Satin Island Read online

  2.3 When, in those days, you entered the Company’s Central London premises, passing the frequently changing but perennially attractive staff who manned the reception desk, a lift would bear you up to several floors of conferencing rooms and viewing suites and studios. Separated from each other by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions on which lower-case letters in the Company’s own, distinctive font were stenciled, these compartments ran on one into the next, creating an expansive vista in which sketches, diagrams and other such configurations of precious data, lying face-up on curved tabletops, pinned to walls or drawn on whiteboards or, occasionally (and this made the data seem all the more valuable, fragile even), on the glass itself, seemed to dialogue with one another in a rich and esoteric language, the scene conveying (deliberately, of course) the impression that this was not only a place of business but, beyond that, a hermetic zone, a zone of alchemy, a crucible in which whole worlds were in the mix. The same lift that bore you up here, though, bore me down to a glassless, brick-and-plaster basement, where my own office was situated.

  2.4 The ventilation system. This deserves a book all of its own. It was cavernous and booming. The air-handling unit was housed in the basement with me—a series of grey boxes joined to one another like parts of a mechanical elephant, a sheet-metal supply-duct curling upwards from the front box forming its raised trunk. The coils, blowers, dampers, filters and so on that made up the boxes’ entrails transmitted a constant hum and rattle that permeated the whole floor, mutating in pitch and frequency as the sound negotiated corners, bounced off walls, was sponged up and squeezed out again by carpets. Before it left the basement, the duct forked, then branched out further, the new branch-ducts leading to diffusers, grilles and registers that, in turn, fed air onwards to other floors, before return-ducts carried it back down again, along a central plenum, to the rectum of the elephant, to be re-filtered, re-damped, re-coiled, then trumpeted back out into the building once again. Sometimes, when someone on a higher floor spoke loudly while they happened to be standing next to a return-vent, their words carried to the space in which I found myself, like the voice of a ship’s captain sending orders through a speaking tube down to the engine rooms—orders, though, whose content became scrambled, lost in the delivery. Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise—or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas. Sometimes these patterns took on visual forms, like those that so enchanted eighteenth-century scientists when they scattered salt on Chladni plates and, exposing these to various acoustic stimuli, observed the intricate designs that ensued—geometric and symmetrical and so generally perfect that they seemed to betray a universal structure lurking beneath nature’s surface, only now beginning to seep through; and I, too, in my basement, sometimes thought I saw, moving in ripples on the surface of a long-cold coffee cup or in the close-up choreography of dust-flecks jumping on an unwiped tabletop, or even on the fleshy insides of my own drooped eyelids, the plan, formula, solution—not only to the problem with which I was currently grappling, but to it all, the whole caboodle—before, waking with a jolt, I watched it all evaporate, like salt in a quiet breeze.

  2.5 When I returned from Turin, I slept for a couple of hours, then showered, then made my way into the office. It was a clear day, one of those crisp ones in winter when the sunlight seems to penetrate the thin, cold air more sharply; the glass and metal carapace of the Company building was flashing blue and silver, as though laced with an electric charge. Inside, too, the place seemed all charged up: people were moving briskly, with a bounce and purpose to their gait. It was the Project contract, of course, the Company’s landing of it, that was generating this excitement. The name Koob-Sassen was being spoken in the lobby, in the lift, along the corridors; even when nobody was speaking it, it seemed to hang about the air and speak itself. Arriving in my room, I called up to Peyman’s office on the fifth floor, and was put through to Tapio. U., Tapio said; you’re back. He spoke in a robotic Finnish monotone, but still he seemed surprised. Yes, I said. Peyman’s not, he told me; he’s still stuck in Vienna. (The airspace there, it turned out, was backed up much worse than it had been in Italy.) He’ll be back tomorrow though, Tapio continued; come and see him then. He hung up, leaving me alone in my basement, disconnected and deflated.

  2.6 On that day, of all days, I left the office early. Rather than go back to my flat, I went to Madison’s. She lived in Westbourne Grove. On the tube on the way there, I picked up one of the free newspapers that lay about the seats. The front page carried an update on the oil spill. The containment booms hadn’t worked; oil was, slowly but ineluctably, encroaching on those shorelines. The paper had reproduced a chart that showed the way the currents circulated in that particular spot: they moved in a large circle, or, to be precise, ellipse, one of whose elongated edges intersected the coast and at whose antipodal point the broken pipeline sat, uptake and delivery of its effluvia thereby rendered all the more intense and concentrated by its and the coast’s perfectly corresponding positions on the circumference. (There were, ironically, stretches of blank ocean lying much closer to the pipeline that were unaffected.) Looking at the chart, its directional arrows, I thought of those two boys, those brothers or not-brothers: I pictured them still running, sliding, plying their oval loop—not in the airport anymore, but on some other floor, a kitchen’s or a school refectory’s or playground’s. Flipping onwards through the paper, I found my attention caught by a small item halfway through. A parachutist had died jumping from a plane. His parachute had detached from him, and he’d plummeted to earth. Although just twenty-five, he’d been a seasoned parachutist, a core member of the club under whose auspices this fatal jump had taken place. Police were treating the death as suspicious.

  2.7 I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was
saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked.

