There’s the low hum of the interior space mediating the exterior. Pleasantly dim. Far above and out, penetrating the AC, one can hear the metal-on-metal scree of some predatory bird. Silence. Then, fainter, one more bird cry. Gentle water drops. Wind.
I reach over, turn off Sounds of the Deciduous Forest, sit up. Plant my feet.
Good morning.
Let’s kick the sheets off and grope out across the room, vampiric, one arm folded across the eyes, the other a feeler out in front, slither forward—slide the sheet of curtains across the wall on their singing ball bearings and reveal, through a seamless pane of multi-ply plate glass, that remorseless sky, hung with its shocking sun. Hiss.
I smell my own breath, repelling, sourly warm off the glass. Squint, adjust, and here’s what there appears to be: the top, hairy fronds of a date palm; its testicular pendules hanging below. A swimming pool, wormy with impossible teal. The long, gated rows of the Residential Enclave, arranged along an artificial river, a canal of some sort, ramifying outward. Culverts. Parklands. One or two geometric sculptures. A large, and mostly empty, car park. A series of tiny, darkly rainbowed and fluorescing oil spots. And past the metastructure: the desert.
Out there.
I crank open the window and the nicely cooled breezes blow in, jellyfishing the curtains. The perfect temperature, a faint tattoo of a spiky palm leaf, now spread out on the floor. I can smell lavender, and the pool is making rippled patterns on the wall and the desk, like floaters in a vitreous humor. A fair, languorous morning, full of promise. Though I also feel a strange, persistent tug at my conscience this morning, as if I’d been caught out in a lie. A vague sense of wrongdoing.
I turn and walk toward the bathroom.
The once-white soap in the dish is now covered in a light blue froth.
Bloody hell.
The ink.
I hold the soap under the tap, watching the semi-hardened blue scum soften and run off down the drain. The uniform, now bearing its moist spot, hangs over a chair. No time for regrets though. No time. I must get myself in order, as today is for touring the Institute campus, and for finding a space in which to compose my project.
(The project!)
The gracious Mr. Al’Hatif has volunteered (been volunteered, perhaps) to help orient me today. I am to rendezvous with him up at the Arts Pavilion. So, I make my way there, through the echoing concrete canyons, past the swimming pools, and gardens with their busy morning sprinklers, past the scuttling workers in their crayon-colored suits, down paths, under arbors, across atria.
“Hmm,” Mr. Al’Hatif mutters, after we greet one another and I point out to him the dark, unsightly blemish on my uniform.
“What can I do? It looks indelible.”
“They take these things rather seriously here, Mr. Percy.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Have you tried the Enclave’s concierge?”
“Not yet.”
“Do. And if that doesn’t work, well, you could take it to the Same Same.”
“The—”
“A fix-it place. In town.” He probes the spot one more time with his finger. “But, I doubt it will come to that.”
We climb the long, open-air white marble stairway of the Arts Pavilion. Arriving at its first mezzanine, we get onto a lift, and take it to the topmost floor and stand out on a wide balcony, where we look over the property unfurling below us, the whole extent of which is visible from this height. There are the various structures, with their strange geometries, arranged haphazardly like upturned toys in a sandbox, or the aftermath of an explosion. An arbitrary torus, a distended cloudlet, some conjoined volumes, a grid-sleeve, an irrupted bird’s nest…From this height, the site feels like a blueprint of itself. I already recognize some of these buildings: off to our right is the Residential Enclave, and that over there is the refectory, and the library, the Pleasure Center, the Mountain House, where I first met Dennis and Miss Fairfax…I ask Mr. Al’Hatif about a large and elaborately vented building just below us.
“That is the Presence Center, Percy. Site of the Main Stage.”
“Is that where—”
“Yes.”
