Infinite Ground E-Book

Martin MacInnes

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Astonishing' Herald, Books of the Year 'Sublime' Irish Times, Book of the Year 'Wonderful' Guardian, Books of the Year During a sweltering South American summer, a family convenes for dinner at a restaurant. Midway through the meal, Carlos disappears. An experienced, semi-retired inspector takes the case, but what should be a routine investigation becomes something strange, intangible, even sinister. The corporation for which Carlos worked seems to serve no purpose; the staff talk of their missing colleague's alarming, shifting physical symptoms; a forensic scientist uncovers evidence of curious abnormalities in the thriving microorganisms that shared Carlos's body. As the inspector relives and retraces the missing man's footsteps, the trail leads him away from the city sprawl and deep into the country's rainforest interior, where he encounters both horror and wonder.

Leseprobe

Infinite Ground

Martin MacInnes has been published in eleven languages and is the winner of a Manchester Fiction Prize, a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, In Ascension (2023), was longlisted for The Booker Prize, won Blackwell’s Book of the Year and the Saltire Prize for Fiction, and has been optioned for film.

Also by Martin MacInnes

Gathering EvidenceIn Ascension

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Martin MacInnes, 2016

The moral right of Martin MacInnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 949 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 948 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Infinite Ground

‘Why should I be disgusted by the mass that came out of the cockroach?’

CLARICE LISPECTOR,THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H.

PART ONE

Corporation

I

Walking is something perfected by children, the people who learn it and who have nowhere else to go. Walking is a special pleasure of children and they see it springing up in others. They learn it quite similarly, watching each other move. Children are the ones who learn to move for the first time, and not simply by growing but by moving themselves. Children don’t need to tell themselves to continue moving, once it’s all started, and adults are grateful for this process having been enabled. Once it’s been established, walking commands the community area as people move around and pick up pieces and drop them elsewhere. In addition to transporting body-weight and facilitating social interaction, walking maintains air-diversity in trailing multiple breaths across and over each other, and this in turn supports the growth of vegetable, fungal and animal life.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, P. 17

He got the call in the night, for some reason. His help would be appreciated going over a case. How recent was unusual – the man had been gone only three weeks. He was to put everything aside and concentrate, for a spell, exclusively on this. Resources would be made available. He would be given all the support they could provide.

He explained his doubts and received the necessary assurances: he would have authority and resources; he could work independently or in league; though he had officially retired, to all intents and purposes it would be just as if he remained a senior investigating officer.

Carlos, the missing person, was twenty-nine years old, single, and lived in a small apartment under an informal rent agreement that afforded him little security. He had joined his workplace – a financial institution in the process of a large and complex merger, leaving it for the moment without a name – six years ago, straight from college. He was devoted to his job, known to forego holidays.

He had recently moved into his own office, with a personal secretary: a considerable forward step. His work demands were said to have increased three-fold, but remained nothing out of the ordinary. Reception records showed he was arriving earlier and leaving later every day.

Carlos took a metro and two buses to and from his work. To enter the corporation building he would wait for a vehicle to approach the basement parking lot entrance and jog or walk briskly in behind before the barriers closed. He phoned his mother, Maria, every second Sunday. Maria had been planning the meal at La Cueva for some time. It took around thirty-five minutes, after Carlos had got up from the table, for the party to establish that something had gone wrong. His cousin, Gabriela, had insisted they continue their meal, the price of which meant it was considered a treat.

Maria first reported her son missing the following morning, but he couldn’t be registered as such for another thirty-two hours. By this stage not only had all possibly significant forensic information been dispersed from the restaurant, but Carlos’s flat had also been reoccupied, his possessions, among which was either a telescope or a microscope, dumped in two black refuse sacks left out on the street.

The original investigating officers monitored his phone records, bank accounts and email addresses; all activity had ceased on the 24th. They interviewed his family, reconstructed the night in question, and promised they would do all they could to find him. Most likely, one officer had said, your son left of his own volition, and he will walk back in through this door just any day now.

The inspector found it a little confusing to begin with, going over his questions with the people concerned – family, friends, the staff at La Cueva, adjacent diners on the evening Carlos disappeared – as their answers seemed laboured, artificial. People responded to his enquiries without any evidence of thinking. They spoke, almost to a person, in the manner of a performance. Of course they did – they had been through all this before, he realized, several times at least. He was not the first to put these questions to them. And now, bringing them back, all he was doing was dredging up remembered, polished versions of the things they’d said some time before.

