Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  3.7 I didn’t meet with Peyman that week, but I met with my friend Petr. Petr worked for a big IT outfit, as a systems analyst. I’d never really understood what that entailed, although he’d told me several times. We met in a pub. He had a thyroid goiter. You could see it on his neck: it moved about beneath the skin while he was talking, like a second Adam’s apple. His doctor, Petr told me, had decided that the goiter should be surgically removed. The removal was to be carried out in a couple of days. It was a small, routine procedure: he’d be in and out of hospital on the same day. But Petr didn’t want to talk about his goiter: he wanted to discuss the Project. His firm was working on it too, like hundreds of others. He congratulated me on the Company’s recent “sign-up to the Grand Metamorphosis.” What will you actually be doing? he asked. I couldn’t really answer him. I told him that Peyman was out of town, and that things would become much clearer once he came back—although, as I spoke these words, I doubted if they were in fact correct. Hey, Petr asked me: how’s the Great Report coming along? Oh, you know, I said: it’s finding its form. This seemed to satisfy him; he went back to talking about Koob-Sassen. It was a huge, ambitious scheme, he said, on the same scale as poldering and draining landmasses of thousands of square miles, or cabling and connecting an entire empire—and yet, he continued, the most remarkable thing about it was that, despite its massive scale, it would remain, in an everyday sense, to members of the general populace, invisible: there’d be no monuments, no edifices towering above cities, spanning countrysides, dotting coastlines and so on. It was a feat, rather, of what he called network architecture. He went on for a long time about networks, convergence, nodes and relays, interstices—it was very abstract. I found myself zoning out; by the third drink, I’d stopped listening to his words completely and was paying all my attention to the goiter just above his voice-box, to the way that, like Lagos’s traffic, it squished and slid.

  3.8 On the way home from meeting Petr, I picked up one of those free newspapers again. Its fifth or sixth page brought more news about the parachutist whose death I’d read about two days earlier. It turned out that the police had been quite right to be suspicious: an examination of the dead man’s gear had unearthed evidence of tampering. The rig, or harness, he’d had strapped onto his back contained two parachutes—three if you counted the small, handkerchief-sized “drogue” that, once deployed, is meant to suck the main chute from the rig—and it had transpired that the cords attaching each of these to one another, to the rig and, ultimately, to him had been deliberately severed. The severing had been carried out with expertise and cunning; all the chutes had been repacked correctly afterwards, so that no outward sign of any interference would be visible. The deed could only have been done by an insider: someone connected to the airfield and the club, who knew the rigmarole of parachute-assembly, the protocol of jumping and jump-preparation—packing, storage, safety-checking and so forth; in short, by another parachutist. It was now a murder story. Arriving home, I drunk-phoned Madison, who didn’t answer; then I passed out on my sofa.

  4.

  4.1 On Lévi-Strauss. He was my hero. He would roam around the world—twice: first slowly, physically, by boat and train and donkey; then all over again on fast-track as, writing his findings up, he zapped from continent to continent, culture to culture, travelling through worm-holes of association till he’d remade the entire globe into a collage of recurring colours, smells and patterns. Patterns especially: the painted patterning on tribesmen’s bodies; the layout, concentric or congruent or concyclic, of village huts; the symmetry or asymmetry of caste systems, their transgenerational rhythms of exogamy and endogamy—he saw all these as co-related, parts of larger systems lying behind not just a single tribe but also the larger one of all humanity. If we had some kind of grid that we could lay across it all, he reasoned, we could establish a grand pattern of equivalences. Describing sunsets, he saw spun webs of lit-up vapour, a whole architecture of reflective strands that both revealed and hid the source that lay behind them; even landscape seemed to him to withhold, in its layers and strata, some kind of infrastructural master-meaning of which any one layer was a partial, distorted transposition. This stuff bewitched me. Master-meaning! Concealed revealment! I spent my twenties wanting to be Lévi-Strauss—which is ironic, since he spent most of his life wanting to be somebody or something else: a philosopher, say, or novelist, or poet.

