Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  13.15 She paused, and held her head alert, as though she were still hearing, in the restaurant, these children’s voices. So what did you do? I asked her. I stood down, she said. I mean, I stopped making the movements, stopped striking up and running through the postures, and just stood in front of him. After a while, when his sobbing had subsided, he opened his eyes and looked at me. He still had the wand in his hand, hanging by the chair’s side; and he passed this to me now. Passed it to you? I asked. Yes, Madison replied: he handed me the wand, the cattle-prod. What did you do with it? I asked. I took it from him, she said, and set it down on the floor some feet away. Then I turned back to face him, to see what he wanted; but his face had gone all vacant. So I moved over to the window. When I looked out of this, I saw a garden, running away beneath it. The villa was built on a hill: although we’d gone down one floor from the entrance to get to this room, on the side that I was looking out of now, the far side, the room was two floors above ground level. There was this garden, and there were two children playing in it. They can’t have been much more than five years old. It was their voices I’d been hearing, coming through the window—not through the machine; I’d just assumed that, because the voices had been caught up in the machine’s general noise. Now that this had dwindled to a slow, quiet croak, they carried to me clearly. The children were playing tag or something; sudden shrieks of laughter and excitement leapt from them and ricocheted around the room. I moved a little to the side and lifted the drape, this crinkled curtain. Behind it there was just more wall, as I’d thought. Then I turned back to face the room’s interior. I went up to the chair with segments and appendages, the maybe-dentist’s chair. It had these straps on it, restraining straps I guess; but these were loose, unbuckled and all worn. Then I inspected the machine, she said: the gizmo, this big, clunky apparatus that had held both me and this man in its power for so long. It really was old: it had all these ancient valves and needles set in a worn metallic frame, and knobs with faded numbers round their circumference. The screen was gridded; the speaker’s grille was cross-hatched, set on a diagonal. Nothing was really coming out of the speaker anymore, though—just a kind of sonic dribble. The wave-lines on the screen were still there; but they were placid and immobile. Whatever this thing had been doing, it wasn’t doing it anymore. It had gone all vacant too, just like its operator … Madison seemed to go vacant at this point herself, staring ahead into the restaurant’s dead space. So what did you do? I asked her. I sat down beside him, she said, on the floor, leaning against the armchair’s side. His hand was hanging limp beside my shoulder. I just sat there, and he sat there too, and all the objects in the room just sat there, doing nothing, for a long, long time.

  13.16 We sat there too, in silence, Madison and I, in this restaurant. I couldn’t think of anything to say. In the fading afternoon light, waitresses and chefs were eating now, taking late lunch or early supper. Eventually I asked her: How did you get out? Out of where? she asked back. The room, I said: how did you leave the room? I didn’t, she said. Not at first. I fell asleep against his chair. I must have been awake for two whole days by this point, if you don’t count the hour of sleep I’d had back at the school building, before the raid. I was really tired. Did he sleep too? I asked. Who? she asked. The man, I said. Maybe, she said. He sat in the armchair for a long time without moving. His breathing was regular and deep, and so was mine; and then I was asleep. When I woke up, he was gone. The machine had been switched off: no more wave-lines, even flat ones; no more noise at all. And the children’s voices had disappeared too. Just moments after I woke up, another man walked in; perhaps his footsteps coming down the corridor, approaching, were what woke me. This new man was much younger—in his thirties, maybe. He was smartly dressed as well, but his clothes weren’t expensive like the older one’s. This man was friendly: he asked me if I’d rested; and I told him yes, I had; and he said: Well, we’d better get you on your way. He spoke to you in English? I asked Madison. Yes, she replied; good English, with a slight Italian accent. I thought he might have been a consular official—a junior one. They use locals for that, don’t they? she asked. I don’t know, I said; is that what he turned out to be? Who? she asked. This other man, I said. I don’t know, she replied; I never found out. I mean, I never asked. He led me from the room, and through some other corridors and doors, not the ones I’d first come through, and then down some other steps; and suddenly I found myself back in the lobby, the reception. You mean up some steps, I corrected her. No, she insisted: down. This man, she went on, handed my receipt, which he must have been given by the plain-clothes guy, to the receptionist, and I got all my stuff back. And he said: There: all accounted for?—something like that. And I told him: Yes, I think so, or something. I didn’t have my mobile, but that had been left behind at the school. He led me back out through the front door, to the cobbled courtyard; and he said, still in a friendly, helpful voice, that I shouldn’t go back to the centre of town, since police were still rounding up people who looked like protestors. Go this way, he said as we got to the road, pointing to the right; then he turned round and went back to the villa.

