Year 2089

Imitation

 

     The cat rouses us

          to the virtue of our madness.

The trembling before the touch.

     What if the body, like a heavy knot,

gets lost in the silent pride

                 of its undoing,

     like when a minor goddess dies,

like when we invented separation,

          or the abolition of death?

Now, a staircase spirals down into hell.

     Our species perceives and imagines

     in collective time,

the strange oligarchy of the Intergalactics,

     you aren’t afraid—

     you know this world is about to end.

 

Year 2089

I know The Animal’s future. I saw it with my own eyes, when I still had eyes, when I was still me. I know the birthplace of our future form. It started with a trade: language for a new body. In our year 55, on Mona Island, this future version of us is born underground, inside a gigantic Anthill made of caves and stalactites and tunnels, where we decide that language corrupts and the body edifies. The inhabitants of the Anthill pose as ascetic Greengrocers disconnected from the Pumpkin and from syntax, so that they can experiment with The Animal’s mind without the disruption of the rest of us. Some say people who are terminally ill come here for healing because they have no other chance or hope in life.

     This world is not real. This little world is not real. What you are reading here is not real. Only what is hidden between these letters remains and softens the beings who are not like us. Their senses are not ours. They do not read because sight is for reading and they have no eyes. They grasp.

     A dead face connected to living bodies. A rigid face. A stiff face stuck with cables to a living head. This face is the back of The Animal. I once saw a tree turn its back on me. A tree of backs can only grow here in this desert of Anthills full of all the dead carrying their multiple deaths, each pregnant with the idea of a future life. The future form of The Animal will be born in the shade of one of these trees and it will follow a path full of turned backs. Imagine the endless expressions of The Animal. Imagine its neural life, that life sheltered here in these Anthills, turning and translating itself outward, creating a colossal hairy skull and a thorax made of continents, and vague extremities that caress other planets. When The Animal born of these Anthills enters the world, its impulses will make it recoil from its new faces and their breathing, their sense of smell, their sight, their ears, the word, the radiance of what is human. Even when syntax sparks momentarily within itself, we will only function and express through our chests and shoulders, and through our cable hair and ribs, by our arms and legs and feet. So many feet.

***

Hold up, let’s rewind. I was born in year 21 of The Animal, the year 2055 of humans. For the first 13 years of my life, I had a name that I have forgotten. According to the tattoos on my body, they simply called me The Romanian. During my childhood and early adolescence, I was glued to the internet. Astonished, I watched the original heroes of The Animal take over the world from the islands of Puerto Rico: the brave Twins; Lucas’ mechanical concert that shook the world while the Green Alliance slaughtered thousands of The Animal’s pioneers; the artificial vines of the Coders and then the construction of the Sun Jungle; the original Greengrocer’s manifesto preaching radical passivity; the Archeologist’s corporation; Galaxia, who seizes all the world’s corporations with the promise of an improbable future; the terrorist Cooks from Brazil who infect us with a tremendous desire to rearrange our domestic lives; the Redistributors; the Nap Takers and their philosophies of the dream; the Animal Revolution taking over New York City when everyone thought all resistance to the Green Alliance useless;  and of course, Unrra, the one who imagines worlds, whose singular mind had the ability to cure degenerative diseases, her mind connected to those other dwindling minds, her saving them.  I guess I was born in Romania but as a teenager I always dreamed of escaping to those Caribbean Islands to be a part of the new world being born. Maybe that’s why, as a child, I dedicated myself to running.

***

They say that curiosity killed the cat, but on this island, cats are having a great time.

***

There are so many tasks to complete just to stay alive, so many skills to learn daily without hardly speaking. I haven’t had time to pull out my notebooks and write about my findings, to probe Unrra’s supposed presence here. A lifetime assisted by the Pumpkin has resulted in me being an awkward craftswoman. Flimsy hands. I haven’t shared more than a dozen sentences with the inhabitants of these desert Anthills. The strangest thing is how quickly one forgets language just after a few days. How quickly one gets used to not speaking, to being, to being here, in body, with them, connected in more ways than one: food, poop, sex, affection, sleeping, trembling and touching. Recently, I was assigned a daily task, a job, a trade to make me more useful to the Anthill. They want me to teach the only three island-born girls to speak. They want me to teach them language. Syntax. They only know a handful of words. Wild, nameless girls who seem to live more with the cats than with the Ants. Two of them are 3 years old and the other is 5. They are strange girls, too smart and empathetic for their ages. Speaking takes a lot out of them because nobody in their world cares about speaking. They communicate with the body and the gaze. If language corrupts and the body edifies—the residing truth here—I suppose that they’ve asked me to corrupt the girls a little, to give them a tiny dose of evil so they can communicate with the rest of The Animal and all of us beyond these isolated Anthills. I suppose they’ve asked me to make them loyal translators.

