22
At the time that Niels’s and Frank’s destinies were joined in a University of Arizona laboratory, neither of them could have known that their alliance would take them all the way to Mozambique. Niels, a Danish zoologist specializing in animal behavior, studying with support from an intercollegiate scheme, was looking into ways of training miniature dogs to sniff out antipersonnel mines. Progress was scant. According to the computer simulations of the problem, the dogs always exploded. Too heavy. Frank, a DHL deliveryman at the time, was the one bringing items to the lab. Their relationship was limited to the signing of Niels’s signature on Frank’s delivery sheets. Until one day Frank said to Niels, I’ve got a way to solve your problem, it’s rats you need, not dogs, come over to my place and I’ll show you. Niels made the near-150-mile trip to Nevada, where Frank lived with his wife and three children in a robust, well-put-together wooden house, complete with a lawn. He was taken down to the basement, and there witnessed the rat spectacular Frank had assembled for his family’s entertainment. Joined together by long enough pieces of string, and being made to pass through all manner of balance tests, they never pressed down more than was safe on any of the levers, and could smell perfectly the decoy: gunpowder from a cartridge. They’re ideal, he said. Cheap, easy to come by, once they’ve got a scent they just won’t give up, plus they weigh under 1.2 kilos—which, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that’s the minimum weight to set off one of those gizmos of yours? From then on they worked so closely together that Niels arranged for Frank to be given a role as an assistant at the university. Now they’re in Mozambique. The second the sun comes up they’re out there with their 15 Gambian rats, which make their way frenetically out into the prairie lands attached to pieces of 50-foot-long string; when they pick up the scent they start squeaking, and once they’ve found the supposed spot where the mine is, they stop by it, sit down, and settle down. One day a letter was wrongly delivered to their improvised field tent and Frank, who to this day hasn’t recovered from the tic of needing to deliver items as quickly as possible, decided to redirect it himself. Seeing as it wasn’t far, he decided to walk, and Niels said he ought to take a couple of rats along as a safety system. Not long after he set out, the animals became extremely unsettled and began to emit the squeak: mine. They tugged and tugged and wouldn’t stop until they reached the foot of a tree, and when they settled again, they each stopped and cast their snouts upward. From the branches of the tree, held there by lianas of some kind, hung a multitude of bones belonging to an animal that was never identified.
23
It was ultimately decided that this project was not to be the one they were going to use to separate uranium. We were told then that we were going to stop, because in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would be starting the project that would actually make the bomb. We would all go out there to make it. There would be experiments that we would have to do, and theoretical work to do. I was in the theoretical work … Well, when we arrived, the houses and dormitories and things like that were not ready. In fact, even the laboratories weren’t quite ready … So they just went crazy and rented ranch houses all around the neighborhood … When I got to the site the first time, I saw there was a technical area that was supposed to have a fence around it ultimately, but it was still open. Then there was supposed to be a town, and then a big fence further out, around the town. But they were still building … When I went into the laboratory, I would meet men I had heard of by seeing their papers in the Physical Review and so on. I had never met them before. “This is John Williams,” they’d say. Then a guy stands up from a desk that is covered with blueprints, his sleeves all rolled up, and he’s calling out the windows, ordering trucks and things going in different directions with building material. In other words, the experimental physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready, so they just built the buildings—or assisted in building the buildings.
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
24
So, we’re in agreement with the idea that Heine is an Austrian journalist, a correspondent for the Kurier in Vienna, and that he’s lived in Peking for the last six years, married to Lee-Kung, a Chinese woman. Their block of flats looks made of concrete, but no. It’s only a conglomerate of sand and iron shavings extracted from low-grade Turkish mines, later pressed and solidified with the use of a glue called SO(3). Inside this structure, the marriage collapsed long ago. He’s fascinated by the boom that China has experienced following the freeing up of markets. The reports he sends back to Vienna are almost all analyses of the future power of the markets here. For instance, Chinese enthusiasm for purchasing cars has debilitated the automotive industry worldwide, with direct threat to oil reserves. The same with washing machines, video games, and Tampax. There’s no keeping up. Lee-Kung, unemployed, spends a great deal of time cutting out photos from the free North American magazines Heine receives. She scans the images and saves them onto her Apple Mac before beginning with her modifications, copying and pasting in Chinese motifs. She’s had an online relationship for the past year with someone called Billy, an American citizen from the state of Nevada who, it turns out, is an expert in rock climbing, a sport she knows nothing about. When they write they always talk about one day seeing each other. Heine’s favorite pastime, after pedophilia and betting at the clandestine rat races in back of the Versace store that opened the previous year just a stone’s throw from his office, is going out and filming what he calls “Pekingese road movies,” using a small camcorder; these, as we know, bear no resemblance to their North American namesakes. The most important element in any road movie is the horizon; it has to feature sooner or later, signifying something in and of itself; a far-off point that comprises the spirit of the film in question. As any number of studies have demonstrated, in European cinema the horizon signifies loss or melancholy; in North American cinema, it’s hope, the magnetizing element for pioneers; and in Chinese and Japanese films it means death.