  4.2 Also ironic: the very first brief I was given when I started working at the Company. I was, Tapio informed me, to compile a dossier on jeans. The client was Levi’s—or, to give the company its full name, Levi Strauss. A little research unearthed more than just coincidence behind the nomenclatural overlap: the jean-maker, like the anthropologist, had been an Ashkenazi Jew; both, leaving Europe under vague or not-so-vague threat, had turned to the Americas, and built their fame on what they did there. Levi-no-hyphen-Strauss was German; but the fabric he sold came, like Lévi-Strauss, from France—from Nîmes, down in the South. Serge de Nîmes: denim. Nîmes serge has unique fading and dyeing properties. I spent my first three weeks of gainful employment interviewing teenagers, mid-life-crisis-riven men and garment workers; assessing the subtle code-spectrum of turn-ups, buttons, zippers, creases; generally breaking down how jeans, and Levi Strauss ones in particular, connoted. I got really into creases. Jeans crease in all kinds of interesting ways: honeycomb, whisker, train-track, stack … I catalogued no fewer than seventeen different crease-types, each of which has slightly different innuendos. To frame these—that is, to provide a framework for explaining to the client what these crease-types truly and profoundly meant—I stole a concept from the French philosopher Deleuze: for him le pli, or fold, describes the way we swallow the exterior world, invert it and then flip it back outwards again, and, in so doing, form our own identity. I took out all the revolutionary shit (Deleuze was a leftie); and I didn’t credit Deleuze, either. Big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters. I did the same thing with another French philosopher, Badiou: I recycled his notion of a rip, a sudden temporal rupture, and applied it, naturally, to tears worn in jeans, which I presented as the birth-scars of their wearer’s singularity, testaments to the individual’s break with general history, to the successful institution of a personal time. I dropped the radical baggage from that, too (Badiou is virtually Maoist). This pretty much set up the protocol or MO I’d deploy in my work for the Company from then on in: feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine. The machine could swallow everything, incorporate it seamlessly, like a giant loom that reweaves all fabric, no matter how recalcitrant and jarring its raw form, into what my hero would have called a master-pattern—or, if not that, then maybe just the pattern of the master.

  4.3 Le pli. While my supposed business, my “official” function, as a corporate ethnographer, was to garner meaning from all types of situation—to extract it, like a physicist distilling some pure, unadulterated essence out of common-mongrel compounds, or a miner drawing gold ore from deep within the earth’s bowels—I sometimes allowed myself to think that, in fact, things were precisely the other way round: that my job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it. Divining, for the benefit of a breakfast-cereal manufacturer, the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it); establishing for them some of the primary axes shaping the way in which the practice of living is, or might be, carried out; and watching the manufacturer then feed that information back into their product and its packaging as they upgraded and refined these, I understood the end-result to be not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents. Helping a city council who were thinking of creating parks and plazas but had yet to understand the ethnographic logic driving such an act; laying out for them the history of public (as op
posed to private) space, making them grasp what these zones fundamentally embody, what’s at play in them from a political and structural and sacred point of view; and doing this in such a way that this whole history is then injected back into the squares, sports-fields and playgrounds millions of citizens will then inhabit—same thing. Down in my office, stirred and lulled by ventilation, I would picture myself as some kind of nocturnal worker, like those men who go out and repair the roads, or check the points and switches on the railway tracks, or carry out a range of covert tasks that go unnoticed by the populace-at-large, but on which the latter’s well-being, even survival, is dependent. While the city sleeps, bakers are baking bread in night-kitchens, milkmen are loading crates onto their floats; and river-men are dredging riverbeds or checking water-levels, while other men in buildings with nondescript exteriors track storm surges and spring- and neap-tides on their screens, and activate the flood defences when this becomes necessary. When the populace-at-large wakes up, they just see the milk there on their doorstep, and the fresh bread in the shop down the street, and the street itself still there, unflooded, un-tsunamied from existence; and they take it all for granted, where in fact these men have put the milk and bread there, and have even, in deploying the flood defences, put the city there as well, put it back there every time they deploy them. That’s what I was doing, too, I told myself. The world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it.

