Satin Island (6 page)

5.9
That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question. As I stepped out of the blind spot back into time and his office, he asked: Have you ever been to Seattle, U.? Behind him, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cranes, clouds, bridges, aeroplanes, the Thames all jostled for position. No, I answered. It’s interesting, he said. Oh yes? I asked. How so? Well, he replied, the truly striking thing about the city is its lack of Starbucks outlets: driving around, you don’t see a single one. That’s strange, I said; I thought Seattle was where Starbucks came from.
Exactly
, he said; you’d think the town would turn out to just be one giant Starbucks. But instead it’s all
Joe’s Cappuccino Bar, Espresso Luigi, Pacific Coffee Shack
and the like. So what’s the story there? I asked. What’s the story indeed? he repeated.
This is exactly what I asked my driver; and do you know what he told me? Peyman looked up from his device. I shook my head. He told me, Peyman said, his gaze now drifting over to his monitor, that these
were
Starbucks:
stealth
ones. Starbucks’ management, their strategists, understand that no one actually wants to buy coffee from Starbucks; they do it for convenience, heads hung low with shame. People crave authenticity, locality and (here his speech slowed down a little, since he’d started typing again)… origin—everything that Starbucks, as a global chain, represents the polar opposite of. So the strategists (he went on) create these “local” figures—Joe, Luigi and the like—and launch a handful of outlets for each, not too near to one another, and see how they fare: real-world R&D. If one takes off, they’ll roll it out nationwide, and across Europe, Asia and the rest—and everyone will flock to it, because it isn’t Starbucks. Isn’t that brilliant? he asked. Yes, I replied; I guess it is.

5.10
He proceeded to brief me on the Project; the Company’s role in this; my own within that. There’d be a meeting with the Minister in a few weeks’ time; he wanted me to come; he wanted me to go to Paris; he wanted me to continue following my own lines (or sidelines) of intuitive enquiry, and report back intermittently on these, as always; there was other stuff. I’m being quite vague, in part because I’m obliged to be; but in part because he was quite vague as well. He’d always been that way: his currency also comprised, as its reserve, a kind of systematic vagueness.
Some spaces of ignorance do not need
to be filled in
—that was another of his aphorisms. His whole knack, the USP on which he’d built his business, was for managing uncertainties, for somehow joining isolated dots into a constellation-pattern people could just—
just
—recognize, and be seduced by. As I listened to him talk about Koob-Sassen, it all made sense, even if it didn’t. Even the fact that it didn’t quite make sense made sense, while he was talking.

5.11
Later that evening, I saw Madison again. Again we had sex. Afterwards, lying in bed, I found my mind drifting, once more, among images of oil. I moved through dark and ponderous swells, black-cresting waves and fleck-spattered shingles, before settling among pools in which oil, spent and inert, lay draped over rocks and animals alike. When it covered whole rocks and whole animals, it looked like PVC, like fetish gear. The rescue and clean-up teams’ protective suits looked both perverse and prophylactic at the same time. Offshore, where the waves were breaking, I could see a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.

6.

6.1
The following week, I organized a meeting with a bunch of civil servants who were working on Koob-Sassen. The idea was that they’d sit in a room and discuss their sense of what the Project entailed, or, more subtly, implied. We had, in the Company’s offices, a room purpose-built for such discussions. It had loungers, sofas, armchairs, even beanbags—all chosen to induce as relaxed and casual an atmosphere as possible, so that the discussion’s participants could just chew the fat while we watched them through a two-way mirror that formed one of the room’s walls. It never worked that way, of course: people always knew that they were being watched, assessed, recorded. It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesis
devised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems—the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison—cyanide, say—would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through—well, the atom would only choose to
have jumped
through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had
already
jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather,
both
alive
and
dead, until the scientist,
post hoc
, peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.

6.2
Thus it was, after a manner, with the subjects I’d observe through the fake mirror. These civil servants knew without being told what was expected of them—not by me, nor even by their bosses, their immediate superiors to whom they could attribute a name and face and rank, but rather by some larger and much vaguer host of assessors, overviewers, judges, lurking on the far side of some other two-way mirror much, much larger, if less obvious, than this one—and were shaping their contributions accordingly. They kept using the word “excitement”
(one hundred and eighty-two occurrences over three hours); also “challenge” (one hundred and four); “opportunity” (eighty-nine); “transformation” (seventy-eight); and, as an upscale variant on this last word, “re-configuration” (sixty-three). They reclined in their loungers, stretched their legs out from their beanbags, tried to exude nonchalance and calm—but to me they transmitted tenseness and unease, like anxious cats.

6.3
The way iodine works, said Petr when we met later that week in the same pub as last time—what it does, is it
recognizes
thyroid cancer-cells and zaps them. Say each cancer-cell was like a coin—a certain type, from a specific period, with an exact denomination—well, iodine is trained to spot this coin and melt it back down, take it out of circulation. That sounds pretty straight-forward, I said. You’ll be cured, then. Ah, he replied: in principle it sounds straight-forward. But in practice it turns out to be a little harder than I thought. He paused. How do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, say one of these coins is degraded, or a little different, through some quirk of the mint—the way a machine-part was lying the day that it was pressed, a piece of grit that found its way into the mix, a hundred other permutation-causing factors we could mention: then the iodine can’t recognize it, since these variations haven’t been included in its recognition-software. So the coin, the cancer-cell, not only stays in circulation; it sets up its own mint and prints new copies
of itself, each one corrupt, unrecognizable as well; and then these introduce new variations and new mint-quirks of their own, until the iodine has no idea what it’s even supposed to be looking for, throws its hands up, mutters
Fuck this!
and heads off home. It’s a systems problem, Petr said. If we had a better database, then I’d be out of danger.

