90.
This city has two great enemies: dogs and winds. Of the former there are far too many. The next pandemic is sure to come via the canine gene. Which animal shall we domesticate in order to exterminate the dog for us? We’ll find a way, I fear. The wind, however, cannot be brought to heel: it gets inside your mind; it muddies and muddles and wreaks its marled havoc. One massive airflow comes down from the eastern Sierra, picking up all manner of sediment along its westerly way, before being confronted by an onshore wind the moment it hits Atlantika. Therein its potency. It dries out the land, it lays waste to the flora. It ties you in nervous knots before yanking your sanity out wholesale. In the later part of the day, only a light ambient buzzing—not much different from the gnawing of rats in the telephone wires. But then, once night descends, something closer to a static roar sets in: I imagine a slaughterhouse at dawn, in the moments before the meat is distributed, as the long line of pigs begins to thin and the hormones and the sweat and the smell of blood send the animals into strange attitudes, strange teeth grinding, heaving noises drawn from their snouts. Then plastic, then methodicalness. But not here; here the wind is all. The winters are the worst: people just don’t go out. The life of our public spaces, and of the stones comprising them, depends on the summer pursuits of visiting tourists. Some years, the February cold extends well into spring, and though the sun begins to show its face, and though a little humidity enters the air once more, the wind in its raw and roaring state does not desist. It tells us what to do. It is a matter of some seriousness for the inhabitants of this city.
91.
I come out of the vision, or go back to it. One or the other. Clara sets herself, focuses. She is thinner than ever, thanks to the latest catastrophe in this our great city: it’s springtime (just like now) and suddenly the coastal waters have stopped producing fish. Most years, the fisherfolk spend all day out on the water, from before dawn until dusk, before separating the catch at the docks and getting royally drunk down there too. But this isn’t most years. A year of sickness. Still they get up in the dark, in spite of the anguish of their sleepless nights, in spite of the almost total absence of food on tables, the interminable protests organized by the Unions, who knows whether they are playing for time, or attempting to come to terms with the loss, or, less likely, trying to find some way out of this incident—this is the way people have been referring to it, the incident, as though wanting to avoid naming it, or wanting to name it only by omission, not coupling it with the concrete fact suggested by our shared history, an incident, they say, in order to give it a possibly irregular and ill-defined form, but a form all the same: the incident begins to take shape in the lee of the palm tree sheltering the protestors from the rain. Its artificiality and its consensual nature are one and the same, given that its form, its true shape, is silence—is it not? And it therefore is named on the basis of its extremities or outer lineaments, which themselves originate in what is not really known: in the afflicted looks of the five or six boatmen sitting in a circle on chairs rocked by the waves, in the circumlocutions that prove to be the outer edges of circumlocutions, in understanding one another perfectly, all understanding that, from a certain moment, everything they might discuss or omit will relate irremediably to the incident. When the ever-present bottle is nearly empty and all gossip and small talk of the day has been covered or has simply ceased to matter in the sudden cool of the encroaching darkness, when the sun has set on the implements of their trade, ridiculous rods and tackle in a time when there is nothing for rods and tackle to haul from the water, only then may the incident be addressed with the necessary care. Ignoring it outright would be nearly as vulgar as trying to give it a precise name. But still they try to do both. And the attempts are vulgar but give them a lift all the same. To avoid the sun ever catching them with feet on dry land is part of an overall and intuitive effort to save themselves; stubbornness and superstition are all they know. And yet the best they manage is a few horse mackerel—on a good day. Anything else brought up in the nets is worthless. Days go by, and the catches remain at record lows. The younger guys are the first to throw in the towel: the pull of the waters has yet to embed itself in them, and they sell off their boats and all their gear and either head up into the Sierra or take a bus to the capital to try their luck in one of the factories or in the kiosks. It’s all over the papers: “Fish Prices Soar.” They say there’s none left. That finally the Atlantik has stopped producing. This is a place in which people live not only on what the sea provides but also in the manifold occupations that accompany the servicing of it, and panic quickly sets in. Looting, cars being burned, scenes reminiscent of the time the Department of Hygiene denied that the Ź-Bug had gotten out of control. At that point all and sundry, mothers, fathers, brothers, and any grannies they could press into service, came out onto the streets to abuse us, to smash shop fronts and bus stops while the news crews came out in almost equal force to film the placards and the pictures of the deceased and the pictures of those who had disappeared. Fucking plumber scum! they screamed, as glass and dung rained down. When it was us—nobody else!