Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  13.4 The Project’s first phase had gone live: it was up and running, rolled out, operational, whatever. Its implementation had been deemed a great success. By whom? I don’t know. Deemers. And the Company’s contribution had been praised, by praisers, as quite brilliant. And my own input into this had been held up and singled out, by Peyman himself, as particularly productive. All this was going to my head. I even glanced about the restaurant, to see if anybody recognized me. This was ridiculous, of course: the people there had probably never even heard about Koob-Sassen, let alone my role in it. And this, perhaps, was not a bad thing, after all: the thwarted saboteurs that I myself had mobilized then turned my back on, the hit squads of vengeful revolutionaries, wouldn’t know who to shoot when they came looking for the traitor.

  13.5 Did you get stamped on? I asked Madison. I got pushed down the fire escape, she said. I bruised myself, but it wasn’t that bad. And that was it? I asked. Did the police leave after that? Madison laughed into her food: a sudden, short laugh that was like a cough. No, U., she said; that wasn’t it at all. That was just the beginning. So what happened next? I asked. The police rounded us up, she said. They got us all into a courtyard, about a hundred people, and they hemmed us in and formed a human square around us, two or more thick, and took it in turns to wade in to the middle of this square and club people and stamp on them some more. Then they made us walk out to these trucks that were parked just outside. Hadn’t you heard them pulling up? I asked. No, she replied. They put us in these trucks, and drove us to a police station. They unloaded us into some other courtyard there, where there were lots more police, fresh ones, all fired up and ready to let loose. Which is exactly what they did: they clubbed and stamped on people to their hearts’ content. And all the time, more and more captured demonstrators were arriving: people I didn’t recognize, who’d been staying in other places—hostels, houses, student dormitories. Truck after truck would pull up, and these people, all bruised and bloodied just like us, would be led out of them, and fed into the middle of this square whose sides were made of policemen, and then beaten up some more.

  13.6 How long did this go on for? I asked her. It’s hard to tell, said Madison. Perhaps an hour. When new people stopped arriving and the ones already there couldn’t stand up to be beaten anymore, or didn’t even react much when they were kicked and stamped on, the police eased off a bit. New officers came out of the main station holding sheets of paper, instructions or something, and after consulting these for a while, they started organizing all the people in the courtyard into groups. I don’t know what the logic of it was: it’s not as though they just divvied the crowd up into blocks where we were standing. Instead, they’d make five of us go and stand in one corner of the courtyard, then bring two more people over from some other part, and two more from a third, and make us stand in rows of three, like soldiers—three rows of three, so there were nine in every group. Then they might move four people out of one group and make them join another group in the far corner while they brought in three from yet another group and one more from another still to bring the number up to nine again. Whatever rationale was behind it, they carried out this sorting quite assiduously, for a long time. Then, eventually, one by one, the groups were marched into the station building itself.

  13.7 Our plates, largely untouched, were lying in front of us. The waitress had skirted by a couple of times, to see if everything was all right. It was a good restaurant. Most other diners were on their dessert course, or their coffee. The ones paying their bills and leaving weren’t being replaced by others; it was well into mid-afternoon. What happened when you came inside the building? I asked Madison. Well, she said, everyone was singing. Singing? I repeated. Yes, she said. The police were singing? I asked. No, she said; mainly the demonstrators. Protest songs, you mean? I asked. God no, she answered: they were singing songs the police were making them sing. Someone in Madison’s group, an Italian guy, had whispered to her that they were fascist songs, from Mussolini’s time. The cops had been leading the singing, moving their batons like conductors do. If anybody didn’t sing, Madison explained, or didn’t sing loud enough, the police would jerk the batons’ ends into their midriffs, upwards, from below—which would knock the wind out of them, of course, but then they had to sing immediately afterwards, wind or no wind, or they’d get another jerk. What if you didn’t know the words? I asked. They taught us the words, she answered—like in nursery school: it was a sing-along. While it went on, they carried on dividing up the groups: breaking them down into smaller groups of about five people, then separating these out into clusters of two or three. We had to sing while they were doing this to us, she said. It was so strange. Eventually, I found myself with just one other woman. She was German, I think. She couldn’t really say much since her jaw had been all smashed up. And besides, we couldn’t talk: we had to keep on singing—singing Italian words. This woman couldn’t do this very well, of course; but since the cops would baton-jerk her if she stopped, she forced the words out somehow, without really shaping them properly in her mouth. I got the sense that she was German all the same, said Madison, just from the way the sound came from her throat.