  13.17 And you? I asked. Me? she asked back. Yes, I answered: what did you do? I walked in the direction he’d suggested, she said. I’d come out into some kind of suburb. It was a nice day: warm and sunny, languid. I remember there were flowers along the roadside, hanging over garden walls. I passed some kind of workshop, where a man was cutting something with a saw; then shops. There was this clothing shop. I went inside and bought some new clothes with my credit card: a shawl, a hat, a skirt. They weren’t particularly good clothes; just the kind of things that middle-aged, suburban women wear. And while I was in the shop, I tried to ask if there was a bus stop or metro station somewhere nearby; and the shop-woman told me ferrovia—railway—and, sure enough, there was a train station just a hundred yards away. One platform took you back to the centre of town; the other one led to Turin. So I took the next train from the second one. And on the train, on a route map in the corridor, I saw a little airport-icon by the stop just before Turin, with Internazionale written next to it; so that’s where I got off, and bought a ticket back to London—again, with my credit card. I remember thinking that it was ironic. What was? I asked. That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism, she said. Oh, I see, I told her; I suppose it was. There was a plane leaving in about five hours’ time, she carried on. I bought a ticket, and sat there for the next five hours, hardly moving, waiting for the plane. And that, Madison concluded, laying her hands, palms-down, across the tabletop and looking at me with a frank but empty gaze, is how I came to be in Torino-Caselle Airport.

  13.18 By now, the staff had finished eating. Dusk was coming down, but they hadn’t switched on the restaurant’s lighting yet. Madison sat back in her chair. As her face retreated from me, it grew indistinct. The thing about Turin, she said after a pause, is that it’s where … I know, I said: it’s where the shroud is from. No, Madison told me; I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of that other guy, who went mad. What other guy? I asked. The famous philosopher, she answered. Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer or someone; the one who said that God was dead. Oh, I told her: you mean Nietzsche. Maybe, she said. I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche, I said. Whoever, she replied; it doesn’t matter: the point is—I found this out later—he saw a horse being beaten in a square in Turin, and he lost it. Can you imagine? After all the questions that he must have grappled with, the complex, universal stuff he’d thought and written about, it was a horse that did his mind in: a dumb horse. Its owner, driver, operator or whatever, she continued, was whipping it; and Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or whoever saw this act of cruelty, and it wacked him out, sent him insane. He never wrote another book. For the first time in the conversation, she looked genuinely disturbed. Of all things, she said: a horse … Her voice had gone all faint. So had her face: darkness was gathering around it, smudging its parameters more and more with each pass
ing minute. We sat in silence for a while, listening to the muffled noise of traffic and the low-level bustle of the staff as they readied the place for the evening sitting.

  14.

  14.1 The following week, I flew off to New York, and this symposium. I didn’t have to give a presentation or a lecture or anything like that—just sit on a bunch of panel discussions. To my surprise, I found myself (in stark contrast to Frankfurt) being fêted at every turn. Peyman had clearly put the word out. Despite saying almost nothing in any of these conversations, I was accorded almost sycophantic reverence, simply for being (as it was stated time and again) one of the Koob-Sassen Project’s “architects” or “engineers.” Any protest I made about the grotesque exaggeration contained in this label, any confession of my utterly diminutive contribution to the whole thing, of how my little subterranean scratching-around had formed a tiny piece of a huge jigsaw, and so on—all these were written down to some notion of quaint British modesty, and had the opposite effect to that intended, boosting my presumed rank and prestige even more. The trade press were all over the event; after each panel, there’d be short interviews, at which off-the-cuff utterances, none of which I can remember, were extracted from me; then I and the other panelists would be ushered to limousines and whisked off to meals in restaurants so expensive that they didn’t print the prices on the menus; not that we were paying.

