Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  95.

  I have an idea: break the stone up into smaller fragments and use each of the fragments as noise traps. An idea, I ought to point out, that I haven’t plucked out of the air, but that’s based on the same mathematics that govern the trajectories of the Vakapý ball, and indeed the probabilities spawned by each and every shot. If we run the correct tests, look at the air currents, maybe do a few scale models, I’m convinced that we can come up with the precise coniguration of these traps. Particularly at the times when humidity levels become unbearable, we’d be able to reduce the effect of the torrents of air that are a tyranny in our streets. You’d still be able to feel the warm blocks of air rushing about, crashing into one another, but the attendant noise would be negligible. In the lee of each fragment, placed strategically where the winds come in most strongly, you would have sanctums of quiet reaching as high as the tops of the palm trees: a protective belt some fifteen by three hundred meters. The suicide rate would drop, without question. And for my scientific brilliance, the keys to the city: mine. Thereafter, the birth of me as political animal, the emergence of my public-spirited, popular-servant self, bursting forth in a way everyone wishes it could burst forth in or from themselves: this, in reality, being our favorite part of ourselves. No two ways around it: our greatest vice lies in our need to serve. The party elects me leader. My first official act, probably, erecting a statue in honor of the exterminators. A monument to those fallen doing their civic duty—this is in gold lettering at the foot of the great man, his belt studded with many dead rats. Yes. I hit the hustings, reeling out the same catchphrase time after time, until, before my penultimate speech, a shrewd consultant, some genius of the campaign trail, tells me to drop the thing about my time in the Ź-Brigađe. Comrade, he says, the people don’t like slaughter and death, all of that. Then, following the customary vote rigging, there’s a hiccup in the ordering of the multimember districts and I bomb out of the race, or I let myself bomb out, because the party then has the chance to come to my rescue, giving the guy who won my seat a department to oversee, not a big department but one that comes with a number of perks, including an office with two windows of its own and ten days’ paid vacation a year. Several terms later, following a respectable, nay, distinguished tenure, I get a boulevard with my name on it. Oh, an artery rather discreet in length and moderate in flow of traffic and persons, broken at a couple of points by roundabouts, roundabouts, truth be told, put in those places out of sheer random caprice over and above any feeling or consideration for the geometrical requirements of the road network. So there is the need to come to terms with its humble dimensions, the slightness of the honor: four benches, two wheelchair ramps, a central reservation overrun by ferns. That is all—that is me. The blocks along which my boulevard runs, what is more, fall under a new regulation stipulating that each of the diverging streets must firstly be reinforced by fragments of the stone, and secondly must diverge at precise forty-five-degree angles from the principal thoroughfares of the Old Town. Just at the point where First Street begins, just south of that axis and positioned north-south, a bronze plaque is the forerunner to the eventual bust that will take my place in the world once I have gone. Thus the efficient practices in this country—history, civic responsibility, and geography—all ticked in the same box: all prosperous citizens have the right to be reincarnated as a statue. As for Clara, who by now takes the form of stone fragments, or traps, if one prefers, she’ll hang in pieces from every tree, a hundred little Clara-bells for the city, the smell of her will inundate my junctions and she will protect me from the ravages of airborne chlorine, oxygen, and brine. Again, it will all happen again, floods, droughts, freezes, hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues of locusts and rats: they will keep on coming, but not a single soul will stand up to accept the blame. Our fear is to be directed solely at these microscopic particles, microscopic but substantial all the same, caused by the disintegration of some consumable, possibly the clouds that come about in the grinding down, or otherwise disintegration of solid minerals carried on the wind. There that bust will stand, as proof of the efficiency of our systems, a head with time always to spare, no place to be, paused in midair in the middle of a boulevard where the wind does not, cannot blow. And it will be Clara, only Clara, who upholds the integrity of this area of calm, in the very place where the Bug first arose.

  96.

  Addendum to idea: when I ask for my boulevard to have its very own median and for this median to be fitted in turn with a row of banana trees, Dos Bocas banana trees, the Secretary for Hydraulic Resources and Social Wellbeing gives me a tender look and exclaims: Don’t push your luck.

  97.

