Infinite Ground (5 page)

‘Are you surprised he disappeared? Think of the image most people carry of themselves, in the front-facing third person. A man and a landscape clearly defined. But he couldn't think like that any more.'

The inspector tried not to be distracted by the passing vegetation, nor to reveal his interest in the marsh pitcher plants, which she would doubtless consider populist, vulgar. Later, ­perhaps, they could tour the glasshouses.

‘Isabella – is this a PhD topic of yours? Listen, I wonder… Can you be clearer? What exactly are we talking about? You said this wasn't metaphor, then you say he disappeared in his office. What do you mean? Because it really happened, he disappeared. We have a bereft family and an empty bed. He's no longer there, distracted on a bus in traffic or queuing for his coffee. This is real. We're dealing with a person reported missing from a restaurant. He got up, he moved, walked through the office doors, got out. So what
are
we talking about?'

‘If I'm being difficult, Inspector, it's because it's a discussion I usually have only with myself. I'm not saying he literally disappeared, into the room, into the desk, into the walls; of course I'm not. I'm saying it's the kind of thing he thought about, that he imagined happening. I'm saying he forgot who he was partly as a symptom of his illness, partly as a reflection of that illness. There is a chance this affected what he did later, even at the restaurant. But…'

‘What?' He turned to her, stopped. ‘What else?'

‘Well… He also, in a sense, well he
was
disappearing. I said he was malnourished. I said he was losing the capacity to digest food.'

‘In theory, could someone wholly disappear this way? Be so corrupted and disturbed they become smaller and smaller, until there is nothing left?'

‘Forgive my frankness, but that's a pretty stupid question. You've heard the expression “waste away”.'

‘Let's go back a little, again. I want to at least establish something and move on. Two things, even. You are saying his illness, a physical thing, had a strong psychological element?'

She began walking again, he followed. He kept having to shield his eyes.

‘I am.'

‘Therefore, isn't it possible that the source was also psychological, even behavioural?'

‘Well, it is possible, but I wouldn't class that as any kind of breakthrough.'

‘Secondly, that the illness broke his identity. That he lost himself. And this was strongly linked to an attack on his immune system.'

‘Yes.'

‘And how much of this is speculation?'

‘I am equally certain about the corruption of his skin and mind. That is my professional opinion.'

‘And we are getting this from a keyboard?'

‘From what's left on it. The only slight novelty is the specificity of the second move, into the brain. It's old news, though most people would still consider it alien, that individuals can be identified by fragments of microbiota – DNA that isn't technically their own. That isn't even human.

‘To begin with he would have claimed, you know, that it wasn't him, that it was an illness, a parasite, a disease. That's what I think. But you can't get anywhere with it. I feel bad for Carlos. Even when he doubted it, even when he worried – “This anxiety isn't me, this is an illness.” That doubting, cynical voice? That was affected, too. He couldn't get outside.'

‘In some sense, I think, you admire what's happened.' He turned, at the edge of the gardens. They could see, over the green, the traffic lines, the rows of accommodation, the beginnings of the market.

‘I wouldn't say that. I just see something neat in it. Two ­disappearances: internal and social. He stopped believing he was real and then nobody could see him. Inspector, I have another appointment. I really should go. But you will keep me updated on the investigation? I would like to find out where he's gone.'

VASQUEZ:
We never went there. But he never invited us. He was devoted to his office. He spent whole nights at his desk. Do you think that's it? That did it? I'm not suggesting the office itself is dangerous. I didn't say that. I'm still working here, aren't I? I was – I am – his secretary. I'm not at risk, Inspector. Do I appear ill to you? And it's evident that you'd say the same yourself. You're here.

KANDINSKI:
Let me clear this up. Carlos was an isolated individual in every respect. Whatever happened to Carlos happened to him alone. In everyday behaviour we, his colleagues, have our guard up. We're safe. We're not liable to lose ourselves. You're not going to embarrass yourself, are you? Are you going to give us those masks you wear?

DIAS:
The cleaning of the ground was a rhetorical measure. Though we couldn't touch his office it was important still that we felt we could be getting on, moving on. The contractors did a good and thorough job. The entire sixth floor – we lifted the contents of our desks outside, opened the windows and spent the afternoon in an adjacent hotel suite while they cleaned. We came back, to all appearances – so long as we averted our eyes from his place – to a new day. Thing about him, see, he was his own man. Kept himself to himself. And you could trust him; he was reliable. He wouldn't spill out secrets. Information was secure. He was solid, as I say. Dependable. Nothing got to him. Nothing. His work was exemplary. Almost exceptionally, he never made a single request for stress leave. Why would I consider that suspicious? A man doing his job? Carlos was at peace in this place. As I say, you should have seen him at his chair.

