Or perhaps nature no longer exists for me because of my job, Antonio thinks, all these years at Prudential Investments running SQL queries and at the same time not at Prudential Investments running SQL queries, pretending I am not running SQL queries eight hours a day inside a cubicle in the financial district of Los Angeles, I am not here, no, I am at my Jesuit high school in Bogotá praying to our Madre Dolorosa and sprinting after a soccer ball across a barren field that will never see grass (for the last twelve years he has been writing about his Jesuit school years in Bogotá inside a cubicle in the early morning, before beginning his eight hours of SQL queries at 9:00 a.m., and because on the other side of his cubicle wall a product manager has been spending her early morning hours arguing about financial health features on conferences calls with technology managers in multiple time zones, he has had to train himself to write about his Jesuit school years in Bogotá with music set to the highest volume, the same Arvo Pärt / Olivier Messiaen playlist on repeat every day for the last twelve years, which has been transmitted to his ears through oversized circumaural Sennheiser headphones whose headband cracks in the middle after a year or two such that the file cabinet inside his cubicle has become a junkyard of cracked oversized circumaural Sennheiser headphones as well as of obsolete electronics like PalmPilots, Nokias, BlackBerries encrypted by Prudential Investments, all of them stashed inside their sturdy laminated boxes containing limited warranties printed in microscript by Robert Walser, and in that junkyard of a file cabinet you can also find a decade of Antonio’s 1040 tax returns, birth certificates for both of his daughters, a bail bond contract assuming obligation for his sister, who due to an accretion of misfortunes he’d rather not think about has been hearing conspirative voices incognizant of the spatiotemporal regulations in the USA, signed documents committing most of his database analyst income to his former wife according to rules set by a mean-spirited divorce attorney), such that, in the early morning, before beginning his eight hours of SQL queries, he has been simultaneously existing in Bogotá, in the alien musical landscapes of Arvo Pärt / Olivier Messiaen, and (not) inside a cubicle in the financial district of Los Angeles, and perhaps this accretion of pretending he isn’t where he is has disrupted too many of the pathways inside his brain accountable for his relationship to nature, window after window into nature shuttered by a decision-management hub inside his brain that he hasn’t imagined in terms of pathways or operational linkages or tentacles connecting and disconnecting themselves to artifacts from nature like palm trees or cordilleras or panoramas abloom with inspiriting vegetation but in vaguer terms than that, thinking instead of the garbological assemblages he’d seen years ago at an exhibit called The Alternative Guide to the Universe, which, because he barely remembers the details of that exhibit, he has to search online as he considers writing about his (non) relationship to nature inside his cubicle in the financial district of Los Angeles instead of thinking about his sister, yes, there it is, The Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery in London (he’d actually purchased The Alternative Guide to the Universe catalogue that came with that exhibit, a catalogue that contains essays about fringe physics, symbolic devices, the symbiosis between magic and technology, and one about counternarrative by Antonio’s former fiction-writing teacher, who almost ten years ago at the New York State Summer Writers Institute had wondered why Antonio didn’t write in Spanish instead of in English, advising him against writing sentences that seemed to contain two or more sentences from two or more narratives at once — pues ya ve que no he cambiado en nada, profe—), and later that evening, after concluding his eight hours of SQL queries, he searches through his The Alternative Guide to the Universe catalogue and finds that the artist responsible for the vague garbological assemblages Antonio has been associating with the decision-management hub that has shuttered his windows into nature is called Richard Greaves, who apparently studied theology and hotel management and quit his job to dedicate himself to assembling his own asymmetrical visions of the world out of abandoned barns, coffeemakers, nicked shovels, computer keyboards, old razors, twine, rope — a nail stops the evolution, Richard Greaves says, but a rope is patient — parsing discarded objects in the forests of Quebec based on his nebulous linkages to them, Antonio writes — and as Antonio marvels at how what seemed like an incondite associative thread turned out to be quite pertinent to his reflections about his (non) relationship to nature, he imagines Richard Greaves spreading his cargo of trash on a kitchen table, trying to find linkages between gnarled tricycles, giant tacks, newsletters about toolboxes, recognizing that this image of Richard Greaves has its origins in Vertigo by W. G. Sebald (and here Antonio searches online inside Vertigo for the word table and finds the passage that according to him describes his own method of composition — I sat at a table near the open terrace door, W. G. Sebald writes, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order—), and yet unfortunately for Antonio the catalogue for The Alternative Guide to the Universe only contains five photographs of Richard Greaves’s houses or huts or installations or anarchitectural visions or whatever one wishes to call them — buildings on the verge of disintegration, Valérie Rousseau calls them in The Alternative Guide to the Universe catalogue — and so Antonio orders a book called Richard Greaves Anarchitecte, thinking that if he can spend a few hours contemplating more photographs of Richard Greaves’s installations he would be able to construct more compelling visions of the decision-management hub that has shuttered his windows into nature, meanwhile, as he waits for Richard Greaves Anarchitecte to arrive, he tries to imagine Richard Greaves’s garbological assemblages in terms of whatever comes to