The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab

by Agustín Fernández Mallo

  67

  Late one Friday Ernesto saw, away in the distance where the Statue of Liberty’s tunic hung down over some storage sheds, a dark brown car with the silhouette of a person inside. He had been watching this car since dusk, his eye drawn by the elastic light inside it, growing brighter and darker without ever growing very bright and without ever altogether going out. He was sure it was the site manager keeping tabs on his crane maneuvers, tipped off no doubt by one of the other dockworkers, and so he did not get his usual container-fish supper but calmly descended the crane ladder, changed clothes inside the hut, put everything in the ATLANTA ’96 bag, and walked by the car on his way to the bus stop. He was all but past the vehicle by the time he realized it was not the manager inside but someone he did not know. And the car was made entirely of wood. Rough, almost Flintstones-esque in finish, it was about the size of a normal car, perhaps slightly longer, and a light was indeed shining from beneath the hood. Inside was a young woman, overweight though well turned out, with fair skin and dark eyes, and she eased open the door and said, Sorry to bother you, but could I ask you a question? Ernesto said nothing, and she continued: The thing is, I’ve seen you fishing these past few days, and I’d like to give it a try. Ernesto didn’t know what to say at first, responding with a simple, Ah, well, followed by, I’m in a hurry just now, how about tomorrow? Words he spoke confidently—no chance this madwoman would come back the next day. But she did come back. As his shift was ending the car came and sat, engine idling, between the storage sheds again, with the same wood grain to the body and the same light coming from inside. He decided to act, to put an end to the prank sooner rather than later, and went over to the car. The woman, her face little more than a maquette in the dark, did not seem upset when he said, What the hell do you want? She got out of the car. Again, she said, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you, I just got here from L.A. and I don’t have anywhere to go or anything to eat, so I just wondered if I could maybe take some of the fish. Ernesto apologized and asked if she wanted to go up the crane. I’ll take you over in the car, she said. What’s that light coming from the engine? he asked, getting in and shutting the door. Fire, she said. It’s a wooden car, and it’s also wood-fired, the whole thing is wood—wood on wood and wood against wood. And Ernesto saw that it was true: the wheels, the seats, the steering wheel, the evergreen air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, everything was made of wood. There were shutters instead of windows and under the hood he glimpsed a roaring wood burner. I built it myself, she said as Ernesto dipped the container in the water, I used planks from a building site in L.A., hence all those little lumps of cement and the pencil scribblings from the bricklayers doing their sums … Watch out, she said, pointing at the fish, you’re letting them get away! Wait, said Ernesto, so you’re seriously saying you drove that thing all the way from L.A.? Of course I did! It wasn’t that hard. I had to make a route for myself sticking to forests or places where there would be sawmills, I meandered a fair bit, that’s true, but it wasn’t so hard—this is America! When I got to New York my only thought was to come to the port, you always get pallets in these places, dockers never mind giving you a bit of firewood, but the food thing has been an issue—I ran out of money a few days ago. Ernesto puffed out his cheeks. They climbed down the ladder and made a random selection of fish. He took 2 small specimens and she took three times that, placing them in the trunk of the car. They said goodbye. As Ernesto was leaving, he looked back. She was sitting in the car, gazing into the flames. He shouted, Staying there? Yes! she called back. I sleep in the car, it’s nice and warm!

  68

  Saigon … shit; I’m still only in Saigon … Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. [Grabs at flying insect.] I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said “yes” to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I’m here a week now … Waiting for a mission … Getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.

  APOCALYPSE NOW, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

  69

  But then the unexpected happened, J said to Sandra and to 5 other friends, all sitting drinking beer. In Madrid, an enormous Olympic flame appeared when a skyscraper called the Windsor Tower went up in smoke at 11:30 one night, the firefighters powerless, the column of smoke visible from the adjacent cities, and the fire blazing away until midday the next day, a sunny February morning, and thousands of people, going out for bread and the morning papers, stopping to watch the inferno, the spectacular way it writhed and twisted. It was the day of the contemporary art fair, ARCO, and as you can imagine sales dropped that day by 50 percent. So what did people like more? I’ll tell you what they liked more, they liked watching the burning tower, the real work of art. And if you don’t believe me, someone light a match, see how we all instinctively glance toward it. Also, and you have to promise to keep this to yourselves, I know it was a work of art because I’m the one who made it.