  In spite of the name, Zulaýma de Garay Boulevard is a pissy little alleyway lined with bright-red gravel. Every footstep raises a little clayey puff, until soon my gum boots are caked in it. The sky, in contrast, is wan and washed out: over the deserted huts on the shoreline, it could almost comprise a chunk of some kind of dissolvent. The huts lead haphazardly in the direction of the Heroes of ’58 Housing Project, just about visible in the distance. The vision also affords shimmering snatches of ventilation units: though the homes are still too far away to be entirely visible, each seems to have an air-conditioning apparatus tacked on. Each is also possessed of its own peculiar sound, which depends on the materials that have been used in its construction, the number of people living in it and the kinds of things they get up to, and the camber of each plot. To one side of these homes, the inlet, and to the other, a bare hill of blackish, blasted soil and cinder paths leading between a slum of cardboard and corrugated-iron shacks. Of the temple that stood here fifteen hundred years in the past, where the natives sacrificed goats, virgins (not very often), and, of course, children, no trace. A couple of presidential terms ago, Housing and Welfare made the decision to turn the area nowadays known as Cordillera Hill into a project: twenty-eight identical subsidized tenement lodgings. The lucky ones, those who turned in their registrations in time, were then crammed in together with their families, distant relations included, friends and vague acquaintances included, in the single-person “transition huts” that were provided. Getting up to Cordillera Hill on foot is easier said than done, so I stand and wait for a bus to come. And stand and wait. And in the end decide to walk, worried above all about the goons from the Department of Chaos and Gaming catching me flat-footed, with the coupon from Señora Albýno#2460 on my person. As I advance, the project reveals itself in sections. In the far distance, at the center of the grid of gated sections, stands CH. It so happened that the inauguration of the project coincided with the abolition of ch as the fourth letter of the official alphabet, due to the fairly obvious fact that ch isn’t one letter but two, and after that the Environment Agency had to get involved in order for the section with the now-defunct letter designating it to be used as a dump, in order to save the Housing Department from further ridicule while simultaneously falling in line with the new eco-policies that ever since then have been the nonnegotiable credo of a tiny but voluble portion of the city’s populace. A third, perhaps center, position between the Magnetiźed and the Chrysaliđs, concerned about dwindling natural resources and forever putting forward innovative technologies to renew them. A metal sign with CH in large letters, presided over by an image of an angry toucan, tells me I’ve arrived. I cast my eye over the enclosing wall: slogans and candidate lists for upcoming elections run the length of its brickwork, which overlooks and provides a kind of corral for the great mound of burning trash inside. Around its edges stand dozens of houses fashioned from anything and everything that falls by the wayside of the dump. A number of years ago, a documentarian from the capital tried to sell a story, plainly false, about the people in CH providing themselves with food from the pickings at the dump. No, no, that doesn’t happen: there’s plenty for everyone to eat, there’s the CH sandwich quota, don’t you know. All kinds of plenty, sure, sure. Which means that, though they live in the very epicenter of the infection, they can’t co
mplain: they get free sandwiches, there’s a permanent rent freeze, and their windows, though boarded up, overlook the lovely Atlantik itself.

  98.

  I am going to meet up with the boys. To look for them. The door to 395-B, section CH, Heroes of ’58 Housing Project, is of strange construction: studded metal, with paint (once upon a time flag green, though now closer to squashed-olive gray) coming away in strips, and identical in size, design, and materials as 395-A and 395-C, which stand to either side—identical, also, to the doors to the rest of the tumbledown huts in CH. All molding and deteriorating under the caustic influence of the filthy air in the environs of the dump fires. The peephole, which is crooked and too low down to show anything but a portion of the visitor’s stomach, must have some kind of mirror system rigged into it, some way of hiding the resident at the moment he or she comes to the door. A terrible moment for both parties, with the one behind the door given little option but to open it and confront the intruding presence, and the one outside having to stand and wait—has he just seen a shadow, something, moving inside? What could be behind the door? An animal of some kind? Or did he imagine it, and really no one’s in? Maybe someone is, but she or he hasn’t heard, is in the shower or enjoying her or his favorite Vakapý-related show on TV. After waiting for a while, shifting on his heels, trying not to think about the passing minutes, those passing minutes nonetheless add up and begin to weigh on him, weigh so much that something breaks—or is about to break, because there it is again: the shadow moving beyond the peephole. Someone breathing? An eye blinking but trying not to blink as the person inside is shocked to realize their eyelashes in motion may give her or him away? But the door is not answered. The form to which the shadow belongs does not step forward. I knock for a fifth time, five times more forcefully now, and though the door doesn’t appear to have been fully closed, it does not budge. And that means I can’t be completely sure that what the stone has shown me is accurate: that on the other side of this door there is a beautiful, immaculately finished room, wonderful polished-cedar surface and flooring—Kashmiri cedar. The coupon from Señora Albýno#2460: that’s my ticket to get inside. Should anyone challenge my presence. Why am I here: here, this is why. I can feel them: on the other side of all of these doors, eyes, millions of eyes, like glimmering blue and red dots, looking out at me. A flicker of light appears at the edge of the door, as though a presage to the storm. A little wider. I step inside, slowly. And there it is before me, the valley: multicolored prayer flags in the distance, hoisted, fluttering like birds at play, between the tops of the poles and the stones in a line.

