He took another sip of coffee and looked briefly on to the settlement’s facing edge. The huge ferns dipped and swayed; they were colossal, but each one also looked like a single leaf, diminishing him and the meagre buildings around. Not for the first time he wondered about scale, an error of perception. There was a lightness in his head and a turning, lifting sensation in his stomach. The coffee, the eggs – Maria brought him a glass of water at room temperature, quicker to digest. Composed, he looked again to the edge. If anything it appeared marginally closer – he must have shifted position slightly in his chair, leaned forward a little.
He reconfirmed, with both Alberto and Miguel, the schedule for the flight departing the following morning. He considered his experience on the outward journey, his almost manic state, and was amused by the difference. He had felt, coming in, a tremendous sense of excitement, a feeling, he had to admit, that he had never quite experienced before. It wasn’t knowledge. Everything, at that stage, was being done in hope, in promise. But there had been, as he flew out over the grids of his home city, out past the part-constructed industrial estates of the suburbs and into the surrounding mountains, an extended sense of extraordinary anticipatory pleasure. And, he told himself, his instinct had been right. They had found Carlos. This was it, he said. This was the end of the investigation.
VI
What Happened to Carlos
Suspicions, Rumours, Links
1.A cargo of chemical supplies – carbon, antimony, ruthenium, lithium, oxygen, silicon – stored on a vessel. The crew unaware of the purpose of the shipment or the nature of the organization listed to collect. A thirty-five day crossing. Individual birds sometimes seen at dawn perched on the bow. A line of vast green turtles moving east below the translucent sea surface. The nearest shore – a single tiny, all but barren volcanic island – 1,800 miles from the current position.
2.CARLOS: A sharp rise and dip, a venture just beginning, eagerly and with high expectations, before dissolving into failure and regret. The shape of the mouth opening widely, as if in astonishment, contracting into the low ‘o’ shape, sound and silence.
3.A free man. A man at liberty. A man who has come free of his moorings.
4.A temporary euphemism hung upon a large amalgamation of disparate biological material, memory and feeling. The name attached as a country is assigned to a stretch of land and water – nobody is expected to believe that it is real.
5.THE INVESTIGATION: an indulgent and morbid fantasy created by a man in middle age in grief for his dead wife.
6.The playing out of the investigation, beginning with the first interview conducted by the inspector in La Cueva, was an elaborate production performed by an experimental theatre company, the large cast frequently changing, the performers aware to differing degrees of the artifice, ranging from the inspector, who knew of some of the fraud but was beginning to suspect more, to the workers in the office, fully aware, and terminating in Carlos, who had never existed.
7.Carlos was collected in a box in La Cueva on the 24th by two company representatives. He was taken out of the building via the emergency exit. The box was placed in the rear of a company car, driven eleven hours to port and loaded on to a container ship. The terminus was a mid-ocean island rich in minerals but having no resident population; quarry workers present three months a year. The box was placed inside the quarry. Rain was due in twelve hours and would degrade the lock on the box, allowing Carlos finally to get out. And it would fill the lower third of the quarry.
8.Among the products funded by the corporation was a partly synthetic bacterium that produced in its host an overwhelming desire for escape. This may or may not simply be a symbol representing the crushing effects of corporate life. Carlos killed himself in the bathroom of La Cueva; everything since is mythic sublimation and fantasy.
9.Due to an unknown personal catastrophe only retrospectively implied in analysis of his daily behaviour and performance in the workplace, Carlos decided to leave his family, his work, his city and embark on a pedestrian march to the centre of the continent.
10.The gastrointestinal infection implied in analysis of material found on his keyboard seized Carlos suddenly as he approached the bathroom door, arresting his heart and causing a fatal attack. The decision was made by the family, chiefly the mother, Maria, to refute the finality of his ending. Carlos’s sudden vanishing was deemed temporary and an investigation launched with the express purpose of bringing him back. The mother did not believe that what was described in the initial survey of the scene – the death of her son – was credible, even possible, and so she challenged it. It was hoped, in the forest, that some sort of answer would be found.
11.Carlos shaved off his hair in a La Cueva cubicle with a razor and a handheld mirror. He hit his face repeatedly, puffing the eyes, nose and mouth to become unrecognizable, and walked away from his life.
12.Carlos remained sitting in his chair at the table in La Cueva, having never got up to leave for the bathroom. He was tied securely to the heavy chair, while everybody else – all members of his family, the entire staff, all other diners – left the premises, walking the short distance to a separate property owned by the Rodriguez family. The reproductions were already in place and all that remained was for the diners to carry their plates, glasses and knives. The sign was removed from the original La Cueva and placed in the new restaurant. Carlos remained sitting in his chair at the table in La Cueva.
13.Carlos never, in fact, disappeared. The disappearance existed only on paper. In reality he returned from the bathroom and was present at the table when the first officer arrived to begin interviews. It being assumed that the disappeared person was not currently present and in full view, even cooperating with the enquiries, the issue was never explicitly addressed.
14.Carlos had been poisoned by the food prepared by an inexperienced member of the restaurant’s kitchen team. Noticing him holding his stomach en route to the bathroom, the cook followed, retrieved the corpse and incinerated it on site.