  70

  And Julio writes:

  Oh, Maga, whenever I saw a woman who looked like you a clear, sharp pause would close in like a deafening silence, collapsing like a wet umbrella being closed. An umbrella, precisely. Maybe you remember, Maga, that old umbrella we sacrificed in a gully in Montsouris Park one sunset on a cold March day. We threw it away because you had found it half broken in the Place de la Concorde and you had got a lot of use from it, especially for digging into people’s ribs on the metro or on a bus as you lethargically thought about the design the flies on the ceiling made. There was a cloudburst that afternoon and you tried to open your umbrella in the park in a proud sort of way, but your hands got all wrapped up in a catastrophe of cold lightning shafts and black clouds, strips of torn cloth falling from the ruins of unfrocked spokes, and we both laughed like madmen as we got soaked, thinking that an umbrella found in a public square ought to die a noble death in a park and not get involved in the mean cycle of trash can or gutter.

  And next:

  Definition of an accumulation point: If a set S is contained in a space Rn, and the point x pertains to Rn, then x shall be the accumulation point of S if every n-open ball centered in x, B(x), contains at least one point of S different to x.

  Examples of accumulation points include the grounding vertex points of objects, such as the tip of a lightning rod or of an abandoned umbrella.

  71

  An old man—though not very old—who lives on the 6th floor, Staircase 4a, in Block P, sits warming himself by a wood burner. The place is Ulan Erge. He looks out the window. The white he sees is the white of an infinite number of sheets; he can’t see past them. This winter the old man—though not very old—has been lucky, the stains on the sheets have been most suggestive, and here and there he sees the odd word written in ink, even the occasional head and torso, vestiges of stains from organic matter, former discharges of former Soviets who wrapped the sheets around themselves against the cold of concentration camps. This second skin, since it is outside the window, does not smell and isn’t any bother, rather it provides an entertaining vista in the absence of any sky to look at during the 6 months of winter. It has become his habit to amuse himself with the compositions he intuits in the fabric, he sees common objects in them, as when gazing at clouds, or indeed comes up with stories about the men and women whose bodies left the marks and secretions on the sheets, and so some of the residents have begun getting together, taking it in turn to host the group, and the person whose apartment it is tells stories based on what can be seen from his or her window, the shaded sections, the signs and stains, as the rest sit listening, sipping their hot toddies of water, sugar, and vodka.

  72

  Drops of rain from the first storm of autumn hit the sides of the asbestos hut. Marc lies in bed and gazes up at the ceiling. He thinks about Henry Darger, author
of the strangest book in the history of literature and loner par excellence, Marc’s obsession with whom came about after he heard Sufjan Stevens’s “The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies.” Sandra had first come across Sufjan Stevens in London when she happened to see him playing live, touring his latest album. The singer wore a shirt with a Texaco logo on it and jeans and a pair of butterfly wings mottled purple and other strange colors; the wings would move in time with his guitar playing. Hanging down over the stage, angels with miniature harps moved to and fro as Stevens enveloped the place in folk melodies from the Midwest. When Sandra went to buy the CD the next day, she knew from the title of the song that it was a musical re-creation of Darger’s universe. Drops of rain, the first storm of autumn, hit the asbestos sides. Marc is doing nothing, he lies in bed, he stares upward. “The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies” is playing on repeat, 2-minute re-creations of the fluttering of giant pastel-and-purple butterfly wings, and of half-naked girls frolicking drowsily. Both in the song and in the hut, night falls.

