Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

1.7Now my laptop started ringing: someone was Skyping me. JoanofArc , the caller-ident box read. I recognized the handle: it belonged to a woman named Madison, whom I’d met two months previously in Budapest. I clicked to accept. Can you hear me? Madison’s voice asked. I said that I could. Activate your camera, the voice instructed me. I did this. Madison appeared to me at the same time. She asked me where I was. I told her. She told me that she’d been in Torino-Caselle Airport too, in 2001. What brought you here? I asked her, but my question seemed to get lost in the relay; she didn’t answer it, at any rate. Instead, she asked when I’d be back in London. Her face, on my screen, jumped in small cascades of motion from one pool of stillness to another. I don’t know, I said. I popped the news page open as I talked to her. The airspace lock-up was announced halfway down, adjacent to and in the same font-size as the marketplace truck bombing. Above it, slightly larger, the oil spill, with a sequence of photos showing tugs, oil-covered men wrestling with grips and winches, those black-ringed outlying islands, the giant oil-flower and so forth. The editor had chosen a “fade” effect to link the shots together, rather than the more abrupt type of succession that recalls old slideshow carousels. It struck me as the right effect to use, aesthetically speaking.

1.8The same two boys ran past me. Once more the small one’s feet slipped out from under him: it must have been the angle as the floor rounded the row of seats — that, and the fact that the floor was polished. Once more his brother (if it was his brother) picked him up and they ran on. Madison asked once more when I’d be back. She said she needed ethnological attention. How so? I asked, sliding her screen back above the news page. I’m lacking, she began to tell me — but just then the audio dropped. Her face froze in mid-sentence too. Its mouth was open in an asymmetric, drooley kind of way, as though she’d lost control of its muscles following a stroke; her eyes had rolled upwards, so the pupils were half-hidden by the lids. A little circle span in front of her, to denote buffering. My screen stayed that way for a long, long time, while I gazed at it, waiting for the buffering to pass. It didn’t: instead, a Call Ended message eventually replaced both face and circle.

1.9I looked up, around the terminal. People who weren’t clicking and scrolling their way, like me, through phones and laptops were grazing on the luxury items stacked up all about us. The more valuable of these were kept behind polished glass sheets whose surfaces reflected the lounge’s other surfaces, so that the marketplace bomb-aftermath replayed across the pattern of a shawl, oil flowed and reflowed on a watch’s face. The overlap between these various elements, and the collageeffect it created, was constant — but, as the hours wore on, the balance of the mixture changed. The luxury objects and their cases stayed the same, of course — but little by little, football highlights and truck bombing faded, clips of them growing shorter and less frequent; while, conversely, the oil spill garnered more and more screen time. It was obviously a big one. By midnight, those oil-drenched men I’d seen in the news-page photos were on the airport’s TV screens as well — but moving now, laying floating booms, trying, without any apparent success, to herd and corral the flow of water-borne oil as it forked and turned and spread out. They looked like demoralized, tug-mounted cowboys whose black cattle, through sheer mass and volume, had mutinied, stampeded and grown uncontrollable. Other sequences simply showed oil-saturated water, dark and ponderous. It seemed to move, to swell and crest, at once more slowly and faster than water usually does — as though, just like the goal that by now had retreated to a single sport-bar TV set at my vision’s edge, it had been filmed with high-end motion-capture cameras, the type that sharpen and amplify each frame, each moment, lifting it out of the general flow and releasing it back into this at the same time. I found this movement fascinating. I watched the images for hour after hour, my head rotating with them as they moved from screen to screen.

1.10The man sitting beside me, noticing the rapt attention I was paying these pictures, tried at one point to spark up a conversation. Tutting disapprovingly in their direction, he opined that it was a tragedy. That was the word he used, of course: tragedy —like a TV pundit. I looked him up and down, scanning his get-up. He was wearing a suit but had removed his tie, and laid it, folded, on a wheel-mounted carry-on bag that stood beside him. He addressed me in English, but his accent was Eurozone: neither French nor Dutch nor German but a mishmash of all these and more, overlaid with ersatz, businessschool American. I didn’t answer at first. When I did, I told him that the word tragedy derived from the ancient Greek custom of driving out a sheep, or tragos —usually a black one — in a bid to expiate a city’s crimes. He turned back to the screen and watched it with me for a while as though this shared activity now formed part of our dialogue, of our new friendship. But I could feel he was upset not to have got the response that he’d expected. After a few minutes, he stood up, grasped the handle of the bag on which his tie was resting and walked off.

1.11I, for my part, stayed put, watching the crippled platform listing, the broken pipe gushing, the birds milling around, the oil-flower unfurling its petals, the dark water swelling and cresting, over and over again. I watched, as I said, for hour after hour; when no public screen was showing these scenes, I watched them on first one and then another of my private ones. They kept me utterly engrossed until, much later, in the small hours of the morning, the airspace unlocked and my flight was called. Nor did I leave them behind me then. When I had finally got airborne, and found my head slumped flat against the window as I slipped into a flecked and grainy sleep, oil seemed to lie around the very cloud-patches the wing-lights were illuminating: to lurk within and boost their volume, as though absorbed by them, and to seep out from them as well, in blobs and globules that hovered on their ledges, sat about their folds and crevasses, like so many blackened cherubs.

2.1Me? Call me U. It’s not my intention, here, to write about the Koob-Sassen Project — to give an exegesis, overview, whatever, of it. There are legal reasons for this: sub-clauses of contracts sitting in the drawers of cabinets that I always picture (and this, perhaps, is not unconnected to my sense of the Project itself, which I came to envision this way too) as made out of some smooth, post-metallic compound — epoxy, say, or Kevlar — although in reality they could just as well be aluminium, wooden, MDF or so on; stipulations protecting commercial, governmental and the level that comes one above that confidentiality; interdictions on virtually all types of disclosure. And anyhow, even if there weren’t, would you actually want to hear about it? It is, it strikes me, in the general scale of things, a pretty boring subject. Don’t get me wrong: the Project was important. It will have had direct effects on you; in fact, there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this. Not that it was secret. Things like that don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring. And complex. Koob-Sassen involved many hook-ups, interfaces, transpositions — corporate to civic, supra-national to local, analogue to digital and open to restricted and hard to soft and who knows what else. It was a project formed of many other projects, linked to many other projects — which renders it well-nigh impossible to say where it began and ended, to discern its “content,” bulk or outline. Perhaps all projects nowadays are like that — equally boring, equally inscrutable. So even if I could, and if you wanted me to, shine a (no more than anecdotal) spotlight on specific moments of Koob-Sassen’s early phases, letting the beam linger on those passages and segments where the Company’s operations, or my own small, insignificant activities, intersected them, would this, in any way, illuminate the Whole? I doubt it.