Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  ________________________

  The rule was that he would try not to work from home; it was the only way they’d manage. He was irascible, defensive, shut off when he worked, and she wouldn’t tolerate this stranger around her. Sometimes he had this glow deep in his sunken eyes, a glimmer of a rich happiness, but this was rare. Most of the time she saw frustration, anxiety, occasionally something approaching a total loss of confidence. It wouldn’t work and he didn’t know why. It should work; why isn’t it working?

  Describing what he did every day, trying to be open, to be less insufferable, he said it’s this constant doubt, this incessant checking. If you could concentrate entirely on only one level it might be okay, it might be manageable; the problem, the impossibility, was working on both levels simultaneously, re-reading each letter in every command to make sure nothing was out of place and at the same time maintaining a constant visualisation of the entire structure. You had no option but to be vigilant at both scales at all times. You have to exert absolute control, he said, because if you don’t, if you make a single mistake and you don’t immediately find it, it won’t work, it will collapse. Not just this one module, but the whole program, everything. From one error, a single mistyped character. The program tries to run only it reads the error and it can’t go forward, it starts stuttering, it focuses all its energy driving round and round this error and it produces something that’s decayed, that’s rotten, that’s full of this redundant, infuriating energy. It’s broken, it’s gone, you’ve lost it.

  ________________________

  Dr Andrews performed the majority of my tests, a small, wiry man with an earnest, serious demeanour, always concentrating on something close at hand, peering in through his horn-rimmed glasses, fascinated by some minor detail that apparently meant the world to him, and almost pathologically unable to stand up straight, to look out, to make firm and direct eye contact with anyone. He seemed on the cusp of being overwhelmed and hence his efforts to keep the wider picture at bay. I watched him and he almost always avoided the windows. He kept his head down but it was even more obvious when he was outside; he seemed afraid of looking, afraid of what he might see and the obligations and responsibilities that might be forced on him. For some reason I was sympathetic to him. I didn’t quite trust him but the edge, the tension and compression, the lack of ease in his manner seemed more appealing and certainly more relatable than the general blanket neutrality of the other staff.

  In retrospect, it was obvious; he knew I was pregnant and for some reason had been told under no circumstances could he tell me. It must have been clear if not from the first moment he saw me exiting the park, or from as soon as I began listing symptoms, then directly the first results came back. Neither he nor anyone else from WEBG ever acknowledged my pregnancy. Instead, tests and medical questionnaires appeared listing every other conceivable explanation for my vomiting, my nausea, my loss of blood, the feeling of difference and change throughout my body. When later, back at home, I saw Alice again, she told me she was given exactly the same questions, indeed that many of the same symptoms presented now in her as well. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that even had I not been pregnant I would still have been vomiting, would still have been presenting myself as in some pain. There was some talk about the contributing effect of ‘psychological factors’, triggered by what we’d experienced in the park and which, if they weren’t actively causing our symptoms, at least exacerbated them. At my most generous I tried to conceive a scenario in which Dr Andrews genuinely had my best interests in mind and where in testing me he considered the vulnerabilities of my unborn child, that the tests were conducted in a genuine, earnest attempt to rule out the presence of an illness, an infection, an invasive agent that might threaten it. He may actually have convinced himself, justifying his enforced silence, that the pregnancy was dangerous precisely in the way some of its early effects could be mistaken for illness, and that using the word ‘pregnancy’ to account for and to explain everything could in fact be the worst possible thing to do, diagnostically speaking, given that it might distract from, might hide entirely, the stealth presence of something else, something other, inside me.

  It was entirely possible they were still searching for pathogens and wanted to have a full measure of my health before giving me the news. Because the first thing I was going to think when I did get the news was ‘Is it okay? Is the fetus stable? Is its development within the normal range?’ And if they couldn’t give me those answers because they were still not sure what else I might be carrying, what other agents I might have picked up, then I might become – they might think I might be liable to become – hysterical, creating all sorts of other problems for them.

  Alice, when I finally found her, after they’d split us up, after they’d put us in different hotels and on different flights, and after I’d already been home several weeks, said with WEBG your first thought regarding motive should always be money, i.e. potential claims to liability. Some obscure contract clause stating that so long as pregnancy is not acknowledged under the period in which the individual is working for the firm, said firm cannot be held responsible in any way for later difficulties or abnormalities that might come up in the development of the fetus. And WEBG – through the employees conducting the interviews back at home – told me with a straight face they had no knowledge of the pregnancy and that it was entirely a personal matter. Though I didn’t want to be dramatic – and I was lightly aware that in dwelling on this I was distracting myself, or trying to, from Jane’s death – I let myself imagine a certain look on the green-grey faces of the legal staff and the administrators in the conference suite, a look between fear and a kind of remote concern, suggesting there was something I still didn’t know, some other piece of information they were privy to, something that had come up in the tests and with clear implications for the development of my child. I would lie awake and think that when they tested me, when they looked inside me, they had found something else, something impossible, unnameable, and that even if they had wanted to tell me they wouldn’t have had the words.

