Infinite Ground (4 page)

Ceremonies performed to mark transitional stages in individuals' lives often involve the ingestion of toxic secretions gathered from plant-aphid symbioses, subsequently ejected from the mouth, along with bile and other stomach contents. The noise created during these expulsions is listened to by experienced tribe linguists, able to divine the hundreds of thousands of words compacted inside. In drier periods of the year, linguists express these stories day and night, and the community listens. Content in these stories varies greatly, and attempts to draw common tropes have largely failed. A slightly less than statistically significant proportion include references to seas, volcanoes and other natural phenomena not present in the community's own environment.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 57

The inspector had taken the same subway train for twenty-five years. On the rare times he was late and on the 8.40 he was aware of the difference in the air. More of these people had cooked: it was on their massed breath. They'd spent longer on breakfasts. He'd learned to trust his nose. He remembered investigating the disappearance of a soon-to-be-married couple. Their flat was unusually clean, but this was contradicted by the air. Microwave stains suggested at least one of them worked late. The bathroom retained the faint lemon scent of shampoo. This was the closest, he knew, he would get to their skin. They had decided to leave together and cleaned their evidence, but they couldn't get rid of the smell. He pictured them together on a yacht in the Pacific or heaped, broken, at the bottom of a disused quarry.

Each inhabited room had its own ecology. He'd insisted, every time, on being the first officer on site and on entering alone. When the teams came in they broke the purity. There was a limited amount of time to gauge the air and it began expiring when he opened the door. From the effects of damp in the bathroom he could make a reasonable guess at how long the occupant spent looking in the mirror. More interesting, and more substantial, were the personal ecologies of cohabitants – couples, flatmates, families. The longer they spent, the stronger each ecology grew. There was a pattern to the way they ate, slept, washed. The amount of time spent in the place affected air fabric. He knew there were problems in a place that was fresh; people who worked so hard at it, cleaning, hiding, wanted out. More than once such freshness in a building had been an indication of murder.

A clotted interior, by contrast, was healthy. Even after all these years he could appreciate a place that had been walked in. Each example was different. He would state that air is exceptional in a building that contained quick walkers. All manner of reasons. More efficient digestive system, so more adventurous meals. A more varied spread of mites and spores from the draught made by the swish of moving feet. Kitchen objects returned to cupboards briskly, vibrating the surfaces of the worktops below. These people showered more, made love faster. They spent longer outside and came back frequently and briefly, opening doors at a higher daily rate.

He remembered things from his own place. The smell of the yellowing pages in books piled high against the walls. Tea herbs fused inside from endless nights by the lamp. The mixing of tangerine skin and the sediment of oversleep, traces of each other retained under fingernails. The passing of time that led to the very particular stage favoured in the life cycle of fruit: ripe, heavy, almost bursting, bruised and fly-begun. Just the way they had liked it.

He could estimate how much language had been made in rooms. It was intuitive, but he tended to be right. A room would be more hectic after language. Perhaps people who spoke more moved differently, and that was all. He used to think he could see language where it fell. The loads amassed at a particularly conducive right angle. It was one of the things that made a bathroom different – its dearth of words. Rooms affected more by language were softer, warmer. It was cold where no one had spoken for some time. All these tiny clues were significant when a person had gone. Everything previously invisible became amplified, enlarged. Each detail was there to be decoded; the key to understanding a collapsed civilization. And any one might bring them back.

He remembered the little things. The asymmetrical accumu­lation of dirt in a vestibule, only six days after a vanishing. The new damp on the right angle where the cupboard met the wall, from all the water boiled in grief etiquette. The refuse left out. The mildew gathering on clothes left wet. The dank air of a room where sleep had repeatedly failed. A disrupted, broken ecology.

When a person goes, that habitat never comes back. An occupied room is a great diversity of life. The inspector would have limited time in Carlos's office. It was the place to start. He was working against extinction.

When his wife had died, it wasn't just her body that had gone. She had been an incalculable volume, and there was nothing unusual about that. She didn't stop at the edge; she had a field of life around her. Her scent, her appearance, her effect would have been wholly different if even one day of her biography were omitted. There was a frame around her, a hive, a community created by the kind of thoughts she had and the way she spun her hands and moved her feet. It wasn't just that she had gone; more than her had been devastated. Biodiversity was weaker.

Sometimes it could seem, in quieter evenings and especially, for some reason, after he had accidentally fallen asleep and woken, alert to and surprised by the dark, that her past animation was the most remarkable thing in the world. He would stare, stunned, still in the dark, at bare, still areas of the apartment that had once been hers. Across which she had moved with humour and purpose. He would be convinced, suddenly, that the whole thing was impossible; equally, that she could have been there and that now she could be gone.

