They’d ‘met’, then, in Switzerland: in the Italian-speaking slice, Ticino, perched beside Lake Maggiore. Precisely: above it, up on a mountainside. The International Association for Emergent Legal Theory had summoned a triadic gathering, a three-day convergence in which academics, practitioners and students moved about the hotel’s Bauhaus‑styled precinct—clean white lines, stark geometry—flitting between airy glass‑walled conference rooms and even more expansive terraces bounded by whitened railings, continuing onward past tennis courts, herb gardens and tea areas, along forested footpaths that threaded by shabby wooden stages, sunken Roman baths that waited in the earth, and other areas whose functions seemed increasingly vague as talks, panels, impromptu gatherings and less formal modes of discussion unfolded. Pirotti’s function there remained opaque. From the outset he appeared to be aligned with the hosts: mingling with them, greeting the opening speakers with practiced ease, nonchalantly stepping into front-row seats that were soon the focal point of jokes onstage, and yet his name never appeared on the roster of organizers; the only hint of his presence was the entry in a compact appendix of the programme, listing the entity under whose banner he travelled—the Centre for Juridical Collaboration.
Stanton, as it happened later, would investigate this CJC: it existed in that it appeared in the Council of Europe’s official NGO registry. Its name, though, cloaked a misnomer: there was no single architectural hub to speak of, nor a centralized nucleus or board that could be pointed to as its core. Instead, it unfurled and interlaced through other bodies, institutions, academic papers, like a labyrinth that uncoiled across the hotel lawn beneath the terrace. During the conference, Pirotti materialized at moments—at a bar, behind a cluster of rocks and abstract sculptures, on a boat gliding toward a lake‑center island, back up the hill into the park’s Zen Garden or its Elisarion Pavilion—his lean figure often framed by the rotunda’s late‑nineteenth‑century panorama of youthful male nudes and fluttering butterflies. Monte Verità’s patchwork mosaic of styles and allusions, epochs and voices had been formed by a long history: reformers, early‑adopter veganists and Freikörperkultur naturists, advocates of naked calisthenics, esotericists, theosophists, anarchists, avant‑garde dancers, painters, poets and yes, even jurists had threaded their way upward across the past century, all fellow travelers along a winding road toward some claimed enlightenment they hoped would, if not fully arrive, at least offer a vantage point from which a limited glimpse of a larger panorama might be perceived. The Mountain of Truth—or, as the locals of Ascona and Locarno teased, after neighbors who brought meals and did laundry for those spiritually unsettled on the hill, of balabiott, naked revelry—had once offered a public display of裸 bodies, which, for a few decades, gave way to team‑building on corporate retreats, vegetables from the garden and a Michelin‑starred dining room. Yet an echo of former licentiousness still lingered in the mountain air. Each day, once the formalities ended, cocktail hour arrived, seamlessly following into pre‑dinner Prosecco, then a two‑glass wine menu, further libations on the terrace while DJs tuned their decks on the lawn, and dancing into the small hours, the marble‑hard diagonals of the maze giving way to a serpentine game of space numbers—less fixed rooms, more starting squares on a vast snakes‑and‑ladders board. Stanton formed a connection with a graduate student named Moira, a Slovenian with dark hair and unorthodox insights on both Internal Energy Market rules and plein‑air intimacy. After a dawn‑tinted tryst on the hillside, she drifted away, her pale form becoming swallowed by magnolias and pines, and Stanton, left behind, shuffled back to the hotel, only to collide with Pirotti, who immediately shed his coat and handed it over to him.
“Lake breeze,” the elder man remarked. “And the air thickens as it climbs.”
Had he been observing them all along? He wore a knowing, almost semi‑smirking expression—the same one that had animated him through the conference, a grin that seemed poised to erupt into laughter a fraction before the crowd’s own chuckles broke through the podium’s jokes. As they skirted the tennis‑court fencing, he turned to Stanton and spoke:
“Your presentation impressed me.”
“It was nice enough—quite standard, you know: pretty conventional,” Stanton replied, his habitual stammer expanding, as if the air itself were a little more buoyant around him in that moment.