‘It is just,’ she said, ‘that I haven’t been back here since. Maybe none of it happened. Is that possible, Inspector? Is that ourselves, there, at the table?’

‘Just tell me, Maria, exactly what you remember.’

‘Well we hadn’t all been together like that in years. A reunion of sorts, and it was all my doing. I sent the invitations, made the phone calls, the reservation. The thing about the meal – it wasn’t to celebrate a particular occasion like a birthday or an anniversary or something, it was simply for the good of us all seeing each other. Many years, I’m ashamed to say. It was a beautiful night – because of the atmosphere, the light. The storm had cleared; it had just stopped raining.

‘As you know, my son Carlos pushed back his chair, excused himself from the table and went to visit the bathroom. We had eaten our starters and we were enjoying our main courses. It is a little surprising Carlos got up while we were eating. He is normally such an attentive and thoughtful man, though I imagine you never believe a mother when she says these things, and why would you? And he had already gone earlier – I assume that that was where he went, the bathroom – which is also unusual, because he had not drunk more than three glasses of wine.

‘Should I really carry on with these details? I’d thought they were only important to me, because of what happened later, what was about to happen, in the restaurant I mean. I wish I could remember everything. It was remiss of me not to have started from the very start and recorded everything my child did, moment by moment, so I could always have it – of course I never expected him to go, to experience losing him, which is unnatural, a mother having to confront this in the case of her child. Not that I am giving up hope, either. For one thing I have brought you here, to the scene.

‘I began making lists. I’ve been doing so ever since he disappeared. There is so much I don’t know of his life and I wouldn’t even want to speculate, it’s his own private area, it’s not a mother’s business, but at least at the start, when he was small, I had complete knowledge of things such as where he slept, and so I have begun making lists of my impressions from his early years. Here, I will show you one.’

The inspector scanned the pages, the locations written in brief descriptions as items numbered from the margin: ‘folds of assistant midwife’s lower arms’; ‘sand on cove’; ‘forest-patterned blankets’. The list went on. He nodded for her to continue.

‘Well, we recorded significant moments like birthdays and his first day at school, we have an album of photographs of those sorts of things, but it is all the uncountable, absent pictures between them that are difficult now. I’m not saying it’s possible to record everything, I know it’s not, but we could have done more, we could have held on to more of these details.

‘He pushed his chair back a little, careful not to let it screech on the tiled floor, and he smiled at his cousin Gabriela sitting to his left in a beautiful soft yellow gown that might have been thought too much for a routine family gathering, only this wasn’t routine at all, as I’ve explained, and I’m sure we would all have remembered it even if Carlos hadn’t disappeared. As he was pushing the chair back several inches in order to give himself room to stand, he stopped, aware just in time of the waiter about to pass between our table and the next; and it is just like Carlos to notice in time, he is very observant, and considerate, kind. He paused for a count of two, dragging out the motion, before finally standing up and walking to the bathroom. And that is the last I saw of him.’

She looked nervous. He thought she was waiting quite anxiously for his reaction. She looked away, then sharply back at him, as if trying to catch him out.

‘I have a confession, Inspector. In reality, I didn’t see him stand up from the table. I was aware of him doing it, from the corner of my eye. I didn’t pay attention, but others later told me he had gone to visit the bathroom. This is merely how I have chosen to remember it, with more of the detail it deserves.

‘I spend a lot of time imagining him pushing back his chair. I spend days doing only this, Inspector. I could speak about this for as long as you have to listen, which I know you will advise me is contrary to the interests of my health, but still, it helps, in some way.’

The heat obstructed him. It slowed down everything. Action took a little longer in this weather. Getting dressed, preparing food, going up and down a flight of stairs. You had to walk slowly as a caution against ruining clothes. He was late for appointments, yet frustrated when the other party arrived later still.

Transport suffered, one public strike after another. Walking wasn’t much better: in dense pedestrian areas you could actually feel, live, the substance sloughing off the population. At the same time other life quickened. By afternoon there was the odour everywhere of product turned to pulp. The bins, even at a distance, appeared unstable, as if you could see the fruit inside expiring, liquefying and vanishing. It was getting worse. He longed for the inhalation of cold, fresh air, all but floored by the momentary consideration of standing on a dawn coastline, the sound of a slowly lapping tide, the hint of new colour to the east.

