-5.
When he wakes, the bulk or heap is him. Everything is as it was previously on the patio except for in one of the corners, where someone has installed an improvised dais and hung a length of velvet from a metal bar like a stage curtain. The velvet is threadbare, and the whole thing looks liable to topple at any moment. The man, an able carpenter, finds himself speculating—if speculating is the word when there’s a good deal of fascination in the mix as well—engaged in enthused speculation as to the origin of such inexpertly worked woods. He begins counting rings, comparing the different grains, when a movement on the other side of the curtain catches his eye. His first instinct is to go over and investigate, though his eagerness itself gives him pause: he is suspicious of it. Eagerness of body, he was told long ago, should never go hand in hand with zeal of spirit. It is possible to separate the two, respond differently to one and the other. And yet, and yet, he does go over, he does look: putting his eye up to a gap in the curtain, he is presented with the sight of a group of nuns dancing around what appears to be a bulk, or a heap. No more than twenty of them, though they give the impression of being far more numerous. There isn’t any music, but the dance is a kind of sprightly polka: in pairs, they step right-left-right, and then back the other way, all in unison and in time, left-right-left, forward two paces and back one, and follow a couple of quick heel taps with a single toe tap before spinning about on the spot and giving a little jump to return to their original positions. And then begin again.
-6.
The bulk or heap—surprise, surprise—is not a bulk or heap, it’s a flower. The man observing me, I can sense, thinks I must be a very stupid person. And nonetheless I am surprised, or I give the impression of surprise, who knows. The surprise comes not from inferring that I’m being watched, but at the sight of this large flower, which has no stem but lies flat on the stage, and on the central corolla of which, separated into five lobes, lies a woman, her head on a pillow-like fruit that gives off the smell of rotten flesh. A woman: she, too, wears a habit, but unlike those of the dancing nuns, hers is dazzling white and tight fitting, delineating the contours of her body. I move closer, and the nuns immediately stop their dancing. Their faces, so incredibly lined and wrinkled as almost to obscure the faces themselves, eyes included, put me in mind of those enormous tracts of land that would have existed before the continental drifts that formed the planet’s current geography. They have gone past old age: they are old age itself. A timeframe apart. As though time had ceased to obey physical laws and was now little more than an accumulation, unnecessary, of dead skin. We’ve been expecting you, Jakarta, says the nun closest to me. They step to either side, forming a tunnel for me to pass through. Then I may admire her. So light and insubstantial—she reminds me of Clara. The scissors and a comb are in my hands, and there’s a spray bottle tucked into my belt. But I am afraid to touch her. Afraid that as soon as I do, she will dissolve, or I will. I tell the ancient women that I can’t. I’m sorry, I just don’t have it in me. If I do this, I won’t be able to go back. They all laugh. It’s the only thing I have, the only thing, I try to say, but I can’t seem to speak, and then there is a lock of the novice’s hair in my left hand. Her hair is freezing cold; it hurts my fingers to touch it. I take some pincers and use them, separating the hair into three sections, making one central guide section that serves to establish left and right. Ice begins to crystallize on my fingertips. But the nuns aren’t interested in that: they applaud each snip and fold as though it were a masterstroke, a true KO, another shovelful of earth on my own coffin. Soon my fingers are blue, strands of the novice’s hair form a small black, frosty mound on the floor, and the smell of rotten meat coming from the flower begins to make me dizzy, but the old wrinkly bags go on clapping: the more cuts I make, the more they clap, and I realize I’m not in control, I’m powerless to stop, and the nuns form up and commence the dance again: right-left-right, hop, sidestep, and I snip-snip-snip more quickly, furiously, even, cutting in time to their dance, their heel taps and pauses and the recitation they begin to intersperse with their movements, the pungent ointments that bind their ghostly presences to the music in two-four time, and a long time passes in this way, I don’t know how long, but the novice’s hair seems never-ending, a never-ending abundance, seeming to grow thicker as I go on with my work, and I go on with my work, cutting, cutting, so the void seems to grow, a void anterior to everything, to the stage, to the patio, to all Jakarta, and I think these things as I go on cutting, cutting, not thinking of the hair I’m cutting but thinking of the void: Who shall claim it as their own? Where is it? Then I realize that the dance has stopped, the nuns have gathered around the flower, around us, and they have cutlery in their hands, old, rusty silverware. The cocoon is ready, says one, her voice metallic sounding (like Grandma’s), and before I can make the final cut they fall hungrily on the body and begin to tear it to pieces. This, then, is what it is to need. A slight variation on fury. They tear off handfuls of her and stuff the handfuls in their mouths. And in spite of the great rends and gashes in her body, the novice doesn’t bleed, though when one of the nuns raises a fork high and plunges it in, her eyes fly open. Eyes of stony black, thinks the man from his place in the room, while simultaneously becoming aware of a number of microscopic bugs that surge forward out of the flower and begin to feed on the scraps of flesh. The meat dropping from the maws of the nuns will serve to make new lives and new deaths, but my attention is focused almost entirely on the way the nuns ingest this fare, by the machines for ingesting they have become, even though their gums are bare of teeth.