“Not at all,” Pirotti challenged in a tone that had sharpened, becoming earnest. “There was a lucidity to it that seemed sharpened further by the paradoxical stance of your argument.”
“Counter. . .” Stanton attempted, only to surrender to the inability to articulate the idea. His paper had explored the distinction between lex lata and lex ferenda—the law as it stands now versus the law as it will or ought to be—an ordinary first‑year law concept, with a twist: elevating the familiar derivative de lege ferenda (“with a view to coming law”) into the model of a certain tense, a future‑oriented or not‑yet‑delivered post hoc, in which legal awareness must locate its presence. “Would you send me a copy?” Pirotti pressed, as the hotel loomed into view.
Stanton muttered assent and climbed the stairs, heading for his own room. It was waking up with Pirotti’s coat still draped over him that reminded him to honor this half‑formed promise and to return the garment, which occasioned their next exchange, as they boarded one of two shuttle buses carrying delegates on a field trip to a nearby valley. There, a renowned musician—avant‑garde in his own circle, just as the village denizens had once been in Monte Verità’s various sects—played a piece that he mixed live on a platform into which kites, flown aloft by student assistants, fed source sounds—wind, flutter of sailcloth, echoes from surrounding mountains—into vibrating wires, and the resulting melodies (or threnodies, or fugues) traveled onward from the deck to cordless headsets issued to every attendee.
“You mentioned,” Pirotti said as they donned these headsets, “that the lege ferenda insight emerged while you were drafting a judicial opinion on a CJEU case touching criminal law . . .”
Nodding, Stanton reached down to his left shin, where damp meadow, shifting altitude, and pressure had made the scar sting, and the thorn of memory pricked at him. Pirotti offered a conspiratorial smile—one that conveyed, without words, that he understood the wound, the concealed depths beneath the surface, and the reasons for Saint’s unease. He reached into his pocket and produced a capsule, pressing two tablets into Stanton’s waiting palm, which, as though already anticipating the gesture, unfurled in his grip.
“Take them one at a time,” he murmured.
Stanton didn’t have water on hand. He only managed to borrow some, and even then he hesitated, staring at the pale blue pills set against the navy script on them, their curved tops and the letters p and b etched into the surfaces—little terrain, like a miniature map, with ridges and hollows that suggested a landscape within a landscape. He found a soft tuft of grass to rest against and swallowed the first pill, then settled to listen to the kite performance begin.
Although the performance wasn’t produced by traditional instruments, the sequences that filled Stanton’s ears sounded curiously musical; the arrangement, the way the tones stacked and interacted, almost formed a symphony. At first he assumed the audible textures belonged to the kites themselves, the designer’s trick turning satellites and lines into sound. But after a while he realized the kites were acting more as microphones, transmitting calls and responses already whirling around through the air, as if someone invisible were eavesdropping on conversations that drifted through the different atmospheric layers above them—birds, storm fronts in a neighboring valley, distant traffic and trains. At one moment a low, resonant click—chopchopchop—began softly, then swelled, eventually becoming the dominant chord. It wasn’t until minutes later that he spotted the helicopter generating that particular track, far down the canyon, its presence announced by the gnats and then the larger, flylike shapes that hovered before a rotor’s roar. In Iraq, children had flown kites for play, and sometimes for signaling, counter‑surveillance or even to carry small arms. There was another kite scene as well—a memory that Stanton couldn’t quite place. Pirotti’s pill had begun to take hold; this time it felt stronger—some form of opiate, yet not the familiar oxycodone. It was both firmer and more diffuse: a connective looseness that seemed to expand the world around him. From the ground up, the grass under his back, as springy as the earphones, stretched toward the horizon; and from above, somewhere between his gaze and the sky’s edge, a boy’s face looked down with a similar, quiet smile. . . .
Had Pirotti known about the wound? Did he research each target this thoroughly? Or was he simply reading Stanton’s interior like a topographic map, outlining elevations and cliffs, weak points and routes best suited for an advance? After the kite concert, he pressed on with his own advance:
“I’d love to see the notes you drafted for that opinion,” he said as they sat together on the return to the hotel. “For my eyes only, naturally; I wouldn’t circulate it further.”