  99.

  The golden city, with its pavilions and watchtowers, what has become of it? All that remains is the snow, so red and uneven. I discern lines, marks. Foundations. Strange: my feet leave no tracks. The snow reforms each time I pick up a foot, draws back together as if nobody has been here. I must have gone the wrong way, I think. I’ve been away so long—I refused to come back for such a long time—that must be why. Or because I’ve come back blindly, feeling my way—I didn’t actually know I was coming back at all.

  -1.

  The valley may be many miles long, but the storm has reduced the visibility such that each step becomes a leap of faith: though generally I keep my hands wrapped around me, hugging myself to conserve heat in the swirling icy flurries, I can barely see them if I do lift them in front of my face. As the incline steepens, the path narrows, worming its way up a defile with sleet water running down the banked snow on either side: coursing redly by, no rucks or crests at all, it gives the impression of lava stopped midflow. The glacier above, also brightest red, from which this water descends, is a vague looming shape through the blizzard; in less hostile weather, it serves as a beacon by which to orient oneself, but for now I must rely on the punched holes in the coupon, which I remove from my pocket at intervals; they are my only guide. Then again, a poor guide: the scaling of the tiny perforated coupon-map is either off or for some other reason impossible to transfer onto my physical surroundings. Onto this situation. I pat my coat where I normally keep my compass, but it’s gone, and then, here, here, my provisions bag, my climbing rope, the ice axe, and the crampons—all gone. I pause, momentarily knocked off my stride, before continuing to climb. Soon I reach the crevice. It’s very narrow: I drop onto my haunches and inch myself inside, barely. But it still seems worth stopping, waiting for the storm to pass, difficult as the wait may turn out to be, particularly because I am unsure how high up the valley I’ve come. The problem being that I’ll freeze to death. I wait, I wait, and the cold begins to feel like splinters in my bones. I think of collagen hardening between cartilages. I think of my icelike joints and bony tissue, stalactites inside me. I think of Clara and go on thinking about her, am still thinking about her when suddenly the ground begins to shake, a rumbling tremor, the bank of snow surrounding the crevice suddenly dangerously alive. I try to tell it I haven’t heard it. I try to trick it. But soon, an abrupt dimming of the already scanty light discernible through the opening. An eclipse, is my first thought. An eclipse. Fakir-like, I poke my head out and see it coming. Finally. An enormous wave painting the sky the color of blood.

  -2.

  I am assailed by an image of a man lying on the steps up to the four temple portals, while I, still crouching in the crevice and almost entirely covered in snow, try to keep myself from turning to ice. The man, on his back on the marble steps, arms outstretched, is wearing a hazmat suit, and his helmet visor is steamed up. I see the temple also from the perspective of the prone man: the half-open door he peers in through, the embossed golden serpent, the scales along the belly, large and skillfully rendered—rendered in such a way that they do not seem to register the change as they cross onto the next section of wall, where brick turns to marble, in spite of the alteration in material and the infinity of alterations in the soil beneath, the infinity of years, ruptures, movements, changes in weather: the serpent, the coiling, looping body of the serpent, retains an uncanny uniformity in its appearance all the way along. And now the man, with some effort, sits up, wheezing grimly: not the noise of the magma that continues to stream beneath the temple foundations but that of his cold muscles creaking into motion once more, blood pounding as the invader-oxygen goads it into motion, tissues separating and rejoining, a cracking like that of dry sticks inside the suit, the gum boots, the gloves. When finally he manages to get to his feet, he stands staring at the four portals. No knocker on them, no bell to ring, and only darkness at their edges, and each guarded by a pair of enormous goddesses in dark stone, eight goddesses all representations of the same goddess, the upper halves of the bodies bare and the breasts disproportionately large. He picks one of the doors at random. He thinks he picks one, thinks his choice is random, and thinks that chance prompts him to think these things.

  -3.