  14.2 On the third day of this, several hours before I was due to fly back out of JFK, I managed to extricate myself from this circus. I thus found myself with a fair stretch of time, free time, and no desire to fill it up with anything. I rode the subway for an hour or so, getting off here and there, walking a few blocks, then burrowing back down into the next lettered stairwell that I came across. I followed no route in particular—just crossed and crisscrossed, switched back, re-traversed the same stretches of track; but all the same, I found myself being drawn, like some weak dowser’s rod, lower and lower downtown. Eventually, abandoning the illusion that this descent was taking place by chance rather than design, I took the decision to do what I’d already been doing half-intentionally: that is, to travel right down to Manhattan’s very base, and to the ferry terminal perched on its southernmost tip.

  14.3 South Ferry is the subway station serving the terminal itself; but for some reason it was closed, so I got off at Rector Street instead. A sign at one end of the platform directed passengers towards the 9/11 Memorial; another, at the far end, read Ferries to Staten Island. It was odd to see those last two words printed out, in public, big and bold and official, after having stared at them, or their variants, in private for so long—as though I were now physically moving through one of my own dossiers: past its coordinates, along its arbitrary channels of association. Beyond the sign, a narrow staircase carried me up to a street bathed in late-winter sunlight. Old buildings bordered this. One of them had its name emblazoned above its portico: New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Others, untitled, had the look of civic buildings too: tax offices, perhaps, or public records depots. Above these buildings, dwarfing them, the half-completed Freedom Tower’s crane-studded skeleton rose up. The thrum of sightseeing helicopters hung about the air; behind the Motor Vehicle building I could see one taking off, its glass nose sniffing the ground to which it glided parallel for a few metres before peeling away laterally skywards; another hovered, its head angled more aloofly upwards as it waited to land. The intermittent beep-beep-beep of reversing buses broke up the chopper blades’ deep, gut-vibrating frequencies, or at least punctuated them. Buses were everywhere: MTA buses turning around or idling at their downtown end-point; tour buses disgorging tourists or awaiting new ones. Men in yellow jackets hawked tickets for these buses, for the helicopters and for boats: aerial and ground tours of Manhattan, cruises to Ellis and Liberty Islands. No one, of course, was selling tours to Staten Island, since the crossing was free—and, even if it hadn’t been, no tourist would have wanted to go there.

  14.4 I wanted to go there. Why? I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything? I was, as I’d anticipated I would be, depressed. I’d been this way for months. Despite the Project’s evident, or apparent, success; despite my own “pivotal” role in the Company’s contribution to this monumental undertaking, all the plaudits it was winning me (there’d doubtless be a raise, an elevated status in the Company, perhaps even a high-up, or at least above-ground, office—how I’d miss the sound of ventilation!)—none of this meant anything to me. Nothing meant anything to me. Present-Tense Anthropology™? The Parachutist Mystery? Trashed, pulverised, dissolved back into the whimsy-froth from which they’d bubbled up. The Torino-Caselle Enigma? Madison’s story was, like Lévi-Strauss’s tribe, just fucking weird. What dot-codex could be salvaged from that? And yet the rich and vivid island-dream had stayed with me, cached itself somewhere deep inside, and was now growing, pulsing as it rose back to the surface, radiating with a prospect, with an overwhelming promise, of significance. Something, I told myself with an assurance that I can’t explain, nor could I then, but which all the same, perhaps for that very reason, seemed completely watertight—something would happen if I went to Staten Island. I didn’t know what; but something would. And something would make sense—if not the whole caboodle, at least something. Something is not nothing, even if it isn’t everything. Like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood, or a gambler down to his last chip reaching for the dice to take one final roll, I’d gravitated down here, to the bottom of Manhattan, armed with nothing more than an idea of getting on this ferry. Would I come back on it again? Perhaps; perhaps not. Anything seemed possible.