mind, no, he doesn’t have enough of an imagination to construct compelling visions out of Richard Greaves’s installations without the aid of additional photographs of his installations, in other words (1) his imagination seems to subsist on the hope that a vague juxtaposition of data signals from disparate sources might yield an associative thread of interest, (2) it is likely the decision-management hub that has shuttered his windows into nature is also responsible for shuttering his windows into visual art, such that the only piece from all the modern art museums he has visited in the last twelve years that has stayed with him is an erased movie at the MoMA in New York (and here Antonio searches online for MoMA + movie + erased + free jazz and doesn’t find what he’s looking for so he searches his old journals for the name of the piece, hoping this search will yield an associative thread of interest (his journal pages during his first trip to New York in October 2010 are empty so he browses through the video catalogue of the MoMA online and eventually finds it, The Death of Tom by Glenn Ligon — after footage of his reenactment of the last scene of a silent-film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was processed, the gallery label text says, Ligon discovered that the film was blurred and the imagery had disappeared and yet the artist recognized an affinity between this spectral footage and his own earlier work — no, Antonio thinks, nothing of interest for him here except the memory of him watching Ligon’s spectral footage in a dark room for an hour or two — perhaps memories in which we see ourselves from a dubious omniscient vantage are uncanny not because of their content, Antonio writes, but because of the vantage from which we see ourselves — there I am in the dark in New York watching an erased movie and that person who’s me cannot see the observer behind me who’s also me—)), and then Antonio wonders if perhaps it isn’t just his windows into nature or visual art that had been shuttered by the inordinate amount of time he has spent pretending he isn’t where he is but all his windows into the outside world, including the ones that look out into what is happening to his sister, in other words Antonio receives a call from the private investigator hired by Ron the Bail Bondsman in Baltimore to interrogate him about his sister’s whereabouts and Antonio tells him no one in our family knows where she is because my sister believes our family + the Pentagon + Obama are conspiring against her, and after the call with the private investigator ends the windows into what has been happening to his sister (losing her job as a Senior Actuarial Associate, losing her house, fleeing Baltimore before a judge would deem her mentally incapable to stand trial for allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors) shut and he goes on living inside his Richard Greaves assemblage without his sister’s misfortunes, without calls from private investigators, without visual art, without nature, without descriptions of landscapes or nature anywhere in his recollections of his Jesuit school years in Bogotá, and although at first he’d thought he was against descriptions of nature in his fiction due to his affinity with the aesthetics of Doing Without, he has come to believe that all these years pretending he hasn’t been running SQL queries eight hours a day inside a cubicle in the financial district of Los Angeles not only have given birth to this decision-management hub that has erased nature for him but have also atrophied this decision-management hub such that it has begun to erase everything at random, yes, so much of his life in the last twelve years has consisted of erasures that have included nature, visual art, his sister, hundreds of passages about avant-garde music that he’d tried to commingle with passages about his Jesuit school days in Bogotá, and while he waits for Richard Greaves Anarchitecte to arrive he wonders if searching for all the other passages he has erased in the last twelve years might yield an associative thread of interest, and it occurs to Antonio that as the erasures have accumulated throughout the years his imagination has had to subsist on a pool of material that’s now a puny fraction of his original material, in other words perhaps all he has left is his Jesuit school in Bogotá and the music of Arvo Pärt / Olivier Messiaen he has been listening to while writing about his life at his Jesuit school in Bogotá, and yet if he were to write about nature for the Nature issue of Conjunctions perhaps he would be better off skipping any mention of decision-management hubs born out of pretending he isn’t where he is or any mention of windows or erasures and focus instead on what still remains for him of nature: there was once a barren soccer field at San Luis Gonzaga High School in Bogotá where I would play soccer every day with friends I haven’t seen since I moved to the United States twenty-one years ago, and my friend Rafael would kick the ball so out-of-bounds, toward the giant palm trees surrounding the soccer field, that we used to call him Monkey Shooter, and whenever we needed a quick rest we would sit on rocks like prehistoric eggs next to Don Jacinto’s cafeteria and prattle about the future of Colombia, that is all that comes to mind when I think about nature, Antonio would write in his essay about nature, I am not a nostalgic but that is all that nature means to me, thank you for asking (and then a week later the bail bondsman calls his work phone again and says the ten days are up and if his private investigators can’t find his sister Antonio and his mother will have to pay the $110,000 as per the bail bond contract they signed, and then Richard Greaves Anarchitecte arrives in the mail and Antonio contemplates photographs of his installations, hoping to find an associative thread of interest (no, Antonio thinks, nothing except Greaves’s spiderwebs of twine, perhaps Antonio prefers these assemblages to exist for him as they have existed for him before, as vague hubs of vague associations — I make the shape of the house with the twine, Richard Greaves says, then I build — such that if a wind came and swept it all only these skeletons of twine would remain)).