  As the glacier continues to erupt around me, icy red floes rushing past, I continue to see the man and am reminded of the ash figures scattered across Upper Curumbý. The nuns took us on an excursion once to see the charred villages. Very educational, that outing, so fantastic: even if the figures in their death throes, and the smell of burned flesh, may somewhat have blurred the experience, those figures are part of our national heritage, monuments to the customs and habits of an era we know little about. You’re not allowed to touch, but at the end of the guided tour, having made your way through the endless shanties and past the petrified forms of their erstwhile inhabitants, you’re given the chance to buy broken-off fingers, fingers found among the remains that, with no blackened body attached, are made available for tourists to take home. The job of harvesting those souvenirs is endless too: a thumb or pinkie beneath every rock you care to pick up. In Upper Curumbý they make a life as stonecutters, and so it is with the man crouching in his niche. Stone-cold bones. Spasmic cadavers, and their natural transformation into works of art, are deeply rooted in Jakartinese culture, as evidenced by the murals that line the interminable passageway
along which the other man now makes his way—having moments earlier crossed one of the thresholds, at random—while the frozen man continues to watch: perhaps by virtue of a predeath dream state, or as part of the connection that exists between death and dream. The man halts every now and then to take in another section of the mural, and having done so a few times—advanced, stopped, and admired—realizes that a single phrase is written repeatedly along the wall, threaded into the design. Though it’s in a language he does not know, he can somehow read it: “And a woman came through the sands to the City.” The faces of the figures, some of which drop away in plaster fragments, also repeat: surrounded by flames, surrounded by frost and snow, run through with spears, sliced away at neck and shoulder, martyrs of plagues and starvation: a moving tour of the natural history of the Noble Empire, exclaims a thundering voice, from inside his head, he at first thinks, from some unidentifiable but certainly finite inner space, somewhere between the first and last portion of the small intestine, to be precise, but that in reality issues from the unidentified bulk on a dais up ahead, a heap covered in a silk cloth, the cypress-wood dais at the end of the down-sloping passageway, past more and more engraved human heads and heads of dogs that hold up the pillars and try, twisting around, to bite his ankles as he passes.

  -4.

  The bulk or heap is neither a bulk nor a heap. I see now. I don’t know what that makes it, and the man doesn’t go over and remove the silk cloth, but it’s also clear that its principle characteristics do not include those of heaps or bulks. What is more, in the moment he takes his eyes off it, it disappears, or rather, just as he starts to take in the detail of the cloth, the colorful, interwoven threads, the artfully hidden knots, semi-invisible as though embroidered long ago, as though embroidered at the beginning of time or maybe even before that and not by human hand, and the lifelikeness of the embroidered dogs that bend back around on themselves to bite their own tails, their teeth sharp and their tongues long and lolling, and the near-perfect surrounding circle that creates the sensation that the rest of the images are caught inside a swirling spiral, though the circle itself is interrupted by what we might call half-worlds or microworlds, starting in the empty borders and continuing, smaller to larger, until they reach a snarled tangle of carrion-eating flowers in the center, in that moment the bulk supposedly lying in a heap-like pile ceases to be there. And where before there had been a rather plain dead-end passageway, now a farther four paths appear. The man carefully considers his options. He takes a step, certain this is the way back to the steps, but coming through the door instead finds himself in a tiled patio, the tiles obscured in places by dun, brownish-gray grass spilling in at the corners and as high as his knees in places. He turns back, and the door has disappeared. He shakes his head: How can that be? The patio’s four walls are the same color as the sky above, which means that as he looks up it is impossible to see where they end and it begins, though something tells him it will not be easy to scale them. Exhausted and as far as he can tell completely trapped, the man crumples to the floor. He starts undoing the suit. The air as it contacts his skin is warm, almost hot. He folds up the suit, places it to one side with boots and gloves, and soon falls asleep. A heavy, easy sleep, so deep and restful that the man, his being, begins to disentangle from his slumbering form. A sleep that exists in the margin of sleep. He is floating. Just a few centimeters off the patio floor at first, but then rising a little higher, and higher, a smooth and accelerating ascent, picking up pace. The sky above gray, but comfortingly gray. He feels no vertigo—the opposite, perhaps. At a certain height, the walls on either side drop away or give way to a transparent, glass-like substance as his sleep-being continues to ascend, so the city is revealed away and below, like a miniature model. And now suddenly the sky, the vaulted surface he thought of as the sky, drops away as well, to be replaced by a darkness, dense and inky black, opacity itself—though, now, sliced asunder by an enormous hand that reaches down toward him. Tremendous hand, tremendous fingers, every crease and wrinkle and fingerprint big as a road, and the dirt beneath the fingernails like enormous swampy expanses. Nor does the giant, of which the only thing he can glimpse is its forearm and hand reaching ponderously through the air, provoke any kind of anxiety in him. No, it’s as though he knows the giant, feels what the giant feels, a quasi affection for the giantness of the giant, such that when it reaches down past him and begins to flatten the homes and buildings of the city, sweeping them aside and causing untold destruction and havoc, a strange feeling of peace blooms inside him, as though none of this has anything to do with him, or with the world.