Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  12.

  12.1 Petr was admitted to hospital in mid-January. The cancer had spread all round his body. It was particularly bad in his lungs. They’d started to fill up with fluid, which meant he couldn’t really breathe. So the doctors had drilled holes in his chest to drain the fluid out through. When I visited him, in a ward full of people who were obviously dying, he was propped up in a bed with these tubes leading from his chest (one from each side) towards a translucent plastic receptacle about the size and shape of a car battery. He had other tubes extending from his arms too: insulin-drips and morphine-feeders, things like that. He looked like Caesar in the famous dream his wife Calpurnia describes: a perforated statue from which streams of bright-red life-blood gush forth, irrigating all of Rome; only the fluid flowing out of Petr’s chest was pink—a lurid and synthetic pink that had an effervescent quality, like Cherryade. We chatted for a while, and as we did, whenever a part of him, a shoulder or a shin or a bit of chest, protruded from under the bedsheets, I would notice various smudgy, dark lumps pushing up beneath the skin. He had one just above his ankle; it was more than dark—it was black. The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all. This upset me, much more than the fact of Petr’s illness did. For crying out loud, I felt like shouting to the nurse, ward manager, whoever: if you can’t save these people, at least clean the windows.

  12.2 The next week brought a massive disappointment: I discovered that my parachutist theory didn’t work. It was bogus; full of shit. The basic logistics of packing and storage, the security measures put in place to prevent tampering, and so forth—all this rendered it impossible. For example: divers, all divers, use only their own, personal packs, for which they are at all times responsible. They keep these in a special locker, to which they alone hold the key; when the packs are out of this, they never leave them unattended, never let them slip from their sight. I learned this from a piece of correspondence I’d started a month previously with a parachute-club safety officer. I read his email as I sat in the same spot in which I’d first made my “discovery,” my dud one. The shock and disappointment I experienced as I read it were worse than those I would have had had the email told me my house and goods were all being confiscated, or that, as a result of some maternity-ward mix-up, I wasn’t actually who I thought I was. It, too, was visceral; it made me feel first sick, then utterly depleted. After I’d read the email, I sat there for a long time, looking through the window. The sky, now, was grey and murky. It was cold. It was only January, but the year already seemed jaded and old. I felt a deep depression coming on.

  12.3 Write Everything Down, said Malinowski. But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. Walk down any stretch of street and you’re being filmed by three cameras at once—and even if you aren’t, the phone you carry in your pocket pinpoints and logs your location at each given moment. Each website that you visit, every click-through, every keystroke is archived: even if you’ve hit delete, wipe, empty trash, it’s still lodged somewhere, in some fold or enclave, some occluded avenue of circuitry. Nothing ever goes away. And as for the structures of kinship, the networks of exchange within whose web we’re held, cradled, created—networks whose mapping is the task, the very raison d’être, of someone like me: well, those networks are being mapped, that task performed, by the software that tabulates and cross-indexes what we buy with who we know, and what they buy, or like, and with the other objects that are bought or liked by others who we don’t know but with whom we cohabit a shared buying- or liking-pattern. Pondering these facts, a new spectre, an even more grotesque realization, presented itself to me: the truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but—quite the opposite—that it had already been written. Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script—that that’s what it was. And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. This Great Report, once it came into being, would, from that point onwards, have existed always, since time immemorial; and nothing else would really matter. But who could read it? From what angle, vantage-point or platform, accessed through what exit-jetty leading to what study (since all studies and all jetties were already written into it), could it be viewed, surveyed, interpreted? None, of course: none and no one. Only another piece of software could do that.

  12.4 These ponderings had another consequence: around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Report but also towards Koob-Sassen underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the Project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous. In fact, downright evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it … I started picturing it, picturing its very letters (the K a body-outline, the Ss folds of cloak, the hyphen a dagger hidden between these), slinking up staircases in the night while people slept, a silent assassin. That’s how I started seeing it. I couldn’t, at first, put my finger on a particular aspect or effect of it, nor on a specific instigator or beneficiary, that was itself inherently and unambiguously bad. But after a while I started telling myself that it was precisely this that made it evil: its very vagueness rendered it nefarious and sinister and dangerous. In not having a face, or even body, the Project garnered for itself enormous and far-reaching capabilities, while at the same time reducing its accountability—and vulnerability—to almost zero. What was to criticize, or to attack? There was no building, no Project Headquarters or Central Co-ordination Bureau. What person, then? The Minister with Shoes? She was no evil mastermind; she had no greater overview of the whole Project than I did. Her immediate boss, a man whose intellectual capacities (like all aristocrats, he was inbred) were held in almost open contempt by even his own cabinet members? The Project was supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything—and infra- too: that’s what made it so effective, and so deadly. I continued to ponder these things even as I laboured on, week-in, week-out, to help usher the Project into being, to help its first phase go live; and as I did, the more I pondered, ruminated, what you will, the more thoughts of this nature festered.