     The girls spend three hours a day practicing Spanish with me, a language that is alien to them. They seem to spend the rest of their time with the cats. They don’t play with the cats. It’s more like the cats are raising them. In the morning the cats wake the girls up. They lick their eyes and noses and ears and lead them to the shared dining room for breakfast. The girls eat when the cats eat. The cats direct the girls to the best places for sunbathing or lounging in the shade. When the girls put dangerous things in their mouths, the cats rush to prevent them from swallowing. The cats gently correct them, care for them, constantly clean their grimy hands with their antiseptic tongues. They warn them about approaching poisonous snakes. They anticipate the rain, the cold, the threat of heatstroke. They guide them to fresh springs where they can drink water. And when the night comes, the girls go down the spiral staircase and disappear until dawn.

     One night while in bed with the cross-eyed man, I ask about what is going on below the spiral staircase. What happens down there? Why do the girls spend their nights there and not up here with me? Why am I not allowed to go down there? He gets frustrated. He answers with very few words.
     The girls are learning to be healers, he tells me. So many down there are sick. You are not ready to go down there.
     I tell him that there are so many sick people on the island, that he himself is sick, that they should all be allowed access to the Pumpkin. The Romanian tells him that in The Kitchen, the Pumpkin is our healer; it uses X-rays and micro-robots to accurately diagnose our illnesses and then renders the cure itself. She says that the Pumpkin is now capable of laser surgery, that if a disease has a cure, then the Pumpkin finds it, that there is no need for the sick to die, that the Pumpkin can even cure him. The Romanian says all of this in haste. Do you know what you have? Why are you sick?
     The cross-eyed man smiles as he listens to me talk about the Pumpkin. He knows something. He doesn’t tell me what his illness is, but he shows me how one side of his face is a little dead, collapsed, how his left leg doesn’t respond, how his left-hand trembles.
     Only the Anthill can cure me, he says.
     He is not sad. He kisses me. He makes love to me again so that I understand that he is at peace with the fate of his body, of his species.

