Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  8.8 They didn’t find a match, said Petr, the next time I met him. Who didn’t? I asked. The Greeks, he said; the lab. Bummer, I said. Yeah, he answered; useless fucking humming-birds. There’s one thing, though, they still want to try. What’s that? I asked. Orange juice, he told me. Apparently my cells twitched, or cringed, or did something or other, when exposed to Jaffa-orange extract. Not enough to blast them, but enough for them to want to try to flush the bad ones out with orange juice. Flush them out? I repeated. How do they do that? They inject the stuff into my veins, said Petr. They shoot you full of orange juice? I asked. Not any orange juice, he said: they have to be Jaffa oranges, from Israel and the Lebanon, or Gaza, Palestine, the Holy Land—whatever you call that part of the world now. I’ve got to go, he said a moment later, and took off; but the thought of him being filled with Middle Eastern orange juice stuck with me for a day or two. Where, before, I’d seen Grecian caves and temples, now my mind’s eye gave me hot, cracked hillsides on which orange groves were planted. Far from presenting an idyllic landscape, these hillsides and these orange groves were dotted with gun emplacements, capped with observation posts from which surrounding villages could be monitored and showered with mortars. Walls, made not of old stones but of ugly modern concrete topped with barbed wire, hemmed these groves in, cutting some of them in two. Beneath them, and beneath the villages, down in valleys that stretched as far as the eye could see in every which direction, oil wells burned, their smoke-plumes blackening the sky—and blackening the orange groves as well as they drifted across these, leaving tarry deposits on trees’ barks, on leaves and on the fruit itself. When that scene came to me, when I pictured all its hatred, all its violence, all its blackness, being injected into Petr, I knew—instinctively and with complete certainty—that he was going to die.

  8.9 The day after I met him was a Saturday. Awaking at home to a free diary and no hangover, I sat down at my desk to plan some kind of outline for the Great Report. It was time, I told myself: time to begin this in earnest. Not the Report per se, but rather its schema, prolegomena, what-have-you. I installed myself at my desk. It was a good desk; it had cost me quite a bit of money. It had an elegant teak body on whose upper surface sat a leather desktop of a dark-blue tint; set in the leather was a large rectangular writing surface with a blotter backing. That Saturday, I cleared the desktop thoroughly and ruthlessly: every object had to go from it; each notebook, stapler, pencil-holder, scrap of paper; the telephone, the clock (especially the clock); rubbers and paperweights—everything. After I’d cleared it I cleaned it, wiping the leather with a cloth doused in a purpose-made detergent that I’d bought at the same time as I got the desk. One day, I’d told myself, I’ll need to clean it properly and thoroughly, transform it into a tabula rasa upon which I might compose a great, momentous work. I’d been right: that day was now. I cleaned it, then I dried it with a tea-towel. It was so clean it almost shone—although the darkness of the leather muffled any sheen, reburied this instead inside itself, which seemed, in turn, to give the desktop more intensity, bigger potential as a launch pad for the task at hand. The smell that rose from it was almost natural, like the smell that comes from lawns and meadows when long grass has just been mown. Sitting at it, I looked out of the window at the sky. This was blue too—clear blue with the odd wisp of cloud. I angled myself so as to face the largest uninterrupted stretch of sky, then turned so as to align myself exactly with the desktop, so that the borders and perimeters of this ran parallel and perpendicular to those of my gaze. I sat there for a long time, luxuriating in the emptiness of first one space then the other: desktop, sky, desktop. It was definitely time.

  8.10 My window looked out over a rectangular, communal garden within which a pond, also rectangular, was inlaid. Neighbours crossed this garden as they left their flats from time to time. There was a family with two small girls. One of the girls, the younger one, had slipped into the pond a few weeks earlier, between the concrete flagstones that spanned this, and I’d come out of my flat to pull her out. Her parents had brought flowers round the next day. The girl wouldn’t have drowned: the pond wasn’t very deep, and the mother had arrived on the scene just a few seconds after my sub-heroic intervention. Nonetheless, they’d thanked me, borne me floral offerings. The parents and their daughters passed through the garden today, on the way to ballet class, or so the clothes the rescued daughter and her elder sister wore suggested. Another neighbour came out with a small dog tucked beneath her arm. She wasn’t meant to have a dog: the estate was dog-free. She’d had an order served against her, a writ from the corporation, which she seemed to be ignoring. I was torn between annoyance at this old woman for keeping the pet, since this displayed an arrogant disdain towards her other neighbours, not least me; and admiration for her solitary, resolute defiance of the forces of the law which were being brought to bear on her. Was she a rebel or a die-hard bourgeois individualist? I chewed this question over as I sat at my teak and leather desk. The dog was a Chihuahua—barely a dog at all; more like a guinea pig or hamster. Its owner teetered (she’d had a small stroke a year earlier) as she carried it across the garden in a shopping bag, like a degraded version of some Hollywood star. When she’d passed from view I looked back at the empty desktop. How much time had passed? I couldn’t tell, since I’d removed the clock. But time had passed. And I was hungry. I decided to go out for lunch; or brunch; or breakfast; whatever. No Report had been commenced, no frame or outline set up, but that was okay. I didn’t need to force things. I had staked a claim, made space: that was enough.

