9

The program was launched from Mara and Andy’s downtown lair. Logical had hacked the delivery page of a supermarket website, sending twenty cases of beer and champagne to the ghost address next door. The party’s curve had begun its climb toward apogee just as I arrived. There were colored lights—tiny little Christmas bulbs—and music that I’d never heard before. Ilona, Maurits, Raddy and a few others were dancing calmly. Aviv was doing a dance from the U.S., something called the Funky Chicken. Max was applying Martin’s eye shadow, the same evil green I’d given to Ilona, and there was a group of girls over in the corner talking quietly with Logical. Wari, Beto, Gera, the Watas and a few others were having a look at the console, and Pabst was too excited to do any socializing. Etián was talking to someone, I couldn’t see who; Dalia and Terleski were there too. Kamtchowsky was chatting with little Q, drawing closer and closer ever so carefully and slowly, and Mara was dancing with Jony, looking at him with deftly concealed fascination. I stayed off to the side for a while, sipping a Fanta; later I shared a friendly chat with Pola (people in the department sometimes get us confused, which is ridiculous—I’m much taller than she is, and she wears glasses). Then I hung out for a while with Martin, Andy and EK. Everyone seemed euphoric and calm at the same time; the bathtub, up high on its lion feet, brimmed with ice and bottles of bubbly.

The program worked perfectly. A delicate touch of a finger on the map of Buenos Aires brought up images of the red-drenched Liniers slaughterhouses, or of the Maldonado River flooding across the line that had once been Juan B. Justo Avenue, or of dotted boundaries indicating the smallpox and yellow fever quarantines of 1871. You could see Maciel Island, near La Boca, torched during Carnaval in 1905; the Plaza de Mayo destroyed by a hurricane, and the surrounding buildings ripped apart; the battle lines of the Guerras del Agua, the most powerful districts lifted to reroute the runoff of storms, leaving other districts helpless and drowned. On the hill crowned by the National Library you could see the house that Perón and his wife had shared, and the recently raised statue of John Paul II rearing up over that of Evita. The routes traveled in Adán Buenosayres as mapped by Marechal could be seen traced in blue; those of Arlt were a series of scribbled lines. There was a strange glow emanating from the house of Carlos Argentino Daneri. There were photos of the old Italpark, of children electrocuted inside the ghost train. Farther north, along the river, was the tree that bleeds red in the ESMA courtyard, and the remains of ships once buried beneath land since reclaimed from Río de la Plata. Toward the city center was a Chinese man weeping as his store was pillaged during a riot, and the Mercado Central where Tita Merello wove her seductions and Borges worked as a rabbit inspector; down below were the paths worn by Gombrowicz on the prowl for young fauns in the Constitución district, and the firefights that took place at the intersection of Juan B. Justo and Santa Fe during the Carapintada rebellion. In Schiaffino one could see the cover of Beatriz Guido’s El incendio y las vísperas and a gif of Silvina making love to Alejandra while Adolfito was away. The scattered sites where the Disappeared were first ambushed; Mme. Ocampo locked up with the hookers in the Buen Pastor, and orgies thrown in Olivos by the Union of High School Students, and orgies in Palermo, and in the lost lovers’ lanes of Villa Cariño; the body of a young girl found amongst the rental boats; Perón on his scooter, motoring up Centenario Avenue, trailing a rosary of blondes. The streets destroyed during the riots that marked the 23rd anniversary of Evita’s death in 1975; the Jockey Club burned down; the Sheraton, converted into the Children’s Hospital; the violent pile-up of buses near the Plaza de Mayo in March of 2006; the white and sky-blue ribbons crushed underfoot during the 1910 Catholic celebrations of the country’s first centennial and the ’86 World Cup championship; the official, military-march-style song of the ’78 World Cup; the urban improv theater conducted by the military to make the bodies of the Disappeared reappear; the blueprints of the catacombs that lead to the Real Colegio de San Carlos, that connect the Casa Rosada to its swimming pool where a bleeding pig turns the waters red; Jorge Luis seated comfortably beside the river trying to pick up a girl; a collage of the many crowds that gathered in front of the Casa Rosada in the course of the 20th century—supporters of Yrigoyen, those willing him to fall, the mass demonstrations that filled the Plaza with Peronists, with anti-Peronists, with tanks, tents, fliers, blue-collar workers, grandmothers, transvestites, the anarchist martyrs in their coffins paraded along Avenida de Mayo, the military parades along that same route, the bright red, the black of other flags, the assault vehicles (always the same model) parked in the Plaza de Mayo, the façade of the Naval Hospital morphing into that of a building in Sarajevo. The geological strata of the region’s speech patterns superimposed one on top of another, starting back in the days of the Organización Nacional; blood spilling over in the Matadero (la ciudad circunvalada del Norte al Este por una cintura de agua y barroxiii), the slumbering bodies sinking into the river, the umbrellas of the first crowds to gather before the Cabildo, and the limits between them and the pillaging mobs.

