The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Read online

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  The proposed model to explain the nuclear reaction that takes place in beta decay still didn’t have the energy it needed to be exact. No one knew where this energy would end up. But the creativity of the scientist is too fantastic to be hindered by trivialities, and so, in 1925, the theoretical physician Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of a new particle that verged on the ghostly: the neutrino. Lacking both mass and electric charge, this would be the one to carry the mysterious missing energy. They set about uncovering it. A neutron monitor was first built in South Dakota, and then five years ago another was built on the outskirts of Beijing, both in the depths of mines so as to avoid contaminations by other sun-based particles. The monitor is a very large water pond, the size of a six-story building, in which the slightest impurity, animal, vegetable, or mineral, would render the project null and void, and as it has turned out it picks up one or two neutrinos a year. At a glance, it’s blue, bluer than the waters off any beach. For a while now, inside this bunker of extremely pure water, Chii-Teen, the lead physician, thinks he’s been seeing clusters of algae, though they then disappear. But today he’s already seen the tail of a mermaid.

  57

  Deserts, like the sick, are objects: though living, they are on the edge of everything, are undergoing a process of consumption, and are fundamentally gaunt. Each has white-yellow skin, and subsists in a state of exhaustion, though each also always finds a genetic oasis to save it in the end. The lack of resources leads them to both fantasize situations of out-and-out abundance and pleasure, even in the most grueling moments reaching levels of delirium that border on the lysergic, and gather into their domains all manner of strange creatures, hoping for the feeling that someone loves them, someone cares about them. Also, their gauntness makes them the most aesthetic objects on earth, and this is why Tom, who was born in Little America and who knows he’ll never himself live in the Nevada in which his parents grew up, decided to become a doctor.

  58

  One of the most interesting micronations is the combined kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (http://elgaland-vargaland.org), created by a duo of German artists. Their constitution begins in the following way, delimiting the outer reaches of their territory:

  The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland [KREV] were proclaimed on the 14th of March, 1992, and consist of all Border Territories: Geographical, Mental & Digital.

  1. Geographic Territory: All border frontier areas between all countries on earth, and all areas (up to a width of 10 nautical miles) existing outside all countries’ territorial waters. We designate these territories our physical territory. These territories, generally considered no-man’s-lands, are constantly in flux, change daily, and other new ones are forever appearing the length and breadth of the planet (example: the border between North and South Korea), or indeed disappearing (the border between East and West Germany in 1989), or indeed, having been in a state of lethargy and submersion, are reappearing (the borders of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania). As is the case, we note, in fishing territories. Both in theory and in practice, areas such as the frontierlands between Texas and the United States, between England and Scotland, and between Sweden and its southernmost landskap Scania, are from this day forth designated the physical territory of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland. It is not impossible that in the future large abandoned coastal constructions will also be annexed, when tourism definitively leaves this outmoded form of leisure behind.

  2. Mental and perceptive territories such as: a) when a person is sleeping lightly, occupying the frontier between waking life and dream, b) states of creative absorptions experienced in a person’s day-to-day life. Both are hybrid zones which, from this day forth, are annexed by the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland. Territories that any citizen of the Kingdoms may explore if looking to carry out artistic or commercial activities within them.

  3. The Virtual Room (digital). Currently, the largest entry point to the Kingdoms is KREV, which functions within the World Wide Web at http://elgaland-vargaland.org. We also see CD-ROMs and floppy disks containing Virtual Reality programs as potential territories for occupation. The digital KREV space is, to date, an edge space, an extant global meeting point.

  Thus, once this microstate’s physical territory has been drawn on a map of the world, the result will be a vector covering all borders, a vector both wide and potentially infinitely long. A fractal. Thus its dimensionality shall not be that of a single line, 1, or that of a plane, 2, but that of a fraction, 3/2. In an apt correspondence, everything that occurs in this microstate is within another body of reality. The flat map will become a relief map, taking on a body-ness, bubbling up. The New York Embassy of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland had its official inauguration at the Kate & Versi Gallery on Fifth Avenue, where the owners assigned it a permanent space. The Los Angeles Embassy is in a mansion in Santa Monica, the residence of the ambassador and his family, on the beach. The embassy in Johannesburg, South Africa, is situated on the top floor of the large Shadows warehouses; the consul is a man who can usually be found sitting in the Office Furniture section. The Spanish Embassy is in a gas station in Albacete, where the pump attendant, the first Spaniard with an Elgaland-Vargaland citizenship, has hung the flag between the flag of Spain and the flag of Wynn’s Lubricants. That’s the anthem he’s currently working on.

