He was some kind of an official, he supposed. An inspector. And he had been working on a long investigation. He was tired. But he had to continue, because everyone had disappeared.
He became extremely sensitive to light. He knew how scarce it was, how little it could be counted on. The vast trees, looped and tangled, bent into strange and impossible shapes, wanted only the light, were sculpted out of competition for the light. He disciplined himself to wake in the dark and observe the faintest scrap of falling dawn. He collected it. Occasionally there were temporary light columns, strange, passing images with no substance. He fooled himself, thinking on three separate occasions that the precise area he stood in belonged to the past. He knew this ground. He was aware how unlikely it was; that he would know this place, of all places. That in the infinite forest ground he should go over something familiar, somewhere he had been before. It had all grown over, so it wasn’t anything particular in the presentation that was the same, the thing he recognized. But it was definitely here, he thought. It didn’t matter how illogical it sounded, he knew he was right, this was it, this ground.
It was one of the few weeks each year they’d managed to get the same time off work. They didn’t need to go far. They stayed in three hotels, each carefully picked out. Distant enough from the overpopulated coast, still accessible in a couple of hours by car. ‘I’ve salt on my back,’ she said. They wanted to run. They’d walked in the hills just out of town, brought coffee, wine, oranges, bread, thick ham, sardines. Finding a level spot they laid out their things, ate in the breeze. Drowsy, they slept, curled together in the ground. He woke, vague, initially confused, stumbled some speech, impressions, and she laughed, pushed at his shoulder. He heard the breeze louder, their things rippling.
They were holding their possessions down in the wind, gathering in, packing up. Driving home. The present rolling on, the year gone already.
This wasn’t it, he thought. This wasn’t the same place.
The trees moved in the breeze and the light passed and he didn’t recognize it any more.
The light did stranger things, especially near the end of the day. It climbed away like smoke; he could never reach it. It was getting dark, he was looking for a place to rest, make an interior of leaves, when he saw a fire glow ahead of him. Just a glimpse, not far away. He tried to walk towards it. When he realized it wasn’t spreading, that it must have been inside something, he noticed a building around it made of stone. He couldn’t get an absolutely clear view, barred by the trees, but the building was small, perhaps a single room. The roof was domed. Someone inside enjoying the hearth, maintaining the fire.
He put his stick out before him, determined to travel in as straight a line as possible to the building and the fire. It should have appeared closer by now, but the building had exactly the same dimensions. The image was constant, as if either he was static or the building, the dome, the fire was moving in tandem. He could get no clear perspective inside the trees. He was no longer surprised when he grabbed for things that weren’t there. He had thrilled one morning, spotting through the mist several hogs grunting in the distance. His stomach cramped, flooded with associations and possibilities. He had marched forwards and, as a line of beetles strung on a silver web met his nose, he had realized his error.
He turned from the building. Another trick, an illusion. There could be nobody living here; no built things, no fire. He was adapting the objects in front of him and inventing scenarios. It was a rare bright flower, a bird, a frog in warning display.
He saw the building again several days later. He wondered if he was shutting down, generating new temptations for going backwards and giving up, lying in the leaves, into some consolation of for ever.
He called out when he found, suddenly, the river again.
He waded into the river, eyes closed, mouth wide and head bent back to touch his shoulder. Just the sound of the water could sustain him for years. The sudden change in temperature and state tightened every muscle of his body, sending a pleasure shock along each nerve, an electric wave ballooning in his head. It felt so good. He tried to be alert, but the water was extravagant and it lit him and he could stay like this. There was so much water, unlimited quantities under the earth. He could drop it all over him, down the fixture of his hair and his hurt shoulders. He took slow pleasure in drying by heat. He could smell it now – abundant life and where it came from, the sluice of minerals, the cold, faraway mountain heights. And the other way, the flow, a discharge down into something vast and inconceivable, the sea.
Climbing out, he saw marks on the river mud. Prints of a large animal leading from the water to the thicket. He measured his feet by them; they were only just larger, a similar shape. They weren’t so different that they couldn’t have been his. He wasn’t surprised at mistakes any longer. He could have left the water earlier and forgotten. The prints running, extending slightly as the moisture filled them.
A small fish, still wet, lay on a stone on the river mud. It was unnatural. Something, he was sure, had taken it there, discarding it. He looked around again. It seemed contrived, too fortunate. No teethmarks visible on the side. He collected it carefully, turning it in his hands, and then held it up to his nose, the memory of the abandoned carcass making him wary. The stench was over him. He flung it back to the ground and he saw the rot where it fell. Fresh, gleaming, tantalizing, what he had seen laid on the rocks wasn’t real, the fish had been surface. Small animals, a kind of micro-circuitry, organized themselves inside it. Soon there would be nothing left, no animal.