VASQUEZ:
Yes, he had everything arranged there. As his secretary it's one of my roles to maintain the quality and utility of my employer's instruments. I mean everything – from the security systems protecting his hard drive to the brightness of his monitor. He had a tendency to sit close to the screen, and, of course, this meant that his constant breathing generated a clouding effect. It was unfortunate. I would attend to this on his breaks. I would polish. His seat would sink – though he wasn't a large man, as you know, in fact he was slender, some would say he was barely there. We used to say he failed to activate automatic doors. Still the chair would sink after a time, typically 7 mm every two months. So I would attend to that, so that his eyes would face the optimum height for receiving images. I'd replace his keyboard every thirteen weeks. That was standard. His pressing fingers would erode the most common letters, leaving everything askew. The surface becoming imperfect, unlevel. Some of the workers go lightly on the keys, they skim the plastic, write more quickly – ‘ghosters', we call them. Their keyboards are replaced annually. I ensured the wires and leads webbing together all of his electronic equipment did not tangle and vermiculate the way these things can do. This is a surprisingly common source of pent-up aggression. I gathered and stocked the black fountain pens he wrote with and the crisp yellow legal pads, narrow ruled and without margin. I provided him with his refreshments at appointed times, performed all the essential functions of a secretary, primarily based around his meets. It's only in the past two months he prohibited my entering his office. Until that time I managed his environment to the best of my abilities, doing all I could so that he would fit in seamlessly on arrival every day – I wanted him to ignore all peripherals, attend only to his central tasks. Ideally, he should not even notice my presence, he should glide. He should be completely alone, the better to concentrate on his tasks.

KANDINSKI:
You're very quiet, Inspector. You haven't said a word in quite some time. Nothing. Is this some new style of interrogation? I wish I knew what happened. I can't appreciate – can't accept – the change. I read about an experiment – perhaps it was an installation. The subject is given a sleep-depriving substance and put in a small, locked room, well lit, with just a chair, desk and a bottle of water. The walls painted white. And on the desk there is a plant, an ordinary house plant, the kind you never really notice in another person's room. Just there, always there. These plants, despite appearances, are about to decay. It happens suddenly, the wilting. Chemically manipulated to fall, just like that. And you have to watch. The ceiling bulb is caged. And you can close your eyes or lean down with your head resting on your folded arms. But you will not tire. You are stimulated. You will always re-open your eyes. In twelve hours everything is gone. You watch the thing – the life – become smaller and smaller, until there is no life. The leaves fold in on themselves, withdraw. But the thing is, technically you watch it. This encroaching nothing. This erasing. It is something that is happening, a positive thing. How can going away be a positive thing? The soil becomes fuller. Larger than before. The door locked, the life present. The door opened, the life, the thing, gone.

KANDINSKI:
I saw him once, through frosted glass, suspended from his feet, hanging vertically. I assumed, I think, that it was an illusion, his shoes hanging upside down, his suit. But even through the glass you could see they were embodied. Someone was inside. It makes sense, fits the pattern. I'd guess now he was trying to drip out what he thought with. Catch it in a bucket! Pour it all away! I saw a blurry shadow stumbling, falling. I imagine that was him getting up, righting himself, getting to his feet. But, poor man, pouring out his head like that, straining all the thought away, out, as he desired. He fell! Evidently there was a stranger living with us for ten months. Not that we really knew Carlos anyway, to begin with. The original Carlos, in his office, before he had left the building. I'm curious what remains… Apparently, we're still not allowed in. Absurd. Why can't we walk in another man's office, a fellow man, a colleague? Though I suppose we never did before, bar Señora Vasquez, who knows nothing.

VASQUEZ:
I am not Señora Vasquez, I only pretend.

KANDINSKI:
You do realize the door is on upside down? Removed at the hinges and reapplied oppositely. Why? It won't open naturally this way. Who did this? What does Vasquez have to say?

DIAS:
What happened to Carlos? Is that rhetorical?

KANDINSKI:
The first day he didn't arrive – which would be the day after he disappeared, the first morning we worked without him – there was a trail of sticks by the sixth-floor copier. Vasquez reported it and saw that it was cleaned up almost immediately, I mean almost immediately the first of us had noticed it; it could have been there all night for all we knew. No one noticed any bigger trail leading in, just this one deposit of short, broken sticks rather neatly placed together, almost folded or arranged, like a bird had made it, Vasquez said.

