His hands sprang back. He held the edge of the sink, waiting. Eventually, he opened the cabinet’s mirror door and took a second mirror from inside. He raised this smaller mirror and lowered his shoulders, dipped his head. Between the two reflections he found it: a small shaved circle, a crater filled with hard black blood.
He made a cup with his hands, gathered water from the tap and released it over the wound. The crust collapsed, the blood spilled. He repeated the process until the water ran clear.
He cleaned the wound on his neck and then removed his shirt, trousers and underwear, noting how they seemed to gather the moment before they contacted the floor. He examined the rest of his body and found further cuts on his left arm and on his chest. He watched all of this distantly and with little curiosity. He appeared to be seeing through a camera lens, observing another person. He detached the showerhead, turned the water on and sat with knees raised in the small cubicle, dabbing at the places marked by blood.
He woke up with a start. He was lying on the sofa downstairs. There was a noise. At first it seemed to be coming from inside. Thumping, shaking, rattling. He closed his eyes, trying to hold it, and the pain stopped. When it resumed it was louder, more forceful. He opened his eyes. Someone was banging on the door.
He got to his feet. Another blow rattled the house. Each one hurt. Every thread and fibre inside was wrenched and pulled apart. Slowly he approached the first door and prised it open. The blows stopped. He waited, feeling the colder air in the connecting room, smelling something bitter.
The next knock was faint. Two further knocks followed. He saw his hands moving towards the key, placing it in the lock and turning with a loud, clear click. He pressed on the handle and pulled the door towards him.
Thick, cold vapour entered the house. A foot stepped forward, approaching the upper step. A long black coat, a hat, a case. An arm extended towards him, taking his hand, shaking it. He waited. The mouth moved – a sound came out, fluid and quick and impossible to grasp. The face looked at him expectantly. He stepped back, withdrawing into the house, gesturing for the figure to follow. The figure moved forward, paused, then entered. Quickly he closed the door. Already it was colder.
The figure looked around, still holding the case with a long, drooping arm. A new sound, a closer kind of pain, working from the chest and the jaw and the inside of the head. A movement like that when he was eating, fragments of nose and mouth shifting up and down. A dry floating sensation and an echo in the mouth. He was speaking, saying something. The figure lifted his head and replied, ‘visiting’. Another word – ‘understanding’. The final word – ‘doctor’.
IV
We’d been walking only hours, sweating heavily, though protected at least from the direct sun, and already the compound – the other voices, the electricity, the sense of structure and willed domesticity – seemed almost impossibly distant. As I looked at Jane in front, I thought it was difficult to tell which came first: the introspection or the mycology. She walked with her eyes pointed at the ground. She missed the trees – we had to walk with her between us, Alice leading and me at the back, guiding her, pushing her on. She saw a different world than we did. I tried to recall any previous mycologists I’d known and picture whether they had had this pronounced stoop too. It made sense that the discipline selected for introspection and then that the pursuit of it, the actual practice of hunting mushrooms, accentuated the posture too. People would stumble into mushrooms, literally. It seemed to me Jane had known the ground better than most people would long before she began her study. Naturally, then, she wasn’t the best communicator. She tended to drift away on her own, a different course, and I had to remind myself that when she looked at the ground it wasn’t in distraction, that this was her work, that she saw something in it. Whether or not it was down to this stoop, this wandering, this appearance of unguided distraction, I saw Jane as considerably younger than Alice and myself and felt duly protective of her. She appeared anxious, preoccupied, didn’t respond well to prompts, to comments that were intended to be light-hearted. I had tried to engage her about the stoop, about looking to the ground, about whether it came naturally, but she answered with a humourless laugh. Later – and expressed differently, oddly; she had clearly composed it, rehearsed it – she said it was ironic that mycology drew introverted people when the whole story was essentially about communication, about networks, about the conveyance, under the ground, of vast tracts of information.