  59

  Sherry and Clark arrive in Las Vegas under a crescent moon: they notice it between the neon signs and remark upon it. They find a small motel in a relatively run-down area. Sherry goes and checks out the room, declaring it better than any at the Honey Route. They pay a week up front. Let’s hurry and go see my Argentinian friend, he says to her while she showers. But where did the two of you meet? asks Sherry, shampoo bubbles running over her lips. Clark doesn’t answer. Following some directions scribbled on a soft-drink company delivery stub that he kept from the Honey Route, and after several wrong turns and many more questions, they arrive at Salsa’s Club, but a doorman in a tuxedo tells them that Jorge Rodolfo hasn’t shown up for work in at least a month, that they don’t know what’s going on with him, and provides Sherry and Clark with his address, writing it on the back of the same delivery stub. On their way back to the motel they decide to put the visit off until the following day. That night, for the first time, Clark asks: Will you let me have a taste? And Sherry, with no further ado, opens her legs, whispering, Go straight for the foie gras. This sends them into fits of laughter, and it’s in this moment that they both understand they’re all each other will ever need, that the two of them alone have enough to get by. After this they focus on finding a job as far removed as possible from prostitution for Sherry, and as far removed as possible from drinks distribution for Clark, but in the month they spend looking, Sherry only manages to find work selling herself in a club in the Venice City complex, and Clark as a soft-drink deliveryman for the bottling firm Las Vegas Castle, on the industrial estate. She has a better salary and garners better tips than at the Honey Route, but he fails to bring in any more than on his previous job, which, far from generating tensions between them, brings them closer together: Clark pushes himself so he can provide Sherry with a better future, and she, for the first time in her life, experiences the pride of being head of the family. They often go back to Salsa’s Club, first to see if Jorge Rodolfo has returned [he doesn’t], and in time just to dance and for the shows. On one of these nights they are there with a few of the regulars watching a ventriloquist who works three puppets simultaneously [one with each hand, the other, according to him, being him], and Clark orders a Gordon’s gin with orangeade—both of which he delivers to the club on a weekly basis. He begins feeling ill, and soon starts throwing up, his skin turning the greenish white of an abandoned garden wall. The ambulance comes quickly, and on the way to the hospital Sherry holds his hand, though words fail her. The medical report calls it a “partial halt of vital signs due to the ingestion of toxic substances traced to bottled orangeade,” and Las Vegas Castle has all its
consignments confiscated, consignments that later end up being sold somewhere in Central America. After a monthlong coma, Clark wakes and begins telling Sherry about a kind of enlightenment he has experienced several times during the period he’s spent as good as dead: it has something to do with a castle, one that appeared very large at a distance but which as he came closer shrank in size, and whose walls were made of soft-drink bottles, but empty bottles containing only air, and the air they contained was the exact amount he had left to breathe before he died, and that it had been so clear to him that he would go north now, to the mountains, where he could enjoy this precious remaining manna in solitude. She tries to convince him to stay, but she is a stranger in his eyes now. He leaves everything he owns behind in the room. The only thing Sherry keeps of Clark’s is the delivery stub bearing the scribbled directions that brought them here to begin with.

  60

  Madrid. A neighborhood in the city center. A fourth-floor apartment in a building, with supporting pilings here and there, the abandonment clear to see. For the last eight years this has been home to 120 paintings by the North American surrealist painter Margaret Marley Modlin. She died in 1998, to be followed two years later by her husband, and then, another two years on, by their only son. Margaret’s last work is also housed here, in the same unfinished state in which she left it. When she died, her husband Elmer began to go to pieces, entering the closed loop of melancholy; he wanted to leave everything precisely as it had been when she was alive. He had been a Hollywood actor in his day, and she a professor at the Santa Barbara University of Fine Arts in California. He, having been active in bringing the Nagasaki bomb to fruition, later turned his back on his past and began leading nationwide protests against the North American military police; his jobs in Hollywood immediately dried up at that point. On the advice of their friend Henry Miller, they fled to Spain. 1972. She shut herself inside the Madrid apartment to paint, only emerging on three occasions: for two exhibitions of her work, and for her own burial. The husband and son took charge of all domestic tasks and social affairs, both taking on any paid work they could so she could continue painting. Her paintings contain clear nods to the surrealism of De Chirico, presenting open spaces that don’t so much play with scale as with the vanishing points of inanimate objects: the people she inserts are the archetypes of people, so, rather than surrealism, it’s a pure mysticism: the human being and the point at which it disappears. Like her—she died without leaving any traces of herself. Only one of her paintings features a tree.

  61

  Chii-Teen, after leaving the neutrino detector complex that he manages, has hit traffic; he’s going to be late. The flatness of the avenue gives him an unobstructed view of the sea of stationary cars. Today is the inauguration of the Beijing Museum of Science Fiction, which he runs. Ray guns, the crossbow from Barbarella, the Xenomorph Queen from Aliens, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, the Flash Gordon laser gun, first editions of Wells’s The Time Machine and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, it’s all there, accessible to all earthlings, and yet the Mars Polar Lander craft, he thinks as he runs his hand over the steering wheel, was lost a long time ago due to an error of calculation on the part of NASA and now, untamed, it roves the galaxy emitting a roar we’ll never hear. At this point he stops thinking. A Chinese woman bearing a striking resemblance to his ex-wife, walking between the stationary vehicles, passes in front of his car.