The city was an utter mess. And yet it was beautiful.

The juxtaposition of epochs gave definition to the map’s specialized syntax. By abandoning the temporal determinations that assign facts to separate intervals, what emerged was the pure, syntactic relationship between the world on one hand and what took place in the world on the other; to a certain extent, the map sought to isolate the abstract form of the notion of consequence, separating it from the consolation of time understood as a series of stages. Facts, details, architecture, catastrophe, chaos, it all returned to write itself once more into the spatial history of repercussions. This history was neither an archive nor a memoir, but a set of graphic annals, witnesses to the phase of the chronicle that consists of the accumulation of tales void of linkage or hierarchy, and strictly speaking it isn’t history at all; in one sense the program seemed to reclaim liberty from out of an anarchy of recountings, but at the same time it established the absence of history as a studiable phenomenon within which causes and effects could be identified in the name of change and improvement. This was the raw dough, the cyclical history of a country where events occurred and then revolved around one another, merely existing, unable to account for themselves. As an overarching phenomenon, this technological poisoning of the city map broke down a series of precepts all of which Pabst wrote about, at one moment or another, on his blog.

The program was all but untraceable. Q had designed its access point such that to enter it one had to track it back through a series of servers scattered all over the world. A cyberspy hired by Google or the Argentine government would have to follow the path taken by digital packets of information through Beirut, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Denver, Budapest, Sebastopol, Marseille and Resistencia—it would be possible, but very difficult, and wasn’t likely to occur.

The work that had begun in Buenos Aires would spread progressively to other parts of the country; this would create a series of non-trivial technical complications for the team, including the limited number of servers available for attack, and the different processes required for poisoning each one. Those who were interested in the project were welcome to participate by sending in digitally altered jpegs of their favorite street corners and neighborhoods. “Painting your village of course isn’t painting the world,” ran the slogan, “but at least you’ll be painting your village.” At first Pabst and Kamtchowsky received the images via their blogs, and Mara uploaded them into the poisoning program administered by Logical and Q. Later the team opened a public forum where anyone who wanted to could upload images and leave messages.

At times, the effects produced by the poisoning obey what seem to be strict formal laws: the cobbled streets now purified, melded, parallel lines appearing to unite. The trees look blurred, skeletal; several of the images are shot through with lightning. The team still hadn’t composed its “Notes toward a Theory of Explosions,” where they would compile the comments left by the map’s users, and add notes on the digital effects used to alter the photographs. The text’s main points described a sort of libertarian utopia based on non-visibility, laying out the importance of the establishment and role of anonymity. Its point of origin was undiscoverable. No one could see anyone else’s golden rooftop or glowing marble floor. It becomes impossible to visualize the streets that we so calmly believe belong to us. And they do belong to us, which means, strictly speaking, that for us they are inaccessible.

Just then, Pabst and Kamtchowsky took each other’s hand; something had told them that it would be a very romantic thing to do.