These networks, miles upon miles of hyphae linking the roots of the trees all around us, were only as thick as a single cell. It was ‘surpassingly fragile’, she said, still speaking with her head lowered so that I had to strain in close to hear her, her words seeming to be spoken into the vegetation and the fungus we walked through, put directly into them, as if to offer misguided nourishment. This makes the hyphae hard to study. If you make contact with the lines – if you so much as disturb the ground around them – they can splinter and break apart: the observer effect, the experimenter interfering with and invalidating the results. It was all but impossible to gain direct, immediate access to these threads of information, which is why they studied the fruiting bodies, the mushrooms blooming and bursting over the soil surface, instead.
Every so often – twice, three times an hour, declining in frequency as we progressed, either because the fruits she saw were self-similar or because Alice’s frustration with the interruptions was getting to her – Jane stopped, put on her latex gloves, squatted and picked a mushroom. She cleaned the bulb with her spit and then manipulated it with her hands. She showed us, once, the colour changing, a beetle-like blue emerging from the black. This was likely toxic, Jane told us, carefully wrapping the specimen and packing it away. It wasn’t unexpected. The more the habitat was disturbed, the greater the variety of fungus we’d find. Environmental destruction was, for many fungus types, attractive. Fungus followed footprints, she said. We studied it and inadvertently we spread it more. Spores one-thousandth of a millimetre thick.
The first time I saw her visibly frustrated was when I mentioned psilocybin. ‘No,’ she said, cutting me off, ‘that’s not my area of research.’ I backed off – clearly the question was familiar to her, along with certain assumptions. I apologised, tried to clarify my meaning – were there recorded instances of animals ingesting the psychedelic compound? Not many, she said wearily, few examples and little in the way of effects noted, although certain groups were said to feed the mushroom to their hunting dogs, possibly to sharpen concentration and sensory awareness. I let it drop, resolving to get back to it later. I would think of a more subtle way into it; I would have to. But it was difficult when the whole issue seemed lurid and over the top. On the connecting flight over, trying to prepare a little by reading papers on animals and fungi, I’d seen a note referencing a discredited theory that suggested psilocybin – the toxic compound described as a psychedelic – might have played a role in cultural evolution, perhaps even in the establishing of certain religious beliefs, inspired by the visions it induced. I wanted to ask her about this, as in one sense it was the direct opposite of the prevailing theory I’d been exposed to in my own education. God, from my loose memory of the undergraduate classes, resided not in these bulbs sprouting in the ground but in the tall swaying trees around us. God, still, in both theories, a hallucination; a chemical inspiration or a face, a presence – a product of fear as much as awe – captured in the rustling movements of the branches ahead, in early light or in the last part of the day.
More generally, I thought, stopping occasionally not just for breath, water, relief but for a slightly prolonged vision of a particularly startling play of light and cloud whenever the foliage broke enough to grant a view beyond the foreground, I wanted to ask her, wanted to find a way of asking her that wasn’t stupid and ignorant and that wouldn’t undermine the seriousness of her work, just what she thought about the simple brute fact that these substances were growing around us, underneath us, with the capacity to
affect an absolute and instant transformation of our minds. Wasn’t it strange, still, I thought, mindful of my shortness of breath, of changes in oxygen levels and of possible dips in the lucidity of my thinking, that this was all here, around us, outside of us? The paper described the close structural similarity of psilocybin and serotonin, so close it almost seemed – I gasped, lumping the weight of my supplies up a brief but sharp incline – as if little pieces of mind existed underground, created out of the breeding and recycling of decayed organic matter. I was distantly aware of overreaching, of exceeding myself, remotely critical but at the same time giving in to the effects of the sudden pale light reflected off the trees – Alice, but not Jane, had also stopped to observe this – and of my tiredness, of the upheaval and the risk and the excitement inherent in all of this, and I felt, for just a moment, tender towards the ground and all the different pieces of feeling, and even memory, that were inside it, that continued to live and to regenerate inside it. What did it mean? Was it any different from digital information storage or from radio emissions that continued to play out unheeded, unending, through space? Or from the cliché, overused because true, that people do live on through what they have done, what they have experienced, that is transformed into memory and carried by others, remembered differently and passed on by those people too? I heard the remote critical voice again – what was this nonsense? Where was the logic in this, the evidence in this? But I smiled as I resumed walking, down the reverse side of the incline, sensing a brief orange glow instructing us to stop soon and make camp – there wasn’t long left – and I thought of Ivan, my father, of the light in my room and of the plants that he had put there. I remembered the marks on the wall registering my changing height and the areca palm potted on my floor that, through summer, in direct light, would ascend in a spiral, corkscrew design, a picture of energy, of urgency, of a vigorous kind of happiness in living. I continued, feeling a pleasant glow from the last, denser light breaking in through the canopy, shafts of sun revealing the air to be thick with spores and seeds and trails and breaking tissue that disappeared as soon as I took a single step into it. I felt good, strange but familiar, felt Ivan close and yet far, felt almost the urge to lie down immediately and press my head against this earth.
