Satin Island (7 page)

6.9
His phone rang at this point. He took the call, and spoke in German (fluent) for five minutes. When he’d finished, he looked up at me and asked me if I saw what he was driving at. I do, I told him. But, I started—then I faltered. But what? he asked. Your version, I said … vision, I mean, depiction—then,
striking upon the right word—
characterization
, of the anthropologist … What of it? he asked. Well, I said, it might have been an accurate one a century ago. But now there are no natives—or
we
’re the natives. I mean … I know, I know all that stuff, he said, cutting me off. I’ve read your clubbing-tome: kaleidoscopes; personae; passing out in toilets; it’s all good. And it’s exactly the situation you describe, he carried on, that makes
our
era’s Great Report all the more necessary. Shifting tectonics, new islands and continents forming: we need a brand-new navigation manual. But also, I tried to tell him, now there is no study, with its housekeeper and Scotch and tisane. I mean, there are universities … Forget universities! he snorted, interrupting me again. These are irrelevant; they’ve become businesses—and not even good ones.
Real
businesses, though, he said, his hand describing in the air above his desk a circle that encompassed the whole building: these are the forge, the foundry where true knowledge is being smelted, cast and hammered out. You’re right, U.: there is no tranquil study. But the Great Report won’t be composed in a study; it will come out of the jungle, breaking cover like some colourful, fantastic beast, a species never seen before, a brand-new genus, flashing, sparkling—
fulgurating
—high above the tree-line, there for all to see. I want it to come out of the Company. We’re the noblest savages of all. We’re sitting with our war-paint at the spot where all the rivers churn and flow together. The Company, he repeated, his voice growing louder with excitement, is the place for it to come from; you, U., are the one to write it.
He carried on looking straight at me, into me. He was smiling, but the way his dark eyes fixed me made it clear that, smile or no smile, he was deadly serious. What I want you to do, he said, is
name
what’s taking place right now. To name it? I repeated; like the princess does with Rumpelstiltskin in the fairytale? Yes, he said: exactly. What do you want this Great Report to look like? I asked. What form should it take? To whom should it be addressed? These are secondary questions, he said. I leave it to you to work them out. It will find its shape.

6.10
Had it, when these events (
q.v
.) took place, found its shape? It was finding it
—finding
it in the same way we might say that we’re
looking
for an object rather than that it’s lost or nonexistent. Shapes were happening inside my thought; or, rather, shap
ings
, a preliminary set of shifts and swirls, coherences and separations of the type that, in their overall movement, seem to promise shape and structure somewhere further down the line. Frames, contexts, modes, tones, formats would suggest themselves—pipe up, step forwards, as though volunteering for a task—then, no sooner than they’d made their willingness and presence known to me, fall silent again, slink back into the crowd and disappear. But these spectral presences, and the promise they (like all ghosts) carried that they might return, helped add momentum to all my enquiries, each of my dossiers, no matter how isolated and idiosyncratic their subject-matter seemed: after all, might this or that one not turn out, in addition
to whatever other function it performed, to be the spur to set the Great Report, by happy accident, agalloping? Although I had done nothing concrete to begin the thing, simply being under starter’s orders in this way lent a background radiance, a promise of significance, to everything I did. At the same time, it sent my general levels of anxiety, already high, still higher.

6.11
Back in my basement, in between various new tasks demanded of me by the Koob-Sassen Project—and against the constant, second-level mental puzzling laid down for me since my first day at the Company by this separate, all-important charge, this Great Report—I started a file on parachutists. Dead ones: ones whose parachutes had failed to open. It’s surprising how many times the story, or a variant on it, pops up: like oil spills, it’s generic. Even when I’d first read, on the tube, the initial three-line article about the episode, I’d had a sense of déjà-vu, a sense of having read this article, or one very like it, at least once before.
Oh, a dead parachutist: one of those
. Everyone can recognize and understand that situation. Before I’d ever heard of Vanuatans, the first joke I learnt to tell as a child was about a classified ad for a used parachute, “no strings attached.” To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon—only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore,
the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype. The parachutist story, in the stark, predictable simplicity of the circumstance that it presented, in the boldness of its second-handness, was refreshing: in its unashamed lack of originality, it was original.

