Infinite Ground

by Martin MacInnes

  ‘How does it affect the film?’

  ‘More likely the images will come out scratched. Rougher. With less developing time it’s harder to judge how much agitation to apply – too much and we destroy it, not enough and we’ll have silver bromide streaks all the way across.’

  The scale effect was strange when a light crept in to what had seemed a darkness, the line on the still-imperfect seam spreading over the fabric, appearing just for a few moments like the sky at the transition stage of an eclipse.

  They had piles of stock. He hadn’t anticipated so much. He was disappointed by the images, which they found amusing. ‘What do you expect, action? Animals leaping out in focus?’ Unfortunately, explained Luis, the youngest of the crew, the camera was not perfect. Sometimes it was too sensitive – things like a falling branch or even a wind-blown leaf could trigger it. But they had got some life.

  They hung the drying sheets on wire lines between the trees and watched the monochrome forms come out with the afternoon. The atmosphere was drowsy and he dozed on a hammock. He imagined them drawing Carlos up and back from the few things found remaining in the ground. The pools of his blood collected in the insect clouds, the fractionally altered consistency of the groundwater on the spot where he had fallen. Concentrating very hard, as if what was required was partly or even primarily an act of imagination.

  He got up, walked indoors and poured some water. Miguel, emerging from his hut, stopped him, asked what was going on, what the crew was doing.

  The confusion was partly the inspector’s fault; he couldn’t have been clear enough. Immediately he had mentioned the caves, Miguel warned against them and against the journey inside. The inspector eventually explained that they were referring to photography, hoping to gain an image. Miguel mentioned real places, cave formations he had visited a couple of times. ‘Years ago,’ he said. ‘Even tourist groups went.’ It had since become unstable, too dangerous to visit, and access anyway, he said, had likely become impossible simply due to the vegetation. It wasn’t the caves themselves, he said; bats flew out in clouds at day’s end; there were strange hidden pools inside, walls and roofs spectacularly carved by erosion and minerals; and there were the paintings. He had seen only the ones closest to the entrances; he hadn’t in any of his journeys witnessed what was said to be the more spectacular art further and lower in. He had no idea of the age. Animals still used the sites; he remembered beaming his torch onto a strange scene, dozens of large peccaries in a sequence on the wall, flowing into each other according to the broken lines, and seeing, when he went to shut off his torch and continue with just his headlamp, a mass of two-toed prints on the ground, around him, all but fresh. A guano smell and mammal faeces.

  Alberto interrupted, walking urgently towards them. ‘Inspector, there is something I think you should see.’

  The photograph was monochrome on a landscape A4 sheet. At first it was difficult to make it out – a thick mesh of dark strokes, little light. It wasn’t easy to establish depth. The area had not been cleared; it appeared relatively untouched. Examining the scene further, he saw the camera faced an embankment. High up in the trees was a patch of white artificial fabric.

  He looked at the second photograph. This image was close, blurred, white. From this perspective, despite the distortion, it was clear the fabric was inhabited. There appeared to be a human crown slashed several times and dripping black ink. A light fuzz of hair only. The face looked down, remaining unclear, but suggesting shame, resignation, perhaps death, he thought. The shirt was soaked, torn, partly stripped. Some of the liquid would be blood. The limbs seemed splayed awkwardly, as if the figure had fallen into position. But something about the pose, the relation of the man to the surrounding forest, made him think he had been put there.

  They split into three separate teams to develop the rest of the film in caves. They hadn’t the time, he insisted, to wait for night. ‘Couldn’t do it then, anyway,’ Marguerite said. ‘Insects are attracted to the chemicals and torchlight.’

  He asked if he could help, but they declined the offer and so he watched them building. Across the terrain of Santa Lucía-south multiple caves went up. They used black sheets borrowed from the Terminación to drape around tents. Inside them was to be the appearance of nothing, so they could then develop something. He saw the chemicals blend and swirl like smoke, imagined Carlos, as an image, a form, briefly coming together before breaking apart. The process was primitive, ritualistic. He imagined murmurs inside, low, focused chanting; Carlos called up from the air, from the ground, and disappearing. The ground turning over, rising in layers, the mountains lowering, the water levels rising. Each ­discovery seemed to reverse the progress it suggested: building up a picture, they saw someone in a state of decay, shapeless and disordered, hurt. He felt the same combination of excitement and dread that he’d had on the verge of the forest – any one of these photographs could, in theory, present an unobstructed image of the face.

  Luis was almost certain that another photograph had been taken later of the same spot; in this one the figure was absent.

  ‘Meaning,’ the inspector said, ‘he is alive.’

  ‘Or has been taken.’

  While they worked on exposure, the inspector pressed for all the information they had. They’d covered a wide area, setting up two dozen filming posts, and no one was certain of the exact coordinates of the shot. Alberto drew a map, marking each of the posts – the nearest eleven days out by boat.

  ‘We put rotting meat on site. The idea was to attract animals. A man wouldn’t come to this.’