6.4
One afternoon, while sorting through the transcript of the civil-servant dialogues down in the basement, I poked my head into Daniel’s office again. This time I found him staring at footage that showed hundreds of legs gliding through city streets. I say “gliding” because that’s what they were doing, rather than (say) walking or running. The legs, I realized after a few seconds, belonged to roller-bladers: lots of roller-bladers, skating past the camera—which itself, since it was moving, was (presumably) being held by somebody also on roller-blades. How’s the Great Report coming along? Daniel asked. Oh, you know, I said: it’s coming along slowly; still finding its shape. Look at the way they move, said Daniel, without turning his head towards me. I looked: the bladers’ heads all angled forwards, focused on a spot beyond the picture’s frame, some point on which they were advancing. It wasn’t a race: there was no urgency to their pace. More like a Friday-evening meet-up (it was dark; the streets were lit), with most people just ambling forwards, or sliding from one side of the moving column to the other, or letting the column’s body flow ahead of them a little
as they waited for an acquaintance to catch up, or checked their phone for messages, or fiddled with the music they had plugged into their ears.

6.5
I shot it in Paris, Daniel said, still facing away from me towards the wall. I’m going there next week, I told him. It’s an MSP, he said, ignoring me. What’s that? I asked.
Manifestation sans Plainte
, he answered. That’s the legal term for it, as set out in the license granted by the Paris
mairie:
a Demonstration With No Complaint. Oh, I said; and we watched the footage in silence for a little longer. The roller-bladers kept on gliding by. They didn’t have to make much of an effort to progress, since the street’s surface was quite smooth. This gave them all a kind of languid look. Paris, Daniel explained when I commented on the pavement’s texture, has the smoothest street surface of any major European city. It’s because of sixty-eight, he said, the general uprisings, when revolutionaries pulled up all the cobblestones to throw them at the cops. They even had a slogan stirring them to do this:
Underneath the paving stones, the beach!
After that, he explained, the authorities replaced the paving stones with tarmac—which had the unforeseen effect of turning the city into a paradise for roller-bladers.

6.6
I kept thinking about the dead parachutist. The circumstances of the incident recalled a chapter from my own childhood. I can pinpoint, with complete precision, the episode that
set me on my career path: it occurred when, at the age of seven, I happened to watch, one rainy Sunday afternoon, a documentary—an old one, from the early sixties—about South Pacific islanders. These people, Vanuatans, engaged once a year in a peculiar ritual: the men would climb a high and rickety-looking wooden tower and, goaded on by their womenfolk, who chanted songs of exhortation, leap from the top of this, head first. They wore vines round their ankles, cut to such a length that they would tauten just before the men’s torsos crashed into the earth below. After watching the documentary, I’d climb up my younger sisters’ bunk-bed and, fastening T-shirts and pyjamas round my ankles and the bedpost, leap repeatedly, head first, towards the carpet. If a Vanuatan hesitated or refused a dive, his womenfolk would whip themselves with thorns and nettles, to shame him into action; I made my sisters whip themselves with flannels. I performed the ritual for several days, until a dislocated shoulder and my parents’ veto brought an end to it—but by then, the documentary had done its work. From that time onwards, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them:
anthropologist
.

6.7
So, with this parachutist: I’d already, as I mentioned, figured out the crime’s location (the sky). The question remained, though, of timing. In other words: at what precise
point
in time had he actually been murdered? When the equipment had been sabotaged? If he’d survived the fall—been greeted by a sudden upgust of ground-wind, say, or landed in soft, deep
snow, or in the branches of a fir-tree that, pliant and supple, had broken his fall incrementally as he tumbled through them, each layer shaving a little more velocity away until the last layer rolled him gently onto needle-covered earth—if any of these miracles (of which popular lore is, after all, quite full) had taken place, the act of sabotage wouldn’t have constituted murder. Yet, as at least one article I read stated, the man’s death was, in this instance—in this country devoid of tall pine trees, this terrain quite unamenable to upgusts, this snow-less season—a foregone conclusion from the moment the cords had been cut. Thus, although he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours—days, perhaps—of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it)
been
murdered without
realizing
it. I tried to picture him walking around in that state: already effectively dead, his body and his consciousness, his experiences, and, beyond these, his experience of his experiences—his awareness of himself, his whole reality—mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams.

6.8
The Great Report: this needs explaining. It was Peyman’s idea. When he first hired me, as he shook my hand to
welcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. The Great Report? I asked, my hand still clenched in his; what’s that? The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m
really
hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? Could you elaborate? I asked. Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins’ mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only as an abstract concept, like adultery for children; and, waving with big, gap-toothed smiles, they send you back to your study—where, khakis swapped for cotton shirt and tie, saliva-liquor for the Twinings, tisane or iced Scotch your housekeeper purveys you on a tray, you write the book: that’s what I mean, he said. Not just
a
book:
the
fucking
Book
. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name.