On the second day we separated further, far enough apart you could imagine you were alone but not so distant you couldn’t focus and make out an unnatural colour or movement, another person. We stopped every four hours to rest and rehydrate. I was too tired to complain. I found myself, as well, blindly following Alice. We tried to minimise use of the mApp, wary of battery limitations. We used the tents as roof sheets when we stopped, spread out in the trees.
Jane, I thought, now seemed cool and remote, as if in denial, as if she were sure there had been a mistake and it would quickly be rectified and she would soon be sent back home. We were both a little unsure around Alice, who barely concealed her impatience and dissatisfaction with us. We should be moving quicker. Complaining about fatigue was redundant. Alice rarely laughed; I wasn’t sure I’d seen her smile. It was interesting watching Alice walk. Despite her pace I thought I saw a limp, or rather a conscious effort to avoid revealing a limp. The beginning of a grimace, heaving her rucksack up again.
It was striking to consider that she might, without ever admitting it, even be suffering a chronic pain. I hadn’t picked up on her limp before we’d left HQ, but then we hadn’t actually done much walking through the over-populated airport or the short, narrow corridors and softly lit hotel lobby. I couldn’t remember exactly when it started. She could have hurt herself on the first part of the journey, fallen and decided she couldn’t say anything because it would upset our rhythm and delay us, worried also it might prejudice us against her. Was that why she seemed irritated? Was she managing pain? She would hate it, I knew, if she had learned the speculative way I was beginning to pity her. She would maintain I had no right to do so, on the basis I knew nothing much about her, knew so little that my weak attempts at prediction were baseless.
Perhaps the injury was older, fully recovered and with a phantom trace, still hurting. She might have hidden the injury in case it was quietly used against her in selection procedures. The clinic’s trials would have been an ordeal. Or she was unaware of the injury’s effect on her, and what I was seeing, or what I thought I was seeing, this attempt, at some level, to pretend that something wasn’t there, demonstrating it while covering it up, was an old habit, a hesitancy, a lack of trust built into her, doubting, maybe, after the accident some time ago, her integrity.
She had short hair, a muscular frame and was several inches taller than me. I had met her only once before, years ago at a conference, though when I mentioned this she expressed surprise and suggested I had mistaken her for someone else. She had published widely until about five years ago, and her work was highly regarded. I asked her a couple of times what she’d been working on since, but each time she managed to be evasive and move the conversation along. I was trying to tell myself the issue wasn’t personal, wasn’t directed at me in particular, that Alice was simply, and understandably, focused exclusively on the task at hand. I watched her again, walking in front, taking the lead. I now saw no trace of a limp and suspected I’d invented it, searching for a way of sympathetically undermining her.
Alice maintained an unwavering pace from the front. She wouldn’t let us fall behind. She continued pushing us on. The longer we went the more natural the whole process became. Jane stopped complaining. We walked so far apart that talking became difficult. My feet moved by themselves; I felt myself drifting pleasantly, better accommodated to the place, and I sustained this relatively thoughtless, peaceful, almost trance-like state for as long as I could.
