Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  12.13 I couldn’t shake the dream off all day: it sat right at the centre of my mind, consuming all my thoughts. Later, in the office, I took Patty and Ulrike down and pinned up in their place a bunch of images of barges carrying rubbish out to the Fresh Kills landfill site in New York Harbor. Staten Island: that’s what that part of town was called—the fifth, forgotten borough, the great dump. That this place—both its name and function—had prompted my own dream seemed obvious: my sleeping mind had done little more than change Staten into Satin. I found the images online: pictures of barges, seagulls flocking around them, gorging themselves on their cargo; or of the garbage mountains photographed from above, from high up, even from beyond the stratosphere: like the Great Wall of China, the dump used to be visible from outer space. I say “used to be” because (as I found out) it had closed down in 2001, although it had briefly re-opened soon after to receive the rubble from the World Trade Center. Now, though, the miles of landfill were being transformed into nature parks. Beyond these, as before, stretched more miles of suburbia. All this the Internet told me. Next, I started following the trail of the word satin. Satin, as I knew from my old jeans-brief, is a type of weave, one in which warp yarns, floated over weft ones, form a glossy surface. I printed off an illustration showing the exact weave-structure. Then I looked at statins—a third term that, the more I reflected, was suggesting itself to me as a hidden link joining the actual word I’d heard, or maybe spoken, in my dream, Satin, and the un-enunciated but still obviously connoted Staten. Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs inhibiting enzyme production in the liver. I found an illustration of their chemical composition, printed it off too, and pinned it next to the one showing satin’s weave. I also printed off a picture showing wooden bleachers by an empty sports-field in the unincorporated town of Satin, Texas (population: 86); and the batting statistics of a former baseball player named Josh Satin, who had spent his career vacillating between major and minor leagues. Neither he nor the town could have been sources for my dream, since I’d not heard of either before; but I printed them off all the same, and plenty more besides. Soon all my walls were covered with such things.

  12.14 Tapio phoned. Will you be here on Friday? he asked. Yes, I answered. Come see Peyman in the morning, he instructed me. Bring your Koob-Sassen dossiers. My Koob-Sassen … I repeated. The files, your findings, all the stuff you’re working on, he said. I think I’ve circulated most of these already, I told him. This was true: I’d processed the civil-servant transcripts, the Parisian financial-service-worker ones and many other documents of that ilk—analyzed them, run them through the ethnographic mill, interpreted the data this procedure yielded and sent my interpretations up, through the relevant floors and across the requisite desks, to Peyman. Yes, said Tapio—but I mean the other stuff, the extra bits: that’s what he wants to see. Oh, I said. I looked up at my walls. Whereas before, I’d been able to parlay my parachute wallpaperfragments into a coherent and insightful contribution to the Company’s overall work on Koob-Sassen (I’d since seen my in-transit metaphor, my perpetual-state-of-passage analogy, used in both internal and external Company memos on the subject), these images—the piles of rubbish, barges, seagulls—seemed to resist all incorporation into any useful or productive screed. I stared at the empty bleachers, trying to think of something to say. Eventually, Tapio broke the silence. Just bring up what you’ve got, he said. Okay, I answered; then he hung up.

  12.15 The next—and final—time I visited Petr, I realized that I’d been wrong on the subject of the windows. They were still all smudged and blackened, as they had been last time—nothing had changed there. So was his flesh: the dark lumps were still pushing up from under the skin’s surface, clouding it. My thinking on my first visit had been that, since the people in this ward, all facing imminent obliteration, had been positioned high up in this tall hospital, the conditions were perfect for affording them a really good sight of the world they would soon take their leave of, a bird’s-eye view of one of its greatest and most teeming cities. Whether the placement had been done by design or chance, it was appropriate: if, as you die, you’re meant to see your life, and life in general, with total clarity, then this small, parting 20/20 moment had been facilitated, laid on, set up by the architecture in which the patients found themselves—only to be confounded, snatched away again, by something as banal as a housekeeping oversight; or, if not an oversight, a small act of administrative penny-pinching. On this final visit, though, I came to see that, along the very lines that had made me view it as so wrong earlier, the windows’ dirtiness was in fact totally correct. It was the world, its stuff, that had left its deposit—on the windows and in Petr’s bones, his organs, flesh and arteries. The stuff of the world is black. If Petr’s flesh was turning black it was because he’d let the world get right inside him, let it saturate him, until he was so full of it that it was bursting out again, erupting with a radiating luminescence. Thinking these thoughts while Petr talked to me of this and that (I have no recollection of what he spoke about that day), I began to suspect that he had already, in an almost literal sense, become an angel; looking around the ward, I grew convinced that it was also full of angels: figures whom the world had so deeply penetrated, flooded, impregnated that, refined in them, its forms and colours stripped down to their pure, constituent goo, it emanated back out from them—not as light but as its opposite: this formless, nameless blackness so dense and concentrated, so intense and blinding that, confronted by it, mortals like me had to shield our eyes.

