11
To the south of Las Vegas Boulevard, as you cross the several-mile stretch above the casino part of town, just when you look back and see the last casino glimmering on the horizon in the rearview mirror, like in Green Flash, you find yourself in front of a two-story building, a Budget Suites of America aparthotel. A poster announces discounts for anyone staying a week or longer, sheets not included, and there’s also the news of a teenage girl from Puerto Rico who had to have three toes amputated from her right foot after they froze the previous winter; it seems she was made to regret having used a very expensive varnish to paint her nails the previous day, one she’d bought in Puerto Rico with the idea of looking radiant at her job interviews. Had she been Japanese, this attenuation of the foot would have signified divine intervention, the kind only geishas have access to. Had she been a New Yorker it would be a sign of immense wealth, like that of the Fifth Avenue ladies who maim their own little toes so they can fit into an extremely pointy pair of Manolo Blahniks [placing the results of the mutilation in formaldehyde, or something similar, to show off to any visitor upon whom they want to impress particularly clearly their socioeconomic status]. There’s a scattering of station wagons and mobile homes in the parking lot. It’s turned into a small settlement by now. Every day poses new challenges to the promise that all these people, one way or another, made when they arrived here: that they would prosper in Las Vegas. The welter is equivalent to the wagon trains of those pioneers and dreamers who would draw together and form a circle at nightfall. In the last five years this place has become the real frontier: beyond this point you’re in the promised land. The whole place is so saturated with dreams that it’s turned magical. Rose looks after her three children in a 30m2 bunker. Each day she goes around the church food halls and the cut-price casino buffets. The utensils they eat with, and the assortment of items that goes to make up the dinner set, were found in trash cans. One of the boys, Denny, was working in a photocopying shop for sex-trade flyers, but got the sack for masturbating too much on the job; the others haven’t got jobs. The oldest sister, Jackie, had done all right for a while, when she was living with an ex-boxer called Falconetti. He’d blown in from San Francisco, having just been discharged from the army, and was taking a chimerical route on foot, inverting Columbus’s expedition. He stayed with Jackie for a couple of months and before he left she gave him a tatty pair of Nikes as a memento of the day they met, when she’d been wearing them; they’d both been hitchhiking on opposite sides of the highway and began talking because no one was coming by. In this, the definition of a postmodern city, where, as is obligatory in everything that is post-, even time is unanchored from history, the percentage of adolescents involved in crime, drug addiction, and sex has risen to 30.75 percent in the past three years. At Las Vegas Boulevard the roads break off in a hundred different directions, flourishing outward arborescently into the desert, and, as they unfurl, those magical aparthotels sprout along them like a sort of fruit. They’re watching TV and Denny reaches a hand into his pocket and takes out a small newspaper package he found in a trash can. His mother and siblings look on as he opens it and lays three toes out in the pool of lamplight, a sparkling, opalescent purple hue to them, and nails painted red.
12
Augmented Reality: via the appropriate combination of the physical and virtual worlds, the missing information can be obtained, as happens in the re-creation of the view of an airport that a pilot would have if it weren’t for the snow.
LUIS ARROYO
13
A long time ago [so long it seems like centuries] there was a very important and famous author called Italo Calvino who invited us to imagine a very beautiful city formed solely of water pipes. A mess of snarled piping that [according to Calvino] rises vertically where the houses should be and spreads out horizontally where the floors should be. At the ends of the pipes white bathrooms can be glimpsed, showers and bathtubs where women luxuriate in the water. The reason [according to Calvino] is that these women are nymphs and these pipes were for them the optimum means of getting from place to place so as to live free and unobstructed in their natural aquatic realm. What he did not invite us to imagine was that within each of us another, even more complex city exists: the system of veins, vessels, and arteries around which blood circulates; a city with neither taps, nor apertures, nor drainage pipes, only an endless channel whose constant return consolidates the “I” we hope might save us from the fatal scattering of our identity across the universe. We all bear inside ourselves a desert, something immobile; a period of time that has mineralized, is at a standstill. Hence the “I” may consist of an immovable hypothesis, one assigned to us at birth and that, until the last, we’re seeking to demonstrate, unsuccessfully.