15.Carlos never entered La Cueva, sending instead a male of approximately similar age, height, weight and complexion. The replacement took care not to hold eye contact for more than three seconds, generally keeping his head bowed. The replacement, leaving the bathroom, shook off the mannerisms he had so far affected, walking differently, holding his head to a new height. Appearing to everyone present as a different person, the counterfeit walked out of the front door.
16.Carlos was never born to Maria, the foetus being miscarried seven months into term. The night in question at La Cueva had been created by Maria, in development with members of her family, as well as with several councillors and her parish priest. Maria publicly acknowledged the tragedy and mystery of what had happened to Carlos, collaborating with police, media and other institutions in an investigation into absence.
17.The disappearance of Carlos was a simple matter of the Earth swallowing his identity whole, overcoming in one moment the whole person, making him nothing.
18.A funny thing happened as Carlos closed the bathroom door. When he made a movement, instead of carrying on into the new present, he preserved his whole body – kept it frozen in one place – and made another, very slightly different one. When the new body moved it did so by halting, preserving itself, building another. This went on. It wasn’t just large, macroscopic moves such as footsteps that resulted in preservation and re-creation; even small, infinitesimal frames like the twitch of a lip were copied, changed.
A footstep was made of 4,000 small frames. There were 4,000 new creations when he moved his foot. He realized all this must have been taking up a lot of room and that there must also be a vast amount of resources fuelling all the new versions that were built.
He was becoming aware of the building process in increasingly fine detail. It took longer and longer to do things. When he turned his head, neck and part of his left shoulder to look
behind him, the process occupied around nine years. So many constructions had been made in that turn; he saw, in the corridor, a collection of mildly different identities each assuming a slightly changed shape.
There was little space for air and light – between all the bodies were only thin drags of different colour. Above the height of them was an ordinary layer of upper-corridor. It made him think of being in a low-roofed swimming pool or an aquarium – though this wasn’t water, at least not any more. From a greater distance it might have looked like a museum or a slaughterhouse. This was all going to take a very long time; the planning, supply and construction of movement was so great it barely seemed possible. It was very unlikely he would be able to see a person again.
19.Carlos – his domestic life, family relations, work, relationships, temperament and interests – was the result of a series of deep suggestions planted in the mind of a permanently incarcerated man undergoing experimental consolation therapy. The disappearance of Carlos was coincident with the prisoner waking up, the ongoing investigation into his whereabouts the grieving of the prisoner for the life he thought he had.
20.Carlos’s official disappearance at La Cueva, aged twenty-nine, was the culmination of a long wish granted finally to him by a loving mother, who constructed the evening with the express purpose of allowing him the pleasure of a vanishing. As he saw it, the action of walking anonymously out of the building was only a long delayed fulfilment of an agreement drawn up at birth – namely, that he didn’t exist – and pretending otherwise, for the sake of appearances and certain administrative customs, had been a great strain on him.
21.Carlos suffered a sudden and giant molecular distortion. He became more fluid, loose, less detailed or recognizable. His hands were paddles, his eyes sewn up. He couldn’t see anything, and gradually the part of him prone to reflection drifted further towards nothing, back inside the tree, deeper into the forest.
22.Carlos resumed his place at the table in La Cueva upon returning from the bathroom, and it was only after several minutes that he realized none of the people around him were the same. He had become disoriented as he opened the bathroom door and, despite the fact that La Cueva was a smallish restaurant, he had turned the wrong way, leaving his family out of his line of vision, so that even when he realized he had sat down at the wrong place he couldn’t initially see where his family was. Not wanting to make a scene, he stayed calm, slowly looked to his immediate surroundings. The number of people in the current party was approximately the same as his own, the meals, he noted – even the drinks – seemed to be in accordance with what he could remember of his family. The clothes worn by the people around him were quite familiar, just a little bit different. There seemed to be the same number of adults and children, male and female. He surveyed their faces. This was confirmation that his instinct was correct and that none of the people were the same; he didn’t know any of them, their faces were all unreadable and blank and he hadn’t set eyes on any of them before. Soon enough he would remember how to get to his own group, but until then, he thought, the safest thing was to carry on acting naturally, as if nothing were wrong.
Before long, the cicadas and the bullfrogs bellowed and he realized it had got dark. All the food had been eaten, the wine drunk, and people were preparing to go home. Most people, in fact, had already left, he saw, craning his neck, surveying the tables of La Cueva. He had begun to feel at ease in the company of the strangers. He didn’t mind spending the major part of the evening with them There had been a lot of drink, at his own party as well as in the strange one, and obviously that had played a part in proceedings – his family, evidently, had forgotten about him, and not for the first time. He wondered what had happened to the real occupant of his current seat, the person who was supposed to be there and who had originally ordered food and wine and begun the meal.