I let it wash over me for a moment. I will—if all goes according to plan—be delivering my talk here, my Discourse™. The day will come soon, before I know it. I will be up on that very stage, in front of that famous, pellucid white backdrop, up there, telling the world of my work—my ideas, beliefs, findings—and everything I say and each choreographed gesture I make will be simulcast and recorded, sent out via redundant fat-pipe systems over multiple platforms and viewed; repackaged and sold the world over. It’s beyond belief.
Looking down now, I watch my new colleagues below. Them too, I think. They will also stride out to that heroic-mode, introductory synth-blast, and straight into the global consciousness. “Thought leaders,” the pamphlet bragged. Yet, I feel now as though I could reach down and knock them off their paths, pluck them up and set them down elsewhere, spin them all, change their orientation and rotation. They are dwarfed by the Institute itself, these international superstars. Dwarfed by it, by me, at this vertiginous elevation. And once again, I marvel at the scope of the thing as a whole. The audacity, the hubris of it, the force of will necessary to construct this large-scale terrarium in the middle of what is surely one of the most unforgiving and uninhabitable regions on the planet.
“The campus is, as you can see, quite large—and there are any number of spaces which could be made available to you,” Al’Hatif says, leading me back toward the stairway.
But we don’t find anything which meets my standards in the Arts Pavilion. So we walk through the Science Center, past hermetically sealed white rooms, bursting with paraphernalia. Some of the gear is incredibly technologically advanced, but in other rooms, wunderkammers of various sorts, there are crucibles and alembics, as well as rows of strange bottles containing odd ingredients—materials which look grown or scavenged. As the doors open and close, hissing as they unseal and reseal, smells leak out—formaldehyde, turmeric, urine, something burnt and acidic.
Outside, we sit, and a mildly troubled Mr. Al’Hatif looks over my manifest. “Are you sure that you need all of…this, in order to finish your work?”
“Oh yes. Yes, I do.”
“But for projects like yours—”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t intend to pry.”
“My needs are complex,” I say, wishing to leave it at that.
“And yet,” he continues undaunted, “all you would truly need, I’d think, is a device, and if you had an old-fashioned bent, perhaps some paper—”
“Paper?” I grimace.
“Yes, paper; no? Some pencils, a pen. A device? Running the appropriate applications? No? Of course, you know best.”
“I am not sure yet what my requirements are,” I say, and, trying to remove some of the sharpness from my tone, add: “How could anyone be sure at such an early stage? But better to be over-outfitted than under, don’t you agree?”
Which prompts the ever-refined Mr. Al’Hatif to snake a pocket square out from his suit pocket and wipe first his mouth and then his brow. “I suppose so, Mr. Percy.” He is tiring. I am as well.
We soldier on.
* * *
—
“So the statue wasn’t, in fact, indigenous to this region,” he explains. “It was built by the religious nomads who were moving along the trading roads—such, at least, was the rationale for its demolition. That the builders were foreign.”
Mr. Al’Hatif’s project at the Institute is the reconstruction of an ancient statue; a statue recently destroyed by fundamentalist insurgents. I’m guessing that Mr. Al’Hatif is the only one of our small number to be working on a project germane to this locale.
“Look.”
An image, a projection of the desert plain, which emanates from his device.
“It had been standing serenely in this spot for ages and had survived every manner of affront at the hands of man, beast, and nature; but still it stood.”
Across red sand, here are remains, the broken stumps of stone or marble legs. Lots of rubble. Smoke still rising. Crews roping off the devastation. Forensic teams setting up lights. An unbroken ring of waste surrounding the scene.
“And all that’s left now is this. What a calamity.”
The crime scene: graticulated and labeled like a map. A grid, made of string or wire or light; whether forensic, or archeological, I can’t be sure. Fragments of rock are marked with small yellow tags.
“The insurgents maintain that the attack was an assertion of faith—in opposition to older, illegitimate, tribal beliefs.”
There’s more to it than that though, I think. A crime like this one is…it is a repudiation of modernity, or some such.
“Of course, the funding is just pouring in for the rebuilding.”