14
The true identity of a certain Polish, Chicago-based musician, still unknown, is hidden under the alias of Sokolov. He came to the U.S. at the age of 10 to be raised by his grandmother. Following the death of his parents in a gas explosion in their building in Tarnów, near Kraków, this was the easiest way for his Polish aunt to rid herself of the boy. The reason he survived was that, at the moment of the explosion, he found himself, as usual, down in the basement making recordings of all kinds of exciting sounds to add to the on-tape cosmogony of his childhood. Hitting a spoon on the table while breathing heavily, turning the drill on and simultaneously reading aloud, without understanding a single word, fragments from the copy of Das Kapital he found lying forgotten among his father’s tools—these are the kinds of things he liked to tape on the old KVN recorder. They pulled him out after 3 days, 3 days without food or water, by which time he’d already been announced among the dead. In Chicago he grew up fitting in easily, like all musicians, to a civilization like the American one, where time predominated over space. His own grandmother was surprised at how easily he adapted. After several years studying electronica and playing synth in local postrock groups, he became interested in the same things he’d been drawn to in childhood, like abstract music and noise, and with this reversal, this ramification, he was soon to be seen frequenting different Chicago neighborhoods, going around armed with recording equipment and field mics, discovering all manner of textures in unexpected urban instruments: from the classic clack clack of cars driving across imperfectly fitting manhole covers, to the gushing sound emitted by a graffiti artist’s spray can. He’d then remix and sample these sounds among other recordings—his own or other people’s—and thus began making his first CDs, which he then distributed around shops and local markets, this in turn generating a certain renown for him as a vanguardist musician. Miraculously enough, when the accident in Poland took place, he had a recently recorded tape in his pocket, one he’s conserved. He often uses it, extracting from it and inserting parts into his current sound pieces, pieces that would otherwise never have existed in North America.
15
At 6:00 p.m. Falconetti pitches up at the poplar that found water, halting in the shade, dropping the green backpack, and using it for his pillow as he lowers himself to the ground. He gazes upward. Finding the swaying of so many shoes hypnotic, he begins to doze off. Night has fallen, practically, by the time he wakes. Not a single light on the whole radius of the horizon, save the camping stove he uses to heat a powdered jerky soup. It seems it was past its sell-by date when the man in the supermarket sold it to him. He dumps it. Inside his sleeping bag, he goes to sleep gazing at the shimmer and sparkle of so many buttonholes above his head. He’s woken by the sun. He takes a pair of small Nikes out of his backpack, ties them together, and throws them up into the tree. They catch against a pair of blue and red ski boots. As he goes through a round of his morning exercises he notices, on the currently shaded portion of the trunk, a used condom.
16
The words organization and organism aren’t actually very closely related. An organism is an entity, sea mineral, animal, vegetable, or sociocultural, that lives and develops independently, according to complex dictates that ar
e internal to it, and almost always spontaneous; in all cases an organism can be considered a living being. An organization is a bureaucratic entity, sea mineral, animal, vegetable, or sociocultural, and it depends on external agents to dictate its development; never is an organization a living being.
17
Of all the manias, without a doubt the most widespread is morning lovemaking. Men always want to at this hour, and end up persuading women. Not a problem if one lives sheltered within the four walls of a house. So let’s imagine a homeless couple who set up on some parcel of open ground or out in the desert; for them the act requires taking cover under the shade of a tree or a bush or a wall. In time the mechanical thrusts and shoves will inevitably begin to mark on the ground, and in the end there will always be some person devising theories that link these marks with spacecraft landings. This is what happened with Kent Fall, the mayor of Ely, who on a morning in 1982 saw very deep marks in the shade of the poplar that found water, deep and gestural and arithmetic, bored into the earth. Above, hanging from one of the branches, he found two pairs of shoes.
18
For a time, Sherry was the only girl available at the Honey Route. The regulars weren’t spending so freely, and it was down to guys who stopped by, passing custom, the kind who, once they’d come in and gotten a beer in hand weren’t going to blink. Every Monday a trucker named Clark, the liquor delivery guy, called in. A while back he’d said to her, It wouldn’t take you a minute to pack your bag—it isn’t as if you’ve got much stuff—and you could come away in the truck with me. The delivery drivers do their rounds before dawn, and so the sun still hadn’t come up when Sherry put her bag in the truck, while Clark cracked open a beer. He started telling her about a friend of his, an Argentine who worked in a club in Las Vegas, and, Las Vegas being pornstar central, he’d be sure to find her some work, they’d inquire. He felt the impulse to kiss her just at that moment, for the first time, but didn’t. Sherry had been up the whole night and went through into the back of the cab to lie down, picking up a book she found among the beer cans and skimming before putting it to one side again, of all the books I have had printed none is, I believe, as personal as this collective and disorderly compilation. J. L. Borges. Buenos Aires, 31 October 1960. The sun was up by now and Clark opened another beer and handed it to Sherry, followed by another and another, until they were on to their eighth, at which point they stopped for a rest, pulling up next to a poplar covered in shoes. Sherry had heard a lot of talk about the tree, and of the supposedly extraterrestrial origin of some marks on the shady side of the tree at dawn, but she’d never seen it for herself. Maybe all the shoes are an offering to the aliens, said Sherry, hopping down from the cab. From here to California all you got is cults. One time a bunch stopped at the Honey Route, and they fucked without fucking, it was weird, all they did was watch me, but they swore they were doing it, and they had me there for hours, beats me, but anyway they paid. They were lying beneath the tree now, he had his arm around her and was fixating on the rise and fall of her large breasts, made all the larger by the combination of the silence and the beer, but he still hadn’t kissed her. Then, visibly moved, he spoke of a book by Jorge Luis Borges that he’d been given by his Argentine friend. I’ve got it in the back of the cab, he said, I’ll show it to you later, it’s called Dreamtigers.