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  He heard the engine start and then the car pull out of the driveway. He looked around the kitchen, sure there was something he was supposed to have seen to, something he had overlooked. He collected her babygrow from the table and a thread came away in his hand. Resisting the impulse to pull on it, the material tightening as it unravelled, he took the scissors, cut it off, folded the thread and put it in his pocket. All her clothes were kept in a small white box, or rather three boxes of ascending size nested inside each other, a present from Catherine anticipating Doll’s growth for the next several months. It was supposed to be about perspective, about declaring how quickly the child was growing, making it obvious. ‘What will go round a baby isn’t much,’ Catherine said, awkwardly he thought, handing the boxes over.

  He lifted the top off the largest box, wet his finger, took the thread from his pocket, pushed it into the saliva and placed it against the white inner wall, where it stuck. What will go round, she said, round and round, the way he had rocked Doll minutes ago, away to sleep, before Shel lifted the cradle and took her away to the doctor’s. Turning her round, always, as he had been told to, as he must, adjusting her position, lifting and rocking her from different sides, coming towards her variously, rotating the pictures along the sides of the cot.

  Catherine was only half-right, he thought, taking out the clothes from the middle box. As Doll turned, in little revolutions in the house – in her cot, in the cradle, in the mat and in their arms – she turned against everything, and that friction aged her. Had Catherine meant something like that by the phrase, not gravity necessarily, but something commensurate with it, the impersonal, everything around her?

  The paediatrician loaded them with information on their first visit, and despite all the practical advice and instruction which he had forgotten, strange, unlikely fragments remained, such as that inside Doll, already
composing her, was a fine filament which, if you were to untangle it and spool it out, would measure the full circumference of the world. That already, in a direct, material sense, she encompassed the world. The white thread in the box, pulling on it, a magic trick, pulling on it again and again as it came spooling out, a guide, a map used to mark a great journey, tracking every single movement across a life. Shel had rolled her eyes, had told him on the way home it wasn’t even true, that it might hold for an adult – in fact it was probably longer, a greater distance – but not for a newborn. He was always being amazed, she told him; he was such an easy audience. The doctor, not much older than them, had seen him coming, someone who could flatter her, and so she had pulled out an arbitrary fact, something from an in-flight magazine.

  He stirred, groggy, opened his eyes. For a moment he was unsure where he was. Colder, the day darkening. He had meant to work. Fallen asleep in the chair by the window. He reached for his phone on the table, looked at the time again. Where were they? he thought. They should have been home already. He clicked through to the messaging app and saw she wasn’t active. He sent a text, Everything okay? Waited, stretched his arms, got up, collected his laptop, still time to do something.

  ________________________

  The counsellors stressed how important it was we experience what we thought was private communication with our loved ones, that it was a crucial, integral part of our recovery. Of course what they didn’t tell us until later was that all these calls were recorded too. The passing, predictable smirk as the staff went through all this showing where I’d signed consent, careful not to too obviously express relish over the full access they’d had to the video calls between John and me.

  However many times I said I didn’t know anything, that there was no value in what I said, they didn’t listen. ‘You might not know what you know,’ was the latest contorted justification for their intrusions. ‘It might be something that seems insignificant, a small detail, something you’d never think of mentioning to us. But, put next to something else, some other piece of information we already have, it could prove revelatory. We just don’t know; we have to gather as wide a net as possible – I’m sure you understand.’

  For those four days at the gates they were obsessed with us. They kept saying if there was anything I needed they would do their best to see to it; they wanted me to be as comfortable as possible. With all the activity and personnel the place was barely recognisable. There was a chef, dressed in whites, ridiculous and immaculate with the humidity and the insects and the wet earth everywhere. Something common to the staff was their pristine attire, incongruous in the setting but somehow functional, reaffirming their separateness and aloof neutrality, this idea they were above things and their experience was virtual, not contingent on anything outside. He quietly consulted with me and asked me to think hard, recall the finest meal I’d ever had; if I could describe it in sufficient detail he would render it again. He asked me to write it down and then go to the sealed office and wait. An odd, instantly effective indulgence, taking me away from there, recreating the past, closing my eyes and with every mouthful lingering on the taste, not just of the food but of everything around it, the smells and the sounds and colours, I was right there, inside the original experience, and when I opened my eyes I saw a broad tinted-glass window overlooking the park, a slightly faded wooden interior, felt an immediate, awful sterility, a blankness.

  Given the remoteness of the place I had no idea where all this food was sourced from; it seemed uncanny, as if this quiet, obsequious figure had performed alchemy, had really transformed the limited material around us into something other. My mind was still a fog, I wasn’t thinking, but even then I remember feeling this isn’t right, this isn’t straightforward, something else is going on here. And there were lots of things, I suppose: distraction from the tests, shifting and managing our perception of the firm, trying to establish a kind of loyalty in us which might prove instrumental further down the line, in the inquest.

  Our own questions failed, bounced back at us. The staff had been trained to respond like this, to give nothing away and press us on our own interpretation of the motives and assumptions behind what we said. ‘So what was this?’ I said once. ‘Your best guess – a boar?’ The young woman shot me this startled look from behind her tablet, standing above me, unnerved and suddenly flustered, not expecting this at all; she visibly composed herself, breathed and took half a step back. ‘Why do you think that? What makes you say that?’ And on.