* * *
—
We enter the cavernous library. The corridors connecting the research and reading rooms are lined with read-only devices of every make and year. I reach out to examine one, but it is either dead or I don’t have the proper signature to whisper it awake. Farther down, on the bottom tier of the building, there are rows of old periodicals on white acrylic stands, in neat colorful stacks. Several fellows are working down here as well, including Dennis Royal, who sees us from across the reading room and wryly doffs an invisible cap to us.
“Now look at these two, will you?” Mr. Al’Hatif juts his chin out toward the other end of the huge room, where two men seem to be engaged in a heated debate. “Always at it.”
We stand there watching the disputants—red in the face, gesticulating—but their rancorous voices are smeared, and faint.
“Professional squabble,” he adds.
“Seems personal.”
“Debate is encouraged at the Institute. It is the very hallmark of an open society such as ours. You’ll see.”
We leave the library, and follow a footpath along the course of the artificial waterway. Everywhere, work crews in coveralls, bent over tasks. A project period has let out, just as it had on the afternoon of my arrival, and the fellows are streaming from their studios. Despite it being a Recess, some of the fellows have taken their work out of doors, and are huddled in small groups, studying and debating under the strange shadows of the brutal buildings. Some wander, and from the fuzzy looks in their eyes one can tell that they are going hard at some problem or another. Looking around, I realize that I am unconscious of the distance Mr. Al’Hatif and I have traveled, and it dawns on me slowly, but with eventual force, that the Institute belongs to a different world; a no-place; a kind of Cockaigne. How did I end up here, I ask myself.
At world’s end. At world’s fucking end.
“Well, here we are,” says Mr. Al’Hatif. It is a new, clean, little set of rooms, and I know before entering that everything is just right. I inspect the ceiling, which is reasonably high. The few windows on the south and west sides of the building are clear, and louvered, sight lines good, so the lighting should not be a problem. Solid electric—lots of it—plenty of signal, etc., etc. The space is accessible to large deliveries, and yet it is also sufficiently secluded. It’s too good to be true. Though the walls are flaking, I notice now, initials carved into them, of people who worked here previously, presumably. Someone has preceded me it seems.
Mr. Al’Hatif is smiling at me strangely.
I don’t mind though. Np. I think I’ll keep them, these marks. They seem important.
“I’ll take it,” I say, as if he were a Realtor. “Tell Miss Fairfax: it’s…perfect.”
“But, Mr. Percy—”
And I’m already imagining where I’ll put my things. The equipment I require. Some technical specifications will have to be examined: the wiring will have to be double-checked.
But in the middle of the room is a desk. That will prove useful indeed.
I walk over to it, tug on the drawer handles, but the drawers don’t budge. Seems as though the moldings and pulls are just for show.
“Mr. Percy?”
And there’s nothing on the desk. The blotter’s surface powdered and empty—though not for long. No sir.
Not for long.
“Mr. Percy?”
All this, Tk, that is, hopefully: soon. (After I get the ink-stained uniform taken care of.)
Now that I’m in the space, my work space, I can’t wait to begin.
It’s like I already have.
“Mr. Percy, but this is your room, already. Your room? We’ve walked you in a circle.”
4
Nighttime.
Something is happening.
I sit up in bed and listen. I hear it once, and then again. Like the collective grunts of several men, followed now by the solitary, high, and reedy cry of one man. Contrabasses v. Oboe. A register of fear. The many against the one.
Difficult to understand.
Now: nothing.
I creep to the door, crack it, peer down the darkened hallway. Wait. No, nothing.
Time passes.
(More time passes.)
A very faint noise: croak or moan.
I ease the door closed until it clicks shut.
Back to bed. There for some time.
Still awake. I take a tablet. Have the bottle at the ready. Hopefully: kaput, right out. What was that hubbub though? Did somebody…cackle?
Tbd, Tbd.
Shhhh.
5
(TABLE TALK)
To work.