     In my first lesson with the girls, I realize, unsurprisingly, they don’t have names. Or they don’t know them. I try to get them to choose names for themselves. I remember the terrible anxiety I felt years before when, after many connections through which I forgot my name, I also forgot my face. I remember it gave me peace to choose a name. The thing I would tattoo on my body (language and body), The Romanian. A small thing, just a name, but one that situates me in this world. I am The Romanian who lives among those Latin Americans revolutionizing the world. I am The Romanian, blonde, curious, journalist and runner, who ran away from her geographies to pollinate the Anthill with my mind of a thousand flowers and a thousand worlds. The girls like the game of inventing their own names, but they do not understand the need to use them, and the names are changed every day. Today their names are “Begonia,” “Cloud Shroud,” and “Weeping Because Clouds Are Sad, or Rain.” Their names are exchanged as if every name signifies each or all of them. “Begonia'' goes with “Begonia” but sometimes with “Shroud” and occasionally they are together “The Weeping Begonias.” “Cloud” is often “Rain” and “The Clouds” are sometimes “Weeping.” They use nouns as verbs without a subject, actions that disappear as soon as they are carried out, “Cloud the snail,” “The crying dreams of us,” “Let's begonia the shroud!”
     “Hunger has us,” one of them says.
     “Yes!” The others agree.
     “I’m hungry,” I correct them.
     Tenderness takes over amidst this attempt to isolate a difference between the first person singular and plural. For these girls, this difference does not exist. Their verbs do not take on singular subjects because they do not need them. Actions happen. Actions create subjects and not the other way around. They feel hunger and suddenly, hunger, as an event, evokes beings who only say emphatically, “Yes!” Like the passive voice, they deny and delay the liability of the subject, but these girls aren’t trying to subvert any responsibility, they aren’t avoiding anything. They’re playing.
     “Leaving the house and the heat all around outside,” says one of them, proud to show off her ability to create complete sentences.
     “So many heats inside and outside,” says another.
     I try not to correct them. What they have, what they use and make of language, is a kind of contentment. Let them be. They have learned so much alone, and yet they have never been alone, they couldn’t name it—aloneness—these ant girls.
     “But also, cold stars all around the night,” says one, confused by something the other two are trying to make of the heat.
     “The night is before or after?” The girls also struggle with the linearity of time. They do not understand the need to conjugate verbs in any tense but the present.
     “In the past, there were cold nights on this island. In the future, there will be cold nights. But now, in the present, it is daytime, and it is hot.”
     “The Romanian is a mutant!” they scream at the same time, terribly synchronized, before breaking into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme song—their favorite song from the big Anthill parties where adult Ants make ninja turtle costumes out of palm leaves and coconut shells. The girls love the parties.
     “What did you mischievous girls say?!” They laugh in rowdy unison, pleased at their mischief.
     “Why am I a mutant!? I am going to eat you 3 like pizza!”
     “You are different, you are different!” one shouts.
     “So many differences!” And they do not stop laughing.
     The Romanian is, however, quite pleased to realize that one of the girls, who currently has no name, has managed to articulate a well conjugated complete sentence in second person: “You are different.” They have always told us that. Even before connecting. As if we were born different. But I’ve never heard, “you are different,” like this. A happy statement. The girls are happy that I’m a mutant, that we are mutants, that we mutate.
     “You are a mutant because you make magic with your mouth.”

     Another complete sentence, conjugated in second person, with a causal clause. The Romanian is happy. We don’t even notice that alongside these ungrammatical girls we’ve almost completely forgotten the fact that our native language is Romanian, and that Spanish continues to be a rather rare language for me, and that months not weeks have passed, and that I no longer know, we no longer know, if we will get out of here or even if it’s worth leaving.

     We finish our lesson and spend the rest of the afternoon lounging with the cats in the avocado tree orchard. The girls wander from cat to cat, accompanying them in their dozing. They hardly touch the cats. No pets here. They drift back and forth, from sun to shade to wind to the smell of the various aromatics in the garden. I sit with my notebook and admire them. I try, to the best of my ability, to document all their movements. They are strange. They are the strangest beings on this entire island of mutants. These ant girls are the strangest and most interesting beings in a world where everything has become strange and interesting. This symbiosis fascinates us. Suddenly we remember my childhood in Romania, surrounded by loving cats who never managed to synchronize my life with theirs. And we wonder, is it the peculiarities of these ant girls that make them more like cats, or is it that they are imitating the cats because the adult Ants have let them grow wild?

