Satin Island

8

8.1 And all this time, behind these apparitions, another one: the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind: the domed canopy above, the floppy strings casually twining their way downwards from this like blithe tentacles, free ends waving in the breeze. This last picture, for me, produces, even now, a sense of calm: no angry and insistent tow, no jerks and tugs and stresses — just a set of unencumbered cords carelessly feeling the air. This sense of calm, of languidness, grows all the more pronounced when set against the panic of the man hurtling away from it below. He would have looked up, naturally, and seen the chute lolling unburdened and indifferent above him — as though freed from the dense load of all its troubles, that conglomeration of anxiety and nerves that he, and the human form in general, represented. Considering the picture, I found my focus, my point of identification within it and my attendant sympathy, shifting from the diminutive man to his expanded, if detached, paraphernalia. I felt quite happy for the latter, for its liberation into carefreeness. Parachutes, as a rule, are treated badly by their human masters: granted false release and then immediately yanked back into servitude, into yoked bondage. This one, though, had slipped the bridle — literally — and billowed out into a freedom that was permanent and real. Its existence would have been a good and full one from this moment onwards.

8.2 The following weekend, the newspaper — the old-style broadsheet, I mean — carried a longer, more reflective article about the case. Its author was an occasional skydiver himself. He discussed the culture of the sport, its general fraternity. Skydivers, he informed his readers, are a close-knit bunch. They have, he wrote, the feeling of being part of a tribe. This sentence jumped out at me, for obvious reasons; on reading it, I looked up at the byline, to see if I recognized the journalist’s name. I didn’t. I thought of my Vanuatans once again. In their tower-plunging ritual, the vines, as I mentioned earlier, were measured so as to tauten not in mid-air but rather only fractionally above the earth: the jumps deemed the best, the ones that won the diver most acclaim, were those in which the cords sprang into action as he hit the ground, plucking him back from the very jaws of death into which they’d tantalizingly allowed him, for a fraction of a second, to descend. On such perfectly realized jumps, the diver’s shoulders would flick leaves and brushwood as they jerked back upwards, as though impudently scrawling the man’s signature across the forest floor. The movement was extremely pleasing to observe. It was this act of scrawling, this graffiti-gesture, I now realized, that, above all other aspects of the ritual, had back then made me want to be a tower-plunger, or anthropologist, or both.

8.3 The article kept mentioning “faith.” Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string. It could be argued, wrote the author, that this belief had nothing of the devotional or metaphysical about it, since each of the things to be believed in had a solid evidential underpinning: the mechanics of a ripcord, say, or a spring-loaded riser — or, of course, on a larger scale, the overall infallibility of physics, its laws of resistance, drag and so on. Yet, he claimed, these things could only carry one so far towards a gaping hole in a plane’s side, and the fundamentally counterintuitive act of throwing oneself through it: to cite the clichéd but apt maxim, they could take the horse to water, but they couldn’t make it drink. That final spur, the one that carried skydivers across the threshold, out into the abyss, was faith: faith that it all — the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety—worked, that they’d be gathered up and saved. For this man, though, the victim, that system, its whole fabric, had unraveled. That, and not his death, was the catastrophe that had befallen him. We’re all going to die: there’s nothing so disastrous about that, nothing in its ineluctability that undermines the structure of our being. But for the faith, the blind, absolute faith into whose arms he had entrusted his existence, from whose mouth he’d sought a whispered affirmation of its very possibility — for that to suddenly be plucked away: that must have been atrocious. He’d have looked around him, seen the sky, and earth, its landmass and horizon, all the vertical and horizontal axes that hold these together, felt acceleration and the atmosphere and all the rest, the fundamental elements in which we hang suspended all the time, whether we’ve just jumped from an aeroplane or not — and yet, for him, this realm, with all its width and depth and volume, would have, in an instant, become emptied of its properties, its values. The vast font at which he prayed, and into which he sank, as though to re-baptize himself, time and again, would, in the blink of a dilated eye, have been voided of godhead, rendered meaningless. Space, even as he plunged into it, through it, would have retreated — recoiled, contracted, pulled back from its frontiers even though these stayed intact — withdrawn to some zero-point at which it flips into its negative. Negative world, negative sky, negative everything: that’s the territory this man had entered. Did that then mean he’d somehow fallen through into another world, another sky? A richer, fuller, more embracing one? I don’t think so.

8.4 Why are your walls covered in pictures of parachutes? asked Tapio when he popped his head into my office one day. It’s to do with the Project, I told him; its overall … configuration. Oh yes? he said in his robotic voice. Yes, I repeated: there are all these strands, and they converge; and there’s an overarching roof — or, let’s say, membrane, skin — above them. And, I continued, warming to my theme, what powers the whole thing isn’t some internal engine, since it doesn’t have one, but rather the way its structure, due to the way it’s, you know, structured, generates kinetic energy as everything around it — in this case, the air — passes through it. I see, said Tapio; and he stared intently at the pictures and the words, the lines conjoining them, for a long time, his own mind whirring as its gears engaged with these. The main thing is, I told him, that (unlike a windmill) a parachute functions not in a fixed location but rather in transit from a point A (the aeroplane) to a point B (the assigned landing-spot on the ground); although these two points are in fact anathema — or, at least, exterior — to its own operation as a parachute: once the ground-target is attained, the parachute stops playing its role, just as, prior to the jump, it remains undeployed. Well, I continued, same thing with the Project: it has to be conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival — not at, but between. Tapio nodded sagely as I made all this up. Was I lying to him? As I spoke, I didn’t even know.