There was a time when he worried their apartment might literally be poisonous without her; that the only thing keeping him alive in this space was the balance made by their accumulated behaviour. Removing her breath, her words, the manner and selection of the food she prepared with him was of potentially grave significance – he was shocked, appalled that the possibility had not been further investigated. They had actually patronized him; someone had given him a card bearing a number. As far as he saw it, it was a perfectly valid concern: it might be toxic here, now, without her, he had thought. Everything's different. My health will go to pot, he had said – just you wait and see.

It was only later that he thought of further evidence for his theory, wishing he'd presented it at the time. In long-­established couples, especially the elderly, who are very sensitive to change, the death of one frequently leads to the death of the other. It is not a romantic thing, not a death of the heart, he had thought, and neither is it simply a matter of grief-induced stress weakening the immune system and leaving the widowed more vulnerable to infection; no, it is about a home space undergoing a sudden violent extraction, disordering a balance that had been slowly and painstakingly built up over many years. It is about a new toxicity entering the home. Without her being there he was more exposed: her contribution to climate and atmosphere was significant, and now it was all shot to pieces. How could he trust the air in a room that was his alone? The idea was ridiculous. There was no evidence to say that his routines and behaviours were fit and able, any longer, to make a viable living space – such things ought to be checked, he thought, as soon as someone leaves, rather than simply trusting them to get on with it, just as if nothing had happened. It was the same way with a birth, particularly a firstborn child, when the couple is simply sent home with the baby after a day or two, if they're lucky, and expected to get on with living with this addition, although nobody has told them the first thing about how to manage it. It was outrageous – the thing breathing, crying, eating, defecating, completely changing everything, without any preparations put in place or routine safety checks being made. He didn't know how any of them managed.

They had talked about it several times, at a very premature stage. One of the rules they had agreed was that they would be a unit as much as was possible, largely to minimize the risk of arbitrary rupture. Travelling distances, optimally, should be done together. That two rather than three of them might go was out of the question. Those kinds of things would have to be affirmed on a daily basis. New equipment installed in the home area would be tested before use, and then quarterly, by an electrician. There would be smoke alarms and carbon monoxide sensors and they were to sleep, always, for the first few years, in the same room. They would alternate sleep duty – one of them, reluctantly, would have to try to sleep, while the other would listen for evidence of the child's continued breath. This was how it would have been.

He was missing something. He made a simple vacuum pump from rubber tubing and a cylindrical cassette. He walked into the empty office, held the vacuum directly above Carlos's chair and took a sample of the air. He was sceptical, seeing Isabella, at first, and prior to speaking with her. She was less than half his age. She couldn't have had much, if any, legitimate experience analysing crimes and other scenes of potential significance. Straight out of college, she was to work with him on the empty office, overseeing the forensic reading. He had no say in the matter. She was the only staff available, and so he should let it go, get on with it.

Eighteen hours later she showed him what had been revealed under a high-intensity microscope: a scale fragment from the wing of a dragonfly; several dirt molecules bearing high iron content; detached strands of cotton-polyester composite; part of a drifting human hair; several orders of living fungal spores; yeast; jet fuel; black carbon.

He wanted more. The desk, the keyboard, he said. Pick up what's on the floor. The walls, the panes, the edges of the windows. There is always something.

REPORT EXTRACT

The subject leaned in as he worked. He is exhibited in the office: in areas of his chair previously warmed and wet by the body; in the marks and indents showing how powerfully or otherwise he hit his keys, and at what angle; in the dust and dirt patterns on the monitor which are the expressions of his breath, revealing the positions in which his head and neck were hung.

One of the abundant materials taken from the carpet is scalp hair. Hair is elastic, cornified tissue made of threaded epithelial fibres comprising a root, a shaft, and growing according to a strict cyclical pattern of action, degradation and rest. An unusually high proportion of the fallen strands were of the anagen and catagen growth stages at the time of separation. Detached unnatur­ally, they were cut in the office.

His hairs are coarser than average and faster to grow, reaching, if unchecked, a minimum extension of 2.2 mm weekly. But he limited his hair and nails with unusual vigilance, unnerved by autonomic recovery. Parts kept coming back at him blindly; he watched and cut at them.

There is marked evidence of exogenous deposition on the recovered strands of his scalp and body hair. Episodes of high anxiety and continuous stress led the body to source further extrinsic material as desperate repair. Tonal difference on the back and seat of the chair indicate he sweated. As well as cooling the skin and lowering excitation, heavy sweating may cause environ­mental particles to adhere directly to the hair shaft, and hence to be chemically incorporated into the body. Strontium, zinc, silver, cobalt, nickel and other ambient metal toxins are sourced in higher than average quantities [Mn: 15.2–26.3 ppm; Zn: 78–108 ppm], secondary losses to the body's essential nutrient store having led to aggressive absorption of airborne mineral particles. These levels of deposition are highly atypical and should be detected only in sub-adults, when adolescent growth demands increased vulnerability and lowered resistance to the outside world.

