Authors: Tom McCarthy
12.10
I sat facing her in silence. I didn’t know what to reply. I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette, scrunching its small stub onto a saucer lying beside the bed, then went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, though, thinking about what she’d said. Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact—the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies—for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture—the one that’s turned away, from
us
at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of
untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization’s perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind’s face.
12.11
That night, I eventually had a splendid dream. A rich and vivid one: one full of splendour. I was flying, like Daniel and Peyman in their helicopter, over a harbour by a city. It was a great, imperial city, the world’s greatest—all of them, from all periods: Carthage, London, Alexandria, Vienna, Byzantium and New York, all superimposed on one another the way things are in dreams. We’d left the city and were flying above the harbour. This was full of bustle: tug-boats, steamers, yachts, you name it, bobbing and crisscrossing in water whose ridges and wave-troughs glinted in the sun, though it was nighttime. Out in the harbour—some way out, separated from the city by swathes of this choppy water—was an excrescence, a protuberance, a lump: an island. Was it man-made? Possibly. Its sides rose steeply from the sea; they were constructed of cement, or old bricks. The island was dark in hue; yet, like the sea, it seemed somehow lit up. As we approached it—flying quite low, parallel to the water—the buildings on it loomed larger and larger. These buildings—huge, derelict factories whose outer walls and rafters, barely intact, recalled the shells of bombed cathedrals—ran one into the next to form a single
giant, half-ruined complex that covered the island’s entire surface area. Inside this complex, rubbish was being burnt: it was a trash-incinerating plant. Giant mountains of the stuff were piled up in its great, empty halls, rising in places almost to where the ceiling would have been. They were being burnt slowly, from the inside, with a smouldering, rather than roaring, fire. Whence the glow: like embers when you poke them, the mounds’ surfaces, where cracked or worn through by the heat, were oozing a vermilion shade of yellow. It was this glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash-mountain’s main body, that made the scene so rich and vivid, filled it with a splendour that was regal. Yes,
regal
—that was the strange thing: if the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse—the
other
place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn’t function; yet it seemed, in its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served. We were homing right in on it now: descending in our chopper through the factory-cathedral’s shell, skimming the rubbish-piles as walls and rafters towered above us, gazing in awe and fascination at the glowing ooze, its colours as they morphed from vermilion yellow to mercurial silver, then on to purple, umber, burnt sienna, the foil-like flashing of its folds and gashes as light flowed across them. And, as we skimmed and veered and marvelled, a voice—the helicopter pilot’s maybe, or some kind of commentator, or perhaps, as before
with the roller-blader half-dream, just my own—announced, clearly and concisely:
Satin Island
.
12.12
I woke up. Madison was still asleep. It was just five o’clock. I pulled my clothes on and went home. Arriving there, I sat at my desk. Below me, on its surface, lay the wreckage of the Great Report’s aborted launch. Outside, the day was, once more, grey. Small specks of water hung about the air. The courtyard, the pond, the concrete stepping-slabs set in it, the glass and concrete of the buildings all around, the general graphite texture of the dawn—these things seemed, in that moment, both consistent, all forming a single object with a single membrane, and, at the same time, porous, like some kind of wrapper that was starting to leak whatever content it was meant to keep wrapped up. Not fully awoken, still enfolded in my dream, I seemed to be consistent with this membrane too, to partake of its leakage. Leaning forwards with my forearm horizontal, perpendicular to the table, I used it to push a coffee cup and sundry other objects to one side. Then I wrote, with a pencil, directly on the blotter paper, on a small patch of it the forearm-pushing had exposed, the two words from my dream:
Satin Island
. Then I went and had a shower.
