Julian Castronovo

 Julian Castronovo

A Simple Gift

I went in search of the man who filmed the giant salamander. The purposes for my visit were, of course, professional. I was to verify the existence of the creature, and I was to treat the situation with the utmost sensitivity. For this I would be paid handsomely, and indeed I was. However I must admit I had my own, more personal, motivations. These did not hinder or influence otherwise the completion of my task, but I feel I should nonetheless disclose that I, as countless others, had been touched by the images in a way I still cannot name. So as I disembarked and walked through the strangely empty Guangzhou Baiyun airport on the morning of 16 August, I harbored in myself a quiet sense of resolve and adventure. I passed through an esophageal tunnel and exited the building’s sliding glass doors; there I found myself in the embrace of a wet heat from which I would not find relief for the duration of my journey. I quickly hired a car and set off.

No doubt you have seen the footage. The green mountains beneath their veil of fog, the particulate isabelline sky. And, then, the man of an unplaceable age turning the camera to himself as he traverses the shore of a small river. He arrives at a place where the bank, heavy with long grasses, overhangs the water. He kneels and submerges his camera. There, just below the surface, is the salamander. It is a breathtaking thing of an immense size and thickness. By the gentle action of the pinkish forepaws it slowly turns itself around, and we are confronted thus by the face of the animal. The milky eyes, the ancient mouth curled always into a curi- ous, disarming smile. Abruptly the camera is lifted from the river. In a singsong, broken English, the man says, “Her name is Paulette.” And the recording ends.

As I was whisked from the Guangdong province, I found I had been unconsciously clutching the small, cream-colored card bearing the coordinates of my destination. I tucked the slip in my breast pocket and, as a means of calming myself, began to review my notes. The video of the salamander was circulated first among those whose primary interests were scientific. Despite a brief period of debate, it was eventually agreed that Paulette was a South China giant sala- mander, a species taxonomically distinct even from other giant salamanders and which had for many years been assumed extinct in the wild. The specimen’s morphological peculiarities were carefully recorded, and efforts were subsequently devoted to determining the size of the creature. Even by conservative estimates Paulette was said to exceed nine feet in length. She was, by no insignificant margin, the largest amphibian ever documented. It was obvious, however, that the salamander possessed an intrigue and puzzling affective power which could not be explained by scientific novelty alone. Indeed, many of the early researchers often caught themselves remaining in their labs, strangely unable to pry themselves from their studies even after their normal working hours had long withered into the night. And, as if by some inconspicuous compulsion, these men of science were led to share the video with their colleagues, families, friends, doubles nemeses on the Cape; with their nannies, neighbors, and half-devoured lovers, even; they too were struck in their hearts by the salamander. So it was not long until Paulette became something of a worldwide phenomenon. She was a fixation, an obsession, a “moment,” as it is said. She: a totem for some thing which lay just beyond the margins of collective understanding, a mystifying beacon towards which all were moth-like drawn—eye-spotted wings beating soundless in the night—the pale light each should just once like to touch upon dying.

At dusk I reached a point where my driver would take me no further. The road had been washed out by a month of typhoon rain. For this I was prepared. I paid the man and gave him a perfunctory five-star rating. I stepped from the vehicle and watched as it went quietly away. Mountains rose from the gathering dark and surrounded me on all sides. I retrieved my machete from my briefcase, consulted my satellite positioning device, and began my descent into the valley below. After several hours of chopping, I found I could chop no more. I wearily collected some sticks and built a small fire. I performed my evening breathing exercises, and yet, in the leaping glow of my little camp, I remained restless. I could think of nothing but the salamander. Paulette was truly famous in a way few things ever are. Like a boulder, say, in the otherwise swift current of human affairs—and, I confess, what pleasure it was to be swept, spun, and anklewise sucked into the eddies and swirling pools of her wake! Yes: an inescapable feel- ing surrounded the animal, but months passed before anyone admitted that this feeling was one of physical desire. Tangible, even carnal, no doubt, and yet it was a desire altogether without purpose or direction. I suspect many experienced it as I did, not as a sensation internal to the body, but rather as a dense and stupefying cloud, a medium for weightless engulfment into which one might wander and wherein the boundary that separates a person from the outside world was hopelessly dissolved. It was, of course, a feeling that could not be truly quantified, yet the relevant statistics are startling all the same. Often now they are expressed in terms native to economics, as rates of acceleration and growth, as aggregates, trends, and sickle-blade curves relating fluidity or seminal “output;” as the spiked demand for midwives and special antibiotic jellies; as the spontaneous reanimation, as it were, of Keynes’ opportunistic corpse which lurched upright to congratulate itself on the deft concept of “animal spirits.” All this to say: in the period following the discovery of the salamander, people were fucking and sucking at a rate unparalleled in recorded history.

