Tom McCarthy - Satin Island

11.6You still haven’t told me how you came to be in that airport, I said to Madison as we lay in bed one evening. There’s lots of things I haven’t told you, she replied. If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world. If knowing everything about a person were the be-all and end-all of human interaction, she said, we’d just carry memory-sticks around and plug them into one another when we met. We could have little ports, slits on our sides, like extra mouths or ears or sex organs, and we’d slip these sticks in and upload, instead of talking or screwing or whatever. Would you like that, Mr. Anthropologist? No, I told her; I don’t want to know everything about you. This was true: I hadn’t asked her very much about herself at all — her family, her background, any of that stuff — not back in Budapest when we’d first met, and not since, either. Our liaison had been based throughout on minimum exchange of information. I don’t want to know everything about you, I repeated. I just want to know what you were doing in Turin. I wasn’t in Turin, she said again. Torino-Caselle, I replied; whatever. Why? she asked. I’m intrigued, I told her. What, professionally? she goaded me. That’s right, I said: professionally. Well then you’ll have to pay me, she said.

11.7Back at my flat, over the following week, objects started impinging on my desktop clearing. At first it was coffee cups; then letters, which brought bills and take-away menus in their wake; then, once these had pitched camp on the leather, plates of half-eaten food and handkerchiefs and random pocket-contents came blithely by and stayed, since I no longer had the will to evict them. It wasn’t laziness, but something much worse. I’d begun to suspect — in fact, I’d become convinced — that this Great Report was un-plottable, un-frameable, unrealizable: in short, and in whatever cross-bred form, whatever medium or media, un-writable . Not just by me, with my limited (if once celebrated) capabilities, but fundamentally, essentially, inherently un-writable. It wasn’t just the fact that there could no more be a Lévi-Strauss 2.0 than a second Leibniz; beyond this, I grew exasperated every time I tried to picture, even in the most abstract of ways, a mechanism capable of managing and arresting, let alone pinning down and mapping the dynamics, processes and patterns — social, anthropological, historical, micro- and macro, what-you-will — that the Report would have to somehow turn into its content, these entities that kept proliferating every which way, from every which turn and juncture, at every which moment. My exasperation led me, each time, to the same conclusion: that it simply wasn’t possible. Peyman, it struck me, must have known this; he was too clever not to. Why, then, had he commissioned it from me? Paranoid thoughts started popping up inside my head. I pictured Peyman back, once more, with all his moguls, mover-shakers and connectors, laughing at me, laughing at the thought that I could have believed, even for a moment, he was serious … Even when I reasoned these last, deranged notions back out to the fringes of my mind, I was still left with the immovable fact of the thing’s un-writability. This filled me with anger, and a feeling of stupidity, and sadness, too — grief not for an actual loss but, worse, for a potential or imaginary one: this beautiful, magnificent Report; this book, the Book, the fucking Book, that was to name our era, sum it up; this book that left the format of the book itself behind, this book-beyond-the-book; and, beyond even this, the tantalizing and elusive possibility of transubstantiated now-ness, live-ness it was to inaugurate — the possibility, that is, of Present-Tense Anthropology™. All that was gone. Which, in turn, raised the question: What was I still there for?

11.8Christmas came and went. Parties; provincial exile; a return to London more relieved than joyous; more parties. On the 1st of January I found myself sitting, once more, beside my desk and blotter, looking through the window at the dawn. I always wake up early after drinking. It was a clear dawn, a good one to usher the new year in. The first phase of the Project would be going live this year. I looked at the pond, this site (since I’d rescued the girl there) of a minor resurrection, and thought of Vanuatans once again. On New Year’s Day, the men ride out on horses or just run about a stretch of pasture firing arrows up into the air: straight up, more or less vertically. The arrows, naturally, fall back down, with pretty much the same velocity as that with which they flew up in the first place. The men ride or run around until an arrow lands on one of them and kills him. Then they stop: the ritual demands that one man must be taken every year. Hungover, jaded, generally un-invigorated by the world, I found myself, in reverie, wishing — just as I had as a child when jumping from my sisters’ bed — that I could be one of these Vanuatan warriors, galloping about the fields, new-year’s wind biting at my cheeks, death whistling all around me, whistling me to life …

11.9Still sitting at my desk and blotter, I looked up at the sky and thought these thoughts. At the same time, I thought about my parachutist once again — with the result that the two scenarios, the Vanuatan new-year arrow-shooting ritual and the fatal sky-diving escapade, merged into one. And suddenly, as though out of the sky itself, with all the speed and penetration of an arrow hurtling to earth, a major revelation came to me. In that instant, I saw the truth behind the parachutist case with total clarity: it was a Russian Roulette pact! The members of the club, or at least a clique within their larger congregation, had made an illicit deal among themselves. No longer satisfied with the adrenaline-hit they got from simply jumping from a plane, they’d upped the stakes, the ante, upped them to the biggest one imaginable, by secretly agreeing to sabotage a single parachute and throw it back into the general pile of packs. No one would know which pack they’d sabotaged, since they all looked the same. And there’d always be surplus packs, of course: the bad one might lie around unused for a year, two years, forever. Or, of course, it might be used at any time: on this jump, right now … They’d never know: that’s why they did it, just like Russian Roulette players. I was certain of this. I was more certain of it than of anything before or since. The triangles, the lines and vectors all made sense now: it seemed to me, in that instant, that I’d solved not just a private puzzle but a fundamental riddle of our time. And not just a single riddle either: the Canadian case, the Polish and New Zealand ones — these, I was certain, were Russian Roulette pacts as well. It was a cult, dispersed, like my own covert anthropologists, around the globe! The realization was enormous — almost as visceral as the ritual it unmasked. It made the blood rush suddenly to my head as I shouted Fuck! Fuck! — not in anger but in awe; to no one, in the middle of my living room: the same reaction I’d had when I watched the Twin Towers falling down on live TV. I paced about quite frantically; I couldn’t sit, or even stand still. What to do with this incredible knowledge? Go to the police? It was bigger than that, bigger than solving a crime; bigger even than the (now-defunct) Great Report. I’d made a genuine discovery , a breakthrough, on the scale of Schrödinger’s or Einstein’s. Of this I was quite certain. Fuck! I shouted, one more time; then I sat down, shot through with revelation. The year would be a glorious one.