The inspector lived in the north of the city, a significant distance from the station. When he and his wife had first moved in it had been relatively cheap. Food outlets on street level, an assortment of unpretentious cafés. The area had an unjust reputation for high crime rates. It wasn’t a quiet place, but that was okay. The calls, in various accents and languages, the crash, at all hours, of bottles tipped into industrial bins. Sirens, infants crying. They had got used to it all; they hadn’t minded so much. She used to say she couldn’t sleep in hotels. Something about the silence. She had been conditioned by the drone of accumulated outside sounds, louder in their evenings as they prepared to sleep. He, however, could and did sleep anywhere.

A commute of forty-five minutes minimum was required to get into the city, and he had enjoyed this journey, not just as a buffer, but as a productive time to think, encouraged by movement and transition. He had often had ideas, insights, breakthroughs in cases, even, as he walked with the hundreds of others down towards the subway tracks or emerged blinking out into the sunlight at the other end.

He liked to imagine the subway traced the route of the river, the Rio Paraná, passing from the east, where the hills on the city edge gave way to the sculpted landscape of the financial district. The river itself changed according to context. From the corporate verandas the water could appear golden, the sunlight refracted off several thousand glass panes; from the river edge itself it was brown and fast, thick with the smell of copper.

La Cueva was set into a natural hillside out on the eastern limits, past the financial district, near the top of a climb. At capacity it seated 200 diners with additional space for eighteen at the bar. The floor was finished black and was reflective for three hours late in the morning into early afternoon. Prices were considered moderate to expensive. The Rodriguez family running La Cueva specialized in steamed river fish; it was what Carlos was eating the night he disappeared, and so the inspector ordered it too, whenever he ate there.

He was always made to feel welcome by the owners, partly, he thought, because he was inconspicuous, slow, he never made a scene. It would not be evident to the other diners that a police official was there, regardless of whether or not he was present in a work capacity. And the owners seemed a little uncomfortable, almost apologetic, having hosted the scene of a crime, something inexplicable.

They barely cooked the river fish, were at the very least skilled in making it appear that way. Kept the head attached, even the eyes, though the flesh came away easily and softly with the fork.

The case was not clear cut. It interested him. As if it were not enough that the man had disappeared just like that, from the middle of the restaurant, without any warning whatsoever, and further that the mother, in relating the incident, had gone on for some time about what even he would consider insignificant details, it turned out, now, that this woman was not who she claimed to be. She was not related to the disappeared, had in fact never met him, was merely employed by the mother to speak on her behalf, she being – the real mother, that is – still too upset to return to the restaurant.

Maria – he had yet to find out the actor’s name – had continued in her narration at the restaurant, reconstructing for him what had happened, or at least her idea of what had happened, along with some of her apparently inexhaustible supply of speculations. What it came down to, he thought, the fuel for this torrent of words, was her astonishment. What had happened, simply put, was impossible. Carlos had gone to the bathroom and then to all intents and purposes he had stopped existing. ‘There is something awful about it,’ she said, ‘in the old sense.’ She had the feeling she could have followed him directly, gone where he had gone, put each foot in the right place every time, and still been none the wiser. As well as being distraught, confused, she was afraid. It was almost as if she had been moved suddenly into a country whose rules and customs she had not yet mastered, yet she had gone on smiling, carefully choreographing her steps, talking in a slow and laboured translation full of clichés and idioms, ready-made blocks of speech that she could present in the hope it would not become obvious that she did not, in fact, know anything about this bewildering foreign place in which a man can simply be going about his day and then be cancelled. She was not in favour of investigating the occult, that was a dangerous path, she said, a tricky slope, but there was something dark and strange at work here, and often now, even in broadest daylight or while going about her shopping in the supermarket, say, she would watch her step, mindful of the ever-present possibility of going under, of falling, vanishing into a darkness.

He located copies of the local and national papers printed on the day of the disappearance and on those immediately preceding and following. He knew the weather – the last day, incidentally, of rain before the heatwave – the traffic levels; the sporting events; the political engagements. He recorded every crime, however unrelated or innocuous it seemed; took note of every traffic violation in the city in the hours after Carlos had gone missing.

