Satin Island (19 page)

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.

14.7
The crowd was growing, pressing in now. A lady with a hamburger in her hands bumped me as she went by. The man with the megaphone made his
momentarily
announcement again. On the wall I saw a little screen I hadn’t noticed before. It was showing Staten Island attractions: a compilation of vague and generic scenes—people playing golf, or sharing a slap-up meal, or walking through some kind of pleasant-looking shrubbery; a carousel; a football field with children running on it; a man paddling a canoe past reeds and bulrushes. These followed one another in no particular order, then gave over to a picture of an orange ferry cruising through calm waters. Shot (presumably) from a helicopter that circled the moving boat so as to film it from both prow and stern ends and from port and starboard sides as it advanced smoothly and happily across a sea that seemed to welcome it and even help propel it onwards, the scene was idyllic: this bright-orange vessel, cruising through the afternoon, cruising (so it seemed) right out of time, past all statutes and limits, to some other place where everything, even our crimes, has been composted down, mulched over, transformed into moss, pasture and wetland for the duck and coot to build their nests in. Maybe I could somehow nest there too, I told myself; float, calmly, to some spot, some tract from which other terrains might open, realms where everything was different. I turned my head from the screen and looked at the real harbour, the real water. These, with low sunlight bouncing off them, also looked unreal, idyllic. I could make out an actual ferry moving over them towards me: being orange, just like in the film, it seemed to emerge from the bright and
hazy light itself, as though the latter’s molecules were rearranging themselves, just like the letters, in an attempt to generate and shape it. Other people had spotted the boat as well: a stir of excitement rippled through the crowd, manifest in hundreds of leg-stances changing, shoulders tightening and lifting, backpacks being slung over backs, general precipitation towards the still-closed sliding doors. Running my gaze once more along the contours of the terminal, I realized that the building was itself shaped like a ferry, its walls angling inwards like a bow as they progressed from north to south, away from the great landmass of Manhattan to the water, the two sides eventually meeting at the sliding doors’ flat prow. It struck me that it would have been designed like that, deliberately: a kind of mirror-double of the boats that came to dock at it. As this boat, my boat, loomed nearer, I experienced a vertiginous excitement at the prospect of this happening: a space meeting its inverse, negative and positive coming together, merging into one; and at the prospect of finding myself standing at the very point where this great fusion was occurring. It was more than just a prospect: as the ferry hove still closer, a transformation that was physical seemed to take place; it felt as though not just the ferry but the terminal as well were moving, carrying me with it, bearing me onto the verge of something rich, strange and miraculous.

14.8
Gantries were coming down now. People were streaming to the doors. The MTA man was announcing, through his
megaphone, that the 3:30 ferry had arrived. He repeated the announcement several times. He did this in a ritualized, almost incantatory manner—as though his annunciation of the boat’s arrival were a necessary component of the arrival itself, one without which the event could not complete its course. The floor shuddered as the ferry’s hull made contact with the buffers. I could make its name out:
Spirit of Change
. Above the writing, in a little cabin topped with radar masts, I could see the captain talking into his radio. Radio-crackle broke out to my right and left: from the MTA man’s walkie-talkie, and from those of security personnel scattered about the terminal. It mingled with the crackling of popcorn: several people near me were eating this as they watched the ferry dock, then watched the passengers who’d travelled with it to Manhattan disembark. These arriving passengers looked, in dress and general demeanour, just like the departing ones, but were segregated from the latter by glass walls that led them down a side-tube to the building’s exit. Once the last of them had trickled out, the sliding doors opened, and the people thronged around me made towards them.

14.9
I was carried with them, with this throng of people; standing in their midst, I didn’t have much choice. Since the terminal was shaped like a big V, the crowd grew more and more compressed the closer to the bottom of this V it moved, like sand-grains running through an hourglass. I tried to recall my flight’s departure time; I still had a few more hours. Beyond the
glass walls, in the sky, I could see other aeroplanes, all angled sharply up- or downwards as they rose from or descended into Newark. Up or down, whichever direction they had come from or were heading in, their vapour trails all met, again in big
V
s, over Staten Island. They were pointing there; the sky was pointing there; the wind was blowing that way, bearing gliding seagulls down flight-corridors that led there, arranging cloud-wisps into lines that ran along the same paths as the vapour trails. On the ground, flags were straining at their poles in that direction too; all the cranes in Red Hook and New Jersey were angled that way; even the Statue of Liberty pointed towards the grey lump. The mass of people in the terminal started compressing even tighter as the glass walls’ funnel grew still narrower, till we became, collectively, a Vanuatan arrowhead, being flighted now across this harbour, on an arced trajectory with the same, inevitable destination, it seemed, as everything else, only a few more feet of terminal and gantry remaining between us and the
pyonngg!
of irreversible release …