6.12
The strange thing was, the more I started looking for dead parachutists, the more they started cropping up—in real time, I mean. Sure, I unearthed instances of parachutes failing to open, and suspicions being aired as to the cause, running back fifty years. There’d been a case in America where both main chute and reserve had ripped on opening, despite the odds against this happening from fabric fatigue alone being about ten million to one; and another one in Australia where a harness had quite inexplicably caught fire in mid-air; and so forth. But, in the very period during which I was compiling these cases—a period of no more than two and a half months—no less than three more stories hit the news involving parachutists slamming into the ground chuteless. They weren’t in England: one took place in New Zealand; one in Poland; one in Canada. And, of course, the particulars varied—but they all involved suspected acts of sabotage; and none of the cases, over this same period, was resolved. The replication, or near-replication, of these situations started buzzers ringing all over my head—and made the case of my own parachutist, the unfortunate soul whose death had snagged my interest in the
first place, all the more gripping: an originally un-original event becoming even more un-original, and hence even more fascinating.

6.13
One day, I went to Paris, and conducted the same type of staged enquiries that I’d carried out in London: a group of financial-service workers this time. There was no mirror; but I had a translator beside me, repeating phrases I’d half-understood on their first iteration softly in my ear. I left in the morning and came back in the evening. Daniel was right: the streets are all tarmaced and smooth. I hadn’t noticed that before. I also noticed that the Eurostar trains have a small but niggling design fault: when they attain top speed, the vacuum created beneath their undercarriage sucks the surrounding air in and funnels this on upwards through the intermittently open toilet flaps, with the result that urine blows back in the urinator’s face. I mused that, should the Company ever find itself hired by its former EU client’s sworn adversaries—hired, that is, by some right-wing, Europhobic lobby group—to come up with a symbol to express
their
cause, I would propose this glitch, this blowback water-feature.

6.14
Madison phoned me while I was still on the train. When are you back? she asked. Tonight, I said. I want you here right now, she told me. Come straight to mine when you get in. I did. Lying in bed later, after we’d had sex, instead of picturing
oil as I fell asleep like I had last time, my mind drifted through black streets. They were the streets of Paris—not so much the real Paris I’d just visited as an imaginary Paris formed in my head through the repetition of the fifty or so feet of it that had made up the background of Daniel’s roller-blading film. These streets, as I said, were black, all stripped of cobblestones and covered in a smooth, continuous tarmac coat. This coat was unrolling as I glided forward: unrolling more and more, decking the boulevards and avenues and alleyways in soft, black oblivion. Occasionally, as I passed such-and-such a spot, I’d be made half-aware that some historical event, some revolutionary episode, had taken place just there—but even as the knowledge flashed up it was extinguished, buried beneath the tarmac. This happened over and over again: whatever acts of insurrection, of defiance, or their markers and memorials, sprung up in an attempt to catch and trip the passing gaze, these were all smoothed out, muffled, drowned. The tarmac ran on endlessly, running each street into the next as I advanced along them, heading nowhere in particular, just gliding, on and on; on either side, at the periphery of my vision, coffee-chain concessions ran together, like the tarmac, in a smooth, unbroken blur. There was nothing dramatic about this; it wasn’t a disaster. No one was complaining, or even surprised: it was just the way it was.
That’s just the way it is
, a voice inside my head, perhaps my own, said. I might even have said it out aloud. Madison kind of grunted in her half-sleep. Then we were both gone.

7.