-7.
The bulk or heap, as suspected, is neither. When the man lifts the silk sheet (a type of silk produced only by worms in neighboring Cambodia), a model of the city is revealed. A place he remembers being in. He recognizes the large body of water to one side of it, the abandoned sports stadium, the main square, the mill, the dockyards, the residential area. A place he has been to, but long ago—so long ago that, though he recognizes the intricately rendered buildings, it is beyond him to picture the people who lived in the city, what they are like in physical appearance. They are represented in the model by bedbugs that, though domesticated, scuttle away and hide at the sight of him. The city was part of an ancient civilization, he remembers, home to a people of singular rapaciousness that frequently teetered close to extinction. But the pet bedbugs have a relatively easy life. Just now, he can see them copulating inside the tiny houses. Not just copulating: putting on full pornographic spectacles, all manner of obscenities. I like the word copulate. It’s a nicer way of saying make them love you. The buzzing noise in his head is intensifying. Buzzing, or maybe more like a smacking, or whips cracking … The bedbugs dance; they’re using sex toys on one another, abusing one another in groups, no holds barred. The man wants to touch them. Play with them. But how clumsy he is, how big and clumsy: as he reaches down into the model city, the buildings immediately begin to topple to the ground.
-8.
No, it definitely, definitively, is neither bulk nor heap. It’s a hazmat suit someone has dumped there, in the niche. It doesn’t give off any smoke; the thinness of the air up here prevents combustion. What happened was this: as a last resort, with the snow piled many meters deep on top of him—both blocking his breathing apparatus and creating an excruciating downward pressure on his body—the man unstrapped his helmet, and, upon contact with the Jakartinese air, was instantly killed. Abnormal and very volatile levels of radon, argon, sulfur dioxide, helium, and neon make it impossible to breathe. The combination also creates extremely high winds, with masses of air tearing across the passes and valleys of the region at speeds of up to seventy-seven hundred kilometers per hour. Even at sea level, the atmospheric pressure in this strange country is impossible for the human body to withstand: the moment the helmet came off, within one billionth of a second, it made puree of the man’s head.
-9.
The bulk or heap is not a bulk or heap. It’s me.
When finally the man lifts the silk sheet away, he then stands looking down for a long time. He opens his mouth, and I glimpse the forked tongue flickering inside. I look back at him, and I don’t feel anything either.
-10.
The bulk or heap was a bulk or heap. The boys did not set fire to it on the final corner of summer. They did not shoot it full of bullets. They did not humiliate it. They did not beat it in the yard, at recess, on every day of every single year. They did not send it away to military school. They used neither belts nor cables on it. It did not die from infection. It just ceased to be.
-11.