Ours is a world in which no mystery is left in peace. Inevitably there was a pro- liferation, a petal-like blossoming of discourse, analysis, and hushed dinner-party speculation regarding the precise origin of this erotic sublime. Indeed, these theories soon became a means of locating or laying claim to one’s particular “place” within the broader, rhizomatous schema of stems which so protrude from the common mud of culture. The safest and most logical among us believed, for instance, that the power of the salamander was a simple matter of geometry, of resemblance. If one imagines the monstrosity as seen from above, the bulbous, orbicular head and the mottled flesh of the thick, elongated body recall, as the fortunate among us know, the shape of male genitalia in an erect state. Similarly, many enterprising individuals—those keen on posting the modalities of their grinds, their tri-monitor trading setups—thought the feeling resembled one of material want, and that it could therefore be manufactured and sold. But they were mistaken, and thus the silicone reproductions outfitted even with porous and self-moistening skin rot now in warehouses around the world. Shouldn’t these capitalist chumps, you might wonder, be shunned and mocked for the blasphemous obscenity of their sexual illiteracies and misunderstandings? But who ain’t a chump? The touch of American money, so pale and so thin, has at some point led each of us, I believe, to recall some moment of formative, incidental contact with the skin of another.

Thus our survey continues: bespectacled academics of the growing field of virility/virality studies felt the salamander was but an “occasion.” Paulette, said the sycophantic teaching assistants in their annex offices, is only an indifferent vessel for a purer, subterranean form of information; the potency of the video, in fact, ought to be seen as a formal consequence of its “spread” rather than a result of some unexpected resonance between the amphibian and the human libido. But did the leggy undergraduates in those cherry-paneled rooms buy into all that? No, and thank goodness for it. Because in the end it was the young avant-gardists— the dancers who know a cupped hand to be an expression of the torso, or, for example, the handsome Scandinavian painters of East Los Angeles—who first supposed the sexual force of the salamander had to do with time. Time? Oh, indeed. And did not its hollow infinity cause my head to spin that night in the jungle? The last of my damp firewood was exhausted, and, as sleep found me, I saw in my mind’s eye a vision of a broken wristwatch encircling a delicate, beautiful forearm, which, I should now like to imagine, perhaps resembles yours.

I awoke at first light. The world was wet and alive. I had hung my suit on a vine and nakedly slept upon an enormous heart-shaped leaf. The morning’s humidity, I was pleased to discover, had steamed my clothing such that it was nearly pristine. I sharpened my machete on a flat stone, dressed, and continued into the valley. I have long found that one of life’s great pleasures, figuratively and not, lies in the clearing of one’s path ahead. There was, I felt, a balletic quality to my twirled sword-strokes and tip-toed footwork. Hither and thither I slashed; plant matter of all kinds fell pleasantly away from my narrow canyon. However, de- spite the satisfaction I took in the Mosaic parting of the jungle before my blade, I was gradually overcome by a sense of unease as I recalled the conclusion to Paulette’s story.

At the height of her fame there were allegations. Some believed the size of the salamander was but an illusion, an optical trick to the way light had been refracted by certain industrial pollutants in the water. Others claimed the video had been digitally manipulated. Evidently this latter theory was proven by a number of so-called experts who, in the bright—and, one imagines, virginal— solitude of their media labs subjected the salamander footage to various tests. Of the methods used in the detection of falsified images, it is said the efficacy of deep learning models which analyze physiological signals such as blinks and heart movements are second to none. This technology, utilizing both convolutional neural networks and recursive neural networks, works, at least in my limited understanding of it, by designating a region of interest, creating a binary classifier to detect the opened and closed states of the eyes, and testing this information against datasets publicly available on the internet. Of course, very little attention has been paid to the flaws of this technology. There is, first of all, the problem of compression. Images so widely circulated and lacking any known point of origin are inevitably low-resolution pictures. The footage of Paulette is blurry, deterritorialized; a significant amount of frame information has been lost in transit, and thus the judgment of the detection models should not be considered infallible. Second of all, there is the more obvious problematic of the assumed equivalency between the economies of humanoid and salamander physiological signs. Surely anyone who’s jolted awake in an air-conditioned hotel room and felt then the hotness of their own blood understands innately this incongruity. Nevertheless the salamander was determined to be a fake, and whatever state of impossible desire the creature had inspired was soon forgotten.