7.1
The Koob-Sassen Project. I won’t, as I’ve already stated, talk of this—and yet, during this period, everyone did, all the time. They discussed it not as people discuss things they know about, subjects whose properties and parameters are given, but rather as they try to ascertain those of a foreign object, one that is at once both present—omnipresent—and elusive: groping after its dimensions; trying, through mutual enquiry, to discern its composition, charge and limit. When, in the course of my professional activities, I asked people to provide a visual image that, for them, most represented it, I got answers varying from hovering spaceship to rabbit warren to pond lilies. I had my own, of course: I saw towers rising in the desert—splendid, ornate constructions, part modern skyscraper, part sultan’s palace lifted from
Arabian Nights:
steel and glass columns segueing into vaulted cupolas and stilted arches, tiled
muqarnas
, dwindling minarets that seemed, at their cloud-laced peaks, to shed their own materiality, turn into vapour. Below them, hordes of people—thousands, tens of thousands—laboured, moving around like ants, their circuits forming patterns on the sand; patterns that, in their amalgam, coalesced
into one larger, more coherent pattern, just as the meandering, bowing, divagating stretches of a river delta do when seen from high enough above. What were they doing, all these ant-like labourers? Why, they were bringing in materials, or carrying out excavated soil, or delivering instructions they themselves, perhaps, did not quite understand, nor even, fully, did the person to whom they were relaying them, so complex was the logic governing the Project as a whole—instructions, though, whose serial execution, even if full comprehension was beyond the scope of any single point in the command-chain, had the effect of moving the whole intricate scheme towards its glorious realization, at which point
all
would become clear, to everyone, and ants would see as gods.

7.2
I had this vision often; as the weeks and months progressed, the edifice within it neared completion, its plan and outline growing more apparent. There were still unfinished bits, though: gaping lacunae where the carapace gave way to reveal guttery of half-laid floors, bare wiring, strata opening onto sub- and super-strata, down and up and every which way. The distances, the heights and depths and spaces in between, were huge—it was an entire metropolis, a Tower (and here, of course, the Company’s own logo wormed its way into the picture) of Babel. Peyman would always be there, in these visions: he’d be standing on the plain, perched on a balcony, or leaning against a half-completed buttress, consorting with engineers and princes, architects and sheiks and viziers, tweaking some
finer point of the overall plan, or going over the logistics for the next phase, or some such activity—there in the thick of it,
connected;
and I, through my association with him, felt connected too. Even if this isn’t what the Project
actually
involved, this is how it presented itself to me, as I sat down in my basement, rode the tube, or drifted off to sleep.

7.3
The meeting with the Minister took place. It’s odd to spend time in the company of somebody with power—I mean real, executive power: to hang out with a powerful person. You would imagine they exude this power at every turn, with each one of their gestures; that their very bodies sweat the stuff, wafting its odour at you through expensive clothes. But in fact, the thing most noticeable about this Minister was her lack of powerful aura. She seemed very normal. She wasn’t physically striking in any way: neither particularly tall nor particularly short; neither fat nor thin; neither attractive nor ugly. Her accent bore no traces of excessive privilege, nor of its masking. She must have been about my age, early forties. She was wearing sober, business-like clothes, with the exception of her shoes, which had small faux-fur tiger-skin stripes on them. We were sitting around a table: Peyman, Tapio, myself, this Minister and two of her staff. The way we were positioned allowed me to see these shoes, and what she was doing with them. As first one, then another person presented, responded, queried, clarified, proposed, counter-proposed and so forth, she rubbed one of her feet against the other, so that her right shoe’s toe, its outer edge,
moved up and down against the side-arch of its neighbour. She performed this activity non-stop throughout the meeting, even when she herself was talking. I thought at first that she was scratching herself, that she had a bite or irritation on her left foot that was itching. Twenty or so minutes into the meeting, though, I had to abandon this hypothesis: while even low-level scratching has a kind of franticness about it, an angry, stop-start rhythm, her movement was so regular and methodical that it seemed almost automatic. With each upwards motion of the toe against the arch, the tiger-skin, its fur, would be drawn upwards, ruffled until its hairs all separated, each one bristling to attention; with each downward or return stroke these hairs would all lie back flat again, losing their individuality amidst the smooth, sleek flow of feline stripes.