  12.5 I started to reassess my own part in it all. I won’t, as I’ve already stated, go into particulars; but suffice to say that my own role was tiny—tiny and lowly. I was, quite literally, underground: secreted down among Koob-Sassen’s, as among the Company’s, foundations, its underpinnings. This afforded me no power to shape the Project in a formal or official way—but to un-shape it, sabotage it even … That, I started whispering to myself, was another matter. Given license to burrow, could I not sniff out central axes and supports, and undermine them? Granted access to all areas, could I not lift a spanner from my tool-bag and, when no one else was looking, drop this in the engine rooms, jamming Project-cogs and Project-levers? Koob-Sassen may have been a giant reservoir into which flowed many tributaries—but I, being trusted to dip test-tubes into and take readings from any of these, was primed to slip out of my lab-coat’s inner pocket a small phial, let trickle out of this a poison that, administered in even the minutest, most diluted form, could decimate whole populaces. Something as simple as providing faulty data, an intervention so mouse-like at point-of-entry, might engender, three or so steps down the chain, a sewer-monster of gargantuan proportions that, Godzilla-like, would rise up and smash everything; or issuing erroneous interpretations and assertions, or even insinuations, could lead to key decisions being made later that were catastrophically bad ones, circuits being wired and switche
s being thrown exactly the wrong way. I could do it, if I wanted: I could torch the fucker …

  12.6 These fantasies grew on me. In my mind, I saw administrative buildings, bunkers, palaces come crashing down, heard glass splintering, stone tumbling, saw flames licking the skies: the Reichstag, Hindenburg, the falls of Troy and Rome, all rolled into one. And then my cohorts, that semi-occluded network of covert anthropologists I’d dreamed into being already: they could join me in the cause. Together, we could turn Present-Tense Anthropology™ into an armed resistance movement: I pictured them all scurrying around to my command, setting the charges, using their ethnographic skills to foment riots, to assemble lynch-mobs, to make urban space itself, its very fabric, rise up in revolt. I saw manholes erupting; cables spontaneously combusting; office wi-fi clouds crackling their way to audibility, causing hordes of schizoid bureaucrats, heads given over to cacophonies of voices, to flee their desks and tear about the streets, blood trickling from their ears … I had these visions as I sat down in my basement, rode the tube, or drifted off to sleep.

  12.7 I visited Petr in hospital again. The worst thing about dying, he told me as I sat between his bed and the smudged windows, is that there’s no one to tell about it. What do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, throughout my life I’ve always lived significant events in terms of how I’ll tell people about them. What I mean is that even during these events I would be formulating, in my head, the way that I’d describe them later. Ah, I tried to tell him: that’s a buffering probl … but Petr wasn’t listening. The dying want to impart, not imbibe. When I was eighteen and I found myself in Berlin the day the Wall fell, he went on, as I watched the people streaming over, clambering up on it, hacking it down, I was rehearsing how to recount it all to friends after I got back home. I watched the people sitting on the wall, chipping at it with their chisels, and the guards standing around not knowing what to do … That’s what I was thinking, he said, what was running through my head, right in the moment that I watched them chiseling and chipping. Same as when I saw the shootout in Amsterdam. What shootout? I said. Didn’t I ever tell you about that? he asked. No, I answered. I found myself caught in the middle of a shootout between Russian gangsters as I came out of a restaurant, he explained. They were all firing from behind lamp-posts, dustbins, cars and so on, and I ducked into an alleyway and one of them was right there with me, holding this huge pistol, a gold one, which he balanced on the back of one hand as he shot it with the other. Wow, I said. Yes, Petr nodded—but the point is, that even as I cowered behind this gangster in this alleyway, I was practicing relating the episode when it was over. He had a huge pistol—a gold one, no less! And he balanced it like this … and it recoiled like that … Or: I was just ten feet away from him … I thought that he might turn his gun on me, but he ignored me … Trying out different ways of telling it, you see? Well, now, I’m about to undergo the mother, the big motherfucker, of all episodes—and I won’t be able to dine out on it! Even if there turns out to be a Heaven or whatever, which there won’t—but even if there does, I still won’t be able to, since everyone else there will have lived through the same episode, i.e., dying, and they’ll all go: So what? That’s boring. We know all that shit. So it’s lose-lose. Do you see my quandary? Yes, I said; I see that could be a problem.