  8.11 One day the following week, I visited Daniel’s office again. This time I found him watching a projection that showed Muslim pilgrims performing the Hajj inside the giant mosque in Mecca. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them knelt and stood in neat, concentric rows; as these static rows converged towards the cube, itself the size of a large building, that lay at the centre of the mosque, they turned into a swirl of slowly moving bodies circling the object. Did you film this? I asked Daniel. No, he said; I found it on the Internet. It had a soundtrack, he said, prayer and music, but I turned it off. You know what this is called? he asked me. No, I told him. Tawaf, he said: circumambulation. They move anti-clockwise round the Kaaba. Anti-clockwise? I asked. How come? I don’t know, he said. Something to do with heavenly bodies: galaxies and planets and the like—some theory of universal movement. We watched some more. As pilgrims shifted from kneeling to standing positions, all in unison, the image’s whole texture changed. When, nearer the centre, they all started circling, they became a spinning comet, petals on a flower, bright water flowing down a plughole. At the very centre, the smooth movement met with some resistance as hands reached out to the cube and got some traction on its granite, if just for a second, before being swept onwards as new hands replaced them. The process seemed endless, self-perpetuating: as each static row of white-robed figures was picked up and swept into the swirl, the next row moved up one to take its place, and each row behind this one did the same, a new row forming at the back, more pilgrims waiting behind this, and more behind. The hands grabbed towards the granite passionately, almost desperately, the angles, tautness and extension of the arms beneath them all exuding longing and abandon. We watched, as was our wont, in silence.

  8.12 Later that evening I sat down, once more, to plot the framework of my Great Report. The clearing I’d made on my desktop was still there, untouched and un-encroached-on—save by a small, dead moth whose corpse had landed there after whatever parachute it had put its faith in had failed. I swept it aside; and, once again, the space was pristine, perfect, blank. Tabula rasa: I pronounced the words aloud as I surveyed the leather, breathing in its smell of cut grass and detergent. Just sitting before it, above it, filled me with a sense of infinite possibility. I pictured myself as an industrialist, viewing a clearing in the forest where his factory would go; or as an urban planner, given carte blanche to design from scratch a new, magnificent cosmopolis; a mathematician, a topologist or
trigonometrist, contemplating space in its most pure and abstract form; an explorer, sea-discoverer, world-conqueror from centuries gone by, standing at his prow as his dominion-to-be hove into view: this virgin territory that he would shape after himself and make his own. Placing my laptop in the middle—the exact, geometric centre—of this clearing, I opened a fresh document and stretched its borders out until it filled my screen entirely. As I did this, though, just as the document’s expanding lower boundary reached the bottom of my screen, my finger momentarily lost contact with the glide-pad; when the finger made contact again, it caused the applications docked invisibly at the screen’s base to pop up, impinging on the clean neutrality both of the screen and of my mind. Trying to hide them once more, I accidentally tapped on the docked news page, which slipped from its box, inflating as it rose, like some malicious genie, taking the screen over—and in an instant, all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated flooded back into the clearing, ruining it.

  8.13 The news page carried new news of the oil spill—of the current one, I mean, the one that had been playing out for the last few weeks. The worst-case scenario, the event that the authorities, environmentalists and the oil-company itself most feared, had come to pass: the oil had reached the mainland. The coastline was snowy; more than just snowy, it was completely snow-covered, swaddled in a huge, unbroken blanket of the stuff. The contact between oil and snow, the impact of the former on the latter, was being shown in close-up, from the land, and long-shot, from a plane—but the same effect could be seen in both views. The snow seemed to absorb and drink in the oil in an almost thirsty way: to blot it up, then pass it onwards through its mass, as though, within the architecture of its vaulted and communicating chambers, their crystalline ice-particles, a series of distribution hubs were secreted. Still sitting at my desk, looking down at the laptop, at the picture on its screen, the streaks and clusters taking shape as oil spread slowly inland, I saw ink polluting paper, words marring the whiteness of a page.