“Notes I . . .? Oh, yes, of course,” Stanton replied, already half‑immersed in the music, and later, under a second tablet, he sent along his notes after the paper he had previously submitted. He would never have done such a thing in Luxembourg, or elsewhere for that matter—but with Switzerland . . . If neutrality had always been that country’s metaphorical badge, Monte Verità was Switzerland’s own Switzerland: a rarefied, elevated zone of transient exchange, a confluence of disparate times and places set in timekeeping’s back pocket. If its archaic, almost anachronistic essence, its strange overlay of eras and sensibilities seemed to lift it out of time and keep it there, then for the three days he spent there all rules and prohibitions were suspended as well. Juridical Collaboration: atop the mountain it made sense—and it appeared to express a hive‑like, collective spirit. Only later, back in Luxembourg, did the word’s second meaning press itself on him.
Collaboration: of course. Was that what he had become? A collaborator . . .
On the conference’s final day, observing Stanton again touch his shin, Pirotti inquired about the wound. When Stanton explained where it came from, he smiled with that knowing gleam once more.
“Old Operation TELIC,” he said. “Weapons of Mass Destruction. How did that go?”
Stanton offered no answer beyond a tight smile, the bitterness hardening his mouth.
“Is it serious?” Pirotti pressed.
“Superficial,” Stanton admitted. Still, he asked what the other man had given him.
“Petit bleu,.” Pirotti replied in that obtuse way. “Blue? A faint blue hue.” Stanton repeated the phonetics aloud.
“Bleu: blue. A touch of blue. The moniker comes from the old pneumatic tubes that used to shuttle telegrams—letters, really—across Paris with astonishing speed: analogue emails, long before the phrase existed. You could receive your message, written on blue paper and sealed in a canister, from one part of the city to another in mere minutes. It’s either from that origin or from a Marseille star anise pastis that bore the same name; I’m not entirely sure which.”
“But who makes them?”
“A startup. A small pharmaceutical venture. Prototype. Awaiting approval. I have—a colleague of mine, or rather an associate—someone in the Netherlands: an urban planner who serves as the partner to a CEO of a research group operating under a provisional EMA license. This fellow—the CEO—sits on the board of an NGO allied with the CJC, and he has . . .”
Stanton lost track amid the torrent of acronyms, yet it mattered little. By the time he descended from the labyrinthine maze, gardens, cocktails and the posthistorical balabiott, he’d been handed his own peut‑etre canister of petits bleus, and Mehrtens’ arrangement had begun to take shape, even if not openly named. Pirotti framed it as a casual, inconsequential favor—an “option,” “there,” if Stanton wished to take it up.
“His stock,” the Italian‑Swiss voice concluded with a nearly flawless English lilt, “is entirely legitimate. They’re nearly ready for clearance—just adjusting levels, nudging potency up or down, as needed. It’s being tested on many volunteers—why not add one more? Your situation makes you a prime subject. It simply . . .”
“Simply what?” Stanton pressed.
“Simply keeps it off the record for you this way. You don’t want a medical file haunting you ten years hence when you’re trying to ascend to who knows what heights . . .”
Those words looped in his mind during the train ride to Milan, and then as he boarded a flight back to Luxembourg. The hum persisted, a kite‑string of memory unrolling endlessly, remixed by a deck that spoke directly to him, bypassing any headphones. What heights . . .? The journey wound through valley after valley, the peaks still capped with snow; the slopes and passes beyond were monstrous in their scale, with pipes, cables and conveyors threading down to energy plants and factories at the valley floor, turning the mountains’ mineral wealth—cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, plus the meltwater’s streams—into power and products. One of the plants’ façades carried the bold label GRAPHITE. Briefly, a memory surfaced of a colossal pencil hovering above an equally oversized sheet of paper, though the image refused to fix itself. The peaks continued endlessly, and the landscape shifted from height to depth, from ascent to the unending fall, as if the mountains themselves had become a theater of subterranean activity.
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From The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy. Copyright © 2026 by Tom McCarthy. Courtesy of New York Review Books