He was surviving well enough. He trailed the river for a mile or so, a safe distance, retaining the sound of it and making forays in at the half-point, daily. He was feeling better, stronger. Days later the river dwindled into streams, marshes he couldn’t pass, and he had no option but to cut back, wait for morning, find a new route out on harder ground.
XIV
He tried to recall the breadth of the continent. He judged the time past as conservatively as he could, but even then, he estimated he couldn’t have much further to go. He thought he was beginning to see signals, stopped, studied them for hours, read the information every way he could. Although he was very careful, when he pushed away the last of the mushroom body it was still possible he destroyed something inside it, covered. He’d thought he had found cloth – he even thought the shape indicated a shoe, something discarded and now wrapped in thick fungal coats. But he couldn’t get at it. Whatever was there had split, crumbled into powder in his hands.
He practised his story; there was pressure to get it right. But as soon as he started on it, he tired, looked for distractions. Although he was getting better, his diet had been so poor, he reasoned, for so long, that it would take him some time to function properly. He was too weak to enjoy thinking of the beginning of his story. All of the details necessary to fill out the scenes he might imagine – starting with the setting, the levelling of the trees around the perimeter of the coastal village where his audience would be; the strange, suspicious looks of the first people to see him; the structure of the homes these people lived in; the physique and facial appearance of the first person he talked to; the drinks they gave him on a tray when they heard how hoarse his voice was; the clarifications they demanded almost as soon as he began, requests for earlier, ‘missing’ scenes, repeated expressions of incredulity, pity – were an enormous drain on his reserves, when he needed all his energy just to maintain himself.
The quantity of information he would have to tell them, once he reached the village, was getting to be a burden. There was too much of it. Instead of being pleased, excited at the thought, he started to picture it in volume, the amount of space it would occupy. He looked at strips of his story, its information. He did not see how there would be room for it. It was harder for him to breathe. He imagined laying out even a brief description of a scene from near the beginning, after the evacuation, telling, broadly, how it
happened. He was immediately overwhelmed. He felt new pressure on his gut and in his head. Just one frame of memory had led to this excess. By tricking himself, admitting memory only in flashes, he had been able to walk, travel a significant distance through the forest. But now he was thinking of presenting them, the memories became real, solid, a fibre in his head.
He hadn’t been able to imagine the village where the story would happen. There was the light, the details of the surrounding environment. He would have to conceive of how people would react. There would be a meal, that was important. They would all eat together. He would have to imagine what type of food they prepared and at what point his story would be set aside for it. He wondered whether he would then, later, when he got back to it, have to start all over again, or whether a recap would do and where he would start with that. At the same time he had to consider the food’s preparation, the length of time it would take to boil the fish stew and whether it took place outside, perhaps in a covered but open domestic area, or inside, in a distinct and furnished room. He had to imagine how high the roof was and what it was constructed from. Was there smoke in the room? Was the fish preserved and prepared this way, blackened over coals? The fabric of each person’s clothing would have to be imagined as well as their hair, their eye colour, the way they moved their head and what it was that had distracted them, some worry, some anticipation, some long-held doubt. Were they all sitting on the ground? Directly or on mats? He had to think of the source of the water used to thin out the juice of the tomatoes, whether it had come from a well or a river – most likely the village would have been founded on a river. He wondered how long the whole process of preparing the food had taken, and during it what and whom the women had discussed, how many children had got in the way, how healthy they were, what was the nature of the relationship between the siblings, who protected whom, who was the leader, the adventurer, and who hung back, stayed closer to home?
The bigger problem was where to begin. In choosing one particular event he would appear to be prioritizing it above all others, saying this was the source of it, even when that wasn’t the case at all. It was all equally important, every detail. If there was some way to present it all indiscriminately, simultaneously, he would do that. That was the only way the presentation would be sufficient.
He had a large investigation to present. He wanted to leap to his feet. He could barely comprehend the idea that he was on the cusp of giving it all over. It was even possible – although he had been gone a long time, and admittedly it had all happened quite a distance away – that at least one person in the village would have some knowledge of the disappearance. There had undoubtedly been several expeditions in the preceding months – years? – of parties sent to the site. Enquiries had been made, surely, after the loss of Santa Lucía, in every settlement around the interior. Chances were that someone in the village would recall his own disappearance, visits made by his colleagues, friends from the department flying in.
For the moment, despite all this excess of time, he didn’t think in any detail about his resettlement. The construction of all the possible scenarios was ludicrously unfeasible. To imagine meeting his friends, relatives, colleagues again, after all this time, after everything that had happened, required many worlds to be built. He couldn’t just cut directly to a celebratory reunion in a bar, dark, full of people whose faces were lacking in detail; it had been some time since he had seen any of them and they would have aged, naturally, every day counting. He would need some idea, first, of the steps that led down to the basement, the distance from the bar to the street, how close it was to the nearest metro station, whether parking was available, what kind of clothing the attendee wore and whether it was issued as standard or adapted to suit, where the fabric had originally been produced and under what kind of working conditions, the duration of any breaks…
Once he got out onto the street, then there were obviously many more details to take into account. An unknown number of people working, commuting, entering and exiting shops, cafés, offices, apartments, moving at various speeds, smoking, talking into phones. Some would be wearing lipstick, lip balm, depending on the humidity, the levels of pollution affected by the time of day and the correlating traffic intensity.
