by Tom McCarthy
6.
6.1 The following week, I organized a meeting with a bunch of civil servants who were working on Koob-Sassen. The idea was that they’d sit in a room and discuss their sense of what the Project entailed, or, more subtly, implied. We had, in the Company’s offices, a room purpose-built for such discussions. It had loungers, sofas, armchairs, even beanbags—all chosen to induce as relaxed and casual an atmosphere as possible, so that the discussion’s participants could just chew the fat while we watched them through a two-way mirror that formed one of the room’s walls. It never worked that way, of course: people always knew that they were being watched, assessed, recorded. It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesis devised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems—the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison—cyanide, say—would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through—well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc, peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.
6.2 Thus it was, after a manner, with the subjects I’d observe through the fake mirror. These civil servants knew without being told what was expected of them—not by me, nor even by their bosses, their immediate superiors to whom they could attribute a name and face and rank, but rather by some larger and much vaguer host of assessors, overviewers, judges, lurking on the far side of some other two-way mirror much, much larger, if less obvious, than this one—and were shaping their contributions accordingly. They kept using the word “excitement” (one hundred and eighty-two occurrences over three hours); also “challenge” (one hundred and four); “opportunity” (eighty-nine); “transformation” (seventy-eight); and, as an upscale variant on this last word, “re-configuration” (sixty-three). They reclined in their loungers, stretched their legs out from their beanbags, tried to exude nonchalance and calm—but to me they transmitted tenseness and unease, like anxious cats.
6.3 The way iodine works, said Petr when we met later that week in the same pub as last time—what it does, is it recognizes thyroid cancer-cells and zaps them. Say each cancer-cell was like a coin—a certain type, from a specific period, with an exact denomination—well, iodine is trained to spot this coin and melt it back down, take it out of circulation. That sounds pretty straight-forward, I said. You’ll be cured, then. Ah, he replied: in principle it sounds straight-forward. But in practice it turns out to be a little harder than I thought. He paused. How do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, say one of these coins is degraded, or a little different, through some quirk of the mint—the way a machine-part was lying the day that it was pressed, a piece of grit that found its way into the mix, a hundred other permutation-causing factors we could mention: then the iodine can’t recognize it, since these variations haven’t been included in its recognition-software. So the coin, the cancer-cell, not only stays in circulation; it sets up its own mint and prints new copies of itself, each one corrupt, unrecognizable as well; and then these introduce new variations and new mint-quirks of their own, until the iodine has no idea what it’s even supposed to be looking for, throws its hands up, mutters Fuck this! and heads off home. It’s a systems problem, Petr said. If we had a better database, then I’d be out of danger.
6.4 One afternoon, while sorting through the transcript of the civil-servant dialogues down in the basement, I poked my head into Daniel’s office again. This time I found him staring at footage that showed hundreds of legs gliding through city streets. I say “gliding” because that’s what they were doing, rather than (say) walking or running. The legs, I realized after a few seconds, belonged to roller-bladers: lots of roller-bladers, skating past the camera—which itself, since it was moving, was (presumably) being held by somebody also on roller-blades. How’s the Great Report coming along? Daniel asked. Oh, you know, I said: it’s coming along slowly; still finding its shape. Look at the way they move, said Daniel, without turning his head towards me. I looked: the bladers’ heads all angled forwards, focused on a spot beyond the picture’s frame, some point on which they were advancing. It wasn’t a race: there was no urgency to their pace. More like a Friday-evening meet-up (it was dark; the streets were lit), with most people just ambling forwards, or sliding from one side of the moving column to the other, or letting the column’s body flow ahead of them a little as they waited for an acquaintance to catch up, or checked their phone for messages, or fiddled with the music they had plugged into their ears.
6.5 I shot it in Paris, Daniel said, still facing away from me towards the wall. I’m going there next week, I told him. It’s an MSP, he said, ignoring me. What’s that? I asked. Manifestation sans Plainte, he answered. That’s the legal term for it, as set out in the license granted by the Paris mairie: a Demonstration With No Complaint. Oh, I said; and we watched the footage in silence for a little longer. The roller-bladers kept on gliding by. They didn’t have to make much of an effort to progress, since the street’s surface was quite smooth. This gave them all a kind of languid look. Paris, Daniel explained when I commented on the pavement’s texture, has the smoothest street surface of any major European city. It’s because of sixty-eight, he said, the general uprisings, when revolutionaries pulled up all the cobblestones to throw them at the cops. They even had a slogan stirring them to do this: Underneath the paving stones, the beach! After that, he explained, the authorities replaced the paving stones with tarmac—which had the unforeseen effect of turning the city into a paradise for roller-bladers.
6.6 I kept thinking about the dead parachutist. The circumstances of the incident recalled a chapter from my own childhood. I can pinpoint, with complete precision, the episode that set me on my career path: it occurred when, at the age of seven, I happened to watch, one rainy Sunday afternoon, a documentary—an old one, from the early sixties—about South Pacific islanders. These people, Vanuatans, engaged once a year in a peculiar ritual: the men would climb a high and rickety-looking wooden tower and, goaded on by their womenfolk, who chanted songs of exhortation, leap from the top of this, head first. They wore vines round their ankles, cut to such a length that they would tauten just before the men’s torsos crashed into the earth below. After watching the documentary, I’d climb up my younger sisters’ bunk-bed and, fastening T-shirts and pyjamas round my ankles and the bedpost, leap repeatedly, head first, towards the carpet. If a Vanuatan hesitated or refused a dive, his womenfolk would whip themselves with thorns and nettles, to shame him into action; I made my sisters whip themselves with flannels. I performed the ritual for several days, until a dislocated shoulder and my parents’ veto brought an end to it—but by then, the documentary had done its work. From that time onwards, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them: anthropologist.
6.7 So, with this parachutist: I’d already, as I mentioned, figured out the crime’s location (the sky). The question remained, though, of timing. In other words: at what precise point in time had he actually been murdered? When the equipment had been sabotaged? If he’d survived the fall—been greeted by a sudden upgust of ground-wind,
say, or landed in soft, deep snow, or in the branches of a fir-tree that, pliant and supple, had broken his fall incrementally as he tumbled through them, each layer shaving a little more velocity away until the last layer rolled him gently onto needle-covered earth—if any of these miracles (of which popular lore is, after all, quite full) had taken place, the act of sabotage wouldn’t have constituted murder. Yet, as at least one article I read stated, the man’s death was, in this instance—in this country devoid of tall pine trees, this terrain quite unamenable to upgusts, this snow-less season—a foregone conclusion from the moment the cords had been cut. Thus, although he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours—days, perhaps—of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it) been murdered without realizing it. I tried to picture him walking around in that state: already effectively dead, his body and his consciousness, his experiences, and, beyond these, his experience of his experiences—his awareness of himself, his whole reality—mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams.
6.8 The Great Report: this needs explaining. It was Peyman’s idea. When he first hired me, as he shook my hand to welcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. The Great Report? I asked, my hand still clenched in his; what’s that? The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? Could you elaborate? I asked. Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins’ mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only as an abstract concept, like adultery for children; and, waving with big, gap-toothed smiles, they send you back to your study—where, khakis swapped for cotton shirt and tie, saliva-liquor for the Twinings, tisane or iced Scotch your housekeeper purveys you on a tray, you write the book: that’s what I mean, he said. Not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name.
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, shapings, 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 h
ad 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.