Isabella fed him reports and told him more were coming. He briefed her about what he already knew, what he had heard. ­Various testimonies from colleagues of Carlos being ill, something unspecified, altering his appearance and behaviour. The suggestion and denial, at once, of Carlos contracting an infection. He hadn't been able to pin down the claims; their answers were long, evasive, rhetorical. Though he worried how unlikely it all sounded, the report seemed to give them some weight. What he needed from Isabella now, he said, was something concrete. If Carlos was ill, then he wanted a diagnosis, a precise identification from an analysis of his remaining things.

Other than the floor and the chair, the surface Carlos had made most contact with was the keyboard. Even at a resting state, before he'd thought what to say, his hands lay flat on it. The condition of the keys gave a hint of his language, greater wear indicating higher use. With this he fell into line, matching almost exactly to Zipf's law. Deposition indicated words with the highest use had a frequency twice that which followed, and so on down. The uneven spread of foreign objects – pollen, skin cells, microbiota, foodstuffs – confirmed the general content of his language.

But they could do more with this. The inspector wanted the specimens analysed, particularly the microorganisms sourced from the body. Isabella surprised him. She was prepared. She would swab the keys, locate the life present at the edge, identi­fy, through gene sequencing, the many species living in his skin.

‘Good, good,' he said, shutting the car door as they stepped out onto the street. Even after several visits he continued to look up; Isabella barely seemed to register the tall glass buildings.

Though Carlos had been gone weeks already she was confident the edge-life would remain, impervious to environmental stresses – temperature, moisture, natural levels of UV radiation. There would be a persistence.

But the skin, Isabella said, walking while she spoke, moving quicker than he was accustomed to, would be just the beginning. He made a noise, somewhere between a gasp and a snort. He embarrassed himself; it's my condition, he said, I ought to exercise more, but this heat…

‘This is it,' he said.

They entered, took the elevator up.

Isabella surveyed the interior walls and floors. Though she had analysed materials previously gathered there, this was her first time present in the building. The inspector followed as they passed into the atrium, through the corridors and offices of the sixth floor, noticing that the photograph with the rows of faces had been removed from the wall. Staff seemed to look at him differently. With Isabella he walked at a brisker pace and with purpose. They carried cases and equipment. Perhaps he could organize another round of interviews, accompanied this time.

He removed the tape and the barrier and opened the door to the vacated office. Well, he said, here we are. She knelt before the desk in mask and gloves. He paused by it, too, at the threshold. She unwrapped the first swab stick, coated in fluid, and brought it down on the centre key.

They took coffee in her small, ground-floor office at the university hospital. Books lined the walls, erratically ordered. George Eliot was a surprise. She had folders open on her desk and kept picking them up, placing them back down as she talked. She was alert, energized. The heat didn't seem to affect her. It was clear she had something to tell him.

‘Firstly, I can establish beyond any doubt this man was not well. Microbiota I've found corroborate results from scalp and body hair.'

‘What was it? What was wrong with him?'

She held up her hands, telling him to slow down.

‘To begin with he was malnourished. I'm guessing you already know that from talking to friends and colleagues. But did you know his skin was infected?'

He leaned in, urged her on.

‘Inflamed.'

The inspector blinked several times and imagined a red body bursting apart.

Isabella's brown hair was held in a bun. She wore a lab coat over a skirt and vest top. She had perhaps noted he was uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact; she got up, walked while speaking, Bic in her left hand, looking occasionally to the window and the courtyard with its well-maintained grass ­quadrants and flowerbeds.

‘His skin held an unusual variety of microorganisms. The combin­ations are interesting. I'm certain acne rosacea affected his face, particularly his forehead. Imagine, Inspector, blotches across him, a constant source of irritation. This partly accounts for the high yield of skin cells across the keyboard.'

‘Okay,' he said, writing furiously. ‘And can you tell me what it is? What the name of the illness is?'

‘I'm running tests, cross-checking the information.'

The scribbling stopped.

‘What I find interesting,' she said, ‘is the nature of the microorganisms, because I can tell you Carlos was not held together well, and I'm not just talking about the skin. The communities living there indicate an inflamed gut, and the presence of certain other organisms. We can infer some of what happened in his gut, the particular microbiota present there, from his skin: we can move backwards, sketch the centre from the edge.

‘An axis: skin, gut and brain. With a second move we can make assertions regarding the mental state. Simply from what we've now learned about his gut.'

She opened her mouth, but delayed.

‘The diversity inside him, the particular ecology? It's strongly linked to psychological disorders.'

‘What was the illness?' he repeated.