  62

  A long time before they met, before they’d ever heard of micronations and before they decided to go and live in Isotope Micronation, Hannah was living in Salt Lake City and Ted in Chicago, he working as a computer programmer for a local phone company, a job he loved, and she, also a programmer, doing jobs of her own devising which she’d then sell to companies, and thus, shut inside her apartment, she got by. Hannah’s true love had never been programming, though, but poetry. Having taken a course in Spanish literature at the state university, she entertained herself in those days translating classics that she borrowed from the local library (university libraries in the U.S. are very good): Saint John of the Cross, Jorge Guillén, and even a number of contemporaries like José Ángel Valente. These translations, all very passable but not the best, she kept to herself. She took great satisfaction uncovering the same poetic pulse in the stripped-back, denuded works of these authors as in her programs, which, similarly, were fated to become intangible nothings inside computers. The day came when she began writing her own poems. She’d write anywhere, but especially in bars, filling napkins with scribbled attempts and ideas. Within a matter of months she had a fairly peculiar collection entitled Other Directions, which she sent around to various publishers, with no success, until she decided to self-publish. She began putting it in front of professors at the university whose opinions she trusted; they praised it, passing it on in turn to some critics, 5.8 percent of whom described it as “a collection deserving of its title,” and other such phrases, which did not prevent it from garnering favorable reviews in numerous newspapers and specialist literary journals. But the book, yet to go on general sale, remained sealed within this academic ambit. When it was put to her that she should do a press release and send it to the newspapers, she thought it over for a night and decided against the idea, that she wasn’t interested in reaching people like that, and that she wanted to carry out a literary experiment instead. Hannah had read lots of conceptual art texts—in fact, the attraction she’d felt for the artists that gathered around the conceptual art movement of the ‘60s, Graham, Smithson, Long, Amat, and others, had encouraged her to become a computer programmer, a discipline she saw as a tool of the art of the future and, of course, conceptual in its own right. These artists would go to a field, paint a white line across it, and call the work Sculpture, or they’d go to drainage pipes in the edges of sea cliffs, photograph them, and call the photographs Monument to a Source—this kind of thing. So Hannah’s idea was this: she’d dedicate the 2,000 copies of Other Directions to strangers: Dear whoever has found this. Now, if you like, you can throw it away. Affectionately, Hannah. Then, in the following weeks, by day and by night, she went around dropping them in the streets, on pavements, under cars, or leaving them at metro stops, bus stops, and airports, an action she worked on for three months, concentrating on the principal cities of the states surrounding Utah. With the help of her brother Mich she created video and photo documentaries of the process, which she then put together in a dossier for the associations of conceptual artists in L.A., New York, and Boston. The important moment, the one that would change her life, came when Ted, who was traveling through Denver on his way to Big Sur for a business convention, got down from the bus at a gas station, and during the restroom stop, sat down at a table in a diner where he found, in between a glass of Pepsi and a napkin with scribbles all over it, Other Directions. He devoured the book in what remained of his journey, but it was the photo of Hannah on the inside that captured his heart.

  63

  She always remembered it. I’m opening the bottle, okay? Fine, dear, Elmer said. Margaret uncorked it and poured out two glasses. She took one over to Elmer’s worktable, a sort of reinforced bunker with its hundreds of reports, files, and letters opposing the militarized police forces in the U.S. He was smoking a cigarette. She went through onto the porch, which jutted out onto the sandy beach. She stood leaning against one of the uprights, looking at the lights of Santa Barbara in the distance. She was certain she’d never leave California. The next day they left in the car for New York, a journey they’d often discussed, an 11-day drive, and that now had a reason: an exhibition of Margaret’s work at the Carrington Gallery. Elmer joined her on the porch and, by way of a toast, placed the cold glass against Margaret’s back, making her jump. All set, dear? Pretty much, she said. They left in the ’63 Buick convertible before dawn. She always remembered it, very clearly, particularly once they had moved to Madrid, and as she would look out at the trees at the far end of Gran Vía
: They set out on U.S. Route 50, they worried about running out of gas, Elmer said the kind of stupid things people who have no idea about the creative process say, like: The desert’s a bit like one of your paintings, don’t you think, Margaret? I don’t know, sometimes, she’d say, amused. Until, silhouetted against the mountains, they saw a tree. It’s a poplar, she said when they stopped in the shade of it. She observed it closely: It’s dying, she said. Opening the hood, she unscrewed the coolant reservoir, inserted a plastic tube, and, sucking on it for a moment, filled a cup with the water that then came pouring out. She walked over to the foot of the tree and poured the water on the ground. It was immediately soaked up and left an anal pucker in the earth. She was wearing a gray knitted skirt, a red V-neck jumper, a pair of pointed pumps, and a ribbon in her hair.