At the bottom of the valley was a small river. I stepped into it and waded up- stream. To my left and right countless tributaries wound themselves into the depths of the forest. Might have one of these streams been home to the sala- mander? Even now I shiver at the thought. As I sloshed ahead, painful erection tucked into my waistband, I was struck by the impression that I was the first human witness to this primordial, riverine world. After wading for perhaps three quarters of an hour, however, the river widened and I beheld a settlement of sorts. Five or six sizable edifices stood along the water, and these rectangular structures had been built in a style of late Wagnerian modernism such that I felt as though I had stumbled, for instance, into some little square in Vinohrady / Prague 2. From my blazer pocket I produced the small, rigid card upon which the coordinates of my destination were printed. Even now I do not precisely know your husband’s means of obtaining this information, but I do not doubt it was some covert violence and/or unfathomable expense by which the card came into my possession. Its embossed numbers matched those indicated by my positioning device. I had arrived.

I emptied the water from my shoes and wrung out my socks. I marched up to the largest building and rang the bell. Though I could hear faint whispers from within, the doors remained closed for quite a while. Finally they swung inward and I was greeted by three Chinese men in military uniforms. The men regarded me as some sort of alien, and amongst themselves they whispered rapidly, as if there was some debate about what should be done with me. At last they came to an agreement and allowed me to enter. I was shown into a room that was completely bare save a plastic chair and a plastic clock. There I was left to sit and wait. So I sat and waited. Hours appeared, trembled in the air before me, and melted, seemingly, into a puddle on the floor. I began to worry my hosts would never reappear, and I felt myself driven towards madness by the thin, slightly irregular ticking of the clock. Again my thoughts wandered time-ward. Time, oh yes. Should I not complete my remarks upon it? Certainly an omission of such relevant information prevents this report from being a comprehensive one. Thus I ensnare myself once more—here I tighten the thread of time about my neck.

So: it has been mentioned that youths of a certain bohemian inclination were the first to attribute the salamander’s erotic potency to the way she was situated in the flow of time. It was proposed, more specifically, that Paulette’s existence was in itself a “durational” gesture involving the possibility of temporal inversion. Or, if not total inversion, then suspension, at least. Study the animal’s features. They are simultaneously juvenile and mature. The eyes, the mouth, the nostrils: here is a larval softness, a roundness, a quality of enlargement. The salamander is, in other words, undeniably cute. But look now to the body, the skin: these are mature, fully-developed. The musculature of the trunk is clearly that of an adult: withered, ancient, powerful. Thus Paulette is at once young and old. The sug- gestion implicit to this paradox is, of course, one of liberation: from biological terror, from fear of entropy, from molecular knowledge of the finitude of love. For the salamander’s time is not earthly, not linear. Instead it is defined by an im- possible, biblical logic of interconnection. It is a murky, astral plane upon which the salamander operates; here the horizontal dimension has been abolished such that within every event there lies as a dormant seed a hint of the future. Each is a promise, a prophecy that cannot go unfulfilled. The child is the father of the man. The larva, which cometh to its mountain stream like a thief in the night, lays the egg from which it will emerge.