  13.8 She paused, and took a big bite of her duck or chicken. I watched her mouth chewing. Then I looked down at my plate, and pushed a vegetable around for a few seconds. After a while I asked: What happened next? Well, Madison continued, this girl and I were taken through a door, and down a corridor, and down a set of stairs and up another one, and down another corridor, then through a final door that led out to a car park. We were taken to this car, she said—an unmarked one. There were two guys in the front, in plain clothes; and the guy in the passenger seat turned round and stared at us both for a while, looking us up and down; then he pointed to the other girl and said something in Italian to the uniformed cops who’d brought us there, and they removed her from the car again.

  13.9 And you? I asked. Me they drove off, she said. It was dawn, and we were driving through the streets—but the guy in the passenger seat told me not to look outside. I understood he meant that, since he kind of barked the same instruction at me every time I turned my head to one side or the other. So I just looked forwards, at his seat’s back. These plain-clothes guys drove me around for a long time, she went on; when they eventually stopped, I looked out, finally, and saw another courtyard—a cobbled one, with some kind of villa curving and jutting all around it. The villa was pretty, she said: an old house of several floors, with ivy climbing up the walls and wooden shutters on the windows. They brought me from the car, and led me to this villa. Inside, it was like a big family house—either that, or some kind of institution. There was a big reception area with a marble floor; and there was a desk here, with a receptionist behind it. The plain-clothes policeman, the passenger-seat guy, told me to empty out my pockets, and he put my keys and passport and whatever else I had there in a tray that the receptionist slid onto a shelf behind her. Receptionist? I said. You’re checking into a hotel now? That’s the thing, said Madison: it didn’t feel like another police station. It wasn’t a police station. I don’t know what it was. This receptionist was perfectly polite—not friendly exactly, but courteous. Even the plain-clothes passenger-seat guy wasn’t barking at me anymore. The lady handed him a receipt for my things; then he escorted me across the marble floor, and gestured, with politeness also, for me to go through a wooden door with stained-glass panels in it, that he held open for me. And we walked down another long corridor, and down some steps again, until, eventually, we came to a plain white door, which he knocked on quietly. A voice answered; my guy opened the door and, standing back once more, ushered me in.

  13.10 She paused again. Well, what was in the room? I asked her. A man, she said. A man? I repeated. Yes, she said. What kind of man? I asked. I don’t know, she said: a man. How old was he? I asked. About sixty, she said. What did he look like? I asked. He was smartly dressed, she said; quite portly; he had grey hair that was turning white, combed neatly back.
He was sitting in a red leather armchair in the middle of this room. He asked my escort something, and my escort answered very deferentially; then he dismissed the escort with a wave, and we two were alone. What type of room was it? I asked. I couldn’t really say, said Madison; it looked a little like a doctor’s room or a laboratory. There was this strange contraption at the far end, past the armchair: it was like a chair as well, but with appendages and segments that looked as though they could be manipulated and adjusted—kind of like a dentist’s chair, an old one. Everything in the room was old; I don’t know why I said it looked like a laboratory. Maybe I meant an old laboratory, where you’d see thick jars of chemicals lining the shelves. But there were no chemicals, and no shelves. There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the wall: this big, wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there—maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall, as far as I could tell. But the curtain gave the room the look of a theatre, or an auditorium—or maybe a recording studio, with the drape there for muffling. The place seemed pretty quiet and isolated: there was no background noise or anything like that. Apart from, Madison continued, that there was this kind of gizmo on a table not far from this man’s red chair. What do you mean, a gizmo? I asked. A thing, she said. A piece of electronic hardware. Maybe a receiver, a detector, wavelength modulator, I don’t know. It was old too: the kind of thing they’d have used twenty years ago, perhaps more. It made an electronic noise. When I came in, said Madison, this man was fiddling with this thing, as though he were tuning it.