23.Attending to an urgent phone message received while Carlos was in the bathroom, the party left mid-meal, gathering all their things and exiting the building. As it was a busy night the restaurant staff wasted no time in clearing away all trace of the party, removing the plates, glasses, cutlery and half-empty wine bottles and in so doing knocking Carlos’s jacket from the back of his chair onto the floor, where it lay unnoticed under the table. By the time Carlos had returned to his seat – seven minutes after he had first got up – a new party had not only been ushered in but had ordered their starters and begun drinking. Assuming he had become disoriented, slightly sheepish at doing something so childish, the kind of thing that would never have happened to any of the other men in his family, he made his way to the broad, front-facing window and turned back, inwards, hoping to gain a perspective on the whole of the restaurant floor.
He saw nothing, no one, just a sea of unknown figures making their way through their meals.
If he had turned the other way, however, and looked out of the windows of La Cueva, he would have seen, on the adjoining street, all the present members of his family leaving, walking away and carrying all of their things, talking animatedly. Past them – La Cueva was on a hill and offered interesting views over the city and on clear days beyond – he would have seen a suggestion of the surrounding mountains and thought how small and vulnerable his family looked in that landscape, and he would have run after them, calling ‘I’m here! I’m here!’
24.It took him some time, adjusting his eyes to the dense light of the room, but Carlos, having exited the bathroom, finally realized what he was seeing. Everything had been petrified. The interior of the food had collapsed; coats of fungi had generated and attracted blowflies. The red wine had dissolved into a thick, organic cake, writhing with moulting worms. The floor hummed with insects. Nothing could be seen through the broad front windows, meshed in larvae and web.
Dust fell in a slow, amber haze. The cloths draped over each of the tables had come apart, the material regurgitated.
Lastly, incredibly, were the bodies, to which he felt no kin at all.
25.When Carlos exited the bathroom he was stopped before he could find his seat. He had wandered absent-mindedly towards his table, only looking up when he noticed someone reaching out a hand. ‘Excuse me,’ the voice said, ‘but you bear an extraordinary resemblance to a relative of ours.’
Carlos assumed his uncle was playing some odd joke on him, which was strange because the two had never enjoyed that kind of a relationship. But as he looked closer at his uncle, he realized that wasn’t exactly who it was. In fact, he looked rather a lot like Carlos’s cousin, Bernal, only considerably aged.
Looking out across the long table, he had the same feeling: these people were like decayed reproductions of his own family.
He obviously appeared confused, because the man smiled and gestured in an effort to demonstrate that the atmosphere should be light, there was nothing to worry about here. The man went on: ‘My cousin, Carlos, disappeared in a similar restaurant, in an occasion just like this, twenty-two years ago. You look a lot like he did then. Maria,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but doesn’t this young man look approximately as Carlos did, the last time we saw him?’
Maria, a very old woman, didn’t seem to have heard. She wore thick glasses and was dressed in black.
‘My name is Carlos,’ he said. ‘I was having a meal with my family, just like you said. I know you. I know your names.’
‘You’ve been watching us, listening to our conversations. I don’t know who’s put you up to this, what kind of strange joke you think you’re playing, but it’s got to stop.’
‘No, you don’t understand: I’m your cousin, Carlos. I really am. I left for the bathroom five minutes ago, that’s all. Look, here’s my identification.’
He reached for his trouser pocket and remembered that his wallet was in his jacket. But his jacket was not on the seat where he had hung it. The seat was occupied by a woman he almost recognized – she had a name he couldn’t quite place – a
nd on the back of her chair was a grey cardigan.
He obviously gave the impression of being wounded, because the man, the one who looked like an older version of Bernal, but not quite Bernal’s father, Andreas, said, ‘Okay, tell me about myself. Tell me things you would only know if you really were Carlos, and not things that just anyone could have found out by eavesdropping or by interviewing friends and colleagues, researching my history.’
‘I…’ Carlos stumbled. ‘We never really knew each other very well. We were never particularly close. We only really saw each other at weddings. But you are my mother’s brother’s son, Andreas’s son, Bernal!’
Bernal, or the one who looked like Bernal, waited a couple of seconds before turning around, fixing the position of his chair again, straightening his napkin and resuming his meal, clearly disappointed. Something in his actions suggested it was not the first time this had happened; many people, perhaps dozens, hundreds, over the years and decades now, had pretended at one time or another to be Carlos. Now that he was finally here, really here, Carlos, it was too late and none of them would believe him.
26.Carlos returned six weeks after the disappearance, dizzy, gaunt, confused, walking back to his table at La Cueva, where the staff recognized him at once. There were jubilant scenes as the police and then the family descended on the restaurant. The matter of what exactly had happened was temporarily brushed aside – Carlos, for the moment, remembered nothing – and the family, newly resident in the suspended operations of the restaurant, celebrated. Carlos was taken under guard to the hospital, where his health would be restored, the story emerging in tandem with his convalescence.
The following evening, at precisely the same hour, Carlos walked through the double doors of La Cueva. The staff alerted the authorities at once, the owner a little irritated. Nobody was blaming Carlos, he said, to his head waiter, it is the police who can’t be relied on to do anything. They can’t find him, the owner went on, they continually disrupt our business, and then, miraculously, when he offers himself back they go and lose him again. It was incredible, but then, he said, they should hardly be surprised.
Infinite Ground Page 17