A supplementary pull-out in one of the less reputable dailies had listed an anticipated astronomical event. The event, if that’s what he was to call it – a passing astral arrangement – had been predicted to take place on the date of Carlos’s disappearance, but he could find no further allusions in the subsequent press. Omega Centauri, a globular star cluster thousands of light years away: twelve billion years old and vast enough that from areas low in artificial light it resembles a full moon. However many times he read the article, he couldn’t really understand what it described. He imagined eclipses, moon shadows, breaks in the line of vision. An arbitrary pattern, a geometry moving inconceivable distances away and Carlos, meaninglessly, hidden from view in a shadow line.

He knew the staff at La Cueva and he knew the regulars and he knew each room and every exit. He went out for cigarettes. He visited the bathroom. There was nothing unusual about the restaurant, nothing that seemed to present any opportunities for a sudden and comprehensive disappearance.

He visited morgues and looked through unidentified bodies and saw nothing. Speculating amnesia, he consulted the psychiatric wards and hospitals but got nowhere. The questions were familiar and the staff were sure they had given the police these answers before, some time ago.

He worked largely without thinking. It was the best way. He would fall into something, a discovery. He amassed notes, detailed transcriptions of his days’ enquiries, the places he went to and the people he talked with. The more information that accumulated, the more likely something of significance would come up. Some detail, no matter how innocuous it might appear at first, would be the key to finding out where Carlos had got to on the night of the 24th.

II

Stretching out to full height, the standing body imparts feelings of control, potential and pleasant awareness of violent reserves. Getting up from the chair at day’s end recapitulates a version of evolution in which the human rises to a more powerful position, at an increased distance from the ground. The sensation of abrupt elevation, at 5 or 5.30, is surpassingly pleasurable and leads to a real sense of warmth and job satisfaction. None of this exists in the interior.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 29

Such was the protracted nature of merger negotiations, the corporation Carlos worked for had been nameless for years. The inspector believed this was deliberate, designed to exploit loopholes, circumvent various responsibilities. The corporation’s legal team as well as its administrators, its marketing department and its front desk staff, had to adapt their language to account for the fact that the body they worked for had no name. It was difficult for the inspector to make external enquiries, because he could not immediately identify the word for the entity to which he was referring. This delayed his progress; he came across as vague, too general, as if he were not actually interested in retrieving the information. He had not forgotten the name, he said, it was simply that the institution, for the moment, did not have one. He had assumed that for tax, pension and payroll purposes the corporation would have an interim name, even just a code, a long series of numbers that could be used in transactions and other official communications, but investigations suggested otherwise.

He learned that, unlike the apartment, which now housed a young, polished PR consultant, Carlos’s office had not been reoccupied, and employees remained prohibited from entering. According to the original reports, anything of real substance had already been removed. Although it was detailed that the computer remained on the desk, it was a shell: the hard-drive, containing all the reports Carlos had contributed to, the total record of his emails in and out, his work-time diary, the various projects he was working on at the time he disappeared, had gone. His login had been disabled – a reflex action that kicked in, the inspector was told, after seven days of unscheduled leave. Retrieving the hard-drive, and the associated physical evidence of work – paper files, reports, folders – was proving inexplicably and confoundedly difficult. The secure storage facility used by the police department claimed no record of the items. Corporate representatives responded to his telephoned enquiries in automated tones, assuring him the necessary authority would investigate his requests and contact him at the earliest opportunity.

He wondered whether Carlos had been involved in fraud. It would explain why the work records had vanished. It might offer a partial explanation for his disappearance: a desertion, a flight.

The inspector had little experience of this kind of duplicity and had kept his time in the financial district to a minimum, but he knew he had to follow wherever the case led. He borrowed an unmarked car from the station and joined an artery heading east.

The traffic was interminable and everything was made of glass. He failed to understand the thinking behind it. Was it as literal as wanting to appear transparent? A corporate confidence trick? The last thing you could do in daylight hours was look inside, the sunlight blasting back from the surfaces. Other glass was dark, tinted, frosted. It was difficult to think clearly. He continually adjusted his sunglasses, rubbing the infernal itch across the top of his thick black hair, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, cursing under his breath, the damp spreading under his arms stopping him from removing his jacket.

At the front door of Registro Mercantil the caretaker had him show identification and complete a series of registration forms and an additional survey. He waited almost an hour for a clerk to appear, before being taken to a small basement room lined with rows of tall grey cabinets. The archives amounted to only a percentage of the transactions covering the years he had requested; for anything else he’d have to wait. Clearance could take a while, the clerk said, and left him to it.