8.5 Le Dupe. At one point in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts his meeting with a tribe who don’t know what writing is. This tribe’s chief, wanting to maintain his elevated status, takes up one of Lévi-Strauss’s pads and starts to scribble on it, figuring that his subjects won’t know the difference: he can con them into thinking that he’s versed in this activity. I’d often think about this episode as I compiled my dossiers for clients. I also thought, while interrogating my informants, of a later part of Tristes Tropiques, in which the subject of duping crops up once more. Having encountered endless tribes who aren’t “strange” enough — tribes who, once decoded, lose all their mystique — my hero finally alights, far up some river, on a tribe so fucking strange he can’t make head or tail of them. This exasperates him too: incomprehensible is no better than banal — it’s just its flip-side. But maybe, just maybe, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes — in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand), and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all — there might be some “ambiguous instances” in which the balance is just right. These instances, he tells us, would be godsends; they’d provide us with the very reasons, or excuses, for our own existence. But wouldn’t these instances, too (he asks), be cons? Who’s the real dupe of the confusion sown by observations which are carried just far enough to reach the border-line of the intelligible, only to be stopped short there? It’s as though he, Lévi-Strauss himself, were now playing the role of the phony, hand-chancing, pen-wielding chief. Will his own subordinates, he wonders — his readers, that is — be taken in? Or is he (we, he writes, nous) — are we the dupe ourselves, tricked into a situation in which we’ll never be satisfied until we’ve dissipated what he calls a residue that keeps our vanity, and us, ticking along?

8.6 Vanuatans have another trademark custom: the Cargo Cult. Unlike Tower Plunging, which dates back centuries, this one has very recent origins. When, during World War Two, the US Army commandeered sections of their island for the war-effort against Japan, they built airstrips. Big cargo planes landed on these, from which not only military hardware but also more mundane objects large and small — cookers, fridges, tinned food and the whole inventory of goods and appliances that supported the Americans’ extended presence there — were unloaded. The natives watched the ground crews bring these metal beasts to heel by waving ping-pong bats at them; watched them disgorge, with the help of forklifts and pneumatic platforms, their great stomachs’ bounty; watched the spinning radar beacons conjure more and more of them from empty skies; heard, wafting from open control-tower windows, transmissions swimming in a sea of static. For them, all these things appeared to be elaborate rituals, ones whose outcomes were both concrete and desirable. Who wouldn’t want a fridge in a tropical climate, or tinned food where foraging and hunting are arduous? When the war ended, the Americans decamped: dismantled all their masts and runways, packed up their fridges, washing machines, record-players and radios, and disappeared into the sky from which they’d first materialized. The Vanuatans, suddenly bereft of all the benefits of Western gadgetry, took consolation in the fact that they had learnt the rites: like anthropologists, they’d studied the bat-waving routines, learnt the choreography of military salutation, noted down the chains of tower-to-pilot scripture, and so on. They had the sequences, the code. Over the following months, and years, and decades, they laid new matted strips down, constructed beacons and antenna-topped control towers, ping-pong bats and forklift trucks alike from balsa and bamboo. And, rotating, waving and generally manipulating these, they enacted, or re-enacted, all the ceremonies that had caused the bounty-laden planes to appear in the first place. If we do it enough, their logic went, the planes will come again. Perhaps not now, or next week, or next month — but one day, they will come.

8.7 The anthropologists who first reported on these cargo cultists treated them with a mixture of amusement and derision. Special chuckles were reserved for the ceremonial name, or title, that was given to the emissary who (it was hoped) would be the first one to return, and whose appearance would herald the onset of a new age of material prosperity: John Frumm. The name, the ethnographers had ascertained through interviewing older islanders, was derived from that of one of the regular cargo handlers or bat-wavers during the golden era of the occupation, who identified himself as simply John from America—a name the Vanuatans, in their patois, had contracted to John Frumm. But when a second wave of ethnographers came to the island, and revisited, in the light of the new research they conducted there, the first wave’s studies, they criticized the colonialist arrogance of their predecessors. More than that: speaking of motes and beams, they urged humility. For hadn’t the West also been awaiting a re-arrival from the skies, and not just for fifty years? Didn’t we, too, have our own, Nazarene John Frumm? They were, of course, correct. Nor was this Messianism confined to Christians. It strikes me that our entire social organism — its economy, its social policy, its civil order — that these don’t implode, hurling us all into a wild abyss of plunder, rape and burning, is down to their being reined in, held in alignment, by a yoking to this notion of the Future; and humanity, its gaze fixed on this apparition hovering just over the horizon, is thus herded along the requisite channels, its anarchic inclinations kept in check. Certainly, each brief the Company worked on, every pitch we made, involved an invocation of, a genuflection to, the Future: explaining how social media will become the new press-baronage, or suburbia the new town centre, or how emerging economies would bypass the analogue to plunge straight into the post-digital phase — using the Future to confer the seal of truth on these scenarios and assertions, making them absolute and objective simply by placing them within this Future: that’s how we won contracts. Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction — but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

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.