  12.16 I went straight home after this visit. My desk was as I’d left it, with those two words from my dream written in pencil on the one part of the blotter pad that wasn’t cluttered up. Staring at them, I was struck by a thought: perhaps, I told myself, those words could form my Great Report. Not just its title, but its content too: the whole damn thing. Rather than hand Peyman new Koob-Sassen Project dossiers when I met him that Friday, I could announce that I’d completed this epochal task, and deliver it to him: all bound and laminated and what-have-you, with nothing but these two words in it. Perhaps, I told myself, I could present him with this actual blotter sheet. Framed? Folded? Scrumpled up? If scrumpled up, would it play out as a resignation notice? Probably. If framed, would he accept it, hang it on his office wall, sit looking at it as he talked, elaborated concepts and connected people, use it as a visual touch-point for all these activities? Possibly. Certainly, the fact that it came from me, and the context within which it was presented, would imbue it for him with all kinds of cryptic meaning. And besides, I felt with real conviction that it was full of this already: meaning of a genuinely deep and intense nature, whose sense eluded me but whose presence radiated, pouring into everything around it. Squinting, I tried to look at the blotter sheet as though it were a picture, rather than a page. The Ss of both Satin and Island were sliced through by a thin, curving, brown line, since they lay on the circumference of a stain left by the coffee mug I’d cleared away. To the d’s right, slightly beneath it, like a comet’s tail, was a big splodge of the same colour. Under this, in smaller letters, I wrote Rumpelstiltskin. Secret name, Peyman had said. I sat staring at the pad for a while longer; then, crossing out all of this last word’s letters but the first R, I changed it to Rosebud.

  12.17 Petr died two days later. I learned of his death by text. His wife, whom most of his friends didn’t really know (they’d been estranged for several years), must, as his official next of kin, have been handed his mobile phone, and sent the announcement out to everybody in the contacts file—taxi firms and take-away restaurants and all. Petr passed away peacefully 11:25 a.m. today, it read. My first thoughts on receiving it—the thoughts you’re meant to think in such a situation (How sad; At least he’s at rest; I’ll miss him; And so forth)—seemed so crass that I didn’t even bother to think them. Instead, I thought about the message itself, its provenance. It had, as I said, come from Petr’s estranged wife; but my phone, of course, like those of all the other people who would ha
ve received it, listed the sender as Petr. The network provider, logging every last transaction, would have marked the sender down as Petr too; if anybody cared to look it up in years to come, the record would affirm the same thing. To almost all intents and purposes, the sender was Petr. His existence, at that moment, was impressing itself on me, and on hundreds of others, with as much force as—if not more than—at any other time. All we need to do to guarantee indefinite existence for ourselves is to keep our network contracts running, and make sure a missive goes out every now and then. We could have factories of Chinese workers do it; pre-pay five or ten years by bequest-subscription; give them a bunch of messages to send out in rotation or on shuffle; or default to generic and random ones; I don’t know. It would work, though. Key to immortality: text messaging.

  12.18 On Friday I went up to Peyman’s office. He was full of beans. The Project’s first phase was about to go live. Everything was falling into place. I was holding a set of dossiers—physical, leather dossiers—beneath my arm, as per Tapio’s instructions. None of them, to my knowledge, contained any type of data, code or misinformation whose effects would be subversive, let alone lethally destructive. So much for armed resistance. I was still nervous, though. But Peyman didn’t ask me to show him anything. He just beamed at me, and told me that my contributions had been vital. He wanted me to go to New York the following month, to talk about it at a big symposium. That’s funny, I said. What is? he asked. I’ve been thinking about New York Harbor for the last few days, I said. I should, of course, have handed him my blotter pad at this point—but I didn’t have it with me, since that idea, plan, whatever, like the vandalism one and so many others, had fallen by the wayside. While Peyman talked, I tried to picture what it would have looked like on his wall: where it would have gone, how it would have changed that space’s dynamic, coloured Peyman’s, and the Company’s, field of operations—perhaps coloured, by extension, our whole age. I let myself get lost in this imagining, and didn’t take in what he was saying to me. After a while, I realized that he’d paused, and expected me to answer something. I tried to track my mind back a few seconds, to recover what he’d just been talking about; it was, I told myself, something to do with the statute of limitations. Maybe, Peyman was saying, you could use that as an analogy when you talk about our contribution to the Project? I suppose I could, I answered, adding something vague and non-committal about laws and terms of accountability viewed from an anthropological perspective. Peyman seemed to approve. That sounds good, he said; go for it; and he called the meeting to a close. It wasn’t until he sent me a follow-up email that I realized I’d misheard him, that it was the Statue of Liberty he’d actually been talking about.

  12.19 Petr’s funeral the following week was really weird. For a start, the funeral home was running behind schedule that day, so the previous service was still taking place when Petr’s friends and family turned up. Parking was the main issue. All the spaces in the street around the home were taken by the vehicles of the mourners who were currently still burying their loved one. When these mourners finally filed out, their cortège still in loose formation, our group seemed unsure of what demeanour to adopt towards them. Some of us tried looking sad—which of course we were; but I mean that we tried to look sad for them, to show compassion for their loss. At the same time, we didn’t want to intrude on their grief, so we tried to look neutral and indifferent as well. They, for their part, struck up a similarly mixed disposition towards us, with the result that the two groups, identically dressed, stood facing one another like a set of doubles. And our cars were double-parked as well: in collaboration with our unknown lookalikes, we had to manoeuvre these forwards and backwards to allow theirs out and ours in. Certain people took command, playing traffic cop, waving and shouting in a way that, given their attire, seemed ceremonial: suited officials, guiding boxes into holes.

