The Rhyl Poster

They’d ‘met’, then, in Switzerland: in the Italian part, Ticino, beside Lake Maggiore. To be precise: above it, on a mountain. The International Association for Emergent Legal Theory had convened a three-day conference at which scholars, practitioners and students disported themselves around the suites and grounds of a hotel built in the Bauhaus style – bold, white, orthogonal – shuttling from airy, glass-walled meeting rooms to airier, white railing-ringed terrace and thence onwards over tennis courts, tea gardens and herb gardens, along wooded pathways running past dilapidated timber stages, empty sunken Roman baths and other performance or assembly spaces of increasingly vague designation as they engaged in presentations and panel discussions, powwows, breakouts and less structured modes of congress. Pirotti’s role there wasn’t really clear. He seemed, right from the off, to be in with the hosts: huddling among them, glad-handing speakers of the opening addresses, insouciantly commandeering reserved seats in the front row, laughing an in-crowd quarter-second before jokes cracked on the podium opened themselves up to secondary, public waves of comprehension . . . But he gave no talk himself, nor was his name listed among the organisers, the only (synecdochal) indication of his presence there being the inclusion in the programme, among a small-print appendix of institutes, alliances and federations, of the outfit under whose flag he travelled: Centre for Juridical Collaboration.

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Stanton, later, would check out this CJC: it existed, inasmuch as it was entered in the Council of Europe’s official register of NGOs. Its very title, though, was a misnomer: it possessed a centre neither in the architectural sense (a building or HQ) nor in the more structural or discursive meaning of the word (nucleus, steering board, newsletter), instead folding and doubling across other contexts, institutions, academic papers like the maze that meandered across the hotel’s main lawn below the terrace, its kinks and forkings offsetting the building’s right-angled modernist clarity. Like a spirit of the maze, Pirotti would pop out as if from nowhere during the conference: at bar counters, from behind rocks and abstract sculptures, on a boat trip to an island in the middle of the lake, back up the mountain in the park’s Zen Garden or its Elisarion Pavilion, his small frame back-screened by the rotunda’s fin-de-siècle cyclorama of male adolescent nudes and butterflies . . . Monte Verità’s hotchpotch collage of styles, allusions, epochs had been shaped by its episodic history: social reformers, early-uptake vegans and Freikörperkultur naturists, boosters of naked calisthenics, esotericists, theosophists, anarchists, avant-garde dancers, painters, poets and, yes, even legal theorists had wended their way up there over the previous century or so, all fellow travellers on the long, serpentine path to enlightenment they somehow hoped would, if not culminate there, at least provide them with a vantage point from which a part of transcendental wisdom’s larger vista might be visible. Mountain of Truth – or as the townspeople of Ascona and Locarno termed it, piqued by tales told by their neighbours who delivered food to and did laundry for the unpragmatic seekers of higher consciousness on the hilltop, of balabiott, nude cavorting. Collective parading of bare flesh before the sun god may have given over some decades before the IAELT meeting to team-building exercises during corporate retreats, homegrown turnips and beetroots to a Michelin-starred restaurant, but something of the old licentiousness still hovered in the mountain air. No sooner, each day, were the presentations and discussions done than cocktail hour kicked in, which hour segued effortlessly into pre-dinner Proseccos, then a two-wine menu, more drinks served on the terrace while DJs set up their decks on the lawn for dance sessions which ran into the small hours, white lines far straighter than the maze’s disappearing intermittently up altitude-dilated nostrils, room numbers treated more as starting squares on some great snakes-and-ladders board than fixed accommodations. Stanton hooked up with a grad student named Moira, a Slovenian with dark hair and novel takes on both Internal Energy Market rules and plein-air coitus. After a blissed-up dawn tryst on the hillside, she wandered off, her pale form swallowed by magnolias and pine trees, and Stanton, loitering alone, suddenly cold, pulled on his clothes and staggered back in the direction of the hotel, only to run, not twenty feet away, into Pirotti, who immediately removed his coat and handed it to him.

‘Lake breeze,’ the older man said. ‘And the air expands as it rises.’

Had he been watching them? He wore a kind of knowing smile – the same one that he’d worn throughout the conference, the one that primed his face to launch itself into a laugh that fraction of an instant before others’. As they skirted the tennis court’s meshed-wire fence he told Stanton:

‘I was much taken by your presentation.’

‘It was pretty – it was, standard, you know: pretty standard stuff,’ Stanton responded, his habitual stutter expanded, like the air’s particles, by a mid-sentence shiver.

‘Not at all,’ Pirotti countered in a tone now serious. ‘There was a clarity to it – made all the more sharp, I thought, by the counterintuitive direction of your argument.’

