Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  10.8 My fifteen minutes? I’d say, noticing the organizer in the wings, hidden from the audience’s view but not from mine, fidgeting with his watch or walkie-talkie, the next scheduled speaker standing awkwardly beside him. What is a quarter-hour, or century, compared to this? Is not the flow of oil the flow of time itself: slowly but inevitably crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline? It embodies time, contains it: future, present, past. How many epochs (with this word I’d pause, as though distracted by the slight, fleeting intrusion of some parallel universe, before pawing the thought away)—how many epochs of pre-history are lodged in this Paleozoic ooze? What back-catalogues of Vendian biota, proto-Cnidarians and Ediacara, their amalgamated urolites and coprolites and burrows, their trace-fossils? To genuinely contemplate, gentlemen, even the smallest drop—to attend to it faithfully, exhaustively—would be to let time expand beyond its Ordovician and Precambrian borders, till it overflowed all measurable limits. When oil spills, Earth opens its archives. That it takes the form of vinyl when it hardens is no chance occurrence; what those men in body-suits on beaches should be doing is not brushing it away but lowering a needle to its furrows and replaying it all, and amplifying it all the while to boot: up and up, exponentially, until from littoral to plain to mountain, land to sky and back to sea again, the destiny of every trilobite resounds. Thank you. Thank you. I’d step back from the lectern and begin to leave the podium, but the cheering would be so clamorous that I’d be forced to come back time and again, to take another bow. Delegates would be surging forwards, address books open, business cards stretched out towards me, their numbers overwhelming the security personnel who tried to hold them back. Thank you, I’d say. Thank you. Thank you once again. I’ll see you in the sauna. Thus passed the week.

  11.

  11.1 Sensational development in the skydiving murder case: the police (the following week’s news pages informed their readers) had arrested one of his pall-bearers. The suspect, the victim’s best friend, had been on the same dive. They’d been inseparable; the suspect had even been the best man at his wedding. No more details could be given at this point: the thing was presumably sub judice. There was, however, one more sentence tagged on at the end; a sentence that, while seemingly just factual and neutral, managed to imply a wealth of supposition. It announced that the dead parachutist’s wife, herself also a parachutist, was “helping police with their enquiries.” The insinuation, of course, was that she’d colluded with the pall-bearing best man—who, it would follow, was her lover. A love-triangle, elevated from the altar to the sky! I marked its various vectors on my walls: lines linking DP (Dead Parachutist) to BM (Best Man) to W (Wife); and each of these to H1 (Harness One), H2, H3; and SR (Storage Room) to AP (Aeroplane); BR1 (Bedroom One, the conjugal one) to BR2 (its adulterous counterpart)… It was more than just a triangle: it was a web, a tangle of competing sections, intersections, blind spots, unfolding like so many strands till now compressed and hidden in a parachute’s sealed bridle; lines that eventually converged, like cords descending from a canopy, on a single spot at my diagram’s base—a spot that represented, naturally, not love but death.

  11.2 A trip to Stockholm helped bring into focus a small insight I’d had into Madison, the workings of her mind. Each time I’d been abroad, she’d phoned me, full of lust and longing, to demand my swift return; yet, whenever I’d actually been with her, this lust and longing had been missing. We’d had sex, of course, but even then she’d given the impression of being absent, somewhere else. Each time we did it, I’d watch her face. Her eyes would remain closed for most of the encounter; then, as she approached her orgasm, they’d open. But that didn’t mean she’d look at me, or at anything else for that matter: as her eyelids slid up, the eyes themselves would roll up with them, and continue rolling after the lids had stopped, until their centres, those small circles of intelligence and colour that you think of as the apertures leading to what’s behind the eyes, to their owner’s being or essence or whatever, were almost completely occluded—just two small, gelatinous segments remaining, moons of pupil thumbnailed by the overlay of skin. Each time this happened (and it happened every time), I’d find myself transported back to Turin Airport: to that laptop screen on which her face had first appeared and then been frozen in mid-gesture. The expression was the same. It got so that I felt I was penetrating not her but rather, through her, that other moment: that long, stretched-out moment, its endless buffering. I would think, again, about the shroud, the not-Christ figure’s upturned eyes; and I’d remember Madison telling me that she, too, had visited that airport, back in 2001, and her not answering my question as to how this came about. The result, the upshot of this repeating cluster of associations, was that Turin, Torino-Caselle, took on over time a kind of sacred aspect: this airport, this slow-spinning hub, this thorn-crown of delay, became, for me, the site of a divine mystery. Approaching and re-entering it, crossing, time after time, its portal, I, too, would become lost in spasms of paralysis.