12.13
I couldn’t shake the dream off all day: it sat right at the centre of my mind, consuming all my thoughts. Later, in
the office, I took Patty and Ulrike down and pinned up in their place a bunch of images of barges carrying rubbish out to the Fresh Kills landfill site in New York Harbor. Staten Island: that’s what that part of town was called—the fifth, forgotten borough, the great dump. That this place—both its name and function—had prompted my own dream seemed obvious: my sleeping mind had done little more than change
Staten
into
Satin
. I found the images online: pictures of barges, seagulls flocking around them, gorging themselves on their cargo; or of the garbage mountains photographed from above, from high up, even from beyond the stratosphere: like the Great Wall of China, the dump used to be visible from outer space. I say “used to be” because (as I found out) it had closed down in 2001, although it had briefly re-opened soon after to receive the rubble from the World Trade Center. Now, though, the miles of landfill were being transformed into nature parks. Beyond these, as before, stretched more miles of suburbia. All this the Internet told me. Next, I started following the trail of the word
satin
. Satin, as I knew from my old jeans-brief, is a type of weave, one in which warp yarns, floated over weft ones, form a glossy surface. I printed off an illustration showing the exact weave-structure. Then I looked at statins—a third term that, the more I reflected, was suggesting itself to me as a hidden link joining the actual word I’d heard, or maybe spoken, in my dream,
Satin
, and the un-enunciated but still obviously connoted
Staten
. Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs inhibiting enzyme production in the liver. I found an illustration of their chemical composition, printed it off too, and pinned it
next to the one showing satin’s weave. I also printed off a picture showing wooden bleachers by an empty sports-field in the unincorporated town of Satin, Texas (population: 86); and the batting statistics of a former baseball player named Josh Satin, who had spent his career vacillating between major and minor leagues. Neither he nor the town could have been sources for my dream, since I’d not heard of either before; but I printed them off all the same, and plenty more besides. Soon all my walls were covered with such things.
12.14
Tapio phoned. Will you be here on Friday? he asked. Yes, I answered. Come see Peyman in the morning, he instructed me. Bring your Koob-Sassen dossiers. My Koob-Sassen … I repeated. The files, your findings, all the stuff you’re working on, he said. I think I’ve circulated most of these already, I told him. This was true: I’d processed the civil-servant transcripts, the Parisian financial-service-worker ones and many other documents of that ilk—analyzed them, run them through the ethnographic mill, interpreted the data this procedure yielded and sent my interpretations up, through the relevant floors and across the requisite desks, to Peyman. Yes, said Tapio—but I mean the other stuff, the extra bits: that’s what he wants to see. Oh, I said. I looked up at my walls. Whereas before, I’d been able to parlay my parachute wallpaperfragments into a coherent and insightful contribution to the Company’s overall work on Koob-Sassen (I’d since seen my in-transit metaphor, my perpetual-state-of-passage analogy,
used in both internal and external Company memos on the subject),
these
images—the piles of rubbish, barges, seagulls—seemed to resist all incorporation into any useful or productive screed. I stared at the empty bleachers, trying to think of something to say. Eventually, Tapio broke the silence. Just bring up what you’ve got, he said. Okay, I answered; then he hung up.
12.15
The next—and final—time I visited Petr, I realized that I’d been wrong on the subject of the windows. They were still all smudged and blackened, as they had been last time—nothing had changed there. So was his flesh: the dark lumps were still pushing up from under the skin’s surface, clouding it. My thinking on my first visit had been that, since the people in this ward, all facing imminent obliteration, had been positioned high up in this tall hospital, the conditions were perfect for affording them a really good sight of the world they would soon take their leave of, a bird’s-eye view of one of its greatest and most teeming cities. Whether the placement had been done by design or chance, it was appropriate: if, as you die, you’re meant to see your life, and life in general, with total clarity, then this small, parting 20/20 moment had been facilitated, laid on, set up by the architecture in which the patients found themselves—only to be confounded, snatched away again, by something as banal as a housekeeping oversight; or, if not an oversight, a small act of administrative penny-pinching. On this final visit, though, I came to see that, along the very lines that had made me view it as so wrong earlier, the windows’
dirtiness was in fact totally correct. It was the world, its stuff, that had left its deposit—on the windows and in Petr’s bones, his organs, flesh and arteries. The stuff of the world is black. If Petr’s flesh was turning black it was because he’d let the world get right inside him, let it saturate him, until he was so full of it that it was bursting out again, erupting with a radiating luminescence. Thinking these thoughts while Petr talked to me of this and that (I have no recollection of what he spoke about that day), I began to suspect that he had already, in an almost literal sense, become an angel; looking around the ward, I grew convinced that it was also full of angels: figures whom the world had so deeply penetrated, flooded, impregnated that, refined in them, its forms and colours stripped down to their pure, constituent goo, it emanated back out from them—not as light but as its opposite: this formless, nameless blackness so dense and concentrated, so intense and blinding that, confronted by it, mortals like me had to shield our eyes.