‘Counter . . .’ Stanton repeated, but gave up on trying to formulate a phrase. His paper had been on the difference between lex lata and lex ferenda, or the law as it stands now and the law as it will or should be – a pretty classical distinction with which any first-year law student would have been familiar; his twist on it had been to elevate the commonplace derivative de lege ferenda (‘with view to coming law’) into the model for a certain temporality or ‘tense’, a future anterior or not-yet-arrived post hoc, under which legal consciousness (he suggested) was obliged to find its presence, or its present. ‘Would you send it to me?’ Pirotti asked as the hotel loomed into view.

Stanton muttered that he would and climbed the steps, for once, to his own room. It was the fact of waking up with Pirotti’s coat still on him that reminded him to honour this half-consciously made promise, and the obligation to return the garment that occasioned their next conversation, as they boarded one of two shuttle-buses taking delegates on a field trip to a nearby valley in which an apparently renowned musician, avant-garde in his own field as denizens of Monte Verità’s various erstwhile sects had been in theirs, performed a composition that he mixed live on a deck into which kites, flown high above them by student-assistants, fed source sounds – wind, fluttering of canvas, echoes from surrounding mountains – down vibrating wires, the combined melodies (or threnodies, or fugues) being transmitted onwards from the deck to cordless headphones with which all members of the audience were issued.

‘You mentioned,’ Pirotti said as they were donning these, ‘that the lege ferenda insight came to you while you were penning an opinion on a CJEU case touching on criminal law . . .’

Nodding confirmation, Stanton reached down to his left shin, which the dampness of the meadow, or perhaps the frequent shift in altitude and pressure, was causing to play up, the scar angled across it throbbing like a compass needle drawn into alignment with a true north of dull pain. Pirotti again smiled – and, smiling, managed to convey a mute assurance that, without being told, he knew just what was ailing Stanton – and knew why, knew all about the asymptotic bullet and its mark . . . He reached into his pocket and pulled out a canister of tablets, two of which he pressed into Stanton’s palm, which had, as though in anticipation of this handover, unfolded.

‘Take them one at a time,’ he murmured.

Stanton had no water on him. Finding someone who did took a few minutes. Even after procuring this, he delayed downing either pill, preferring instead to contemplate them for a while against his skin, intrigued by their pale cyan backgrounds with the navy skeins, their cambered upper surfaces, the enigmatic p and b carved into these, the letters separated from each other by deep trenches: defiles between stamped and rounded peaks, pillow-like swellings – miniature terrain as pronounced as that of the landscape all around him. Finding a spot in this, a soft clump of grass rising to form a bank against which he could rest his head, he washed the first one back, then settled in to listen to the kite performance which was just then beginning.

Despite not being produced by instruments as such, the sequences Stanton found playing in his ears were strangely musical; their arrangement, through its patterning, the dynamism of its counterpoint and dissonance, almost symphonic. For the first quarter-hour stretch, he presumed that the content he was hearing, its constituent timbres and pitches, belonged to the kites, that the composer’s trick had been to turn these hovering objects, their materials, into producers of tone and phrase. After a while, though, he came to realise that the kites were operating more as microphones, relaying calls and responses already ricocheting around the various strata into which they’d been hoisted, as though by an eavesdropper, to spy on whatever conversations happened to drift through their resonant box-frames: birdsong, thunderclouds in neighbouring valleys, distant cars and trains. At one point a low and gut-vibrating chopchopchop started up quietly, then grew, and grew still more until it had become the passage’s dominant chord. It wasn’t until some minutes later that his eye, gazing down the canyon that extended several miles eastwards from his feet, picked out (first gnat-sized, then, larger, still blowfly-fuzzy, and then suddenly, aggressively pulled into focus) the helicopter that was generating that particular track. In Iraq, kids had often flown kites, for fun – but also, more strategically, for signalling, counter-surveillance, sometimes even small-arms delivery . . . There was another kite-scene too, a memory Stanton couldn’t quite place . . . Pirotti’s pill was coming on now; he’d presumed that it was codeine or perhaps, as per the night before, MDMA, but this was stronger – some form of opiate, for sure, although not oxycodone either; he’d have recognised that, too. This was both harder and softer: more spread out, connective. From beneath his back, the springy grass bed, as cushioned as his earphones, seemed to run beyond itself, in a framework of roots and rhizomes, to the far horizon; from above him, somewhere in the expanse between eye and eyelid (shorter than the distance to the kites and at the same time larger than the one between him and the sky’s proscenium above these), a boy’s face was looking down, smiling as well . . .

Had Pirotti known about the wound? Did he do that much research on each of his quarries? Or was he intuiting his way into Stanton’s interior as he went along – marking its fall levels, its contours, weak spots in its layout, vectors most suited to advances? After the kite concert ended, he continued setting up his beachhead:

‘I would love to see the notes you made while drafting that opinion,’ he said as they sat together on the way back to the hotel. ‘For my eyes only, of course: I wouldn’t circulate it any further.’