  73

  Antón has a theory about hard drives: that all the information tucked away inside them in digital form, all those ones and zeros, will never decay, no matter how often the drives are formatted. Rather, during the time a drive is not in use, a spontaneous process takes place, the information materializing as a physical substance—quite thick and yellowish blue—that he calls “informatine”: pure informational chemistry with its own peculiar DNA. And given that information is never created or destroyed, it only changes form, and given, too, that the barnacle is the single living creature that grows on a violent frontier, constantly receiving information from the union of all the natural processes [hence its musculature, hence its intense flavor], Antón dreams of transferring all the “informatine” he gathers into the barnacle, thereby redoubling the flavor and making it grow in size, without losing the original marine tang. A dream of transmuting the zeros and ones of a Photoshopped family photo, or of a bad poem drafted in Word, or of an Excel account spreadsheet, into pure edible muscle.

  74

  After several days and no sign of the woman with the wooden car, she appeared again one Friday evening, just after Ernesto had finished bringing up his haul. She greeted him enthusiastically, though she looked in worse shape than before. Ernesto was more communicative this time. He found out that her name was Kazjana, and she brought a bottle of vodka from the backseat and they began drinking, later driving the wooden car across the Brooklyn Bridge, heading for Ernesto’s apartment. They cooked the fish and drank late into the night. Ernesto told her about his architectural projects, and learned that she was an artist from Chechnya, and that her work was held in high regard in Europe. She was in the U.S. to make a documentary, the idea being to catch people’s reactions when she drove by in the car—she had it all on film, she said. Joost Conijn, a Dutch artist, had done the same in Europe already. I wanted to try it here, she said, Americans are different, I thought it would be interesting to compare the 2. But I’ve spent all the money now and I’m actually not very pleased with the results, and I haven’t touched base with the people who gave me the grant in over a month. Anyway, do you know Conijn? Never heard of him, said Ernesto, chewing on a fish tail. They carried on drinking, her more than him. She drank and said things like, “Alcohol doesn’t go to my stomach, it goes through this other pipe, a pipe that only we Chechens have. Pour me another.” When Ernesto woke it was a cold, bright January day, and snow lay all around. The light sliced up Ernesto’s face as he looked out through the slats of the blind. The wooden car, parked between a Chrysler and a Pontiac, had a layer of snow on top, and it looked as though one of the wheels had been stolen. Kazjana was still asleep on the sofa, and he went down for donuts and coffee. An hour later she was sitting at the table, steam from the cups veiling her face, and she burst out laughing when Ernesto came around behind her and tried to do the thing he had not been brave enough to do the night before—to lower the strap on her top. She knocked him aside with a slap, before launching into a story about a Bering Strait made of sewing needles instead of water, and about a boat plowing a course through those metal waves.

  75

  In the rolling steppe of forest and scrub beyond Vartan’s pig farm a single smooth concrete road, cutting up through the Nagorno-Karabakh, provides the only link with Azerbaijan. This dark strip with its white center lines is referred to by the 20 pig-tending families as “the school,” because it was here that the Azerbaijani army learned to shoot; civilians would come to collect brushwood for kindling and bedding for the livestock, and the soldiers, driving by in their 4-by-4s, used them for target practice, and would bet on who could hit them at the highest speeds. Since the war, without any towns or soldiers to give it life, the road is never used. The 20 families sometimes go out and walk along it together, taking supplies including salt pork, bread, and wine, and stopping somewhere for a picnic—always somewhere different, but also always somewhere the same, given that this steppe is the exact repetition of a Euclidean landscape. After eating, they sing and dance. A mule is occasionally spotted in the distance, wandering along a stretch of disused railway. The families sometimes make it as far as the Nagorno-Karabakh itself, coming to a small, deserted city whose walls are pitted with bullet holes and where the only thing left is a UPS courier office with a single employee. Arkadi, the oldest man in the group, once saw a sign there: the words GREASE FOR SALE had been daubed on a wall but then crossed out, and below, WASHING MACHINE FOR SALE, also crossed out, and below that, not crossed out, HOUSE FOR SALE. The whole area has now been designated a natural park. It was also Arkadi who, on one of these excursions, while the rest of the group was lighting a fire to cook the potatoes and pork, went off a little way and lay down to sleep, making a bed on a species of protected grass, and when he woke felt something hard beneath his head. Fumbling as he parted the stalks, he found a tattered record sleeve: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There was no record inside, nor any earthworms or soil, for that matter, nor indeed any lonely hearts: it was empty. After the picnic dinner they set off home, singing songs as always, and as always using the light in Vartan’s upper attic to guide them, a beacon that grew gently brighter and dimmer, fluctuating like a light-sponge that might absorb them. The occasional truck passed, loaded with cured pigskins and steering a course by that same light.