The main indicator of large-scale fraud was records of unlikely purchases. According, at least, to his half-remembered training. The problem in identifying evidence was the impenetrable legalese. He could see himself spending hours fruitlessly scanning through the minimal paperwork. Were he to be rigorous, trace the nature of every significant outgoing payment, or, say, only those whose purpose remained unclear, he would have to leave aside virtually everything else in the investigation. At this early stage he couldn’t justify limiting his remit to such an extent. Technically, nothing linked the disappearance to financial irregularities or even to the corporation at all; the process of requesting assistance, the loan of an officer better versed in fraud, for example, would itself be too time consuming and ultimately to the detriment of the case. So he really was, as he saw it, on his own. He would comb through the records as quickly as he could, not wasting longer than a single afternoon.

The corporation moved money around. That, at least, was clear. He came across some highly unusual claims. A protest group had launched a civil action, claiming illegal occupation of land in the interior and the resettling of tribal communities. Information was scarce – much seemed to have been deleted or redacted and it had inevitably come to nothing, the parties arriving at a settlement. The individuals concerned were impossible to trace. Some of the original reports suggested violence on the part of the protestors, but the full extent of the allegations had subsequently been erased.

He had to leave the basement more than once in search of coffee and air, neither of which gave much relief. He went blindly, hopelessly, through the reams of printed information, drifting off only into the most indirectly related speculations, catching himself much later seeing the hands had still been working, the pages parsed, and he would resolve to focus more firmly on the task at hand, stay on track, but the same thing happened again, the pattern repeated, he’d go outside.

It might have been easier if he could append the pages, score through anything obviously irrelevant, highlight any patterns of potential interest, but the signature demanded by the clerk prohibited him from duplicating any records. The camera focused on him from the south-west corner of the room. He continued.

He found the corporation paid a significant monthly amount to a ‘performance agency’. Considering the use of an actor to represent Carlos’s mother, it was a lead of sorts. He pushed himself back from the desk, took out his mobile phone and began ringing around. Eventually, he sourced a number and was put through to one of the directors. She was disarmingly open, admitting they hired out ‘performers’ to fulfil various capacities at the corporation. They would prepare and send men and women to act as low-level employees; it was especially helpful, she said, when the corporation was entertaining prospective clients, engaged in a series of meetings and wishing to give the best possible impression, displaying an appearance of optimal efficiency and hard work. She admitted it seemed counter intuitive at first.

‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘they appear much more convincing in the role of hard-working, busy employees than such employees do themselves. It’s more common that you’d think. Of course, some of the hired staff are working so hard at appearing to be working hard – filing, checking reports, making urgent phone calls and demanding to speak to so-and-so – that there’s really nothing inauthentic about it at all.’

Staff weren’t hired only to populate the office at such times, she went on; sometimes it’s the opposite, hired so that they’re not needed to populate the offices. ‘Certain personal obligations, understandably, conflict with the necessary fulfilment of corporate duty. The corporation, and increasingly many other institutions, will pay for outside performers to stand in for their own staff’s daily lives. This is easier to do if the obligation is based on viewing something – say a son or daughter’s participation in a concert or a sporting event – when the hired staff can be visible at a distance and report back with the required information. It’s at the employee’s own discretion, of course, but the majority are only too happy to brief outsiders on how best to stand in. We suspect some staff invent or exaggerate work, so they can hire performers to cover personal obligations. It is enough, most of the time, that you’re represented; it doesn’t have to be you. Caring for elderly parents becomes especially trying, so in addition to housing them in permanent leisure communities, performers from agencies such as ourselves stand in on visiting days. This is not immoral or duplicitous, Inspector. In almost all cases the relatives are not only quite aware of what is going on, but also relieved at how smoothly the encounter goes, how their son or daughter appears to really listen, to be genuinely interested. Besides, it naturally speaks very well of the parents that they have brought up children who have gone on to be so successful, working in the kind of institutions that can pay for the courtesy of ersatz personal encounters.’

The longest-serving false employee had been with the corporation more than four years and had become so adept at appearing to be effective that the gap between this and actually being effective was invisible, arbitrary, and she was in fact deemed essential to the smooth running of the business. Seeing her so confidently and authoritatively appearing to do her job was instructive for the other office members, who could watch and learn from her and see how to do it themselves.

