Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

12.17Petr 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.

12.18On Friday I went up to Peyman’s office. He was full of beans. The Project’s first phase was about to go live. Everything was falling into place. I was holding a set of dossiers — physical, leather dossiers — beneath my arm, as per Tapio’s instructions. None of them, to my knowledge, contained any type of data, code or misinformation whose effects would be subversive, let alone lethally destructive. So much for armed resistance. I was still nervous, though. But Peyman didn’t ask me to show him anything. He just beamed at me, and told me that my contributions had been vital. He wanted me to go to New York the following month, to talk about it at a big symposium. That’s funny, I said. What is? he asked. I’ve been thinking about New York Harbor for the last few days, I said. I should, of course, have handed him my blotter pad at this point — but I didn’t have it with me, since that idea, plan, whatever, like the vandalism one and so many others, had fallen by the wayside. While Peyman talked, I tried to picture what it would have looked like on his wall: where it would have gone, how it would have changed that space’s dynamic, coloured Peyman’s, and the Company’s, field of operations — perhaps coloured, by extension, our whole age. I let myself get lost in this imagining, and didn’t take in what he was saying to me. After a while, I realized that he’d paused, and expected me to answer something. I tried to track my mind back a few seconds, to recover what he’d just been talking about; it was, I told myself, something to do with the statute of limitations. Maybe, Peyman was saying, you could use that as an analogy when you talk about our contribution to the Project? I suppose I could, I answered, adding something vague and non-committal about laws and terms of accountability viewed from an anthropological perspective. Peyman seemed to approve. That sounds good, he said; go for it; and he called the meeting to a close. It wasn’t until he sent me a follow-up email that I realized I’d misheard him, that it was the Statue of Liberty he’d actually been talking about.

12.19Petr’s funeral the following week was really weird. For a start, the funeral home was running behind schedule that day, so the previous service was still taking place when Petr’s friends and family turned up. Parking was the main issue. All the spaces in the street around the home were taken by the vehicles of the mourners who were currently still burying their loved one. When these mourners finally filed out, their cortège still in loose formation, our group seemed unsure of what demeanour to adopt towards them. Some of us tried looking sad — which of course we were; but I mean that we tried to look sad for them , to show compassion for their loss. At the same time, we didn’t want to intrude on their grief, so we tried to look neutral and indifferent as well. They, for their part, struck up a similarly mixed disposition towards us, with the result that the two groups, identically dressed, stood facing one another like a set of doubles. And our cars were double-parked as well: in collaboration with our unknown lookalikes, we had to manoeuvre these forwards and backwards to allow theirs out and ours in. Certain people took command, playing traffic cop, waving and shouting in a way that, given their attire, seemed ceremonial: suited officials, guiding boxes into holes.

12.20But when the funeral proper started, it got even weirder. Why? Because everything that was said about Petr was wrong. I don’t mean that it was wrongly nuanced or beside the point or missing the essence of his character or anything like that. I mean that it was simply, in a factual sense, false. For a start, the service was a Christian one (Petr had been an atheist); the minister described how Petr had found succour in his faith during the months of his illness. He spoke of his family life, and how his wife had been a rock of comfort and support to him (they’d met from time to time, it’s true; but they had, as I mentioned, separated several years before his diagnosis). It went on and on like this. The thought crossed my mind that there had been a mix-up; that, due to that day’s times being out of kilter, we were listening to the spiel about the person whose entourage we’d encountered on the way in, or perhaps the person after us, the one whose time-slot we’d slipped into. But the minister called the man inside the coffin Petr; and he mentioned his job in IT, adding that his real passions were reserved for certain leisure pursuits (windsurfing, chess) that I’d known to hold no more than passing interest for him. As the litany of falsehoods progressed, I thought about standing up, interrupting it and setting the record straight; the more it continued, the more these thoughts took on a violent hue. I imagined striding to the front, grabbing the minister by his frock, headbutting him to the floor, jumping between the coffin and the furnace and denouncing the entire procedure. Then we would all storm the dais, tie the priest up, urinate onto his font, break Petr’s body out for a huge party that would bring the rafters down, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, we — I—didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited.

13.1About three days after the funeral, I cornered Madison. Confronted her. Pinned her down. I really want to know what you were doing in Torino-Caselle, I said. We were in a restaurant. The starters had arrived. I’d ordered deep-fried squid; the tentacles, reprising a vague image from a previous reverie, reminded me of parachute cords, and hence of my now-defunct theory. I think it was the sense of impotence this brought about that spurred me into getting all aggressive on that other front. Madison was eating gravadlax. She paused in her chewing when I put the demand to her. The way I’d phrased it, my tone of voice, left no scope for dodging the question, brushing it away, like she had on at least two previous occasions. She finished her mouthful, laid her knife and fork down and said: I’d been in Genoa. What had you been doing there? I asked. Demonstrating, she said. Demonstrating what? I asked. No, demonstrating, she said, more emphatically. Protesting. Oh, I said; what against? The G8 summit, she said. In 2001, it was held in Genoa. I didn’t know you were an activist, I said. Used to be, she corrected me; it was a long time ago.