  14.5 Skirting the edge of Battery Park, I managed to pick out a couple of small signs for the ferry terminal: cheaply printed ones, clamped onto lamp-posts, jostling for space with better, more official signs pointing to Battery Park, to Bowling Green, or to a second Memorial, this one for veterans of Vietnam. I had to weave and thread my way through queues, lines, gaggles, general throngs of people speaking Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Mandarin and who knows what else, before, behind a broken veil of pretzel stands and gyros trucks, the terminal loomed into view. The building itself looked new: all glass and metal, not unlike the Company’s headquarters, with giant, steel-cast, three-dimensional letters mounted above the entrance, boldly announcing STATEN ISLAND FERRY. As I followed the path round towards the building, more food stands and lamp-posts, passing through my field of vision, temporarily erased some of these letters, so the sign read SATE I LAND, then, a few seconds later, STATE IS ERR. This intrigued me; I started moving back and forth erratically to tease new couplings out by eliding some letters, restoring others. I got SAT AND FRY, SANS LAND, TEN SANDER, TEN IS LAND … The letters were like Scrabble pieces rearranging themselves in an attempt to form a legitimate word; or like the numbers on a combination lock, revolving singularly and in series through their permutations, each click bringing with it the chance that the correct sequence, the true number, will eventually reveal itself, crack open whatever safe it’s protecting, spill its contents. FER. AIL. END. S A I L—then, to my great excitement, on the fourth or fifth pass down the same ten-yard stretch, S AT I N. An irrational elation overtook me as this last word spelled itself out. It was short-lived, though: soon the word morphed into STA I N; then the roof’s overhang eclipsed all but the first two letters: ST. Coincidentally, at the same moment I became aware of a man’s voice off to my left pronouncing, over and over, a word that sounded like a contraction of Starbucks: Stix or Stycks. He said it in an interrogatory manner. Turning round to where the voice was coming from, I saw that its owner was an old-style confectionary vendor selling candy-floss out of a street-cart. He was asking two kids whose dad was buying them some whether they wanted it in a bag or on (and this, of course, was the word I was mishearing) sticks. The kids chose sticks. After he’d handed them the billowing, synthetic stuff, they stood munching it silently, staring back at me with hostile, sticky faces.

  14.6 The terminal’s interior, despite
its new façade, was dingy. Parts of it were boarded up, awaiting repair. The smell of popcorn, hot dogs, pizza and donuts hung about the concourse, impregnating air that was much warmer than the air outside—cloying and heavy, too. People were milling about, waiting for the ferry: normal, everyday folk who commuted on it daily. A few of them wore suits—cheap, polyester ones, the standard-issue outfit of the low-white-collar ranks; but most wore plain, casual clothes. They looked bored, frumpy, tired, unhealthy, overweight and generally just very, very normal. An MTA man armed with a megaphone was telling them that the 3:30 boat would be arriving momentarily. He actually meant “in a moment”; but the term’s correct sense, for a moment, given these ferries’ quick and constant turnaround, was carried over in his misuse of it. The man’s megaphone, and his impatient and authoritarian tone, gave the scene the air of an evacuation: looking at the drab, deflated passengers, I pictured refugees being herded off towards some makeshift temporary shelter. One of them was hobbling on crutches; another had a cane; a third one a badly fitting wig. The walls of the terminal were largely bare. On one side of the sliding doors towards which these walls funneled the passengers, there was a poster advertising low-cost medical insurance; on the other side, one selling debt-relief packages. To this poster’s left, large windows framed gantries that, since no ferry was docked, were raised. A seagull idled at the end of one. Beneath it, buffers, formed of wooden stakes packed together in tight rows, were turning gangrenous and rotting where they sank into the water. Beyond them, out in the harbour, tankers passed by. I could see one being loaded up over in Red Hook, by giant cranes that looked like insects reared up in the throes of some dying agony. Scanning my gaze across the harbour, to the right, I could see Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty, the outline of New Jersey, with more cranes; then, furthest away of all, no more than a grey lump on the horizon, the place where we were headed.