—who had gone and gathered up the bodies of their children! Obviously the Atlantik, for the people who take their name from it, is a delicate subject—just as delicate and mysterious as the Bug. Up there, maybe even, with Vakapý. The Fishing and Marine Resources Department refuses to take responsibility. It’s unusual in the extreme for a public body to openly give in like this: far more usual for their kind simply to lie and say everything’s fine, they can handle it, they are in fact handling it, despite appearances. And with no head, unsurprisingly enough, the body quickly begins to fall apart: in this case, a wholesale failure to regulate sailing times, chaos in the chartering of vessels, no security measures at the docks, and an abrupt end to the usual muster of sailors. Even the most corrupt of the union bosses start to worry that their private stockpiles won’t see them through winter. One of the few fishermen who has stuck at it carries on getting up in the dark, rolls up his nets, cleans his hooks, checks and calibrates the rigging. He creeps out of the house, trying not to wake his wife, and rows away from the harbor. It is a day spent alone in the eye of a storm that only he can perceive. It is day after day spent in this way: casting his line, waiting. Wind- and wave-buffeted, each bearing down on him with his noticing—like rabbit punches in boxing, delivered repeatedly and in the end devastatingly to the back of the head, jeopardizing your spinal cord. Then one day he comes home to find his wife not there. On this particular day he’s back in daylight: he has decided to return early in an attempt to confirm or rule out recent nagging suspicions. These days and weeks at sea—the only thing that has gotten him through them are his constant thoughts of different ways to kill her. There is no particular basis to his suspicions, rather a certain asymmetric congruence, the same conviction that has convinced him the only way to end this is restitution has led toward the tragic denouement. She isn’t home: guilty. Unbeknownst to him, she’s gone out for sugar. He takes a leisurely look around their little shack to check she isn’t there—nope, nobody is—then decides to sit down and wait. What a bother it would have been to come up with another explanation. The wife returns shortly before nightfall to find him sitting on the armchair with the orange sailcloth upholstery. The moment she’s within striking range he falls on her, a flash of the descaling knife. Later on, he dumps the body out at sea. Nobody comes around asking where she is. A number of weeks pass and a fisherman—not him—brings the tattered corpse up in his nets. Newspapers across the region cover the story, and it lingers even in those of the capital city for a couple of days. As the motives are picked over and blame apportioned, the two fishermen each go on the defensive: the one everyone assumes did it, the husband, and the one who had the shitty luck of discovering the body. Then the reporters go back to their respective cities and the world once more forgets about this self-important little town. But, strangest of all, the surfacing of the dead woman is followed by a return to the Atlantik�
��s prodigious fish-producing ways: it immediately starts spitting enormous, unprecedented specimens into the nets. People don’t even have to take boats out to secure the incredible catches: fish start to appear, unabetted, in the bays and inlets all along this stretch of the Atlantik. A story I forgot all about, until a day came (also in spring) when Clara and I were walking by the docks, and she pointed a man out. He wasn’t the standout feature of the scene that presented itself to us: he was standing next to a rich boat owner, the real focal point in the midst of a large crowd. The boat owner, dripping in gold, had a couple of assistants with him, sent down by a sardine-fishing company in the North, and was wearing a pair of bottle-green glasses, a woolly hat with a golden trim, and a magnetic bracelet on his wrist. Also, around his neck, a cravat made of semitransparent silk with an exotic pattern: a pair of dogs eating each other’s tails. He was standing on a small dais fashioned out of crates, and the tips of his deck shoes, polished to a high gleam, rested on the prow of a small boat while the crowd pretended to hang on his every word. Speech over, the non-standout man handed him a bottle of sparkling wine that the boat owner then smashed against the side of the boat. The crowd clapped. What a joke; I wanted to die of embarrassment, vanish, for the waters to rise and swallow me. But Clara told me to look again, not at the sailor but at the man who had passed him the bottle. There was nothing to distinguish him: a supporting actor in every sense. Came out of prison a few months ago, Clara said. The jury blamed it on the wind. The Atlantik-Farers Union soon appointed him Spokesperson, then Deputy Representative. If he plays his cards right, he’s gonna have a nomination for Rep to the Fishing and Marine Resources Department, right at the top. So it goes, I said. Clara stood looking out across the water.
92.