He did not feel prepared for this. The regularity of the peopled world would not come back easily. Even fundamental details were stark and shocked him. He could not move forward from one thing to the next. A single physical detail was excessive, it contained too much.
He tried to picture something that should have been simple, typical – a vendor at a news stand. Begin, move on. He aimed at a clear outline, but faltered, seeing newsprint on the tip of the man’s right index finger and thumb; he thought of childbirth, of cupboard drawers in the poorer districts, lined with near germ-free print.
He didn’t know where to look on the street. A single street. A bank of space. An overwhelming series of objects reflecting, refracting, obstructing light. He tried to imagine the sunlight, which meant first he would have to fix on a certain time of day for the reunion to take place, dictated by the schedules of the people most important to him, who would by now, it was only fair to imagine, have moved on with their lives; it may be, in fact, that his returning, specifically the reunion evening he was in the process of creating, was greeted with something other than unreserved joy. He tried to make it real, picture the roads, the pavements, the models and manufacturers of cars, the distances the parts had travelled, the nature of the automated machinery used to guide their larger construction, the litter on the ground, the footwear worn by pedestrians, the sounds of the surrounding city travelling as many as six miles or more.
Even then, it wasn’t as if he could cut directly to that day, straight from the forest, all the details of the reunion celebration spontaneously willed into being. He would have to travel there, move his body along in a series of different vehicles; even when he had exited the forest and the interior there would be a long time spent with medical experts, physical and mental, evaluating his condition, judging his state and suitability for reintegration. As he was very ill, with all manner of infections, parasites, there would be a long time, weeks at least, he should think, spent in transit, in medical quarters. He realized, in addition, that even just procedurally, as a technicality, he might have to prove to them, the officials handling the case, that he was indeed the person he claimed to be; they would have to verify his identity either biologically or through an extensive series of questions.
He could not imagine what it would be like at the airport. Had he passed national frontiers already, in the forest? Would the embassy have to assign him a passport before travel, and what would that entail? Again there was the long, difficult question of verification, of meeting the stringent demands the officials would place on him. He couldn’t think of the word denoting the material passports were made of. It seemed a laborious process manufacturing it, printing on it, laminating the pages, linking up all the details to other profiles on vast digital databases. That was the problem he was facing now, trying to distract himself from the flies on his nose, his cheeks, his eyelids and his lips. Whenever he tried to anticipate something different, something from the future, a new scene, anything ongoing, anything, in other words, that was not this, he felt he had to establish the smallest part, every feature of the hypothetical scene, or else it would fall apart. The effort seemed impossible. How could it be done? How could it continue?
XV
Something different, he thought, around him in or through the trees, but he didn’t name it. He went slowly, thinking more about his resettlement, about what might happen to him when he made it out of the forest. His seniors, the department, the friends and even before that, local officials, police authorities, representatives of the council… They were all going to expect something from him, weren’t they? Then, of course, there were the relatives of the people involved in the disappearance – what was he going to say to them? H
e had not enough time, yet. He was anxious the more the light filtered through the trees behind him, late in the day. He had to think hard. Could he go back? Spend longer going over the forest, furthering his work on the investigation? Perhaps all the way back to Santa Lucía – to the place, he corrected himself, where Santa Lucía had once stood? Certainly, he wasn’t prepared, he hadn’t any useful information to give to them when he got clear of the forest, far less any kind of comprehensive dossier relating to the investigation.
The light continued to develop further every morning – there was nothing to accept but that he was getting closer to the end, or at least to a substantial clearing, suggesting a sizeable community. The forest around him now was different, had been harvested, even lived in at some stage, and he was confident, he was almost certain, that people lived not far from here, just a little further on. He didn’t know what to do. He could still turn back, make his way into the thicker parts of the forests, which he had lived in, now, for months at least. Perhaps in the couple of days following, a hunter or some playing children from the village would notice his prints, see them as strange, and report on it. There might be an initial, only cursory attempt to locate him, but it wouldn’t be anything that could threaten him, really.
He was light-headed, and he kept hearing himself laughing, which was strange. It was all absurd, he thought, the whole thing. But would he not regret turning back, having trusted, up from almost nothing, up from just the ground, the light, moving east and getting there, finally, to the edge? Equally, could he really simply stop, as if it were finished, as if he had completed something, anything, when clearly he hadn’t, he hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t begun any kind of investigation at all?
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