25
Description: all materials, all objects, everything we see, are clots—catastrophes that took place on the neutral, two-dimensional, isotropic plane coterminous with The Beginning. These are the so-called First Order Catastrophes. When a foreign agent alters the equilibrium of one of these objects, it then breaks off in unpredictable directions, dragging along other objects—whether near or far—in a kind of domino effect. This we call the Second Order Catastrophe. The desert, given its flatness and isotropic nature, is the least catastrophic place. Except when the silence is broken by a scarab beetle dragging a stone along, or when in some fold in the land a blade of grass emerges, or when a poplar finds water and grows. Then, a husband, looking for ways to aggravate his wife, throws her shoes to the top of this tree that, like an attractor point, has been gathering hundreds more shoes besides. And, it goes without saying, this also counts as a Second Order Catastrophe.
26
The first poem that Hannah, a native of Utah, wrote, was this:
The content of this poem is invisible: it exists but cannot be seen. Even the author doesn’t know what it says.
27
Lee-Kung, as always happens in Chinese movies, as well as in all marriages that have fallen apart, has relatives who grow rice in the countryside, and two years into the marriage she had begun spending long periods with them so she wouldn’t have to be constantly dealing with the concupiscent face of Heine (now serving a life sentence in Chao Province). At the family house Lee-Kung was always able to go online and not worry about being discovered by Heine. Her grandparents, who spend their time either working or asleep, never had a clue. Today Billy told her about coming second in the XV Rock Climbing Competition in Sacramento and sent some photos. Beyond the computer screen, the sweeping view across the paddy fields makes her heart seem to shrink. It turns to lead. Small but dense.
28
The truck crossed the border at El Paso without any problems; in fact the consignment of black beans it carried was already well
known to the U.S. officers who saw Humberto at regular 37-day intervals. He came from a place called Monterrey in northern Mexico, and his destination was the Central Market in Salt Lake City, which served as a fruit and veg distribution point for Utah and the surrounding states. Having hit U.S. roads, each time he stopped for the night or to refuel he’d usually open up the trailer and take a look at the state of the merchandise; if anything was damaged from all the bumping about, or because the load hadn’t been secured correctly, he’d have to pay for it out of his own pocket. But he didn’t check this time; at some of the stops he felt very tired, and at others he just found too many interesting things to look at, and forgot all about the beans. For example the new amusement park just after coming through San Antonio, or the splendid vista from the highway, also new, linking the incredibly high bridges in a canyon-dotted stretch of New Mexico, or the conversation of a hitchhiker named Bertrand who was headed as far north as he could get, and whom, after buying him a meal, Humberto left at a bus stop near Ely. So it was that, driving along not really thinking about what was in the trailer, after four days he came to the market, an industrial polygon where the goods were stored in the wholesalers’ units. No one had imagined that when they opened one of the doors at the back of the trailer they’d find a dead man up on the top crate, lying facedown with his back grazing the roof. The right door, open, afforded a view of the man’s legs and waist, which half dangled in space. When they opened the left door, which when shut had hidden the face and the upper half of the body from sight, the cadaver tumbled down on top of them. It hit the ground with a sound like an empty eggshell breaking. It’s a Mexican, said the ashen Humberto. We have to call Immigration! No one said anything for a few moments. Suffocated, someone murmured. No doubt, another. Not wanting to lose the merchandise, they decided to take the beans the young Mexican had been lying on and mix them into other crates, that way they could say they’d thrown them away and not have to deal with paranoid or scrupulous future buyers. If we assume that the body of the late youngster was of average proportions, 5'8" in height and 1'7" wide, we’re looking at a surface area of 3 square feet of beans, scattering, going around the world covered in the saliva, sweat, tears, urine, and excrescences of that man who crossed the border. One more body in negative, a double devaluation then distributed among window displays, veg sections, shopping carts, stomachs, and saucepans. A broken map, 0.875m2 in circumference, of which perhaps some certain fragment might have returned home, being that there’s a charity store in Salt Lake City that periodically sends shipments of vegetables to the poorest parts of Mexico.
29
Not many people know about the small community of North Americans living in Tsau-Chee, a province in southeast China. This is globalization’s great plus point, the fact that you can have a Tex-Mex in China and a bamboo soup in a town in Texas. About two dozen families have created a simple, carefree environment for themselves, but also based on great wealth. Basically, they’re executives from American companies who, in their day, came and worked in the region. Now that conditions are sufficiently favorable, due to the intriguing mysteries of the free market and its contract relations, they’ve been given early retirement, all of them on full salaries. Free of the moral pressures of North American society, and on the other hand in a position to enjoy everything an artificial North American society has to offer, theirs is a happy lot. The eyes of southeastern China are trained on these several hundred square feet. It’s the kind of life desired by any self-respecting Chinese on the path to modernity. But the main thing, the most well-known thing about this little America, is that a nucleus of surfers, the best surfers in all of the Yellow Sea, have joined together there. Initially this nucleus was made up of the children of the North Americans, but now multitudes of Chinese have been drawn in, too, with the peculiarity that it isn’t the younger surfers who can really ride, but the elder statesmen of the region. Their grandchildren aren’t a patch on them. The explanation lies in a dangerous local tradition, one that only the older members of society are allowed to take part in: kwai muk collecting. The kwai muk is a citrus fruit that grows on a tree of the same name, and it is gathered by means of a tightrope walk along ropes slung from treetop to treetop—at times 80 feet off the ground. The day these grandmothers and grandfathers stepped into neoprene suits and onto surfboards, they swept all before them.