VASQUEZ:
It is a minor detail, but you said to include everything, right, no matter how insignificant it might seem? Everything we remember around the time of his disappearance, anything at all out of the ordinary – that's what you said, isn't it? Well the only thing I have is the sticks – around fourteen of them, the largest no more than 4 cm long and 2 wide. It might have been a joke, a game somebody was playing, only I can't think of anyone who fits the bill. We have a very strict policy here regarding the outdoors. Technically, you are supposed to change footwear upon entering the basement, though security are likely to turn a blind eye, so long as you've been indoors all the way, entering your car via a garage annex, etc. But whoever trailed in the sticks must have walked outside, over woodland I imagine, which is quite unorthodox. Any vestibule areas are designated ‘mud rooms' – they're explicitly thresholds, where anyone coming from outside can fix themselves, change outfit and adapt to being indoors again.

VASQUEZ:
I've often wondered exactly what he was trying to tell us. I never mentioned this to anyone, but before they cleared the sticks away I inspected them, I looked for signs. There was this change, this atmosphere – it was 10 a.m., which meant that Carlos was late, unprecedented, as you know, and maybe we all just sensed that something had gone wrong. Nothing had been communicated at that stage, he'd been gone only a matter of hours. But I swear something was different. The sticks landing there suddenly. I don't see how they could have been brought in or who could have done it. We couldn't all have missed the pile, could we? No one had entered since 8.47.

KANDINSKI:
I thought they looked prepared, built – that they weren't an accident. That's how it looked. I don't know if it was a part of something bigger, some clue or other. Where they were placed, it looked like what had been there before – carpet – was gone. That this stick pile had replaced it. I know that doesn't make sense. We're not, as a rule, superstitious on the sixth floor – someone might occasionally send round the horoscopes, but that's as far as it will go. So it means something, it's notable, when I say that we were spooked.

VASQUEZ:
I know that he went missing from the restaurant the previous night, and that there was no question of him returning here in the interim, but several of us had the feeling he'd been here again, he'd visited, that the office was the real place he'd vanished from. Isn't it a little suspicious it happened at a restaurant? The ideal place for a vanishing, right? Because presumably everything there would be covered up almost instantly – all the cooking, the cleaning – and there would be nothing left to recover, no evidence. I shouldn't say this. It's nonsense, I know. I'm just saying what it felt like and I want to tell you everything.

KANDINSKI:
Someone said they smelled burning.

DIAS:
The sticks were a curse. They came as he went missing. That day was a write-off. You might think it's crass to talk this way, but I don't care. I'm telling you everything. It was our lowest daily yield that quarter. It was really poor. We were distracted. The sticks got in the way.

KANDINSKI:
They weren't supposed to be there and they changed everything. I know we had them cleared away the moment the first of us noticed anything, but by that stage it was too late, the damage had been done. They had contradicted the office. It should have been unfathomable, the sticks, and I gather that's how it was for some of the others. But for me, that day, I had the terrible feeling that it had been entirely natural and correct that the sticks were there. And that around them and over them was something else, and that stuff was us.

DIAS:
I don't want to feel that myself, my staff, my office are intruding.

KANDINSKI:
I imagined the sticks multiplying, covering the floor, the walls, the drawers, then piling up in layers, drowning us slowly. We kept climbing, there was less air to breathe, then the sticks were inside us, pressed against our orifices, until finally they swallowed us. I got that from a small pile of sticks innocuously trailed on the office floor. How on earth can you account for that? The sticks were provocative, they changed us.

DIAS:
Vasquez tried his number repeatedly on the hour. The family hadn't yet got in touch, nor the police. It was too soon for anything to be made official. I know you have your reasons, I know there has to be some line drawn, but those first forty-eight hours, when someone has gone but is not yet considered missing, they strike me as very strange. What kind of suspension are they supposed to be in? So we, or rather Señora Vasquez, kept trying his number; we'd have to get through eventually, wouldn't we? Someone would pick up. What's the alternative – nothing? We were annoyed rather than alarmed, because we were counting on Carlos, we needed his input and by the time I arranged appropriate cover it would be getting to the end of the working day.

VASQUEZ:
The sticks meant something. Someone had put them there that way, in that particular formation. We shouldn't have ordered their removal, we should have given them more of our attention, offered them a more considered response. The individual sticks were very delicately placed over each other. There was a sort of symmetry to it, a pattern repeated either side of the centre. Each stick appeared to have a contrived relationship with all the others. We should have measured them; it might have told us something. There may have been a message kept inside. But maybe it's best we didn't find out, that we didn't read it.

DIAS:
You think there's something else going on now, around us in the office, something awful, something we don't want you to know about, and that's why we are keeping you in here and spinning stories about the sticks? Something that also happens to be the answer to the question of what ultimately happened to Carlos. Am I right? Have I caught your trail? Why don't we go out this moment and see what's happening? No one is expecting us to emerge for at least an hour. If we go now, into the foyer and towards the other doors, what we would see would be completely natural and unscripted. We would go out into the middle of it and if there was anything happening then we'd see it right away, it'd be all around us. Shall we do that? Shall we go out right now? Are you sure, Inspector? You're ready?