  12.8 The idea of Present-Tense Anthropology™ as armed struggle excited me. I thought of the seventies in Germany: the way those Baader-Meinhof people—highly educated, liberal-arts degrees in their back pockets—ran around causing mayhem. They wore such good clothes! Shirts with big, big collars; aviator sunglasses; flared cords. And they’d have sex with one another all the time: turn up at a safe-house in Munich, Düsseldorf, it didn’t matter where, give the sign, show you’re one of them, and boom! straight into bed. Same with the Patty Hearst gang in America: the funky heiress, honour-roll fine-art student, banging all those revolutionaries in her closet. I printed an image of her off the Internet and pinned it to my office wall. She wasn’t actually that hot; it was the gun she held that made her sexy. I did the same with Ulrika Meinhof, who had a similar look about her: kind of plain and big-boned too. That didn’t matter, though, I figured: my network of highly educated, highly trained subversives, armed with the very latest, anthropology-derived search-and-destroy techniques, would be the sexiest, best-dressed, most orgasmic revolutionaries ever.

  12.9 One evening, I confided to Madison my dream of vandalizing everything, of using my insider status to wreak sabotage upon the Project. I knew a boy like you once, she said when I’d finished. Nobody had called me a boy in a long time. It was strange; I kind of liked it. But the thing is, she continued, turning from me in the bed, it won’t be you doing the wreaking and the vandalizing. Oh? I said. Who will it be then? She turned half-back again, sat up, lit a cigarette and said: It isn’t revolutionaries and terrorists who make nuclear power plants melt and blow their tops, or electricity grids crash, or automated trading systems go all higgledy-piggledy and write their billions down to pennies in ten minutes—they all do that on their own. You boys, she said, as once again I felt a double-pang of compliment and slight, are sweet. You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain’s factory that he’s just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion’s taking place already—it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice …

  12.10 I sat facing her in silence. I didn’t know what to reply. I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette, scrunching its small stub onto a saucer lying beside the bed, then went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, though, thinking about what she’d said. Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact—the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies—for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture—the one that’s turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization’s perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind’s face.

  12.11 That night, I eventually had a splendid dream. A rich and vivid one: one full of splendour. I was flying, like Daniel and Peyman in their helicopter, over a harbour by a city. It was a great, imperial city, the world’s greatest—all of them, from all periods: Carthage, London, Alexandria, Vienna, Byzantium and New York, all superimposed on one another the way things are in dreams. We’d left the city and were flying above the harbour. This was full of bustle: tug-boats, steamers, yachts, you name it, bobbing and crisscrossing in water whose ridges and wave-troughs glinted in the sun, though it was nighttime. Out in the harbour—some way out, separated from the city by swathes of this choppy water—was an excrescence, a protuberance, a lump: an island. Was it man-made? Possibly. Its sides rose steeply from the sea; they were constructed of cement, or old bricks. The island was dark in hue; yet, like the sea, it seemed somehow lit up. As we approached it—flying quite low, parallel to the water—the buildings on it loomed larger and larger. These buildings—huge, derelict factories whose outer walls and rafters, barely intact, recalled the shells of bombed cathedrals—ran one into the next to form a single giant, half-ruined complex that covered the island’s entire surface area. Inside this complex, rubbish was being burnt: it was a trash-incinerating plant. Giant mountains of the stuff were piled up in its great, empty halls, rising in places almost to where the ceiling would have been. They were being burnt slowly, from the inside, with a smouldering, rather than roaring, fire. Whence the glow: like embers when you poke them, the
mounds’ surfaces, where cracked or worn through by the heat, were oozing a vermilion shade of yellow. It was this glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash-mountain’s main body, that made the scene so rich and vivid, filled it with a splendour that was regal. Yes, regal—that was the strange thing: if the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse—the other place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn’t function; yet it seemed, in its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served. We were homing right in on it now: descending in our chopper through the factory-cathedral’s shell, skimming the rubbish-piles as walls and rafters towered above us, gazing in awe and fascination at the glowing ooze, its colours as they morphed from vermilion yellow to mercurial silver, then on to purple, umber, burnt sienna, the foil-like flashing of its folds and gashes as light flowed across them. And, as we skimmed and veered and marvelled, a voice—the helicopter pilot’s maybe, or some kind of commentator, or perhaps, as before with the roller-blader half-dream, just my own—announced, clearly and concisely: Satin Island.

  12.12 I woke up. Madison was still asleep. It was just five o’clock. I pulled my clothes on and went home. Arriving there, I sat at my desk. Below me, on its surface, lay the wreckage of the Great Report’s aborted launch. Outside, the day was, once more, grey. Small specks of water hung about the air. The courtyard, the pond, the concrete stepping-slabs set in it, the glass and concrete of the buildings all around, the general graphite texture of the dawn—these things seemed, in that moment, both consistent, all forming a single object with a single membrane, and, at the same time, porous, like some kind of wrapper that was starting to leak whatever content it was meant to keep wrapped up. Not fully awoken, still enfolded in my dream, I seemed to be consistent with this membrane too, to partake of its leakage. Leaning forwards with my forearm horizontal, perpendicular to the table, I used it to push a coffee cup and sundry other objects to one side. Then I wrote, with a pencil, directly on the blotter paper, on a small patch of it the forearm-pushing had exposed, the two words from my dream: Satin Island. Then I went and had a shower.