  9.

  9.1 The next week, I flew off to Frankfurt to speak at a conference. It was held in a new, glitzy building: smart-seats, ambient lighting, corporate logos everywhere. The papers delivered there weren’t really papers as such—more like sales pitches or motivational speeches, each of which, backed by the latest AV software, advanced a “paradigm” for the delectation of assembled delegates. The event was invitational; to be invited was an honour, confirmation that the invitee belonged to the world’s very top rank of paradigm-advancement. I was met at the airport by a man holding a card on which my name was neither handwritten nor printed but rather embossed, then dropped at a hotel that boasted not one but two saunas (the first dry, in the Finnish style; the other, in Turkish, wet). The theme of the conference was—for once!—not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse. It was, of course, a topic to which I’d been giving much thought: radiant now-ness, Present-Tense Anthropology™ and so forth. But I wasn’t ready to give all that stuff, all those half-formed notions, an outing. Besides which, I’d started to harbour doubts about their viability. These doubts themselves, I told myself in the days before the conference, were what I’d air. To air the doubt about a concept before airing the concept itself was, I thought, quite intellectually adventurous; it might go down well.

  9.2 Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they talked with evangelic zeal of neuroscience, genomics, bio-informatics and a dozen other concepts currently enjoying their moment in the sun. When my turn came, I didn’t have any slides or clips. I started by saying that The Contemporary was a suspect term. Better to speak, I proposed, of a moving ratio of modernity: as we straddle the dual territories of a present that, despite its directional drive, is slipping backwards into past, and a future that will always remain notional, we’re carried through a constantly mutating space in which modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming “dated,” or at least historical. The term epoch, I informed my listeners, originally meant “point of view,” as in the practice of astronomy; only later, I said, did it start being used to organize the world into fixed periods. This latter use, I argued, was misguided. Instead of making periodic claims which, since they can’t be empirically justified, only produce an infinite regress of detail and futile quibbling over boundaries and definitions, we should return to understanding epoch as a place from which one looks at things. From that perspective, I went on—the perspective of shifting perspectives—we can still pose the question of the difference introduced by one day, one year, one decade, in relation to another. To understand that question fully, though (I concluded), what we require is not contemporary anthropology but rather an anthropology of The Contemporary. Ba-boom: that was my “out.” My talk was met with silence, then, when my audience realized that I’d finished, a smattering of polite clapping. No one approached me to discuss it afterwards. Later that evening, in the “wet” or Turkish sauna, I recognized one of the other delegates. He recognized me too, but broke off eye-contact immediately before slipping away into the steam.

  9.3 While I was in Frankfurt, I dropped in on a friend of mine who ran the city’s anthropology museum. The museum was housed in two nineteenth-century villas: one for the public galleries, the other for administration. I met her in her office in the second; when she picked her coat up and announced that she would show me the collection, I presumed that we were heading for the first. But instead she led me to her car, and we drove for ten or fifteen minutes to an industrial part of town. There it is, she said, as the car double-bumped over an old freight-train track. Following her gaze, I saw a concrete bunker rising up beside the road. We pulled into a docking bay beneath this building, parked beneath huge arches and got out. Around us, large as totem poles, parts of old electric circuits lay about: fuse-boxes, regulators and capacitators, ribbed ceramic insulators and so on. The building used to house a transponder for the city’s transport system, Claudia explained; that, she said, pointing to the grille that slid by as we took the roomy, doorless lift up to the fourth floor, was a Faraday cage.

  9.4 We walked down corridors whose walls, made of the same thick, unpainted concrete as the building’s exterior, made me think of those giant sarcophagi they pour around damaged nuclear plants to stop the radiation leaking out, and came to the collection room itself. Huge metal storage units lined one wall of this, with slide-tracks beneath their bases and spoked handles, like the ones they use in submarines or decompression chambers, mounted on their outer ends. Parallel to these, freestanding filing cabinets stretched the room’s whole length, with index numbers marked on every drawer. In the room’s centre a long, slab-like table lay. A fat male porter, who seemed to have emerged from the walls and cabinets themselves (I hadn’t noticed him when Claudia and I entered the room), laid large sheets of fresh tissue-paper across this, then stood to its side, wordlessly awaiting instructions.

