of all outsiders. It was to be an impregnable labyrinth. Though the king was known for his calm and levelheaded nature, a part of him was conscious of the risk in such an undertaking. Nonetheless he decided to proceed. His name would go down in the annals as a leader of great accomplishments, a philanthropist king; not only would there be a
place for him in the pantheon of Albýno nobility but also among that of all great latter-day monarchs. The Royal Hydraulics Committee immediately set to work, inviting tenders from the best architects. In the teahouses and skin bars of the country, the talk was of little else. The man who succeeded in building the perfect labyrinth would be rewarded with all the gold from the largest mine in the land. Within weeks the first proposal was presented at the palace, and others soon followed, differing wildly in quality and hailing from the least expected corners of the known world. They came accompanied with offerings for the king—jewels, extravagant cloths, spices—but the designs themselves, to a one, were of the utmost simplicity: gardens of winding paths, cheap trompe l’oeils, traps and tricks to please a child. Nothing the king was satisfied with. As time passed he even began to feel that each jewel and incense-decked chest took him away from the reality of the construction he had first seen in his mind’s eye. Soon—and in disproportion to the ever-decreasing number of offerings and tenders that arrived—rumors about the fragility of his mental health began to spread. Feeling himself far from the world already, he quit the court and went into a kind of exile, taking up residence in the tallest tower in the palace. In his solitude he came to think that the architects’ inability to create the perfect labyrinth was in fact down to the question he had asked, or the way he had formulated it: he had posed it as a problem of spatiality and not of language. Maps, paths, layouts: none of the architects had been able to resolve the fundamental question of the labyrinth; they had each been seeking a spatial resolution to a problem of a different order altogether. They were overly concerned with beginnings and ends. A way in, a way out. Was that all it was? Would he allow his great life’s work to be reduced to such generalities? Months alone in the tower led him to conclude that each of the sketches before him was but a replication of each architect’s logical mind: these labyrinths had all been resolved in advance, and this was precisely how they had come to exist, at least on these sheets of paper. This is a labyrinth, said one of his ministers (said Kovac) the day they decided to break down the door to the tower to be confronted with a cadaverous, unkempt individual, his nails and beard long: he had renounced his rule until such a time as he found a solution to the torture he himself had instigated. Reams and reams of parchment lay around him, miles of it, and in the gloom—and in spite of the ministers’ excellent Albýno eyesight—they looked like nothing so much as great piles of ermine rugs. In reality the hide scrolls were covered in the most intricate of script: thousands, millions of dashes and marks in red and blue, the red column on the left, the blue on the right. What is a labyrinth? asked the king. A labyrinth, Your Majesty, said one minister, is a place composed of paths that twist, fork, and overlap in such a way as to mislead any person entering therein. But the way out, said the king, is not something one should be concerned with: perhaps only the labyrinth itself ought to concern itself with questions of ways out. But, Majesty, with no way out and no promise of ever finding that way out, one would have a prison and not a labyrinth. These explanations, cried the king, who is it that speaks them? What is their relationship with the labyrinth—what order of importance do they possess in relation to the labyrinth? Are you a labyrinth? No, Your Majesty. Blaggard, you do not know that for certain. Truly: the perfect labyrinth has self-awareness, or comes to develop it. It adopts its guests, and these in time become the labyrinth itself, while at the same time new labyrinths take shape inside them, do you see? That thing you call a way out is but one more junction among so many others. It has nothing to do with the space separating in and out, which these upstarts seek to complicate in a purely linear way, but rather with the nature of the movement of things in that space, and what is lost—or found—there. Let us consider that the purpose of these entities, disoriented, trying to find their way, may derive not from what they do inside the labyrinth, but the other way round: their purpose determines which, out of all the experiences, will comprise the labyrinth. And it was then that the king understood that the ministers were bound forever to disappoint him, because to them any notion of space had first to pass through the filter of scientific knowledge; to them a labyrinth was a projection of specific volumes and mass, of somewheres: abstraction and rational process, over and above a field in which various bodies interact. A labyrinth, he concluded, is nothing but a way of seeing, just as seeing is a way of being in the world. And he also knew then that no architect would ever be able to do what he needed, and, with the help of the ministers, he got to his feet, giving the order for his court painter to be summoned.