30
It was in Hoeller’s garret, where I had now moved with Roithamer’s papers, most of them relating to the building of the Cone … it was here that Roithamer had conceived the idea of the Cone and drawn up the basic plans for it … and no sooner had I entered Hoeller’s garret than I discovered that, now, some months after Roithamer’s death and half a year after his sister’s death … his sister for whom he had built the Cone which is already abandoned to natural decay, Hoeller’s garret still contains all the plans … books and articles in every possible language, including languages unknown to him but translated for him by his brother Johann who spoke many languages and in fact had a gift for languages like no other man I ever knew, the translations were also here in Hoeller’s garret, and I could see at once that there had to be hundreds of them, stacks of translations from Spanish and Portuguese, as I noticed when I entered the garret, hundreds if not thousands of laborious decipherments of probably important considerations for the construction and completion of the Cone by experts unknown to me but probably familiar to him, who concerned himself with the art of building, he hated the word architect, or architecture, he never said architect, or architecture, and when I or someone else said architect, or architecture, he instantly countered by saying that he could not stand hearing the word architect, or architecture, that these two words were nothing but malformations, verbal monstrosities which no thinking man would stoop to, and I never used the words architect, or architecture, in his presence … even Hoeller got accustomed to avoiding the words architect or architecture, like Roithamer we resorted to words such as master builder or building or the art of building; that the word BUILD is one of the most beautiful in the language, we knew ever since Roithamer had spoken about it, in that same garret where I have now installed myself, one dismal rainy evening when we again, as so often, dreaded the onset of another one of those torrential floods.
THOMAS BERNHARD
31
There wasn’t any traffic so Falconetti spread the cloth out in the middle of the road rather than in the ditch—next to a sizable pothole, against the side of which he leaned the backpack. It’s like having a 250-mile-long table, he said to himself. These were things they’d taught him in the army: to redefine the absurd to suit your own ends. This was how you survived, and he knew it well. After preparing the jerky he remained seated, basking in the sun, in the center of the rhombus traced by the east and the west at their respective vanishing points. He thought about the Nikes he’d left hanging up. About what might become of them. About what the inhabitants of earth would think when they found them 2000 years later; “vestiges of a civilization” they’d perhaps say—that’s what he always thinks when he sits down at a café and the table hasn’t been cleared, and a previous customer’s leftovers are still there. He removed a book from the backpack, The Incredible History of Christopher Columbus: For Children, which he had taken out of the library at the Apple Fork barracks. In it he read that you don’t need to circumnavigate the earth to find out that it is round, just pick a spot and stay there and you’ll see how it’s the others that do the circumnavigating. Rain began to fall.
32
There is a universal Principle of Reversibility which dictates that anything we cannot see or detect via one of our senses, by the same token cannot see or detect us. Thus microbes, thus the future, thus stars situated beyond our event horizon, thus the interior of any person who comes by and greets us, thus dead people, all of them, 100 percent of them. When we watch a film we do not see it—given that the characters cannot see us. But to fully understand the rule, we have to imagine it’s as if the
norm were that children didn’t look anything like their parents, so that they wouldn’t recognize themselves in them. Not easy. But essential to understand.
33
Heine came home tired, as usual, from his Pekingese road-movie-making; he was always disappointed with the material he gathered. For dinner he grazed on leftovers while Lee-Kung watched the latest show on Chinese TV. It was a piece of live reality TV based on catching people doing disgraceful things, catching them in the act. Heine found it deeply annoying. Pushing aside the pile of magazines with his leg, he went to kiss Lee-Kung. Annoyed at being spurned, and though he hadn’t been planning on going out that evening, he headed to the rat races. On the way there, as he was walking along, he caught sight of her down an alleyway, standing in front of the closed souvenir shops: a gorgeous Chinese teenager wearing a miniskirt printed with patterns from Western comic books. Their eyes met, and that was all it took: he went over, pushed her up against the wall, and, left hand clamped over her mouth, violated her. It was then that Heine realized that the lights he could see to one side of the alleyway weren’t streetlamps but a reality TV show crew. He never saw Lee-Kung again. Among the prisoners there’s a custom he finds strange: like an offering to a god—one that offers them a better horizon—they work on a sculpture together, constructing it over the course of the days by attaching pieces of their dried shit via silk threads to the gingko, the millenary tree out in the yard. Lee-Kung had once said to him: This is the tree we get ginseng from.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 3