  13.11 She picked a caper from her plate. Then what happened? I asked. Madison held the caper up, as though inspecting it, then set it down on her plate’s side. Eventually, she said, the smartly dressed man in the room turned round to face me. He beckoned me over and told me to turn around in front of him: revolve, rotate. I had a scrape on my neck, which he looked at closely, holding my hair back. He asked me, in English, where else I’d been injured, so I told him: Here, above the hips; and here, just on the elbow (Madison pointed to these spots now, in the restaurant, as though I were this man)—and I thought for a moment that he was a doctor. Or maybe a lawyer, with his expensive suit. But he wasn’t. He reached down behind the red armchair and picked up, first, a black wand. A wand? I repeated. Yes, she said: a plasticky-metallic kind of pointer. Then, she carried on, a glove—a thick one, like a gardening- or oven-glove. He slipped the glove onto his right hand; and, holding the wand in this, he touched the thin end to my midriff. Then the glove twitched, and I felt a huge electric surge run through me. What the fuck? I said to Madison. It was a cattle-prod I guess, she told me. Did it hurt? I asked her. Yes, U., she replied, it hurt. It hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt before or since. But it was over very quickly; and I was too startled to shout or scream or anything. After he’d zapped me with his prod, this man just stood beside me, calmly, seeing what I would do. What did you do? I asked her. Nothing, she answered. I just stood there. Where would I have gone? He watched me while I stood there. He still had the prod, down by his side. I somehow knew, though, that he wasn’t going to keep on zapping me: he just wanted me to know that he could, if he wanted to—and wanted me to show him that I understood that. Which I did, by standing still. Once this understanding had been reached, we could begin.

  13.12 Begin? I asked her. Begin what? What we did for the next couple of hours, said Madison, is that he made me strike up and hold certain postures. Postures? I asked. Postures, she repeated; like a fashion shoot. I had to turn one way, then another, then to bend, then hold my arms up, stick my leg out, things like that. This man told me exactly what to do; he was really precise. From time to time, if I didn’t have the posture quite right, he would raise the prod, to threaten me; once, when I let my arms fall to my side since I was too tired to keep them raised like he’d instructed me, he zapped me again; after that I kept them up, tired or not. And all the while, while forcing me into these shapes, he was consulting with and nudging at this other thing. What other thing? I asked. The gizmo-thing, she said; this modulator or detector. It had a small screen on it, that had lines running across it: wave-lines, like you might get on earthquake-predicting machines, or on those other ones that show stock-market prices as they fluctuate. He’d look at the screen, then look at me, and make me shift my arm an inch this way or that way, or rotate my head clockwise a tiny bit, or anti-clockwise, or tell me to jut my chin or chest out; then he’d look back at the thing, and turn a knob a little bit, and say something to himself, or to the machine, or to whoever was behind it, on the other end. The other end? I asked. It was a two-way apparatus? It seemed that way, she said; I thought that it might be a radio, some kind of intercom or clunky, antique walkie-talkie. But then there were no voices coming out of it, at least not at his end: just electronic whining, crackling, things like that. He listened to it, though, really attentively, and watched the modulating wave as if its jags and vacillations meant something. I think that he was being sent instructions through this thing. Instructions? I repeated. Yes, she said. By whom? I asked. I don’t know, she said. That’s the thing. This man was obviously important. I could tell that just by looking at him, from his clothes and his demeanour, from the way my plain-clothes guy deferred to him, from the house and its whole rigmarole: everything seemed to orbit around him and this room. Not just the house, but everything: the raid on the school, the beatings, the weird sorting and dividing in the courtyard, all that stuff—this man, somehow, seemed behind all that. And at the same time, he himself seemed to be governed by these messages crackling and zig-zagging their way to him from … I don’t know: from somewhere else. I said there were no voices in the noise, she went on; but actually, after a while, I started hearing, at a certain point within the crackling, something that sounded a little bit like children’s voices. Children’s voices? I repeated. Yes, she said. They’d kind of separate out from the general sound, like strands that had come loose, then merge and fluff back into it again. What were they saying? I asked her. Nothing, she replied; at least not anything that sounded like real words, in Italian or any other language; just shouts and chirps and little bits of sing-song—general infant babble. It was very indistinct: as soon as I thought I’d picked these voices out and tuned into them properly, they’d disappear again.