  9.5 Where do you want to start? asked Claudia, rattling a set of keys. How do you mean? I asked back. We have over fifty thousand objects here, she said. This way (she gestured to a caged door leading off the main room) is Oceania; that way (she gestured to another caged door on the perpendicular wall) is the Americas; and there (she gestured to a third door on the wall facing Oceania) is Africa—take your pick. I don’t know, I told her: Oceania. She fished out the appropriate key and led me through to a room as big as the one we’d left, in which rows of older, wooden cabinets stood, one after the other. Through their vitrines I could see clusters of objects: carved whalebones, arrow-heads, head-dresses, plates, knives, masks. All the objects had inventory numbers painted on them—usually near the bottom, although, on the smallest ones, the number covered almost the entire surface area. Claudia opened a random cabinet, and an overwhelmingly sharp odour forced its way right up my nostrils to my nose’s bridge. Naphthalene, she said, seeing me wince.

  9
.6 She pulled a pair of smooth white gloves on and picked up a woven belt, one of at least twenty lying folded in rows inside the cabinet. The next cabinet she opened had a similar number of small tobacco boxes in it. Why so many? I asked. Why not just one or two? Claudia started to explain that the larger part of the collection came from what, to my ears, sounded like the Great Sepia or Septic Journey of 1960. The What Journey? I asked. Sepik, she repeated. The Sepik is a river in New Guinea. The Museum, she said, sent an expedition up it, to acquire material culture. They stopped off at every village on the river’s banks, one after the next, and the natives sold them things. Word spread (she said) from settlement to settlement; as they arrived at each, the tribe would be waiting there with all their tribal objects laid out, like a jumble sale. The expedition bought so many objects that they filled whole boats and trains with them, stacked up in giant containers. The idea was that you needed to study the morphology of, say, a cooking pot: how the shape and decoration varies from one village or one family to the next. That’s why you needed twenty, fifty, a hundred. And, of course, she added, you could trade surplus objects with other anthropology museums back in Europe later: we’ll swap you ten head-rests for two totems. The prevailing wisdom was that you had to gather everything: a hammer or a pair of scissors might tell you as much about a culture as a sacred fetish—suddenly release its inner secrets, like some codex.

  9.7 Claudia paused. When she continued speaking, her voice went strangely melancholic. But then, she said, all that changed. How? I asked. Well, she said, from the mid-sixties, there was a turn away from objects: suddenly the prevailing wisdom held that you don’t need to look at pots and arrows anymore—you need to study patterns of behaviour and belief and so forth: your school of anthropology, U. She cast an angry glance at me. Trapped with her in this bunker, this cage to which she alone held the keys, I didn’t argue back. She took my silence as an admission of guilt, and sighed. Plus, she carried on in a more conciliatory tone, we Europeans started to suspect that it had been a bit shitty to take all these objects in the first place. So now, she said, sweeping her white glove, already a little smudged, round the room, we’ve got these store-rooms full of crap we’ll never show, or even understand. What do you think, for example, she asked, opening another cabinet and pulling out a strange wicker contraption, this thing is for? A snow-shoe? I suggested. U., she said, it’s from the tropics. Then a fishing net, I tried again. Maybe, she said. A fishing net; ceremonial head-gear; a bat for playing some kind of game; a cooking implement … Who knows? We don’t. We won’t. We haven’t even catalogued half this stuff. What should we do with it? Why not return it? I asked. That doesn’t work, she answered curtly. The tribe’s descendants don’t know what this wicker thing is for either; they’ve all got mobile phones and drink Coke. And besides, if you repatriate an object it just turns up on the market six months later—may as well just send it straight to the collector’s Texas ranch. That’s even worse than us having it. So they pile up here. She cast her glance first one way, then another, down the rows of cabinets, and we stood in silence for a moment. Sometimes, she said eventually, I feel like I’m in the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they stash the holy relic in a box exactly like all the other boxes in some warehouse that just stretches to infinity. Or Citizen Kane: same thing, but the artifacts are heading for the fire. This, she said, sweeping her now-dirty glove around once more, isn’t fire; but it’s oblivion all the same. And all the time, she added, her voice going really quiet, as though she were afraid of being overheard, in the back of my mind I’ve got the nagging suspicion that one of these objects—just one—has Rosebud written on its base.