Satin Island (9 page)

7.12
The iodine’s not getting any traction, Petr said the next time I met him; so they’re trying a new tactic. Oh yes? I asked. What’s that? Well, he told me, they’ve taken sample cancer-cells from me and sent them to this lab where they mix them with cells from honey, and thyme, and rosemary, and the sweat of humming-birds, and all kinds of natural things. The cells of these have quite specific structures, which react in certain ways with other structures—and, once in a while, one set of cells can neutralize another, take them out. If they find one that takes out my cells, then we’re rolling. Don’t they know already which cell-structure will suit you? I asked. No, he replied, they haven’t got it all mapped: it’s still hit and miss. You just have to pair your cells with each of these others, moving down the line, running the gauntlet, and you never know, you might just find a match. The lab’s in Greece, he said. Greece? I asked. Yeah, he answered: Greece. How about that? He paused, and I pictured this Greek lab for a few moments. I had a quite clear picture
of it—only it was shedding, even as I held it in my mind, its modern, scientific ambiance and acquiring an ancient one instead: mutating into a grotto full of hecatombs and urns into which white-robed ministers served offerings of blood and flesh. Above these ministers, hovering beyond the smoke and vapour, a pantheon of gods sat around a long board table at whose centre lay a big, fat tome in which all structures and all matches had been written down. It was to them, to this Olympian committee, that these libations were being given, these supplications made—made in the hope that the committee might, in their infinite pity, wisdom and benevolence, do what only they could do: look up an entry and send back to meek, afflicted mortals a celestial
ping!
of recognition. Petr started speaking again, his words floating above this vision like a voiceover. It’s worth a try, he said.

7.13
Talking of visions: as time went on, my mental picture of the Project, my baroque casting, or elaboration, of it, changed. Out went the towers and palaces—or rather, better to say they flattened, their balconies and arches, corbels, cornices and spires and all such wedding-cakery steamrollered down into a uniform consistency. What these second-generation reveries gave me in their place, compressed and smooth, was a black box. It might have still been standing in the desert; or perhaps up on a plateau, a raised plain—above a city maybe, like the Parthenon, or maybe situated (for strategic reasons) far from any settlement, but nonetheless connected to a city,
or a set of cities, over which it exerted influence. Then again, sometimes this black box in which Koob-Sassen had become embodied seemed to be lying on the shelf of some administrative building. More accurate, perhaps, to describe it as resting on a
plane
, rather than plain: one geometric shape that sat atop another. As to its size: this, too, was far from clear. It was hard, in these visions, to maintain a sense of scale. Sometimes it seemed enormous, like an emperor’s mausoleum; at others it appeared no larger than a trunk, or coffin; at others still, the size of a child’s toy- or music-box. The only constant or unchanging aspect of it was that it was black: black and inscrutable, opaque.

8.

8.1
And all this time, behind these apparitions, another one: the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind: the domed canopy above, the floppy strings casually twining their way downwards from this like blithe tentacles, free ends waving in the breeze. This last picture, for me, produces, even now, a sense of calm: no angry and insistent tow, no jerks and tugs and stresses—just a set of unencumbered cords carelessly feeling the air. This sense of calm, of languidness, grows all the more pronounced when set against the panic of the man hurtling away from it below. He would have looked up, naturally, and seen the chute lolling unburdened and indifferent above him—as though freed from the dense load of all its troubles, that conglomeration of anxiety and nerves that he, and the human form in general, represented. Considering the picture, I found my focus, my point of identification within it and my attendant sympathy, shifting from the diminutive man to his expanded, if detached, paraphernalia. I felt quite happy for the latter, for its liberation into carefreeness. Parachutes, as a rule, are treated badly by their human masters: granted false release
and then immediately yanked back into servitude, into yoked bondage. This one, though, had slipped the bridle—literally—and billowed out into a freedom that was permanent and real. Its existence would have been a good and full one from this moment onwards.

8.2
The following weekend, the newspaper—the old-style broadsheet, I mean—carried a longer, more reflective article about the case. Its author was an occasional skydiver himself. He discussed the culture of the sport, its general fraternity. Skydivers, he informed his readers, are a close-knit bunch. They have, he wrote, the feeling of being
part of a tribe
. This sentence jumped out at me, for obvious reasons; on reading it, I looked up at the byline, to see if I recognized the journalist’s name. I didn’t. I thought of my Vanuatans once again. In their tower-plunging ritual, the vines, as I mentioned earlier, were measured so as to tauten not in mid-air but rather only fractionally above the earth: the jumps deemed the best, the ones that won the diver most acclaim, were those in which the cords sprang into action
as
he hit the ground, plucking him back from the very jaws of death into which they’d tantalizingly allowed him, for a fraction of a second, to descend. On such perfectly realized jumps, the diver’s shoulders would flick leaves and brushwood as they jerked back upwards, as though impudently scrawling the man’s signature across the forest floor. The movement was extremely pleasing to observe. It was this act of scrawling, this graffiti-gesture, I now realized, that, above
all other aspects of the ritual, had back then made me want to be a tower-plunger, or anthropologist, or both.

8.3
The article kept mentioning “faith.” Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string. It could be argued, wrote the author, that this belief had nothing of the devotional or metaphysical about it, since each of the things to be believed in had a solid evidential underpinning: the mechanics of a ripcord, say, or a spring-loaded riser—or, of course, on a larger scale, the overall infallibility of physics, its laws of resistance, drag and so on. Yet, he claimed, these things could only carry one so far towards a gaping hole in a plane’s side, and the fundamentally counterintuitive act of throwing oneself through it: to cite the clichéd but apt maxim, they could take the horse to water, but they couldn’t make it drink. That final spur, the one that carried skydivers across the threshold, out into the abyss, was faith: faith that it all—the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety—
worked
, that they’d be gathered up and saved. For this man, though, the victim, that system, its whole fabric, had unraveled. That, and not his death, was the catastrophe that had befallen him. We’re all going to die: there’s nothing so disastrous about that, nothing in its ineluctability that undermines the structure of our being. But for the faith, the blind, absolute faith into whose arms he
had entrusted his existence, from whose mouth he’d sought a whispered affirmation of its very possibility—for that to suddenly be plucked away: that must have been atrocious. He’d have looked around him, seen the sky, and earth, its landmass and horizon, all the vertical and horizontal axes that hold these together, felt acceleration and the atmosphere and all the rest, the fundamental elements in which we hang suspended all the time, whether we’ve just jumped from an aeroplane or not—and yet, for him, this realm, with all its width and depth and volume, would have, in an instant, become emptied of its properties, its values. The vast font at which he prayed, and into which he sank, as though to re-baptize himself, time and again, would, in the blink of a dilated eye, have been voided of godhead, rendered meaningless. Space, even as he plunged into it, through it, would have retreated—recoiled, contracted, pulled back from its frontiers even though these stayed intact—withdrawn to some zero-point at which it flips into its negative. Negative world, negative sky, negative everything: that’s the territory this man had entered. Did that then mean he’d somehow fallen through into another world, another sky? A richer, fuller, more embracing one? I don’t think so.

8.4
Why are your walls covered in pictures of parachutes? asked Tapio when he popped his head into my office one day. It’s to do with the Project, I told him; its overall … configuration. Oh yes? he said in his robotic voice. Yes, I repeated:
there are all these strands, and they converge; and there’s an overarching roof—or, let’s say, membrane, skin—above them. And, I continued, warming to my theme, what powers the whole thing isn’t some internal engine, since it doesn’t have one, but rather the way its structure, due to the way it’s, you know, structured, generates kinetic energy as everything around it—in this case, the air—passes through it. I see, said Tapio; and he stared intently at the pictures and the words, the lines conjoining them, for a long time, his own mind whirring as its gears engaged with these. The main thing is, I told him, that (unlike a windmill) a parachute functions not in a fixed location but rather
in transit
from a point A (the aeroplane) to a point B (the assigned landing-spot on the ground); although these two points are in fact anathema—or, at least, exterior—to its own operation as a parachute: once the ground-target is attained, the parachute stops playing its role, just as, prior to the jump, it remains undeployed. Well, I continued, same thing with the Project: it has to be conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival—not
at
, but
between
. Tapio nodded sagely as I made all this up. Was I lying to him? As I spoke, I didn’t even know.