  Whatever had happened in Westenra – whatever sickness had afflicted the original animals; the real reason behind their decision to invite us and accommodate us in the park; the encroaching into our camp by a predator; the ongoing terror experienced by the troop; ultimately Jane’s mauling from inside her tent, impossible, remarkable in so many ways, not least because it is such anomalous behaviour in almost every animal I can think of, they simply wouldn’t do that, stalking a human, as if determined, coming after them, seeking them out at night, knowing they were inside and slicing up the tent – it remained out of reach. Much later I confided in Alice my suspicion that throughout it WEBG had been in control, that the whole three weeks comprised some kind of test, that the officials watched us, that they were on the periphery, that the whirring, clicking sounds I sometimes heard and that we picked up more than once in the audio were indications of drones floating above us, recording us, filtering through the trees. That they had put us in that situation as an experiment, just to see what would happen. It was no secret that WEBG knew more than they were saying, but the idea that our invitation was a charade was startling. Was it possible, I thought – again this was indulgence, grief distraction, fantastical speculation – that WEBG had known that something terrible was in the park and by putting us in there they were hoping to goad it, provoke it, tease it out? To see it better? To capture it, harvest it? Something like a weapon? And that though they had been watching all that time they had recorded no direct footage of the predator, and so, rather than the relentless interviews that followed being rhetorical, or some kind of attempt to establish their innocence, they genuinely were at a loss in the end?

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  The interface still wasn’t right. He had tried everything, he had thought it would take care of itself, it would come naturally, but whichever style of graphics he chose it was wrong, it was underwhelming. He needed to find a way of visualising the data that was both simple and comprehensive, that worked at different scales, a style that would communicate information in a single glance but would also reward sustained analysis. He set his laptop down and began walking, stepping over the lines of newsprint laid out earlier that morning.

  He saw columns of text on the pages and columns made by the linked pages and columns in the individual letters composing the words. A self-reiterating shape; a pattern repeated at different scales; a basic fractal design. Adhering to the principles Shel noted in cell biology, the fact that every cell in an organism contains a nucleus inside which is a description of the whole organism. It was a perfect, breathtaking illustration of data compression.

  DNA, then, he thought, as a naturally occurring storytelling graphic, expressing fractal movements in the cells, organisms and eco-systems it created. In one sense, nature itself was an unsurpassable surveillance machine. Everything that happened, however trivial, contributed to the ongoing shaping of the environment, which formed the individuals, who in turn affected the environment. Every single creature, everything that lived, every animal and every blade of grass, every spore and seed, every hint of a virus trailing in a breeze, told not just the story of itself, where it had come from and where it might be going, but told the story of every other thing, animate and inanimate – mountains, sedimentary layers, varying ocean levels. Everything that happened, irrespective of how distant or how far back in the past, was there in the fullness of every living cell, in the adaptations of a lineage that could still be traced. He brushed a fine powder from the
sill and felt molluscs descending and calcifying and forming new sea beds and appearing aeons later as a white cliff wall, as the unstable, mobile surface of a desert. He was losing the thread, the significance, the practical application. Concentrate, he told himself, closing his eyes: data compression in fractals; multi-level information capture; aesthetically pleasing, self-reiterating patterns.

  He pictured Shel’s face tilting, a patient smile appearing as she gently told him the comparison of DNA to a language is as old as the hills, that even Darwin, confounded, noted that the number of languages arising in a given area broadly matched the area’s biodiversity, as if words too bred from the soil.

  Shel’s mouth when she returned, when she stepped out at Arrivals, her lips peeled from the sun, the slight sense that it hurt to speak, or at least to say certain words, that she wasn’t ready to speak yet and talk about it, everything that had happened, it was too close, there was too much of it, and she was traumatised and in shock and more than anything else, she said, slowly, as they walked towards the exit doors, she was exhausted. He thought of her lips again, of the first slow, gentle kiss by the doors, the rough, hard flakes of skin, hint of blood. He remembered Shel, years before, when they would talk all night, when they were young, when they were still unfamiliar, asking about his work, asking whether synthetic languages, machine languages, the languages that he worked with day in and day out, and which in volume now occupied, he supposed, the greater part of his communicative experience, given the little he was able to read outside of work, given, now, how tired they both were and how little, relatively speaking, they saw of one another, and how little he saw of other people, and given that the words he used in Doll’s presence tended to be limited and repetitive, she asked if these artificial languages adhered to the same principles as natural languages, like the one, she said, we’re speaking now. What do you mean, he said, by principles? Do you mean grammar, because—? No, she cut him off, extending her legs over him on the sofa – he noticed she’d pulled a single sock halfway down her foot so it covered only the toes, he felt the rub of her heels on his thighs – I mean things like word frequency, you know, how the frequency of the most used word is supposed to be twice as great as the next one, which is used twice as much as the third, and so on. Does this happen, I mean, she asked him on the sofa, with the languages you write in, too?