  11.3 In the basement next to me that week, Daniel was watching pretend zombies. They marched across his wall on one of those parades; lurching slowly through the streets, their heads lolling from side to side, their eyes, like Madison’s and the video-file’s fishes’, vacant. There were young ones, old ones, even children taking part. Some wore business clothes, some military uniforms, others firemen’s outfits, evening gowns, tracksuits, pyjamas. There were nurses, bridal couples, traffic wardens, fast-food restaurant workers, skateboarders, mothers with zombified babies, hospital patients, clowns. Some of these pretend zombies carried pretend brains, or hearts, or limbs, which they would gnaw at intermittently. Stewards in yellow jackets, themselves daubed in pretend blood, kept the procession to one side of the road, away from traffic. The odd mounted policeman could be seen as well. The pretend zombies lurched past offices and cafés, across traffic intersections, petrol-station forecourts, bridges, civic squares. What city’s that? I asked Daniel. What does it matter? he replied. They have zombie parades everywhere now.

  11.4 Then, after holding and questioning him for forty-eight hours, the police released the pall-bearing best man. They sprung him without charge, making it clear that they no longer thought he was in any way accountable for his friend’s death. In his place, though, they arrested a second member of the club. This one, also well-known to victim, wife, best friend and all, hadn’t been on the dive; but he’d had access to the room in which the rigs had all been stored. They also held and questioned him for two days—then released him, once more without making any kind of charge. Over the next two weeks they made four more arrests, each of which ended in an unconditional discharge. They arrested the club secretary; then a senior instructor; then the cleaner; then a member of the canteen staff. Eventually they stopped making arrests: presumably they’d run out of people to slap cuffs on. They started looking down the suicide route instead: exploring the possibility that the victim had sabotaged his own chute. This, too, proved a false trail: the man turned out to have been happy, and to have shown no melancholic tendencies. After this, the whole thing started going quiet; news pages and newspapers all dropped the story. To plug the gap this left in my life, I transferred my attention to the skydiving mysteries in Canada and Poland and New Zealand. Nobody in the media seemed to have noticed, or at least attributed any significance to, the fact that the episode, its variants, were appearing concurrently on three separate continents. This, too, excited me: that I alone was starting to pick up the outline of a set of permutations, to discern a morphology at work. I say “concurrently,” but in fact the overseas cases weren’t quite in kilter with the British one: they lagged slightly behind it, and one another. Nonetheless, a similar sequence was playing out in each: a flurry of arrests and speculation, then a dwindling away as all the trails turned cold.

  11.5 The Great Report. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts how, after spending months on end among the Nambikwara, with no prospect of escape in sight
(the rainy season, rivers flooded and un-navigable, all the perks he’d brought with him—food, wine, bottled water, cigarettes—consumed or traded off, clothes damp and rotten as the hut whose dripping walls and ceiling beat out the slow, metronomic rhythm of his days), bored out of his skull and starting to fall prey to what he later called a “mental disorder” that can afflict anthropologists, he started to compose an epic drama. For six days my hero wrote from morning till night on the back of sheets of paper containing his research notes. The drama’s plot involved a Roman emperor and his assassin, and a grand exploration of the themes of glory, power, nature and annihilation. I picture him writing it, cold and rheumatic on interminable afternoons. No, scratch that: what I actually picture is the paper that he writes it on: on one side, columns of Nambikwara words and phrases, transcriptions of tattoos, diagrams of the village’s huts’ layout, with attempts to correlate these with the tribe’s wider myth and kinship structures, which he’s extrapolated and laid out in graphs and tables—then, on the other side, the play. On one side, scientific, evidence-based research; on the other, epic art. If my Report had come to be completed, which side of the paper would it have been written on? More to the point: to which side does this not-Report you’re reading now, this offslew of the real, unwritten manuscript, belong? Perhaps to neither side, but to the middle: the damp, pulpy mass that forms the opaque body at whose outer limits, like two mirages, the others hover.

  11.6 You still haven’t told me how you came to be in that airport, I said to Madison as we lay in bed one evening. There’s lots of things I haven’t told you, she replied. If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world. If knowing everything about a person were the be-all and end-all of human interaction, she said, we’d just carry memory-sticks around and plug them into one another when we met. We could have little ports, slits on our sides, like extra mouths or ears or sex organs, and we’d slip these sticks in and upload, instead of talking or screwing or whatever. Would you like that, Mr. Anthropologist? No, I told her; I don’t want to know everything about you. This was true: I hadn’t asked her very much about herself at all—her family, her background, any of that stuff—not back in Budapest when we’d first met, and not since, either. Our liaison had been based throughout on minimum exchange of information. I don’t want to know everything about you, I repeated. I just want to know what you were doing in Turin. I wasn’t in Turin, she said again. Torino-Caselle, I replied; whatever. Why? she asked. I’m intrigued, I told her. What, professionally? she goaded me. That’s right, I said: professionally. Well then you’ll have to pay me, she said.