12.16
I went straight home after this visit. My desk was as I’d left it, with those two words from my dream written in pencil on the one part of the blotter pad that wasn’t cluttered up. Staring at them, I was struck by a thought: perhaps, I told myself, those words could form my Great Report. Not just its title, but its content too: the whole damn thing. Rather than hand Peyman new Koob-Sassen Project dossiers when I met him that Friday, I could announce that I’d completed this epochal task, and deliver it to him: all bound and laminated and what-have-you,
with nothing but these two words in it. Perhaps, I told myself, I could present him with this actual blotter sheet. Framed? Folded? Scrumpled up? If scrumpled up, would it play out as a resignation notice? Probably. If framed, would he accept it, hang it on his office wall, sit looking at it as he talked, elaborated concepts and connected people, use it as a visual touch-point for all these activities? Possibly. Certainly, the fact that it came from me, and the context within which it was presented, would imbue it for him with all kinds of cryptic meaning. And besides, I felt with real conviction that it
was
full of this already: meaning of a genuinely deep and intense nature, whose sense eluded me but whose presence radiated, pouring into everything around it. Squinting, I tried to look at the blotter sheet as though it were a picture, rather than a page. The
S
s of both
Satin
and
Island
were sliced through by a thin, curving, brown line, since they lay on the circumference of a stain left by the coffee mug I’d cleared away. To the
d
’s right, slightly beneath it, like a comet’s tail, was a big splodge of the same colour. Under this, in smaller letters, I wrote
Rumpelstiltskin. Secret name
, Peyman had said. I sat staring at the pad for a while longer; then, crossing out all of this last word’s letters but the first
R
, I changed it to
Rosebud
.
12.17
Petr died two days later. I learned of his death by text. His wife, whom most of his friends didn’t really know (they’d been estranged for several years), must, as his official next of kin, have been handed his mobile phone, and sent the
announcement out to everybody in the contacts file—taxi firms and take-away restaurants and all. Petr passed away peacefully 11:25 a.m. today, it read. My first thoughts on receiving it—the thoughts you’re meant to think in such a situation (
How sad; At least he’s at rest; I’ll miss him; And so forth
)—seemed so crass that I didn’t even bother to think them. Instead, I thought about the message itself, its provenance. It had, as I said, come from Petr’s estranged wife; but my phone, of course, like those of all the other people who would have received it, listed the sender as Petr. The network provider, logging every last transaction, would have marked the sender down as Petr too; if anybody cared to look it up in years to come, the record would affirm the same thing. To almost all intents and purposes, the sender
was
Petr. His existence, at that moment, was impressing itself on me, and on hundreds of others, with as much force as—if not more than—at any other time. All we need to do to guarantee indefinite existence for ourselves is to keep our network contracts running, and make sure a missive goes out every now and then. We could have factories of Chinese workers do it; pre-pay five or ten years by bequest-subscription; give them a bunch of messages to send out in rotation or on shuffle; or default to generic and random ones; I don’t know. It would work, though. Key to immortality: text messaging.