  ‘I don’t know. Say he had been walking a considerable time, six weeks or so, and for most of that had been without substantial food. He wasn’t himself, he was desperate. It’s not inconceiv­able. Was the camera completely concealed? Maybe he noticed it. Maybe that’s what he was aiming for. Contact.’

  He was aware of time and opportunity expiring, the force of the pressure. Things were moving too quickly, he felt a little passive, swept along. There was a chance he was missing something, a piece of information that might have been integral to the success or otherwise of the case. The crew was leaving in days and there was still so much to do. They had more to uncover. He was frustrated: he couldn’t achieve the necessary speculative distance.

  He went over, again, the photographs discovered so far. Each time he took them out he expected resolution, proof, this time, that it was Carlos beyond doubt. But the turn of the face and the position of the body were perfectly arranged, engineered as if to evade personal identification. Initially, thinking the position looked artificial, he had posited the involvement of a second person. A standing figure, tall behind the automatic camera focus. Did the figure appear to be turning from someone, deliberately facing away? The inspector willed some evidence in the picture, anything to increase the likelihood that he was still alive.

  Something remained in the figure’s arrangement across the seven photographs, something he hadn’t yet identified. A significance related to the contrived nature of the stance. He read it again, again. He was always drawn to the face, although it had turned and said nothing. A fragment of the open mouth was revealed in two of the pictures, but he couldn’t make it out. What call it made. The words were mute, like the hummed melodies remaining in the ground surfaces of nightmare-weathered teeth.

  He watched the fingers, visible on the left hand only and which he saw, for the first time, were held in a loose grip. He noted a slightly unusual and, hopefully, unnatural proportion in the distance between each of the fingers. He then studied the neck, the violent stretch and sideward twist of the bowed head. Proportions, relationships. Holding a body, artificially and in front of a lens, was an opportunity to communicate information. The figure, he thought, may even have been wittingly expressive in the photographs. The significance almost floored him, almost distracted him. Assuming for the moment that the individual wanted to be found, then the
most likely content of his information regarded his location. What could he say, through the fingers, the empty clasp of a hand, the wrenched neck?

  The inspector sketched angles and proportions. Drawing out all avail­able spatial information, he mapped the body every way he could. He was flooded by possibilities, theories relating to the language intended in the figure. Morse, a binary communication – slow, heavy, expensive – at most speaking a single word, and what? His distinction between major and minor, regarding the angles of the expressed body was, he knew, fairly arbitrary, and the message he drew out contained nothing intelligible.

  Perhaps he had the wrong scale. Did the body contain coordinates? Did Carlos – the anonymous figure, he corrected – have knowledge of his precise position and the ingenious ability (suggesting prolonged captivity, the resources of tedium) to express his coordinates through digits, the angles created by the gaps across his body?

  He spent twenty minutes trying multiple ways of extracting numbers from what the body did, but again got nothing intelligible. He needed assistance, a second professional opinion; he was certain then that he would unscramble the body’s expression. He put the photographs back into the sealed plastic folder and went to return to his room. In the alteration of his blood movement, his airflow, his heart rate, and his moving perspective of the forest, he noticed something. Environment, landscape. The body as environment itself, he thought, not encoding one, not charting it in numbers, but being a landscape. He needed only to confirm with the photographs, but he knew it: the body drew a picture of a particular location. The figure, Carlos, mimicked the arrangement of the rocks, the precise bend of an adjacent river. He was communicating in his apparently unconscious expression his exact location in the forest.

  V

  The decision was made: he would leave with them on the flight the day after tomorrow. Enough had been found to justify a comprehensive and fully funded search of the whole area. Alberto struck the inspector as a dependable, capable man, consistently responding to enquiries helpfully and succinctly. He appeared sympathetic to the case, willing to help in any way he could. They would come back together. He and Alberto would lead a specialist team, bringing adequate transport – a helicopter, perhaps – substantial supplies, a variety of professionals, hunting dogs. Forensics, even. Isabella’s help would be invaluable and she was hardly likely to turn down a chance to visit the forest. It was the sensible option.

  He felt himself relaxing. He ordered at the bar that evening and joined Alberto and the team at their table. ‘The nature of this work is very solitary,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have your help. All of you. Even talking is a relief. These weeks have been difficult. When I’m back,’ he said, ‘I’ll need to make some changes.’

  They smiled and nodded politely, except for Luis, who was frowning in front of his open laptop. Luis, an intern, wasn’t being paid. A couple of days ago he had described his digital recordings to the inspector, the ‘making of’ featurettes which would appear at the end of the film. This was his own project. The inspector felt uneasy when Luis had shown him. What he saw was surely obtrusive optical and audio equipment along with their operators (young men and women in faux-military fatigues) as they filmed their footage, at times closely interacting with animals. It looked dangerous, reckless.