‘Notes I . . .? Oh, yes, sure,’ said Stanton, nodding out, still thinking about music. Later, under the aegis of the second tablet, he fired these on after the paper he’d sent earlier. He’d never have done this in Luxembourg, or anywhere else, in fact – but Switzerland . . . If neutrality had always been that country’s USP, then Monte Verità was Switzerland’s own Switzerland: unworldly, elevated zone of transient exchange, nebulous meeting point of vagrant times and places set in timekeeping’s own backyard. If its anachronistic nature, its strange overlay of periods and zeitgeists, seemed to hoist it out of time and hold it there suspended, then for the three days he spent there all rules and all prohibitions seemed suspended too. Juridical Collaboration: up here on the mountain it made sense – seemed to express a spirit of the hive, of the collective. It wasn’t until later, back in Luxembourg, that the word’s second sense impressed itself on him.

Collaboration : of course. Was that what he’d become? A collaborator . . .

On the last day of the conference, Pirotti, observing Stanton reach down once again to rub his shin, asked him about his wound. When Stanton told him where he’d got it, he smiled knowingly again.

‘Old Operation TELIC,’ he said. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction. How did that go?’

Stanton wordlessly returned the smile, mouth set in a bitter twist.

‘Is it serious?’ Pirotti asked.

‘It’s superficial,’ Stanton told him. All the same, he asked Pirotti what he’d given him.

‘Petit bleu,’ Pirotti answered obtusely. ‘Blur?’ Stanton phonetically repeated.

‘Bleu : blue. A little blue. The name comes from the old pneumatic vacuum tubes that used to carry telegrams – well, letters really – around Paris at super-fast speed: analogue emails, more than a century avant la lettre. You could get your message, written on blue paper enclosed in a canister, from one side of the city to another in just minutes. It’s either from that or from a type of Marseille staranise pastis which had that name too; I’m not quite clear which . . .’

‘But who’s – I mean, who makes them?’

‘Start-up. Small pharma. Prototype. Approval pending. I have – colleague of mine, or associate really – a guy in the Netherlands: an architect, or rather urban planner, who’s the partner of the CEO of a research group operating under provisional licence from the EMA. This guy – the CEO – sits on the board of an NGO with whom the CJC are allied, and he has . . .’

Stanton lost track, among the acronyms’ proliferating onslaught, of the chain of hook-ups. That didn’t matter, though. By the time he descended for the last time from the maze and the gardens and the cocktails and the post-historical balabiott, he’d been handed his own canister of petits bleus, and the bare bones of the arrangement with Mehrtens had been set in place, if not yet named as such. Pirotti framed it as a casual, offhand favour, of no consequence to him, Stanton or Mehrtens – just an ‘option’, ‘there’, if Stanton wanted to avail himself of it.

‘His stock,’ he reasoned in his near-perfect English tinged with an Italian-Swiss lilt, ‘is one hundred per cent legitimate. They’re almost at green-light stage – just tweaking the levels, nudging the potency up, down, whatever. It’s being trialled on scores of volunteers – why not add one more? Your circumstances render you a model target user. It just . . .’

‘Just what?’ Stanton asked.

‘It just,’ Pirotti continued after a pause, ‘keeps it off-prescription for you this way. You don’t want some medical record coming back to bite you in ten years from now, when you’re ascending to who knows what heights . . .’

These words replayed for him throughout the train ride to Milan (from where he would fly back to Luxembourg), humming and zinging as though sent along a kite string both invisible and endless, remixed by some deck transmitting, without intermediary of headphones, just to him. What heights . . .? As the train plied its way down valley after valley, Stanton gazed up at the peaks, still snow-capped, the impossibly steep cols and slopes and couloirs plunging from them. Several of these, near their bases, were inlaid with pipes, wires and conveyor belts that ran further down to aggregate plants, substations and factories on the valley floor, converting these giant mountains’ minerality, their cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc and asphalt, their meltwater’s chutes and cascades, into energy and products. One of these plants’ fronts announced its business in large painted letters: GRAPHITE. Briefly, with the same sense of déjà vu that he’d experienced at the kite concert, Stanton half-recalled some kind of outsize pencil hovering above an equally enormous paper sheet, but couldn’t place that memory either. Peaks towered on for another hour and more, above yet more valleys – but what most impressed itself on Stanton’s consciousness was all the industry about their lower slopes and at their bases: this elaborate scene of things being tapped, being put to use. It was as though the mountains had been flipped round or inverted, and the drama of their scales, of their unfeasible dimensions, were actually a drama of not height but depth, not of ascent but of repeated and interminable falling.

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From The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy. Copyright © 2026 by Tom McCarthy. Courtesy of New York Review Books