Only when I stopped and felt myself gathering again, a little dazed and briefly alert, did I contemplate some of the landscape around us. Torrents of secondary growth. A fallen trunk ripped open and carried by at least a dozen younger trees and vines. We passed through an oddly cold, quiet, gloomy thatch of bamboo stalks, bending towards their twenty-metre summit, creating an archway, a cathedral filled with shadows. Jane, for once, looked up. The stalks swayed, strained. Later in the afternoon we passed a stunning, dramatic collection of giant tree fern, vast and surpassingly soft, tinged with a sleepy cottony veneer, drooping and hanging high above us. For me this was the most transportive sight of all, putting me in mind of the outsize aspect of the Mesozoic era, and I indulged in childish play, imagining untold megafauna – gargantuan raptors; dragonflies as big as cars – concealed on the other side of it.
I looked at this and it seemed impossible there were cities, external regulation, imposed structure, that the overwhelming majority of my days were spent domestically, in narrow buildings, and that I had even been prone to both boredom and anxious thoughts about the immediate future. I tried to describe this fleeting sensation and I ruined it. We had stopped to rest and both Jane and Alice looked at me suspiciously, perhaps pityingly. My anxiety returned as I doubted the integrity and priority of the feeling, suddenly caught up in myself again, in my own local limitations.
‘We shouldn’t stay long,’ Alice said, hurling her pack up again. ‘If we push on we can reach the coordinates in three hours.’
The first sign we were close was the sound of flowing water. We were so tired, exhausted from the bulk we carried, and our impressions so confused by the lack of clarity, the infrequency of any notable vantage points from which to gather perspective, that we weren’t sure exactly where the sound was coming from. We went separately, each trying to catch it. Twenty minutes later I heard something crunch behind me. I turned and Jane appeared, head low, apologetic, flushed. ‘Found the river,’ she said, her large protruding boots leading comically in front of her.
One of the advantages of making camp within distance of the stream, in addition to the obvious utilities, was the possibility of keeping our domestic space isolated from the troop. The animals took the bulk of their water from roots and fro
m fronds and were known to be fearful of rushing water. The rangers identified the troop as being, on last sighting, nine kilometres distant from our present location. Of course, it was possible they had since shifted substantially, perhaps driven in some way by whatever had happened to their two deceased conspecifics, but Alice and I agreed this was unlikely, that the preponderance of fruiting trees nearby suggested they had not exhausted their time here.
I smiled, let my bags fall to the ground again and stretched out my arms.
‘Not yet,’ Alice said. I thought I saw a hint of humour in her eyes. ‘We still have to choose the site.’
It rained; we had to hurry. We found a reasonably level spot to put our tents up but had no time to clear ground or begin other adaptations. We could worry about everything else in the morning. There was so much to do, even after establishing the site. Digging out the latrine, heaping twigs and leaves into a large pile beside it. Hanging the lime powder in a sealed bag on a branch. Building a lid of snapped branches tied with twine, covered with leaves, to lay over the hole. The latrine should be roughly a kilometre from camp, the kitchen too. The kitchen an area just big enough to hold the three of us under a tied tarp roof, reasonable enough protection from the rain. Rocks collected from the stream to hold the gas canister and the cooking pots in place.
I sighed, peeling off my bag for a second time, and took out my tent. After setting it up I began unpacking. I took the pile of ziplock bags used for storing samples as well as collecting any food that might break off from our hands. Leaving food behind was strictly prohibited. We could attract first one, then further members of the troop towards us, which would be disastrous. They would destroy our camp, breaking our equipment, spilling our supplies. Worse, we would artificially manipulate their diet, making the whole trip redundant. So nothing could fall on the ground. We’d have to measure our meals conservatively because we couldn’t leave any scraps. Cans would be rinsed and packed in sealed bags too, our pots and cutlery immediately scrubbed clean. In theory, there should be no food waste at all. In reality, in my experience, there always was. Something always fell on the wet ground. It was important, I reminded myself, that we were patient, that we didn’t blame someone. We were supposed to be four and with an odd number the easy thing was to form a division, create a scapegoat.
Gathering Evidence Page 6