This notion of omnitemporality was supported, if tenuously, by scientific evidence. Countless species have been observed to retain their juvenile, hatchling forms and char- acteristics even upon attaining sexual maturity, and this phenomenon of suspended time—typically termed neoteny or paedomorphism—occurs in salamanders of all families.The causes of neoteny are innumerable, but in the case of Paulette one might reasonably attribute the specimen’s somatic delay to an insufficiency of iodine. The general public, I have found, is almost completely ignorant of the importance of iodine in the development of the hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid mechanism, which in amphibians stimulates the apoptosis of the cells of the larval fins, tail, and gills. (But perhaps, my dear, you will allow me a brief, semi-speculative digres- sion. True, we have not met and I have been briefed only perfunctorily on de- tails of your adolescence, but I imagine withal that you have experienced some version of the following scene: Think to a late summer’s night of long ago. You are walking through a field of waist-high grass which sways, moves as if it were itself made of moonlight. Tucked beneath your arm is a bottle of your father’s brandy. You cross the field. There you meet a boy, your first lover; together you drink and you lay beneath the clear sky without touching. The boy is simple and beautiful and incapable of summoning the courage to guess at the source of your unhappiness. But at length you tell him your relationship is untenable. You must leave your little town and find someone who can better provide for you, you say. Having always known this, the boy does not protest or let you see him cry as you part ways.) I do not conjure such a scene to inspire in you unnecessary nostalgia or longing but merely to illustrate analogically my point regarding the influence of a particular environmental factor on amphibian cellular and hormonal development. We might speculate, in other words, that within the scope of my little tale you were sufficiently exposed to iodine such that you underwent a normal process of emotional maturation. The evolution of your needs and desires led you to abandon eros in favor of more practical matters; rended extraneous by this process, your boy was left, therefore, to his chemically-imbalanced state of perpetual intimate naivety.

Finally my hosts returned to my holding cell. Upon coughing up the cash I had brought for the purposes of being coughed up, I was told the man who filmed the salamander would see me. I stood, straightened my blazer, and put on my game face, so to speak, which in my case is an expression of steely intelligence and unplaceable warmth. I bowed slightly such that the men could secure a black muslin bag over my head. A hand was placed on the small of my back and I was guided from the room.

I am in the business of looking men in the eye. It is my trade, my area of expertise. It is the skill for which I am hired and for which I am duly compensated. Indeed I have looked into the eyes of men all over the world. They have been the politicians, adulterers, brothers, enemies, friends; they have been disgraced men, curious men, lonely men, cunning men. To each of these men I posed a question. My questions are, without fail, extremely simple. Simplicity is a requirement of the work. Thus all my questions can be answered with: Yes or No. My interlocutors, of course, often try to circumvent this binary. They say: The context is. It’s not as easy as. But what about the. Consider the facts surrounding… But I am never led astray by these stutters and pleas. I am inclined to welcome them, in fact, because, as far as my business is concerned, all information is useful information. I am in the business of information, after all. Or, more precisely, I am in the business of truth. So my business is this. I ask a man a question, and I determine if his answer is truthful.

To my knowledge no lie has escaped me. My judgment is an endowment, a nat- ural talent, but I have devoted much of my life’s energy to sharpening it all the same. It functions now as a knife. It is the edge with which I parse the world’s contradictions, sever its duplicitous threads. My captors pulled the bag from my head. I blinked. The room slowly took shape around me. It was a windowless rectangular space with a concrete floor. There was a table, a chair, and a bare light bulb which dangled from the ceiling on a wire. Seated in deep shadow behind the table was my man. It is a curious experience: the sudden, unmediated appearance of a face seen countless times before from the far side of a vast, one-way gulf of some screen or shimmering display. The guards left the room. I rendered myself void of bias, familiarity, and preconception. I approached the table and studied the man. His hair was grayer than it had been in the video. He looked at me and smiled.

I asked the man if Paulette was a fiction. He shook his head and said, “No.” I searched his visage for a tell, for any hint or fish-belly glimmer of deceit, and I found nothing. So I thanked him for his time, spun on my heel, and left. Thus it is a simple truth with which my report concludes: the creature is real. Your husband wishes this information to be imparted to you, on the occasion of your forty-eighth birthday, as a gift. He was witness to the renewed youth and vigor that the footage inspired in you; he likewise watched, following the debunking, how a certain depression widened, first, and then enclosed you like a mouth. Your husband is a man of means and power, true, but he does not kid himself with regard to his diminished capacity for rhythmic adoration or the decline of his physical appearance. His gut, he knows, at times overhangs the waist of his trousers, protrudes from the gap of his silk robe. He is no stranger to the bald patch, to the fleshy pouch of the double chin. He is no stranger to the ways un- happiness can make a person violent and temperamental, and he is very sorry for not properly retracting his knuckles the time he smacked you in the face with the back of his hand. He wants you to know the salamander is real, and he sincerely, desperately hopes this knowledge might rekindle in you a sense—which, for the record, he’s never lost—of endless desire and everlasting joy.