  4.4 I compiled a lot of dossiers. They weren’t always for clients. The Company gave me carte blanche to follow my own nose when not working on a specific brief. I went to conferences, read (and, occasionally, wrote) articles, kept my finger on the soft pulse of the media—and compiled dossiers. I had a dossier on Japanese game-avatars, and another one on newspaper obituaries; a dossier on post-match interviews with sportsmen and their managers; a dossier on alleged alien sightings and one on shark attacks; dossiers on tattoos, “personalization” trends for hand-held gadgets, the rhetoric and diction of scam emails. These dossiers sprang up spontaneously, serendipitously, whimsically. A situation, a recurring meme would catch my eye, pique my fancy, and I’d start investigating it: following its spore, seeing where it led, collecting instances of its occurrence, assembling an inventory of all its guises and mutations; like a detective keeping a file on a quarry that’s both colourful and slippery, elusive—a cat-burglar, say, or quick-change-artist con-man.

  4.5 When I write “dossier,” this might imply some kind of tidy, reasoned set of entries, each held in its own box-file. But the process was much less orderly: my dossiers largely consisted of scraps of paper stuck around my walls, with lines connecting them and annotations, legible only to me, scrawled at their margins. Each one would stay up for a while, then be replaced by the next one. As the scraps of paper came down, I would stuff them, usually unsorted, into large portfolios. Only the ones for clients ended up as neat, legible documents—although whether the personal whimsy-dossiers were actually so separate from the client-ones is another question. Who’s to say what is, or might turn out to be, related to what else? Occasionally, a whimsy-dossier would suddenly and without warning overlap with a client-one, or with a previous whimsy- or client-one, or several of both, in quite unexpected and surprising ways, parities and conjunctions appearing between contexts that, on the surface of things, seemed to have nothing in common. When this happened, I’d feel a sudden pang, a bristling in the back of my neck: the stirring, the re-animation, of a fantasy that, like in hard-boiled novels and noir movies, all the various files would one day turn out to have been related all along, their sudden merging leading me to crack the case. What was “the case”? I didn’t know—but that was the whole point: the answer to that would become clear once all the dossiers hove into alignment.

  4.6 In my office, waiting for Peyman to come back to London, I began a dossier on oil spills. The oil spill that had started while I’d been in Turin was still making the news headlines, but I didn’t confine myself to that one: I read about all kinds of oil spill, going right back to before the First World War. An anthropologist’s not interested in singularities, but in generics. Oil spills are perfectly generic: there’s always one happening, or one that’s recently transpired, or, it can be said with confidence, one that’s on the verge of happening. I printed off tables of data, statistics about frequencies of oil spills, their clustering by region, year and company; images of tankers trailing long, black tails; of birds coated in oil; of people in white suits pushing brooms over vinyl-coated beaches. I looped on a spare laptop a video-clip that Daniel found me: it showed a close-up sequence of a few feet of sea-bed across which oil was creeping, carpeting the floor as it coagulated. The film had been captured by a hand-held underwater camera. You could see the diver’s other hand, his free one, reaching down into the shot, its white-gloved fingers feeling their way along this new-laid carpet or linoleum flooring’s edge until, finding a bump or buckle that allowed for entry, the hand slid under and pulled a section of it up. The oil, still unguent, stretched as it rose. Threads, strands and filigrees appeared, thinning as they lengthened before thickening and folding in on themselves as they were gathered back by the black, undulating mass. Every time I re-watched this last piece of footage, I sensed, or thought I sensed, a smell: the sweet, familiar scent of homemade toffee at the point—that magical instant—of caramelization. That’s what these pictures, even through the airless medium of water and the odourless relays of fibre-optic cable, through the mangling of digital compression, the delays, decays and abstractions brought about by storage and conversion, managed to transmit to me.