  76

  A key feature of this type of posthumanism—as its name suggests—is that it consciously models itself as a type of humanism. As the Extropy Institute’s “Transhumanist Declaration” states: “Like humanists, transhumanists favor reason, progress, and values centered on our well-being rather than on external religious authority. Transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by means of science and technology combined with critical and creative thinking. We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek continuing enhancements to our intellectual abilities, our physical capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or posthuman condition.”

  EUGENE THACKER, “DATA MADE FLESH: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE POSTHUMAN,” CULTURAL CRITIQUE, NO. 53, WINTER 2003, PP. 72–97

  77

  Steve is cook, manager, ideologue, and overall ruler at Steve’s Restaurant on Orange Street in Brooklyn, a space that functions as a kind of ideas laboratory. His wife, Polly, cleans and waits tables. It was once a hovel, and aesthetically still is, but has gradually grown more popular, to the point that nowadays the waiting time for reservations is as long as 3 or 4 months. Steve, with his considerable paunch, is often to be seen in the kitchen dressed in an ankle-length astrakhan shawl [only his boxer shorts underneath], yelling at no one in particular as the customers wait to be served. There is no menu, nor may cust
omers order. They sit down at a table with a checkered tablecloth and vinegar bottles, salt and pepper, and a small lamp in the middle, and the dishes start arriving. The dishes most frequently served, depending on Steve’s mood, are: furtive Polaroids of the customers taken through a hole in the kitchen wall, then fried in egg batter; as the batter is parted, the photos, and the people’s transformed faces, are revealed. Another specialty is electric wiring, the classic 3-colored variety [positive, negative, and ground], in a Lebanese garlic-and-oil dish. Then you have Paperback in Syrup: a pocket book served, curled around inside a jar, in syrup; the sugars adhere to the ink, making crystal formations on the letters. And finally, Carpaccio of Work of Literature in Pepper Marinade, which work depending on what Steve has found at the secondhand market: [1] On the Road by someone called Kerouac, [2] The U.S. Constitution, [3] Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. He’s also begun experimenting with roasted blank CDs—they rumple and blister like seared pig’s ear, and he serves them to any Muslim customers who, by this symbolically evil act, seek to enter the twenty-first century fully exorcised. Steve serves the dishes himself, coming out of the kitchen with the plates held high, shouting at the top of his voice. Some people come to witness what, according to them, is a marvel of theoretical cuisine; the majority come out of curiosity, and only once; and there is also a smaller group who consider the place to be a site of real-time contemporary works of art. Once a year an open day is held in which anyone can present their own theory-dish, and prizes and special commendations are given out. 12:30 a.m., they had closed for the night. Polly stood behind the bar with a gin and orange juice in her hand, while Steve, undoing his shawl, sat down on a stool facing her. She ran her hands through his hair. I’m beat, he said, letting her stroke and fuss over him. The astrakhan wool of the half-open shawl mixed in with his chest hair. Come on, little bear, she said. To bed. He pretended he hadn’t heard. You know what I really want to do, Polly? What’s that? At the moment we cook objects, little things we find here and there, but wouldn’t you like to cook, say, a boat, or an airplane, New York City, a ray of light even, or, better still, the horizon? Cooking the horizon—imagine that! Sure, Steve, sure I can imagine it. You could do it. Since the first day I met you I knew you could cook anything you wanted to. They turned out the lights and went upstairs to their apartment. And when they woke the next day, the first thing Steve said was, I’ve seen it, I’ve got it. I’ve worked out how to cook the horizon.