***

A valve opens. Electrode fluid enters your brain. You feel the whole Anthill inhale…and exhale. They tune their instruments. The concert begins with a roar of syncopated emotions that reverberate in muscles you didn’t know you had. You stretch the length and width of the bed until all your bones are fashioned. You feel like a baby fresh from the womb—that primal spanking that opens your lungs to the world for the first time. You cry at the knowledge of your body. At the knowledge of the world. The syncopated roar becomes a soft melody. It calms you down. It seeks to soothe you into a kind of certainty: you are not alone here in this cave. We are more than the cave, your antennas share everything, you will be a part of us. And without realizing it, you sing. You distinguish your voice, surprised to find it, clearly, among so many other voices. You are strong. The torment does not torment you. The torment does not torment you. You are the storm. Your 34 years of life have trained you for this moment, this cavernous arrival where we finally achieve simultaneous connection to many brains. The Animal enacted the miracle of connecting our minds to think/know collectively. The Anthill enacts the miracle of a collective body. It gives our connected minds a connected body. You have been trained to give birth to a new Animal, a better Animal. You begin to differentiate between the voices singing these songs to you through the cables. You decipher us. And we are so many. And so different. You embolden yourself. You have always been brave. We sense it, then we change the melody and lead you to the next phase. We reveal a little more of everything we are, but we are so much. You sense the metallic sound of those closest to you, those on the same level. Here, we are 8. We are all adults who connect to the cave every two or three days. This renews the cave of the experiences that take place on the island outside. We bring sun and salt. You feel how the minds of all the others enter the nervous system of us 8, how it revives the impressions left on the burly, healthy bodies. You feel how the island is the peak of a huge mountain underwater. You experience all the destructive forces of a Caribbean hurricane, how it organizes chaos in a spiral harmony. You cry because you understand, alongside us, that there is harmony in our sufferings. You understand that we are small, and we suffer alone because we do not have the perspective of the hurricane’s eye. You feel the affectionate encounter with a sea turtle off the coast of Mona Island. The understanding that our time is slow. The turtle comes to lay its eggs. You sense spicy potatoes and cauliflower on your tongue, a dish some witch has prepared and she’s asking you: don’t you want a little more chili on your plate, baby? In another mind, you recognize the soft murmur of the Coders, their fascination with the aerodynamic architecture of the dandelions. You identify, clearly, the static ancestral dividend from which we have broken away. You identify the much more ancient currents, the underground rivers with which we have now connected. Our vitality as athletes, lovers, eaters, we are movement itself, fault lines that no longer open the planet, but open time. You admire us. You sense in us the spell of your teacher, Alice (and also the spell cast by Unrra). Only then do you feel fear. You know this group; this level of exploration is just the beginning. You know Alice would not approve of this connection. At this point, we take away your control. You are not ready for what is coming. You are not ready. You’ve trained. But you are not ready. We make you go up to the next level of the cavern where your mind finds Begonia, Cloud, Rain or Crying. In your girls, you witness The Intergalactics and their telepathic powers. We shake you. We shake your girls. Now, they are the teachers. Their neurons caress and entertain your nerves to teach you a lesson. You are our favorite mutant! You think you feel (but we know) that the girls are playing with your DNA, exploring possibilities, changing the order of two helices from your genetic code. They are more skilled at connecting than you are. You sense Begonia’s laughter as she reorganizes your neurons. Neurons that have never met each other in your brain meet for the first time. You rediscover yourself. Begonia’s laughter opens access points to new interiorities. You have the most beautiful hallucinations. You think you hear (but it’s all in your head) Begonia say to Cloud that it might be better to connect this one with that one, and that it’s going to tickle. You know that these girls have spent their lives, since they were born, connected to all these minds. They have grown up connected. For them, playing with the minds, nerves, cells, and genetic material of others is a skill like any other skill they do while awake, the same as walking or swimming or speaking. You knew this, but only now do you understand.

     The girls rearrange your mind so that you are ready to go to the next level of the cavern. Your mind, through the electrode-filled cables, enters the mind of 3 newborn babies. The Ants silence all the minds so that you can experience this most intense blankness, the minds of those 3 babies. We can’t wait to feel your reaction as you explore what was once forbidden by the old Animal. You feel the pain of the babies’ growing bones and muscles. But that’s all you feel. You search every nook of their minds for some truth, but you cannot find it. Their fragile bodies have a sweet effect on you. Your muscles, tendons, spine, bones, and nerves, every part of you dusting off and recalibrating to become more efficient. Connection to the Anthill empowers and enlivens every muscle, making us as strong as our genetic cousins, the apes, who with much smaller bodies are stronger and more limber than humans. Without realizing it, you clench your fists and flex your biceps to feel a body that has never been more alive, a body that sees without opening its eyes.

     You want to keep exploring the nothing, the mind of these babies where there seems to be only echoes. It clicks: babies only imitate. They imitate everything. We are beings born of imitation, and you feel reverberations of your own mind in theirs. You’ve never felt less alone. You almost convince yourself that it is better to return, to go back down, that this is zilch space. But then you hear four fatal notes: G, B-flat, A, D. Your mind crashes noisily into the abyss of the cave, where you find the minds of conspiring old quadriplegics who have been connected permanently to the Anthill for 21 years. You recognize those four notes. They want to tell you something, as if there was an infiltrator, some spy, among them.

 

-Translated from the Spanish by Katie Marya