‘Slow down,' she replied. He thought he saw traces of a smile. ‘I won't be coarse. Won't be pushed.

‘There was a unity to the physical and psychological symptoms – I won't say one caused the other.' She looked right at him, drew breath. ‘Let me describe his condition in more detail. Several of the species I found work against him, preventing him from digesting food. They secrete small compounds that break barriers and act as chemical signals that damage cell function. Some organisms may have reached his brain. The enteric nervous system – which lines the intestines with neurons, hundreds of millions of them – communicates directly with his brain. And in this case, with these microbes, it is sending distress.'

He realized the day's cloud cover was unusual only when he saw the light move across the room and Isabella momentarily shield her eyes. The flickering shadow patches and broken light looked, he thought, just like a swarm on her, an infestation of bees.

‘The organisms may have entered his brain,' she repeated. ‘Step back from the investigation. Doesn't it strike you as extraordinary? His gut fermented anxiety, paranoia. Other likely side effects: hallucination, hypergraphia. I think he indulged in fantasies, wrote long arbitrary notes until his hand hurt. This isn't metaphor, Inspector. I'm not saying he became distressed because of how a stomach illness changed his life. While that may be true, it's secondary. The microbes, in some sense, activate change in his thoughts. Think of it like a factory producing the elements of feeling – chemistry.'

‘Go back,' he said. ‘So he did pick up an infection. That's what happened? Then where did it start?'

She moved her hands again, frustrated, annoyed. ‘No, I can't identify the source.'

‘No, no,' he leaned forward. ‘Keep… This breakdown you're describing, it was a physical event. Meaning that there might be something – some source – still present in the office, right? Isn't that dangerous?'

Did she know, he wondered, that he had gone into the office days ago, bringing in his vacuum, with nothing covering his face?

‘I don't think that's the case. The masks were purely a precaution. If I thought anyone in that building was in any kind of danger don't you think I would have acted?'

She moved to the window again. He speculated whether the plants in the beds immediately outside were her doing. He wondered if the ashtray on her desk was a courtesy, finding the explanation as unlikely as the alternative. He didn't know a thing about her.

‘The plants will look good in this light,' she said, turning back to him. ‘Let's see the gardens.'

REPORT EXTRACT

His windows are east-facing and the heavy volume of lashes detected on his keyboard and on his desk is higher than would be expected from the limited time spent directly facing the sun. One possibility is a rapid blinking reflex instilled through long exposure to light-reflective surfaces such as seawater. His exposed skin had prematurely aged, wrinkles growing in areas adjacent to the eyes, which contracted, pushing out his cheeks into a smile or a grimace.

His stationing almost exclusively within the bounds of his office during the day and his home by evening and through the night led to muscle atrophy more typically seen in the decreased muscle-mass of persons between 60 and 70 years of age. Muscle strength has lessened anywhere between 30 and 40 per cent. By these and other means his decay was accelerated, the onset of his final disappearance beginning perhaps with his first day present in the office.

‘Put it down,' she said. ‘Listen. You don't need notes. I'll reproduce anything you need. But I want to get back to it. Because we haven't got to the matter yet. I haven't described what happened to Carlos.'

They went slowly, more at his pace, making a circuit of the hospital gardens. He used to visit often, before, but hadn't been in many years.

She gestured while speaking, still wearing the lab coat, guiding him through the botanics. He needed a bit of help, clearly, she must have thought; it wasn't subtle. Light, plants, animals. The larger environment a learning aid.

‘What I swabbed from the keyboard is part of a chain moving through him. There wasn't a secret and pure Carlos kept sealed from all this, you know, watching. Whatever happened cut through everything like – like an acid.'

She kept stopping her speech, as if she expected him to say something, bring his own perspective on the analysis. After a couple of seconds she would smile and move on again, he thought, in a kind of disappointment.

‘I'm going to go with this, Inspector. Because I want you to have an understanding of what it was like to be Carlos. What may have happened to Carlos.

‘There is no clear distinction between him and his room, inside and out. Likewise no neat separation of physical and mental parts. There was nothing he could do about that – he couldn't decide, say, to no longer have anything to do with the life of the room;
he would
be
thinking via the life of the room.
It's harder to see his shape, harder to locate him. There isn't a free-standing identity surveying its environment, Inspector. I think he'd seen that.

‘Definition was his problem. None of him was solidly drawn. His skin came loose, rich and fertile in microbiota. He sloughed off. His immunity was weak, no longer doing its job to any reasonable standard – a common effect of depression and anxiety. It wasn't sealing him, wasn't asserting his identity, so he was vulnerable, exposed, wide open to the world. This happened to all of him. You can imagine how terrified he was of the city. He was forever ill. He was a segment of environment. He was almost nothing. Take a cup, scoop some air, that's what he was. How are you going to find that?