14.10
I didn’t let myself be carried through the doors, though: at the last instant, I held back. This wasn’t easy: bodies were wedging me in on all sides. I had to push against them, turn myself around, then hoist and grab at passing arms and shoulders in order to move the other way. At some point, in that final stretch, I’d made my mind up not to take the ferry after all. To go to Staten Island
—actually
go there—would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality,
have solved, or resolved? Nothing. What tangible nesting space would I have discovered there, and for what concrete purpose? None. Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well. And so I found myself, as I waded back through the relentless stream of people, struggling just to stay in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know. I worked my way out to the side, and stood watching the crowd parading by. Their tight-packedness made them edge and shuffle rather than flow, a stop-start rhythm that was nonetheless placid rather than agitated, their stares fixed not on the back of the person right in front of them (although their eyes all pointed there) but rather on some abstract spot beyond this, or, perhaps, on nothing. The thought struck me that I should be filming this scene on my phone for Daniel, or, perhaps, myself—but I didn’t act on this thought. I just stood there, watching. The man on crutches shuffled by; and the one with the wig; and the ones in polyester suits; and the ones in plain, casual clothes. Many had small backpacks, most of which were loose-strung over single shoulders; one young man, though, had a larger one strapped tightly to his back, over both shoulders and around his waist, but hadn’t closed it: cloth-like fabric of a fleshy hue was trailing slightly from its unzipped opening. A woman with striped black and yellow shoes edged past me, and for a fleeting instant I thought it was the Minister. It was my jet-lag kicking in, colliding times and places in my head. I saw, amidst the mesh of limbs and torsos, a large bump on someone’s neck. I didn’t see their face—only their neck, and this just for a second. Helicopters
thrummed again; I thought of humming-birds; again a radio crackled, and some children, possibly the ones with the candy-floss, or maybe other ones, processed by. The crowd thinned out; late arrivals scurried past me; then the doors closed; and, almost immediately, the gantries, like the drawbridge to some castle that I’d never enter, were hoisted back up.

14.11
Through the closed doors, their salt-flecked glass, I watched the ship reversing from its berth, churning the water as its hull bumped against the buffers on each side. Once in the open water, it swung round, then made a beeline for the lump on the horizon. Staten Island was no longer grey, and it had grown: the sun was right behind it now, haloing it, transmuting it into a brilliant orange pool that spread across the harbour like a second mass of water, one set on a slightly different plane that spilled across the first one when the two planes intersected. This pool of light was spreading right towards the ferry, swallowing it up, dismantling it pixel by orange pixel. Its haze spread even further, past the boat’s still-discernible stern, turning the ferry’s wake, and those of other vessels, a metallic, silvery shade. There were scores of wakes, crossing each other in irregular and tangled patterns.
Networks of kinship:
the phrase flashed across my mind; I snorted with derision. Three or four other people who’d been standing in the terminal hadn’t taken the boat either. They, like me, stood looking at the harbour, at the light, each other. Were they anthropologists as well? Of course not: the radios of two of them identified them as plain-clothes
security personnel; another was the MTA man, megaphone now hanging at his side. The fourth was a homeless guy working his way along a row of payphones. That was it: for a few moments there were just the five of us on the empty concourse, stood (it seemed) in some kind of formal arrangement whose logic escaped me, amidst discarded popcorn cartons, like a sparse matinee audience at some movie in which nothing happens. A cleaning machine whined into action, brushes slowly rotating as it crawled across the floor, squirting disinfectant. Then the first passengers for the next ferry started trickling in, and the whole cycle started up again.

14.12
I was, as I mentioned, jet-lagged: disorientated, undirected. I’d travelled down to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to take the ferry and not taken it, or perhaps just travelled down there to not take the ferry. I’d been standing in the same spot for some time now. So, too, had the plain-clothes security personnel, and the MTA man. As the concourse filled up with incoming passengers, our arrangement, its sculpted geometry, which had impressed itself upon me with such clarity and (at the same time) mystery for a few minutes, faded back into the general mass of bodies. It was still there, though, camouflaged or buried: none of us had moved. The homeless guy was still there, too, going slowly down the row of payphones, searching for forgotten change caught in their mechanism. In his attempt to trigger its release, he lifted each receiver from its cradle and held it up for a few seconds, waiting for coins to drop. None
did. I looked out at the harbour once again. The dazzle on the water now was all-consuming, overexposed, blinding: the departed ferry, Staten Island, all the other landmarks and most of the sky had disappeared in a great holocaust of light, whose retinal after-effects, in turn, made the terminal’s interior too dark when I turned back to it. It took a few more seconds for the levels to adjust. I found myself still looking at the homeless guy. He was still holding a receiver away from his ear, making no attempt to listen to or talk into it. He looked all wrong; anachronistic. Who uses payphones these days? I wondered if these ones even worked. I stared at him; our eyes met for a while; then I, uncomfortable, broke off the contact and started walking, past the growing stream of people, out of the terminal and back into the city.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Satin Island
gestated during a 2010 residency at the International Artists Studio Programme in Stockholm, which I spent projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end. A year later I was the recipient of equally generous hospitality from the Center for Fiction in New York, who lent me a spacious office in which to sit and think about the general impossibility of writing a novel about the general impossibility of etc. As the book started gathering momentum, Alfie Spencer, Ednyfed Tappy and James Westcott helped it along by giving me an invaluable lid-lift on the strange eddies and cross-currents that arise when the tributaries of left-field thought run into the Amazon of new-corporate culture; to them I’m very grateful. Also to Clementine Deliss, to whom I already owed so much, for showing me her remarkable museum. I should also mention Paul Rabinow, whom I’ve never met, but whose brilliantly formulated thoughts on the notion of “the contemporary” I have freely and shamelessly lifted.
Satin Island
, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical
reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined.