His movement – he had straightened suddenly – must have caught the attention of one of those members of staff in praetorian pose: slinking out of the beam of her floor light, into shadow, and into soft, diffuse light again, came a girl. She was in her twenties, no older than twenty-five, dark haired. Her eyes were the most supernaturally wolfish grey, and her fringe hung in a silk curtain ending in a straight border just below her eyebrows. A name tag on her T-shirt read FONDLER.
‘What can I do for you?’
He had no answer, but said, finally, ‘I’m looking for information.’
‘Information? On …?’
‘Um.’
Her eyes, Rickard saw now, were not in fact grey but the deepest black: the grey had been a reflection in her pupils of the light from the screens.
‘On a product?’ she said.
‘No, not on a product. Information on the internet.’
‘On …?’
‘The internet.’
‘Does your query have a specific application to any of our hardware or software?’
‘I want to look something up on the internet.’
He gestured to his screen and an animated caricature of Townsend Thoresen that had appeared.
‘As you can see, the internet has vanished.’
‘That’s a screensaver, sir. Press any key and you’ll be on the internet again.’
The rest of his time he spent looking up Toni on social media and other websites. She was surprisingly easy to find – surprising, because she was not a sociable or voluble person. But here, she was everywhere, with an opinion on every matter. Most of her sentences ended in exclamation marks, but she rarely exclaimed anything in reality (meaning the real, speaking, face-to-face world, which, Rickard had to remind himself, was a world that he and Toni occupied together, at the same time, a very long time ago now, it seemed).
***
‘Well, it looks like we’ve landed ourselves in the image-sourcing business,’ said Rickard’s boss at Verbiage, Robert, overwhelmed, on his return to the office from the western midlands of Ireland where he had been trying to solicit work.
‘Images?’ said Rickard. ‘Landed?’
‘Oh boy, yeah,’ said Robert, resting his head back into the sling of his hands, and looking even a little expectant now. ‘I had a bottle of whiskey with the head of the syndicate two nights ago. They’re building a tower in the bog, eighty floors high, with a quarter of a million LCD screens on the outside and inside. He needs a different image for every single one of those screens. He’s calling it the Europa Tower. Each of the pictures has to be a painting by a famous European artist. I told him that I could deliver the images before anyone else could. He said this time six months would be fine. The money’s not great, but I think I could get more business out of these people.’
Robert set to work finding free pictures on the internet. By the end of the day he had collected some fifty pictures of paintings and put them in a folder on his computer. This folder was also accessible via Rickard’s computer. (The computers were connected in some way.) While Robert was on his lunch, Rickard opened the folder to see what his boss had found. When he clicked on one of the picture files it opened not a picture but a page of gobbledegook text (the text-encoded binary data that Robert often harvested for concrete poets). It was so stark and ugly and unanticipated – like a spider on the back of his hand – that he panicked, stabbing his keyboard and adding some text, though he immediately deleted what he thought he had added.
A couple of days later Robert announced:
‘Brilliant, Rickard! The syndicate thinks it’s great!’
And then:
‘Come on, I know you manipulated that file! I have an electronic record of when you go into what. It’s okay, Rickard. And anyway, the head of the syndicate knows what we’re about. I told him we’re chiefly a text-extraction company. This intrigues him. And he loves how Quentin Massys’s Notary’s eyes now appear to have swapped around.’
For the next six months Rickard’s job was to change the text versions of pictures that Robert found on the internet; the pictures, when opened as pictures again, would then have changed too. At the start, Rickard thought that the syndicate would soon tire of the gimmick. For the next hundred pictures that he changed he made no more effort than he had made for his first picture – he simply randomly inserted text into the code by stabbing the keyboard. But this consignment only increased the head of the syndicate’s enthusiasm for the project – he came back to Robert saying he thought the alterations ‘the work of a genius’. Deemed such, Rickard found himself taking his task more seriously. Now there were greater expectations of him, and he thought: I got lucky with one hundred and one of these pictures; what if my luck runs out, as surely, mathematically, it will over the long course ahead?
For every set of code behind each picture in the next batch he stared at his computer screen until his eyes and head throbbed with pain. He knew – or rationality told him – that there could be no making sense of the reams of Roman and Hebrew and Cyrillic characters that comprised the text-encoded binary data without knowledge of how the computer translated the binary into this gobbledegook. But then he did not want to leave his success to chance again. And so he told himself that a careful reading – again, he knew this was ridiculous – of the gobbledegook, a more thorough exposure to it, would enable him to understand how it translated back to binary, and how the binary translated to a picture.
And then a funny thing happened, four and a half thousand pictures into the project.
Plain words within the text would sometimes give a clue to the title of a picture, or who had painted the original; one day he went home knowing that the last picture he had worked on was called ‘IKB 191’. When he got home he took his Great Art Book from the shelf and looked ‘IKB 191’ up, discovering that the original had been painted by somebody called Yves Klein. The picture in the book was basically a solid block of dark blue. He knew straight away that the picture he had been looking at in text form earlier had been of a different blue to the blue of the picture in the book. He knew all this from the pattern of the code he had been combing through that day. When he went into work again the next morning he returned to the picture. He could, he knew, if he’d wanted to, have changed the picture to something near the shade of blue in the Great Art Book. He changed sections in the centre of it to a bright red instead. He understood not how he was able to know how to do this.
With every set of code now he could tell exactly what the picture looked like; fields of textual scree collected at the bottom of his mind and gathered upwards as great artworks. Not only this, he knew how the electronic renditions of the pictures – even, perhaps, something of the original versions – came together, and how they might artfully come apart; to achieve ‘X’ or ‘sigma’ effect he knew precisely what to do. He was no longer happy with randomly scrambled images; he conceived of and executed thoughtful deconstructions, though none required any great expenditure of effort. If what the head of the syndicate was seeing over in the western midlands was ‘the work of a genius’, then this, he supposed, as he raced through a day’s images, was how geniuses worked. They just understood, and they just set about. Genius! Genius! If someone had suggested to him only a few months before that he was a genius he would never have believed them. But then genius was not something that a person was born with; it was arrived at through hours and hours of practice: Mozart’s twenty thousand hours, or Mondrian’s ten thousand hours, and though Rickard had not spent ten thousand hours exposed to these encrypted pictures, perhaps he had received the equivalent in compressed form, or perhaps even had been assimilating genius itself.
‘Rickard! Rickard!’ came Robert’s voice from the muffled auditory world and the receded and blurred visual one.
‘Rickard?’ he said.
Well, he had another task for him. It was this:
Though they were some thirty thousand pictures away from completing their project for the syndi
cate, a Brazilian publisher and art connoisseur had seen many of the deconstructed pictures and wanted to bring out a book featuring a selection of them to coincide with the opening of the Europa Tower. The head of the syndicate had put the publisher directly in touch with Robert, who, the publisher had been led to understand, dealt vaguely with the written word. He wanted now ‘this genius’ – the head of the syndicate’s reference – responsible for the deconstructed pictures to write the introduction for the book. Because Verbiage was a company that re-purposed online text rather than generating original text, Robert insisted to Rickard, as a matter of professional justification, that they work from pre-existing sentences. These sentences he got from a website on which people had pasted examples of bad technical writing. Rickard’s own suggestion was that they used not the sentences as they read in English, but as they translated in code form.
‘Is that possible?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Can the sentences be translated to gobbledegook just like the pictures were translated to gobbledegook?’
‘A-ha’ – as in ‘Leave it with me’ – said Robert.
By the end of the next day, Robert presented Rickard with hundreds of encoded excerpts of bad technical writing. Or rather, the excerpts plus a sort of frosting of gobbledegook, as Robert explained; what was seemingly the bad technical writing translated to code was actually nonsense excess text that had accreted around the excerpts after Robert had emailed them to himself. (And indeed, there, embedded in the accretions, were the original excerpts in plain English, so to speak.)
‘So where does all this extra stuff come from?’ said Rickard.
‘I don’t know,’ said Robert.
Then: ‘From the fairies who live inside the internet.’
Rickard went to work on the accretions (he ignored the excerpts themselves) with the confidence he had gained and with the same rigour he had never ceased to apply while working on the pictures. This new project, however, seemed to take a lot more out of him than even the earliest pictures had. It was harder to say something in rearranged gobbledegook than it had been to rearrange something in rearranged gobbledegook. The point, of course, was that he would say something from what was already there, but from the beginning it was apparent that, to create something rather than deconstruct something – that was to say, to say something – he would need to draw on something extra that he had not needed to draw on for the pictures. Then he remembered how he had known how to put the patches of red into Yves Klein’s ‘IKB 191’, and how he had known how to change the tint of blue in it too, and soon after he chanced to catch – to actually read, or listen to, or in any case perceive – one of his own thoughts in the moment it took to relay across his brain, and he realised it was not even in English or any other spoken or written language. These things revealed, and with the confidence he already had, he knew he had everything he needed.
The idea of an introduction for this Brazilian publisher’s book explaining blah blah blah was soon abandoned. (Indeed so was the idea for a book, although the picture project was completed to the syndicate’s enormous satisfaction.) Quickly Rickard moved on to the possibility of notating thoughts untainted by having to be carried in a human language. Knowing he was on to something great emboldened him; his thoughts – characterised in mysterious symbols culled from online gobbledegook – became definite, brave, truthful, and finally incomprehensible to his bodily, delimited self.
Robert merely indulged him to begin with (the syndicate had paid them handsomely), but soon he was enthusiastically encouraging his employee. He, Robert, was an ‘imaginist’, he told Rickard. He scrunched up his eyes, walked in figure-of-eight circuits, and told Rickard that he thought the company was ‘finally going where I’d always wanted it to go; we’re getting to a level now, Rickard. I think we stand on the threshold of a new conceptual framework for non-augmented non-experiential eventfulness.’
Hearing such gobbledegook from his boss had a sudden and profound effect on Rickard; it was then that he realised that the thoughts he had been notating were not even his own. They had merely been transmissions, intercepted unknowingly, and sent on their way again. Arrogance had buried the deep but incandescent conviction that the thoughts were false ones, and just because the thoughts had been smoothly transcribed into a language that he couldn’t, as a human being, understand, didn’t make them any less false.
Other truths crept up on him. He was not what he had become. He touched his hand to his computer that always remained cool; he had never cared for these machines and the intangibles that floated between them. He preferred those other intangibles, the ones that no one was ever sure about: romance, imagination, the soul. And of tangibles, he liked, so he told himself, their limitations: the limitations of the analogue world, as he had known people describe the world just gone; and words on his clodding tongue, his voice sounding stupid, vibrating through bone and fat.
7
And so he was lowered in a great bell into the place of his imagination, where was to be found his soul anyway. The bell sealed off a circle of earth and the air inside was laden and spicy. The air only grew heavier and heavier with the traces of the dead, and, constantly circulating, gave life to the dead. Daylight came down through an ocular punched in the top and sealed off again with glass. Landed and sucked to the earth now the bell was a redoubt. Passages made of wood and hair and regurgitated paper clung to its outsides, their floors sloped in an outward-falling pitch. The passages layered and pleated the space that they carried and let in something of the outside air. The permanence of the central redoubt, the certainty of its form, the security that came from knowing it would give shelter in a catastrophe, only showed up these passages for the flimsy constructions that they were. Because of the breadth of the bell around which they wound, and because they were never built to expedite at any rate, a walk in the passages could result in lengthy and spiralling journeys. In them were encountered many lost men. They had grey and glassine faces. They came here in their distress and confusion and built the place in the shape of this confusion. They hobbled on crumbling ankles and with the pitch of the floor. Their walk was catching; caused Rickard to palm the walls. Pictures of golfers and golf holes came off in his hands. Books on business – only ever books on business – tumbled from the shelves. Some of these men had business plans, or ideas that would contribute to a larger business plan. Apart from this that they had in common – their confusion, and, for some, their business plans – they shared nothing. The point of this sanctuary was that they would be left alone in it, another silent node in a network. Rickard imagined all the nodes in the network silent and anxious, across the world. More and more he thought of these nodes as fortifications spread widely through hostile territory. Increasingly he was aware of contingencies for a future conflict.
He found himself opening a door, and then another door, and exiting the clubhouse. He was in an alleyway filled with trees whose spring blossom gave off a smell of cats’ urine. One end of the alleyway was open to the street. He came out on to the street and walked northwards and westwards and adumbrated certain thoughts he had about the coming conflict.
Meanwhile he arrived either inexorably or with militant purpose at what he considered the enemy omphalos. On the way he thought of himself as a basking shark, but not in the usual way that he thought of himself as a basking shark. Denny often encouraged Rickard and Clive to think of themselves as basking sharks. A basking shark was basically an immense cone that was nothing if not for the water that flowed around and through it. Stretching his ribs and muscle and circular cartilage to the maximum extent the singer could be in balance with his medium – external, eternal feeling – until he became the medium. The idea was to give oneself up to the currents of feeling and let them have their way. But taking the temperature of the outside air Rickard had felt nothing. And so he simply became a basking shark that was either numbed by intent or dead and given up to other currents. But that was not to say he could not at a future time find feeling on the air:
the leaders of one side in this coming conflict would do well to remember that all on their side were owners of special human gifts.
He observed the tourists in the plaza in front of the Puffball Store gathered in clusters like seahorses on the sun-warmed reef. Among the seahorses glided sharks – not basking sharks, but clean and consolidated species like mako sharks or great whites. His eyes alighted on one young man – in a plain blue T-shirt and baggy brown trousers and glasses with thick frames and carrying a shoulder bag – who might have been the very emblem of this type if he did not move as sluggishly as he did smoothly, and whose beard was as untidy as it was neat. Rickard had tended to think of the combatants on one side as Youth, or Whites, or Sharks, and on the other side as Lived, or Blacks, or Eagles/Owls, but he would come up with better names, because this young man exhibited none of the characteristics of a shark.
It was easy, too, to identify the one person who, in the glut of his totality, was firmly on the other side: the flushed and flabby sixtysomething standing on the spot, dabbing from one foot to the other, owing to fallen arches, or to feeling lost, or probably to a combination of the two. This was a creature to be pitied, and naturally to be allied with. What was he doing here? This man had come to the plaza to see what all the ‘fuss’ was about. Now he knew what the ‘fuss’ was about. The ‘fuss’ was a fuzz that rattled along every nerve and told him on a sub-awareness level exactly what it was about. For now, and likely until such a time as violence shuddered him to full knowledge, all the man understood about the ‘fuss’ was a sadness. At some time in the past, this square, for this man, had been the most public of New York’s public spaces. Perhaps like others he had dreamt of one day announcing his fame here. He didn’t know what form this announcement or fame would take, just as he didn’t fully understand why neither of these would now happen. All he could clearly picture was a bunch of sad carnations in his own terrified hands. Both he and Rickard had made their way, on this day, each for his own reason, to this seditious detail on an enlightened planner’s map.
Green Glowing Skull Page 10