  But such scenes, far from being casually taken from actual feature-filming, Luis said, were scripted pieces produced afterwards, on revisiting the site. They were popular because of the flowing, unrealistic nature of the dialogue – viewers were ­supposed to enjoy ‘behind the scenes’ access while maintaining the uncanny suspicion that the featurettes were just as worked at as the main productions (and that the real authority might remain inaccessible). According to Luis the featurettes were an ingenious way of exploiting suspicion, extending the intrigue of creation. By appearing to offer full transparency over the means of making them, but actually only deferring the truth, the films, he explained, became more popular.

  If he were to believe Luis, then 20–30 per cent of any one production was ‘stock’; that is, taken from archives of classically satisfying general material. This stock, used to varying degrees from one film to another, was not original to any one film, but worked rather like cliché in language and in art. Just as a painter applied certain background styles to frame the focus, producers and directors filled out natural history films with stock dynamic waterfalls, hazy canopies and wide deserts. Whole features – series even – might be composed entirely of recycled footage, old material reapplied in new arrangements. Identical animals had been located in features thirty years apart or more, apparently unchanged in time, as if cloned without a single copying error.

  From features – new narratives – made entirely of old and unrelated things, the inspector reasoned, it wasn’t such a leap to producing so-called documentaries made up of scenes animated artificially from the start, pixels generated that bore no real relationship to what they purported to represent. A script could be written without restraint – anything could be said to happen, as anything could be produced. Some of the nature scenes might never have happened, being computer generations from the start, dreamed whimsy of isolated, burdened, over-worked producers in offices.

  ‘Are you looking for the thin man?’ Luis now said, interrupting the conversation at the bar table.

  ‘Thin man?’

  ‘Yes. You’d see him at night, in silhouette. Preparing food in his room, standing by the window.’

  ‘Who, sorry? What room is this? Do you mean—?’

  ‘In your room. The room you’re in now, I mean.’

  Alberto stepped in. ‘Luis, you’re mistaken. The inspector’s staying on the other side of the hotel. What you were seeing was Miguel.’

  Luis looked steadily at Alberto for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Sure, right.’ He turned his attention back to the screen and began typing. He stopped again. ‘But the photographs, Inspector. What if it’s not what you think? Did you consider that? What if this person doesn’t want to be found?’

  ‘Why would he not—?’ The inspector broke off. He couldn’t be distracted any more by philosophical questions. He had a job to do. He instead finalized a few details about departure times and then went to settle up at the bar. As nothing could be left to chance, he reserved rooms throughout the whole of the Terminación, anticipating the arrival of a large investigating party. Miguel required a deposit to be paid – no problem, he said. They would most likely be arriving on the evening of the 24th, departing early the following morning, and they would require provisions.

  He looked forward to the occasion, the feast they would hold. He wanted Miguel’s and Maria’s help coordinating everything. They would eat well, lavishly, making the most of the opportunity, before going further on into the forest. They would gather up their strength and enjoy themselves. Eat and drink till late, fill themselves all the way up, their laughter drifting out into the sounds gaining on them around and above the settlement buildings.

  On his last afternoon, he went for one more coffee at Maria’s.

  For the first time, really, in all of this – apart perhaps for the forensic work with Isabella – he felt he had support. They had evidence, in physical form – Carlos’s image recorded, a range of approximate coordinates within which he could be found. The time had come to step back, change perspective, call on wider resources. The department could mount a comprehensive search of the area, after which there was no doubt that Carlos would be found.

  He had earned time off, he thought, now that resolution was in sight. This, he decided, would be his final investigation. Surveying the last thirty years, this would count as one of the great restitutions. Missing persons cases were like fissures, breaks in the Earth, and there was no greater feeling than a resolution, correcting the error, restoring the identity back to its place. The family could eat again, one day, at La Cueva. Whatever strangeness had caused this co
uld be settled, the old order restored.

  He made a note of all the things he would need to do once he was back home, the friendships he had neglected, the upkeep of his apartment. He would sort out his diet, eat with a greater focus on his health. There were many opportunities. He had been meaning to look up some old friends. He looked forward to resuming his regular life.

  He continued thinking ahead. Once they had recovered Carlos, he would personally make the call to the mother. Although it wasn’t advisable, or even feasible, that the family would come to Santa Lucía, he imagined it that way – Carlos being led out of the boat on the jetty, the relatives there, waiting. There would be hysteria, disbelief. They would want to touch him. They would admit that they had thought him gone, dead. Despite their claims, they’d believed there was no hope. But there he would be, helped out of the boat, dazed, thin, concussed, alive. They would tend to him on the flight back out, supply him with water and salt, maybe feed him through an intravenous drip. Arriving back in the city, he would be brought directly to the hospital, where they would thoroughly examine him, check for internal damage, any indication of possible long-term trauma caused by a blow to the head. The question of what exactly had happened to him, how he had come to be there in the forest, thousands of miles from home, wouldn’t be raised until later. Not until his convalescence was complete and he could walk, digest food on his own, speak for himself.

  The first person to hear the full story would be himself, the inspector. Everything would be confirmed to him privately, before being put on the record. All of the suspicions, rumours and the links would be settled.