19
A spy wants to send a message saying, “The nuclear weapon is situated in…” To make a secret code of it he switches letters out at random: e’s instead of h’s, l’s for k’s, a’s for v’s, and so on. The message ends up as: “hk vjtvhbil bñwkhvj…” Now, if the enemy were to intercept the message, would they have any chance of decoding it? The answer is yes, if the message is sufficiently long. The reason being, in every language, the frequency with which each letter appears is fairly fixed. You only need to count the number of times each letter repeats in the coded message, and make it correspond with the letter that, in the normal language, repeats with the same frequency.
JEROME SEGAL
20
Jorge Rodolfo Fernández is Argentinian, living in the Budget Suites of America aparthotel at the point where the last casino on Las Vegas Boulevard glimmers on the horizon. His room, situated at the front of the building, though built from demolition materials, is one of the most decent; it belongs to the series that was built with horizontal windows and a rationalization of space in the style of Le Corbusier—the International Style, as it came to be known. The window looks out across the parking lot, its trailers and RVs forming a sort of chromatic crossword of magic and misery, he thinks; the thing is, though his job is collecting empties in a club, really he’s a poet. Unlike his neighbors, who fill their rooms to bursting with all manner of useless detritus and colorful plastic objects they find in trash cans and at derelict theme parks or hotels, his room is the closest thing in the whole of the U.S. to a monk’s cell. Painted a light gray suggestive of concrete, it has a rickety metal-frame bed, a night table that also serves as his dining table, a stripped-down cooking range, a cupboard he made from some leftover plywood, and a wooden chair. Above the night table hangs a framed photograph of Jorge Luis Borges. He doesn’t work Mondays, so he got up this morning to boil rice for the week, which he divides between Tupperware containers, and he’s sitting reading by the window, making the most of the single bit of sunlight he’ll get, because of his hours, all week. Some of his neighbors walk by; they’re carrying buckets and have their dogs with them. Hey, they say. He reads the same Borges passage he reads every day at midday before going to work, happy in the certainty that he’s found the perfect spot in which to pass his days, Borges’s secret location, because, as well as being a poet, he is (as he himself will attest) “a seeker of Borgesian fiction-places” … In this empire, the art of cartography was taken to such a peak of perfection that the map of a single province took up an entire city and the map of the empire, an entire province. In time, these oversized maps outlived their usefulness and the college of cartographers drew a map of the empire equal in format to the empire itself, coinciding with it point by point. The following generations, less obsessed with the study of cartography, decided that this overblown map was useless and somewhat impiously abandoned it to the tender mercies of the sun and seasons. There are still some remains of this map in the western desert, though in very poor shape, the abode of beasts and beggars. No other traces of the geographical disciplines are to be seen throughout the land. With the last light of the last casino of the empire in view, Jorge Rodolfo shuts his eyes and gives thanks to the Maker for allowing him to inhabit the ruins, to him alone revealed, of this map.
21
It’s getting warm in the station wagon, that’s what makes these old ones such a drag, says Kelly, pointing to the bag on the right of Christina, who’s driving, so she can take another look at the bikini. She bought it at a service station in Santa Barbara, and isn’t convinced: she tried it on in the bathroom in front of a mirror barely 30 × 50cm2 and eaten away at by the gases that ferment the moment they contact the salty humid air blowing in off the Pacific. The other two girls, surfers like her, are asleep. All four are blond, two of them bleached-blond. None of them is wearing shoes, surfers don’t need shoes. As they pass mudflat after mudflat, power line succeeding power line, a sense of deferred conviction is generated inside Christina, who accelerates: in the distance, at the end of all these power lines, it must follow that a person will be there. Kelly strips from the waist up and fastens the bikini catch; her modest 22-year-old breasts weigh down the elasticated fabric. She considers herself in the mirror of her sunglasses, which magnify her breasts, Like Pamela Anderson, she says to herself. The TV lifeguard responsible for transmitting the Californian surfing bug since the beginning of the ‘90s. They pass a sign for a detour onto U.S. Route 50, she takes the bikini bottoms in her hands, slips her fingers inside, pressing on the Lycra, and, against the light, on top of the greenish blue of the print, her hands resemble seaweed under water, she thinks, the rh
izomey, arborescent structures that, when she fell from her board, she’d observe until forced up to the surface for air. Not nowadays, she’s turned into a very good surfer now, and for a moment, as she shifts her gaze toward the roadside ditch, she feels a pang for those beginnings. What her hand really resembles beneath the Lycra is a surgeon’s glove, but she doesn’t know that yet. The sun’s been up for a while and the sky’s starting to cloud over, dark spirals of air forming in the distance. Kelly thinks the successive power lines that stretch from pole to pole are like the waves of a now-skeletized, seaweedless ocean; nobody knows what caused the drying-out. Radiohead’s “Karma Police” is playing. She imagines herself catching waves in the Indian Ocean, and falls asleep holding the bikini bottoms. Her breasts turn softer.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 2