  13.13 These postures that he made you strike up, I asked Madison: were they erotic? Some of them were, she said. Sometimes I had to bend over and stick my arse up in the air, or pull up my culottes and show my thigh, or slip my shirt down off my shoulder. But all this was pretty mild; I mean, he could have made me strip, or raped me, or done anything at all, given the situation. The positions he was making me assume were more like the postures of classical statues, or old paintings. He was getting off on it, though, kind of: I could hear his breathing growing heavier, and hear these quiet grunts, these moans, coming from deep inside his chest. But these were beyond sexual. If they were sexual, the excitement wasn’t exactly for me, but for some kind of relation between me, the angles of my limbs and torso, and the machine, the rhythms of its crackles, beeps and oscillations. When these fell into alignment, when we got it right—well, then he’d moan more deeply, with real pleasure. After a while, I came to recognize these rhythms. What do you mean? I asked. There were these sequences of pitch and frequency, she said, that faded into one another and then came back round again, only a little differently each time. It got so I could recognize these sequences, and know which part of them we were in at a given moment, and what I should be doing at this part, and what was coming next. I came to know just what it was he wanted, how I had to move; he didn’t need to keep telling me what to do. This made him really satisfied. More than just satisfied, she said: it seemed to move him deeply.

  13.14 Madison looked round the restaurant. The place had emptied out now. The waitresses were sitting at a table, wrapping newly washed cutlery in napkins, which they folded with a regular and automated movement. Two chefs were sitting at another, going throu
gh a list of stocks, ingredients, supplies. No one was pushing us to leave; they appeared to have forgotten us, just as we’d forgotten both them and the food they’d made us. So you struck these postures, I said. You ran through sequences of them, and this man watched you. Yes, she answered. He and I kept this up for an eternity. Time seemed to have stopped. We could have been the only people in the world—the first-ever people, a new Eve and Adam. Time seemed, she said again, to have just … stopped: to be suspended, while we two performed this strange ballet being choreographed from elsewhere. You mean you did, I said. No, said Madison: we both did. He was moving too. At first he moved his body and his limbs to show me how I had to move mine; then, as I learnt the sequences, his own movements grew less emphatic, and then almost imperceptible. But they were still going on: his leg would buckle and his knee extend a little; his right shoulder would angle upwards, and his left arm twitch below the elbow. He was as much a part of the choreography as I was. After a while, he closed his eyes; and yet his limbs still subtly moved and twitched and angled, to the same rhythm, the same pattern, to the modulating sound of the machine and my own corresponding sequences of postures. He was, like I said, deeply moved. At one point I saw big tears rolling down his cheeks. You saw …? I started asking, but she went straight on, cutting me off. Then these gave over to sobs, she said. Sobs? I asked. That’s right, Madison answered: he was sobbing. He was a big man, as I mentioned: portly. The sobbing shook his frame. His face had deep, grey wrinkles cut into its cheeks; the tears ran into these, and ran out through them; they were like drainage conduits. Eventually he sat down in the leather chair, slumped deep into it and gave me to understand that the spectacle, charade, the game, was over: I could stand down. And at this moment, the machine’s pitch slackened too: its jags and crackles, that had been so charged and jumping, went all elongated, flattened, like the thing was running down. Apart from the bit that sounded like children’s voices, she said—that part of it remained, and seemed to become clearer …