8.5
Le Dupe
. At one point in
Tristes Tropiques
, Lévi-Strauss recounts his meeting with a tribe who don’t know what writing is. This tribe’s chief, wanting to maintain his elevated status, takes up one of Lévi-Strauss’s pads and starts to scribble on
it, figuring that his subjects won’t know the difference: he can con them into thinking that he’s versed in this activity. I’d often think about this episode as I compiled my dossiers for clients. I also thought, while interrogating my informants, of a later part of
Tristes Tropiques
, in which the subject of duping crops up once more. Having encountered endless tribes who aren’t “strange” enough—tribes who, once decoded, lose all their mystique—my hero finally alights, far up some river, on a tribe
so
fucking strange he can’t make head or tail of them. This exasperates him too: incomprehensible is no better than banal—it’s just its flip-side. But maybe, just
maybe
, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes—in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand), and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all—there might be some “ambiguous instances” in which the balance is just
right
. These instances, he tells us, would be godsends; they’d provide us with the very reasons, or excuses, for our own existence. But wouldn’t these instances, too (he asks), be cons? Who’s the real dupe of the confusion sown by observations which are carried just far enough to reach the border-line of the intelligible, only to be stopped short there? It’s as though he, Lévi-Strauss himself, were now playing the role of the phony, hand-chancing, pen-wielding chief. Will his own subordinates, he wonders—his readers, that is—be taken in? Or is he (
we
, he writes,
nous
)—are we the dupe ourselves, tricked into a situation in which we’ll never be satisfied until we’ve dissipated what he calls a
residue
that keeps our vanity, and us, ticking along?

8.6
Vanuatans have another trademark custom: the Cargo Cult. Unlike Tower Plunging, which dates back centuries, this one has very recent origins. When, during World War Two, the US Army commandeered sections of their island for the war-effort against Japan, they built airstrips. Big cargo planes landed on these, from which not only military hardware but also more mundane objects large and small—cookers, fridges, tinned food and the whole inventory of goods and appliances that supported the Americans’ extended presence there—were unloaded. The natives watched the ground crews bring these metal beasts to heel by waving ping-pong bats at them; watched them disgorge, with the help of forklifts and pneumatic platforms, their great stomachs’ bounty; watched the spinning radar beacons conjure more and more of them from empty skies; heard, wafting from open control-tower windows, transmissions swimming in a sea of static. For them, all these things appeared to be elaborate rituals, ones whose outcomes were both concrete and desirable. Who wouldn’t want a fridge in a tropical climate, or tinned food where foraging and hunting are arduous? When the war ended, the Americans decamped: dismantled all their masts and runways, packed up their fridges, washing machines, record-players and radios, and disappeared into the sky from which they’d first materialized. The Vanuatans, suddenly bereft of all the benefits of Western gadgetry, took consolation in the fact that they had learnt the rites: like anthropologists, they’d studied the bat-waving routines, learnt the choreography of military salutation, noted down the chains of tower-to-pilot scripture, and so on. They had the sequences,
the code. Over the following months, and years, and decades, they laid new matted strips down, constructed beacons and antenna-topped control towers, ping-pong bats and forklift trucks alike from balsa and bamboo. And, rotating, waving and generally manipulating these, they enacted, or re-enacted, all the ceremonies that had caused the bounty-laden planes to appear in the first place. If we do it enough, their logic went, the planes will come again. Perhaps not now, or next week, or next month—but one day, they will come.