But first, a brief jaunt out to the dome’s perimeter; to one of the Institute’s “Observation Points.” As long as I have come all this way to the desert, I decide that I might as well take a good picture of it. I head out from the flat, walk past the pool, down the winding, palm-lined paths, around the huge blue kidney of the lake (at one point I can hear, and then see: a pink jumpsuit in a golf cart following behind me at a discreet distance, the driver speaking periodically into his walkie-talkie, most likely making sure that I don’t wander too far or otherwise come to ill; before he peels away eventually in a diminishing hum) out past the fountains, and huts and depots, and all the way to the perimeter and turbines. It takes a while, but I get here. I have made it right up to the edge where the green biome meets the desolate, arid one.
Here it is, an unending, billowing, landscape of rust.
Center it in the viewfinder. Take the shot.
Distance. Space. Sky. Rock. Sand. Unirrigated and austere. Same as on my screen.
Smells of nothing.
There’s a single bench. Which seems to be here for just this purpose. “Desert Viewing,” the small plaque reads. A scenic view.
Perching here, I can see the ten meters in front of me in impressive detail, the grains of sand. Then the plain behind, upon which are those quicksilver lakes of mirage, floating pools, hovering just a smidge above the ground, snakes of heat spiraling upward. But then the honeyed dunes behind that, the first wind-ruffled rank waving like eels, and each successive grade fading into vagueness in discrete degrees of blur.
Twenty meters, blurry.
Thirty meters, blurrier.
Etc., etc.
Detachment doesn’t so much descend as it does remind me of always having been there. I am the only solitary presence out here. Everything else—sand, dunes, stones, the ragged clouds, even the sun, nestled in its own halo—are multiples.
And as my optical focus moves outward, my mind wanders inward, running over my memories of the last few days, playing back for me my insertion into Institute life. And I can feel an effort being made, just beneath this layer of consciousness, which cons
titutes the active formulation of a story. Something coalescing. I don’t have much of it yet, but I know a few things. For instance, that nothing about me, here, at the Institute, is particularly startling, or particularly novel. That this personal narrative of mine—“Uncanny Tales of Percy Frobisher”; a story of genius, brave endeavor; of adventure and personal growth; the conception and realization of a thrilling new project—all of it is nothing but a tired trope out here. It’s everyone’s story. All the fellows have seen, unpacked, drilled down into some fascinating topic and traveled great lengths to pursue further inquiries. We are all brave explorers; and thus, none of us are. I’m another in a number; another item on the shelf. But then, but then: I didn’t come here to stand out. I didn’t sign up for this psychotic geste—didn’t utterly deracinate and reformulate myself—in order to achieve celebrity, or notoriety.
No. Just.
There came a juncture in my life when I found myself in need of reinvention.
When I began to suspect that there was no bottom to the dull satiety; when not another aimless and indistinguishable day could pass without my suffering a boredom akin to pain; when all of the minutes of all of my dissolute days were martialed in ranks against me, and there was no longer anything for it but to desert my post. I up and left my life—such as it was. I knew it would happen. Of course I did. And it came to pass. The submission, the awarding of the fellowship…It all arrived just in the nick of time, and I accepted it without question. A change of state, a change of charge and velocity. Regeneration; reinvention. Finn-e-gan, begin a-gain. It had been time to go.
Past time.
But now things have become odd. Strange, and rather quick-like, under the metastructure. The disorienting exoticism. Directors and admins. Ideators and projects: all impressively idiosyncratic; all indicative of the bleeding-edge moment. The VR Modeler. The Historian of Prosthesis, the Creator of Cryptocurrencies—whose blockchain ledgers help further the abstraction of commodities already abstracted beyond understanding—the Man-Who-Assiduously-Tracks-His-Own-Life-Data, the Woman-Whose-Face-and-Hands-Are-Covered-in-Yarn (the Performance Artist?). In the line for breakfast this morning, a reedy and disheveled man beside me told me he was finishing up extensive work on a cylinder.
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