  12.20 But when the funeral proper started, it got even weirder. Why? Because everything that was said about Petr was wrong. I don’t mean that it was wrongly nuanced or beside the point or missing the essence of his character or anything like that. I mean that it was simply, in a factual sense, false. For a start, the service was a Christian one (Petr had been an atheist); the minister described how Petr had found succour in his faith during the months of his illness. He spoke of his family life, and how his wife had been a rock of comfort and support to him (they’d met from time to time, it’s true; but they had, as I mentioned, separated several years before his diagnosis). It went on and on like this. The thought crossed my mind that there had been a mix-up; that, due to that day’s times being out of kilter, we were listening to the spiel about the person whose entourage we’d encountered on the way in, or perhaps the person after us, the one whose time-slot we’d slipped into. But the minister called the man inside the coffin Petr; and he mentioned his job in IT, adding that his real passions were reserved for certain leisure pursuits (windsurfing, chess) that I’d known to hold no more than passing interest for him. As the litany of falsehoods progressed, I thought about standing up, interrupting it and setting the record straight; the more it continued, the more these thoughts took on a violent hue. I imagined striding to the front, grabbing the minister by his frock, headbutting him to the floor, jumping between the coffin and the furnace and denouncing the entire procedure. Then we would all storm the dais, tie the priest up, urinate onto his font, break Petr’s body out for a huge party that would bring the rafters down, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, we—I—didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited.

  13.

  13.1 About three days after the funeral, I cornered Madison. Confronted her. Pinned her down. I really want to know what you were doing in Torino-Caselle, I said. We were in a restaurant. The starters had arrived. I’d ordered deep-fried squid; the tentacles, reprising a vague image from a previous reverie, reminded me of parachute cords, and hence of my now-defunct theory. I think it was the sense of impotence this brought about that spurred me into getting all aggressive on that other front. Madison was eating gravadlax. She paused in her chewing when I put the demand to her. The way I’d phrased it, my tone of voice, left no scope for dodging the question, brushing it away, like she had on at least two previous occasions. She finished her mouthful, laid her knife and fork down and said: I’d been in Genoa. What had you been doing there? I asked. Demonstrating, she said. Demonstrating what? I asked. No, demonstrating, she said, more emphatically. Protesting. Oh, I said; what against? The G8 summit, she said. In 2001, it was held in Genoa. I didn’t know you were an activist, I said. Used to be, she corrected me; it was a long time ago.

  13.2 I pressed her further, of course. I felt that I was finally getting somewhere. She corrected herself a little now: it was really her boyfriend of the time who’d been the activist, she told me. He and his friends and associates, his general social circle, would descend on all these big G8 events. This time, they had converged from all around the world on Genoa. They’d stayed with scores of people, in a school building in the middle of the city, where the classrooms had been turned into dormitories, independent media centres and discussion rooms. It wasn’t only protestors: there were journalists and academics too, she said. The gathering had the air of a big carnival, a circus of ideas. Sounds fun, I said. It was, she said, until the police arrived. They kicked down the school’s doors in the small hours of the morning, when everyone was asleep, rushed up into the dorms and started attacking people in their beds. Shit, I said. Yes, she answered. As soon as people on the top floor realized what was going on, we ran out to the fire escapes—but police were waiting on these too. The raid was well-planned. So what did you do? I asked. We held our hands up and surrendered, she said. But that didn’t matter: they attacked us too. They stamped on people’s legs, and heads, and chests; I saw this one guy’s chest crumple as they stamped on it—and heard his ribs cracking too. It’s a strange soun
d, she told me; a bit like those old chocolate bars—the ones with the synthetic honeycomb inside, that used to crunch when you bit into them. Crunchies? I asked. Yes, she answered, that’s right: Crunchies. Those were good, I said. Yes, she concurred; I’m not sure you can get them anymore.

  13.3 Why have I never heard about this episode? I asked. I’ve never spoken about it before, she said. No, I said, I mean why didn’t I read about it in the press—especially if there were journalists there, staying in the very building where it happened? U., she said, this took place in the late summer of 2001, just before September the eleventh. After that, all other news was blown out of the water: no one was interested in what had gone on in Genoa, or anywhere else. It was as though it had never taken place. She paused, while our main course was laid in front of us. I’d ordered pork; she’d chosen chicken, I think—either that or duck. We sat in silence for a few seconds after the waitress had left, tasting our food. Then Madison picked up where she’d left off. Sometimes, she said, I even wonder if it actually took place myself. Are you still in touch with people from that time? I asked. My boyfriend’s circle, you mean? she asked back. I nodded. No, she said: I don’t have any contact with them. And besides, I don’t think they’re a circle anymore.