  4.7 As I watched this sequence over and over again (it was only about forty seconds long), other recognizable scenes began exuding from it. The diver’s gesture, for example—reaching down and pulling up the solidifying oil—was familiar as well: it was the gesture of a priest raising the holy water in his fingers, or a jeweler displaying a valuable necklace, or a zoologist handling a sleek, endangered snake. The diver, naturally, would have held the camera right beside his face, or perhaps in front of it, pressed up against his mask. This point of view produced another strange, confectionary-oriented pang of recognition; each time I watched, I felt my own face and the diver’s run together. I knew the look on his because it was the look on mine—not only then, watching the clip, but also once when, on a childhood holiday to San Francisco many years ago, I’d stood rooted to the pavement in front of a candy-store window in which taffy was being pulled, transfixed by the contortions of the huge, unmanageable lump (what child could eat all that?) as the machine’s arms plied it, its endless metamorphoses in which, despite the regular, repeating movements that stretched and folded, stretched and slapped the taffy through the same shapes over and over again, I knew, even then, that no part of it, no molecule, would ever occupy the same spot in the overall formation twice.

  4.8 Eventually, after days spent immersed in this material, I received a call from Tapio upstairs. Peyman’s on his way back, his robot-voice intoned. Come and see him on Friday. Okay, I said. How’s the Great Report coming along? he asked before he hung up. Oh, you know, I answered: it’s finding its form. Five minutes after he’d called, Petr called too. Hey, he said: you know that goiter they were going to take out? Yes, I replied. Well, he told me, they did; and then they cut it up to look at it, and it was cancerous. Shit, I said. Yes, he said. Good thing they took it out, I said. No, U., he said, the goiter’s just an indicator: I’ve got thyroid cancer. Shit, I said again. Yes, he repeated—but it’s not that bad. How come? I asked. Because, he said, as cancers go, thyroid is a pretty lowly one: a lickspittle of cancers, a cadet. It’s almost never fatal. What do you have to do? I asked. I have to drink a bunch of iodine, he said. It soaks up all the bad cells and destroys them. It will make me radioactive. I’ll be going round town oozing rays and isotopes, like a plutonium rod. Far out, I said. Yes,
he said: I’ll be able to look straight through girls’ clothes and see what colour underwear they’ve got on. Really? I asked. Of course not, he said. But I will ooze rays. Far out, I said again; I didn’t know what else to say. Yeah, he repeated: far out.

  4.9 On my way home that evening, I opened the free newspaper again, and found a photo of the airfield where the recently killed parachutist’s club was based. The photo showed a hangar and a runway cordoned off by police tape, with an officer standing in front of this to ensure that visitors and press stayed out. Something struck me as not quite right about the image. The officer was oddly poised—slightly unbalanced, as though starting to move off in such-and-such a direction but not yet fully launched into his walk. It wasn’t this that was wrong, though: it was the choice of restricted area itself. If a person had been shot or stabbed within the airfield’s boundary, it would have made sense for there to be a cordon round it; but this man had died on landing in a field some distance away. Presumably that field was cordoned off as well. But even that location didn’t accurately represent the one at which the crime had actually taken place: just where its consequences had played out, left their imprint. The crime itself, the moment of its actually-happening, would have occurred when, just after he threw his drogue out, as he awaited the familiar jolt and the ensuing drag, the reassuring easing of his downward plummet brought on by the opening of the parachute itself, the victim realized that these things hadn’t occurred, that he was still in freefall. The happening-moment would have taken place a second time after he’d pulled his ripcord and again felt no consoling bite, met with no purchase on the air around him; and a third when he’d attempted to deploy his reserve chute, equally fruitlessly. Did that mean there’d been three crimes instead of one? Perhaps. As I held the page above my knees, sat on a tube train shuttling through a tunnel, the question of the murder’s true location resolved itself for me: I realized that the crime scene, properly speaking, was the sky. Or, to flip this one back out as well: the sky was a crime scene.