  11.7 Back at my flat, over the following week, objects started impinging on my desktop clearing. At first it was coffee cups; then letters, which brought bills and take-away menus in their wake; then, once these had pitched camp on the leather, plates of half-eaten food and handkerchiefs and random pocket-contents came blithely by and stayed, since I no longer had the will to evict them. It wasn’t laziness, but something much worse. I’d begun to suspect—in fact, I’d become convinced—that this Great Report was un-plottable, un-frameable, unrealizable: in short, and in whatever cross-bred form, whatever medium or media, un-writable. Not just by me, with my limited (if once celebrated) capabilities, but fundamentally, essentially, inherently un-writable. It wasn’t just the fact that there could no more be a Lévi-Strauss 2.0 than a second Leibniz; beyond this, I grew exasperated every time I tried to picture, even in the most abstract of ways, a mechanism capable of managing and arresting, let alone pinning down and mapping the dynamics, processes and patterns—social, anthropological, historical, micro- and macro, what-you-will—that the Report would have to somehow turn into its content, these entities that kept proliferating every which way, from every which turn and juncture, at every which moment. My exasperation led me, each time, to the same conclusion: that it simply wasn’t possible. Peyman, it struck me, must have known this; he was too clever not to. Why, then, had he commissioned it from me? Paranoid thoughts started popping up inside my head. I pictured Peyman back, once more, with all his moguls, mover-shakers and connectors, laughing at me, laughing at the thought that I could have believed, even for a moment, he was serious … Even when I reasoned these last, deranged notions back out to the fringes of my mind, I was still left with the immovable fact of the thing’s un-writability. This filled me with anger, and a feeling of stupidity, and sadness, too—grief not for an actual loss but, worse, for a potential or imaginary one: this beautiful, magnificent Report; this book, the Book, the fucking Book, that was to name our era, sum it up; this book that left the format of the book itself behind, this book-beyond-the-book; and, beyond even this, the tantalizing and elusive possibility of transubstantiated now-ness, live-ness it was to inaugurate—the possibility, that is, of Present-Tense Anthropology™. All that was gone. Which, in turn, raised the question: What was I still there for?

  11.8 Christmas came and went. Parties; provincial exile; a return to London more relieved than joyous; more parties. On the 1st of January I found myself sitting, once more, beside my desk and blotter, looking through the window at the dawn. I always wake up early after drinking. It was a clear dawn, a good one to usher the new year in. The first phase of the Project would be going live this year. I looked at the pond, this site (since I’d rescued the girl there) of a minor resurrection, and thought of Vanuatans once again. On New Year’s Day, the men ride out on horses or just run about a stretch of pasture firing arrows up into the air: straight up, more or less vertically. The arrows, naturally, fall back down, with pretty much the same velocity as that with which they flew up in the first place. The men ride or run around until an arrow lands on one of them and kills him. Then they stop: the ritual demands that one man must be taken every year. Hungover, jaded, generally un-invigorated by the world, I found myself, in reverie, wishing—just as I had as a child when jumping from my sisters’ bed—that I could be one of these Vanuatan warriors, galloping about the fields, new-year’s wind biting at my cheeks, death whistling all around me, whistling me to life …

  11.9 Still sitting at my desk and blotter, I looked up at the sky and thought these thoughts. At the same time, I thought about my parachutist once again—with the result that the two scenarios, the Vanuatan new-year arrow-shooting ritual and the fatal sky-diving escapade, merged into one. And suddenly, as though out of the sky itself, with all the speed and penetration of an arrow hurtling to earth, a major revelation came to me. In that instant, I saw the truth behind the parachutist case with total clarity: it was a Russian Roulette pact! The members of the club, or at least a clique within their larger congregation, had made an illicit deal among themselves. No longer satisfied with the adrenaline-hit they got from simply jumping from a plane, they’d upped the stakes, the ante, upped them to the biggest one imaginable, by secretly agreeing to sabotage a single parachute and throw it back into the general pile of packs. No one would know which pack they’d sabotaged, since they all looked the same. And there’d always be surplus packs, of course: the bad one might lie around unused for a year, two years, forever. Or, of course, it might be used at any time: on this jump, right now … They’d never know: that’s why they did it, just like Russian Roulette players. I was certain of this. I was more certain of it than of anything before or since. The triangles, the lines and vectors all made sense now: it seemed to me, in that instant, that I’d solved not just a private puzzle but a fundamental riddle of our time. And not just a single riddle either: the Canadian case, the Polish and New Zealand ones—these, I was certain, were Russian Roulette pacts as well. It was a cult, dispersed, like my own covert anthropologists, around the globe! The realization was enormous—almost as visceral as the ritual it unmasked. It made the blood rush suddenly to my head as I shouted Fuck! Fuck!—not in anger but in awe; to no one, in the middle of my living room: the same reaction I’d had when I watched the Twin Towers falling down on live TV. I paced about quite frantically; I couldn�
�t sit, or even stand still. What to do with this incredible knowledge? Go to the police? It was bigger than that, bigger than solving a crime; bigger even than the (now-defunct) Great Report. I’d made a genuine discovery, a breakthrough, on the scale of Schrödinger’s or Einstein’s. Of this I was quite certain. Fuck! I shouted, one more time; then I sat down, shot through with revelation. The year would be a glorious one.