The limits of what the agency people could be expected to do were not clearly defined, but it appeared likely, the director said, that they had been used to build an aura of gentle festivity on workers’ birthdays and to insert morale-boosting moments of ambiguous flirtation when certain team members appeared to be feeling down. It was even possible there was some truth in the rumours reported, including that one office member had been seen receiving detailed tuition from another, presumably an actor, on how to sneeze better, i.e. in a way considered more acceptable within the industry – quieter, more professional and controlled.

They sent employees out on public transport and in adjacent cafés on workday mornings, looking brisk and ready for the day ahead, helping others in the industry approach their work in an optimal frame of mind. They were deployed by the coffee room at typical low-sugar periods, ready with promising and uplifting slices of anecdote and gentle conversation, which employees could look forward to resuming and developing at a later date. They waited in the car park in the evening, so no one real was the last to go home; they took exactly two minutes forty seconds to return from bathroom visits and they produced particularly purposeful rhythms punching keys even on slow, midweek afternoons.

She insisted, however, that the corporation continued to legitimately function – it was unusual, for instance, on any given day to find the ratio of real to representative office workers fall in favour of the latter. The corporation maintained its operation and made money; it was a self-supporting, autonomous system, because if there ever came a point when the corporation ceased to be profitable there would be no funds left to pay the agency and the actors. The fact that they remained there was proof positive that things went well.

She had no record of Carlos. They had not, to her knowledge, engineered any performances in his professional or personal life. He thanked her and ended the call, before continuing his search of the files.

The door opened and the caretaker told him the time was up. He hadn’t realized at all how late it was. Clearly he’d been talking on the phone much longer than he’d thought. He gathered his things and followed the dreary figure upstairs.

He had his bag searched, then sighed as he removed his jacket, put his arms out to be patted down.

‘This weather, huh?’ he said.

The caretaker said nothing.

He thought things over on the drive back. He’d need, of course, information from the corporation itself regarding the performance agency. It explained the mother – presumably a complementary service offered in sympathy and support to the real Maria, who still couldn’t bear to talk.

The easiest thing, of course, the inspector thought, the least disruptive and the cheapest, would have been to put someone from the agency in Carlos’s seat the moment he’d gone. Colleagues were taking on his work and doubtless extra staff had been brought in to help, but they only replaced his product, not his presence. The vacated office remained off limits and it would continue to be so, treated as a site of potential evidence, until the inspector declared otherwise.

When the caretaker had interrupted him, he’d been crosschecking bulk orders of office supplies. A circuitous route towards locating Carlos, he would admit, should any updates from his seniors be demanded. It had been reasonably interesting, perhaps only because the items were listed plainly, and also, he supposed, because of the familiarity of the content. He could fool himself into thinking he was being efficient and capable, when really he was just relieved at having understood something.

The orders could be broadly categorized under worker and machine supplies. So in addition to ink cartridges, data sticks, copier toner, replacement hard drives and memory, there were 5 kg coffee tubs, quantities of anti-bacterial gel, paper towels. What had seemed slightly odd, the only thing really, after the performance agency payments, was that in the last several years these costs were constant, despite the slow, steady expansion of the business. The growth of the corporation’s estate failed to match its supplies.

Fairly minor, he imagined, but something to look into.

Back at his apartment, the inspector found that the company’s listings online contradicted the true nature of the estate as indicated in the records: between 10 and 20 per cent of property accounted for on paper led to nowhere real. Fundamentally, the corporation was smaller than reported. He was sure this would turn out to be an error on his part, financial naivety, something he had failed to understand.

After a substantial time trawling the internet for clues to the discrepancy, he found a reference to ‘corporate contingency’ sites. It was common practice, he discovered, for larger corporations to rent additional office space in remote locations, typically on the outer edges of new towns. A single tall building catered for a dozen companies or more, lying empty most of the year. The offices were primed for work, fully furnished, connected and in some cases guarded by watchmen in booths and remotely surveilled.

Post-disaster, the theory went, a corporation could reestablish itself in one of these sites, continue as if nothing had happened. The assumption was that any attack would focus primarily on the city, so an alternative was needed, a contingency site. Several days each year a team was dispatched to prove it could be done. Before the taxi ride from the central hub, secretaries prepared packed lunches, coffee flasks and bottles of still water. The gates were opened, networks re-established and the team went in to work, careful not to look outside. In most cases, he read, staff hated it, couldn’t wait to get back to the real office. Too quiet. The days going on and on. No one went there more than once.