Morgan deserted a few days after being given the all clear by the medics. He’d been talking about setting out again, resuming the journey. The twinkle in his eye was a giveaway, that gelatinous, distant gleam, like the fish you see at market laid out on the ice in hottest August: I knew he was on his way. He was like that for several days and then disappeared, didn’t even bother to make it official with a letter. His disappearing acts were pretty common by then. He’d go, he’d come back, little explanation. We were on body-gathering duties again. The Ź-Bug was into its final stages, but the bodies were just as dead as the first ones had been. He made his getaway while we were carrying out a routine operation on Cordillera Hill, which had by now been converted into the Zone CH trash-processing area in the Heroes of ’58 Housing Project. To be honest, Cordillera Hill had always been a dump anyway. We found his hazmat suit in a skip on our way back from the inspection site. Nobody was overly worried, not even me. I pictured him, still in the undersuit, running off between the scattered needles, latex gloves tied at the thumbs, ash-covered urinals. Later on it occurred to me that in this reckless dash, surgical mask still covering his mouth, the big work boots on his feet and antireflective tape strapped all over his body, Morgan would have resembled one of those extraterrestrials whose movements and motivations he claimed such intimate knowledge of. We used to get bussed from ĦQ to an inspection site and back, and that day the return journey was interrupted by me standing in the middle of the road. The driver honked his horn. You don’t want to spend the night in a place like this, he called down to me. We’re missing a guy, I said; we can’t go without him. But he didn’t know who Morgan was, he’d never heard of him. At ĦQ that night, our unit captain read out his name a couple of times, just twice, before crossing it out. A couple of lines in ink was enough to bury him: Morgan ceased to exist. Three days after his disappearance his locker was assigned to a new recruit, a talkative type. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the tunnels. About the explosion, the nights down below, the Bug. His head was full of stories. Kovac, who had only partially recovered his sight, acted as though he was also deaf. The new boy had heard that only one of us survived the explosion—half survived—and he was dying to shake him by the hand. People said, he said, that the brigađiers had eventually been forced to eat one another, and that the last survivor had started in on his own body before he was pulled out—had started with his right arm. He wanted, had to, was dying to know more. I felt like telling him not to worry, that the worst was past. That the Ź-Bug was on its last leg, that people died in the tunnels, yes, but they were dying above ground too. But something prevented me. Killing rats, I said to the new boy, taking them out in the tunnels and in the grain stores and in the slaughterhouses, is a respectable job, respectable as any job you’ll find, and not just that: it’s a way of being somebody in the world, kiddo. I told him about Morgan—the guy who’d survived—and about his vision of the exterminator’s office as one of the fine arts, about the day he broke the rat-collecting record, about how as a kid he’d go and steal mini pinwheels and bangers from the Chinese stalls at market, about Zermeño, Birdface Helguera, Fatty Muñoz, the Page Three stash, about the time el Chino Okawa was stupid enough to say something about Birdface’s mother and Morgan had to drag him the length of the schoolyard on his face until his face was like meatballs, and not because Morgan was upset about the insult, far from it, but because in order to rule, you have to set down the rules, boundaries that no bastard may transgress, boundaries that are there even if you can’t see them, even if it’s all smiles and pats on the back, and that by the mere fact of their existence, by giving the appearance of a beginning and an end, and of an amniotic zone, why don’t we call it that, in between, become elemental, elemental in the sense that if any bastard should infringe them at all, even just a mini, minute, miniscule infringement, then a punishment has to come down, regardless of whether said transgressive bastard knew of said elemental boundary rule, or was just, whatever, preoccupied. Kovac squinted up at me, eyelashes like alabaster pins. He wanted to talk as well. To tell the new guy about the noises, all the advances he’d been making in his theory of furtive rat language. But the new boy was mine now, mine, all mine. Kovac was going to have to find some other sucker to lead into his mountains. Some other fool who wanted to go back. You can always find one or two of them, oh, just busting to go back. All stories are, to some extent, a return. That night, before going into the mess for dinner, I was suddenly aware of the pressure of my tongue pushing against my teeth, poking them, nudging them contrariwise to the gums. The gums themselves had a rubbery consistency, rubberlike elasticity. The space between each of my teeth grew wider and my tongue was identical to that of a lizard: forked halfway along. I spied the new boy ahead of me, just going into the mess hall. Catching up with him, I placed a hand on his shoulder. Hey, kid, I said, just one thing: patience. That’s what you need in this job, patience. It’s no good going rushing in the second you hear the first little squeak, screech, or scratch. No, no. If you can learn to wait, you’ll go far: any sap knows how to blow a tunnel to smithereens, not all of them have got what it takes to wait for the right moment. Could be that you’ve got talent, kid. This job isn’t for jokers, right? The people need us. It’s us keeping this city on its feet. Can you imagine where they’d be without us? Propping up a pile of rotting corpses, that’s where. Pure and simple. Listen to the rats. Sing to them—and hear how they sing back. Who’s to say they won’t be naming streets after you one day?
93.
“Dogs have color vision, but they don’t perceive all the same colors as us. They go around in relative darkness. Also that means they can see ghosts. And earthquakes.”
94.
The following summer, after the Ź-Bug’s definitive defeat was announced, tourism returned to Atlantika. The strain had been stabilized, and a vaccine rolled out. It must have been the wind. Rats are susceptible to the wind as well. It was the wind that finished them off, must have been. We were in the papers, and on TV too—“Pied Pipers of Hamlýtika,” they called us. But we didn’t do shit: it was the wind. Nonetheless some praise was heaped; you could blame the wind for things, not really place a garland around its neck. Once the quarantine was lif
ted and people started returning to their homes and their normal lives, the normal vicissitudes of life came back too, all the little issues, good health and time allowing, that you can plague yourself with. Street cleaners stopped bringing in dead children, the cemetery became a place of peace once more, and we were forgotten about. Since the day I took off my hazmat suit, I haven’t seen a single rat in the streets.
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