The bulk or heap or mound or protuberance on the ground gives off a foul stench. It is a pile of trash. Kovac, Morgan, and I stand over it. We’re suited up and are looking for something in the detritus. I don’t know what, but there seems to be some urgency about it. It doesn’t matter. We go on looking. The pile is enormous—extending as far as the eye can see. We turn over anything at hand, picking up and dropping empty packaging, strips of metal, cans, plastic bags, bits of cloth, glass, wheel rims, jars, old urinals, dead dogs, dead children, sections of hosepipe, food scraps, plastic bottles, fish scales, pencils, charcoal, ash, newspapers, toilets, cardboard packaging—objects that are good for nothing now except as landfill, as elements in these new and autonomous territories. We are the founding fathers of the mound. And its constituents too. Not even the Environment Agency has jurisdiction in this new land. For all its fluidity and changeability, we are its uncontested masters. And at the summit, the stench is not quite so bad. I tell them this, but they ignore me. Up there, boys, I say, up at the top. They don’t want to know. But when Kovac sees me start to wander off, he shouts, begins waving his hands around. I can see his lopsided eyes through the visor. It’s good to be with Kovac again; it makes me happy, gives me a peaceful sensation—the peace you experience only in memories. The peace of absence. How long has it been since I was this close to him? I smile at him, feel sure he’s smiling, too, inside his helmet. Then, more calmly now, he tells me to get back to work. Concentration, kid, he says: con-cen-tra-tion. So I concentrate. Morgan’s making the noise with his mouth. The noise that annoys the shit out of me. Concentration, I mutter. But I don’t know what we’re looking for. It could be anything. Sometimes it’s about looking but not trying to find anything, I tell myself, though that seems more or less like class-A bullshit. And yet I go on, down on my knees, rummaging in the trash. I turn it over in my hands. I probe the slimy layers, sticky conjunction of sun and waste and percolating waters. Then I’ve got it; it’s in my hand. Or rather, I see it—the eggplant purple of it—and then it’s in my hand: a finger, a child’s finger. But it’s a finger all right, and fingers tend to come with hands; it’s pretty unusual for them to go wandering about on their own. I clear away the nearby detritus, about ten feet around, and come up with the other four digits: the first one was the ring finger. Kovac and Morgan are busy pulling clear the body of a large, fat man—they keep dropping him—and haven’t noticed my find. The Bug—it hits me: we’ve been wrong about it all along. How stupid we’ve been. We don’t contract it, it isn’t contagious. We’re born with it. It reveals itself piecemeal, little by little, but then reaches a kind of critical mass, becoming suddenly apparent to a large group of people. Now, two things happen—many things happen, but two stand out: the clicking of Morgan’s tongue grows louder, and he starts doing it faster, and the ring finger, to all appearances quite solid, turns out to have the same consistency as gelatin. These two sensations, allied with the smell of putrefaction, are in perfect harmony with our digging efforts. And I must say there is something pleasant about the pliable, spongy consistency of the ring finger. I give it a little squeeze, testing its firmness, only for it to pop between my own fingers like a puss-filled zit. Oh: no more finger. I decide to pull out the rest of the body, and this time to be a bit more careful. First I come up with the other hand, the left one, then the right forearm; when I pull on the arm, it comes away from the submerged body at the shoulder. So I put the arm to one side; I’ll get the rest out and then piece it all together again. A thousand times I must have done this, it’s like a muscle memory now: which bones go with which, which expanses of flesh and which organs you need to be most careful with. I could assemble a body for you like a wardrobe or a chest of drawers from a box. But, like the rest of the objects that comprise the towering mound, the child’s body parts aren’t a child’s body parts anymore: they have become part of us, even if I couldn’t say precisely how. I find the head a little way off, in a shopping bag. Birdface’s head has no useful function either anymore; it’s trash like everything else here, there’s a cut on the forehead, and a beret’s been sewn into the nape of the neck with black thread. I hear two heavy thuds, and the ground shakes. An earthquake, I think. Morgan’s tongue-clicking stops, and there’s the sound of another object, a large bulky mass, striking the trash heap. I turn and see that Kovac has been half swallowed by the heap. And Morgan has an enormous stone in his arms, I see, shiny and very dark. He’s breathing heavily inside the suit, and Kovac, sinking down, almost entirely subsumed by the heap, can hardly move. It’s me next: when he’s finished Kovac off, he’s going to come for me. But there isn’t space inside the helmet for Kovac’s tongue. There’s no way for his tongue—very long, and moving independently of the rest of his body—to wriggle out of the helmet, no way for it to get free and wrap around his neck. I watch as he gradually begins to turn purple, the same purple as Helguera’s body, becoming shapeless, too, the bones seemingly suddenly removed, the sinews and tendons, all bodily tissue. I can’t find his original shape, but that doesn’t matter either now. Nobody’s coming to claim him now. Somewhere a dog howls. I go back with the dogs: to the time before howls. Morgan wants to come. He knows his place: every two or three decades, it manifests. And it can manifest in such a variety of different ways: hence why in these lands the people have never fully been able to deal with it. Morgan, Morgan, Morgan. With his last remaining ounce of strength he raises the stone high and brings it down on Kovac’s head. That’s all he’s got, nothing left now: he totters for a moment, stumbles, and falls. Gasping, he tries to get up. Another tremor shakes the trash heap, knocking him down once more. Then he turns toward me and begins dragging himself in my direction, stone under one arm. Was it the same in the tunnel? Did he try to finish me off down there too? But yes, here you can see the sky. Endless grays. Kovac gives a final shudder. The howling has grown louder, there’s more than one dog now, though I still can’t see them anywhere. Morgan, Morgan, Morgan. How can such skinny arms be so strong? He drags himself along, a trail of blood in his wake. How slow he is. I could get up and run off in the time it’s going to take him to get to me. And if it weren’t for the fact I’m already very far away. Not ahead of him, or behind. Just far.
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