He read it as an example of corporate anxiety. Their imagination of the apocalypse was limited and picturesque, affecting a distinct, geometrically precise land segment, allowing civilization to be transported elsewhere, uninterrupted.

For the practice to be as widespread as it was, it had in some sense to be profitable. He wondered what statistics would show over productivity: what the difference in daily output was between employees who believed that everything, no matter what, was going to be okay, and those with no alternative workspace.

He wondered if workers would go calmly about their daily work, more adept, in the knowledge of readied replicas. Idealize the unfilled places where, once settled, everything would run more smoothly. A microwave plate obstructed as it rotated; a door failing to close firmly on a first attempt; a sub-optimal phrase used in a rare group-meeting interjection: all those things could be smoothed, corrected, perfected in the parallel office.

He was amazed and impressed by the colossal corporate arrogance, the stunning lack of imagination. The idea that all places – a forest, a desert, conceivably even seas – were really urban spaces in the preliminary stage.

He had been reading for hours. He hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch. He took his wallet and went downstairs in search of food. Waiting for duck and rice in the Celeste Imperio he remembered something, a story told by a colleague at a bar – or was it, he thought, stretching on the red plastic chair, a detail he had read long ago, perhaps in an American novel? In the story an insurance worker had suddenly disappeared. Mid-thirties, married, father to two. No history of mental illness, no particular financial insecurities, no sign, his wife had said, of anything amiss. He had left for work at the usual time on that last morning, finishing his coffee as he pulled on his coat, kissing her on the left cheek as he stepped towards the door.

He had never come back. He had not reported to the office. Had made no attempts to contact anyone, left his bank account untouched. She swore he had been killed. He had suddenly been made inactive, something impersonal had struck him. No body was found. She pressed several months later for a funeral in absentia, a ceremony to encourage the transition. The missing man’s brother arranged a detective to search. One day, six years later, the wife took the call. I have some news, the brother in law said. We have him. He’s here. I’m watching him right now.

He’s dead.

He’s not.

He lived, they discovered, two towns down. He had switched across two letters of his Christian name. He had a wife, a son, a daughter. He was rising through the ranks of a local insurance firm. The detective had watched him for some time. He cooked the same meals in a regular routine carried over from the first life. Continued to swim in a pool twice weekly, just as before. He had quickly amassed a record collection near identical to his previous. The wife drove with the brother and the detective, insisting on seeing the life. She thought, she said later, that she was dreaming or watching her own life as if from outside. The new wife reproduced her hairstyle and her gait. The children, though younger, enjoyed a power balance identical to her own offspring. There was a languor, a carelessness expressed in the lay of objects on the new lawn exactly as there had been on their own six years before.

Could it be him, she said? It looks just like him, but it’s not, it can’t be. A twin? Removed at birth? You hear about these things, she said. You read about them. The amazing coincidences, the same choices, down to the smallest thing.

Nothing had ever been explained. The man, when confronted, said nothing, offered no reason for his actions. The marriage had not been formalized and it proved difficult to bring a case against him, all but impossible to put together any charge more significant than wasting police time.

The thing I don’t understand, she said, is why would he leave me if only to build exactly the same life again? Sure, it would hurt if he’d run out on me, left me for someone else – but at least then I could understand it, I think. But he didn’t do that. He did the same thing again, the same life twice.

The inspector searched for the exact words of the phrase. He left and grew the same life again, a few miles on.

He wondered now if this insurance company also used contingency sites. If the man had been encouraged, however indirectly, to build a duplicate of everything in his life, some blank and dull response to the possibility of ruin. More than once, everything again, towards a greater chance of preservation.

The server called his order number.

III

In other societies, sitting is the dominant body position. Sitting on furniture the body is set into three straight lines of near equal length with right angles on the lap and beneath the knees. From here it is easily folded into its smallest possible shape, the knees pressed to the face and the heels to the posterior. In this folded position, the body is transportable and readily fits inside a small box. This encourages people to stay indoors and travel in vehicles. The mechanical formation of the body in a sitting posture, with minimal pressure, strain or curvature, the rods flatly expressed via the joints, matches the expectation of completed tasks, and its tiered expression resembles steps or stairs, most explicitly when viewed in profile, implicitly endorsing existing power structures and habits.

TRIBES OF THE SOUTHERN INTERIOR, p. 42

He’d expected something grander. The use of acting staff, perhaps, had done it, suggesting a firm priding itself on innovation and experimentation, alert to the power of appearances.