  2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards, lying in bed, I asked her what she’d been doing in Turin. I wasn’t in Turin, she answered; you were. But you were too, I said. No I wasn’t, she replied. You told me that you had been once, I said—when we Skyped, just last night. I never said I’d been in Turin, she mumbled into her pillow; she was half asleep. She was silent for a few moments, and I thought she’d drifted off. After a while, though, she continued mumbling. I said, she told me, that I’d been in Torino-Caselle. Okay, I said, Torino-Caselle: what were you doing there? Waiting, she said, just like you were. What for? I asked. A plane, she said. What else do people wait for in an airport?

  3.

  3.1 My meeting with Peyman didn’t take place all that week. He’d been delayed in Vienna for so long that by the time a flight became available his schedule had him in Seattle, so he’d flown straight there. This was annoying—beyond annoying: frustrating. In fact, his absence filled me with what I can only describe as anxiety. Not that his presence made you feel un-anxious, calm; far from it. The whole place ran on anxiety: it was Peyman’s motor-oil, his generative fuel. But there’s anxiety and anxiety. With the Project contract won, knowing the weight he attached to it, I, like everyone else in the Company, was now anxious to see Peyman and, through Peyman, to connect: either to some rich and stellar network that we pictured lying behind this name, Koob-Sassen; or, if not that, then at least to … something. Being near Peyman made you feel connected. In his absence, I spent the week wrapping up other briefs that I’d been working on: transcribing audio files, drawing up charts, tweaking documents, drifting around websites. Mostly drifting around websites.

  3.2 What does an anthropologist working for a business actually do? We purvey cultural insight. What does that mean? It means that we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp—the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it—and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product). Ethnographers do field research, creating photomontages out of single moments captured in a street or café; or they get sample citizens—teenagers, office workers, mums—to produce video-diaries for them, outlining their daily routines in intimate detail, confiding to the camera the desires, emotions, aspirations and so forth that visit them as they unload a dishwasher, lace up trainers, or sip foam through that little slit you get in plastic coffee-cup lids. It’s about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample batch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief—blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies (quantitative analysis, econometric modeling and the like), lay bare some kind of inner social logic, which can be harnessed, put to use. In essence it’s not that much different from what soothsayers, ichthyomancers, did in ancient times: those wolfskin-clad men who moved from stone-age settlement to stone-age settlement, cutting fish open to tease wisdom from their entrails. The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds.

  3.3 Once, for a brief time, I was famous. My renown came in the wake of my first—and only—major academic study. The study’s subject was club culture. For three years, in the nineties—my mid-to-late twenties—I spent a large portion of my waking (and sleeping) hours among clubbers. I took a barman job in Bagleys; spent off-nights at the Fridge, the Ministry of Sound, the Velvet Rooms and Turnmills; took poppers, speed, MDMA; the lot. By the end I was helping procure venues for illicit raves, helping direct crowds to these through coded messages put out on pirate radio stations, cellular networks and the array of whisper-lines that spring up around this type of dubious activity. I then spent two more years writing it all up. On my study’s publication (first as a doctoral thesis, then, two years later, with me in my mid-thirties, as an actual book that real people could buy), what was generally found to be most notable about it wasn’t the insight it afforded into the demimonde or “mindset” or whatever you want to call it of clubbers, but rather the book’s frequent and expansive “asides” in which I meditated on contemporary ethnographic method and its various quandaries.

  3.4 For example: I considered at great length the question of field. In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it into something meaningful. But when the object of your study is completely interwoven with your own life and its rhythms, this distinction vanishes: Where (I asked, repeatedly) does home end and field begin? Or—and this problem follows from the last—I reflected on the anthropologist’s relation to the figures known as his “informants.” If these people’s background and culture are at base no different from your own, and if these people are your friends—albeit ones who might (or then again, might not) know of your sidebar ethnographic carryings-on—then how should you interrogate them? What constitutes “interrogation” in the first place? In what way should it be staged? Does sex with a Lycra-miniskirted informant on your writing table at five a.m. when you’re both tripping count? Does passing out with someone in a toilet? Then, in the train of that one—and I’m not skipping the solutions to these predicaments, these pickles, since I didn’t provide any—comes the question of the anthropologist’s persona. Since the necessary act of approaching the familiar as a stranger, of behaving—even to yourself—as if you didn’t understand the situations that in fact you do, is an obvious contrivance; and since, conversely, pretending to understand them, at a profound, unmediated level, to think and believe and desire certain premises, propositions, objects and outcomes, for the purpose of attaining better access to the subculture you’re infiltrating, is equally contrived; or, to flip it back the other way again, to actually think and believe and desire these, but to be forced nonetheless, in your role as anthropologist, to pretend you’re being and doing what you really are being and doing—in brief, since all this shit entails a constant shifting of identities, a blurring of positions and perspectives, you end up lost in a kaleidoscope of masquerades, roles, general make-believe.

  3.5 I wrote about all this. It made me famous—relatively speaking. Let’s not get carried away. A famous anthropologist, even one with a real book out, is about as well-known as a third-division footballer. No, less: let’s say an Olympic badminton player, or a reality-TV contestant from an unpopular show five years ago. And come to think of it, I’m even exaggerating the degree of fame my study brought me in my own field, let alone the world of letters. Rather than “made me famous,” it would be more accurate to say that the book “garnered me some attention”—the odd public reading, the odd newspaper review; and, as they say, tomorrow’s fish (unlike ichthyomancers) can’t read. It was enough attention, though, to bring me onto Peyman’s radar, there to beep, or throb, or do whatever things on radars do; which, in turn, prompted him to pluck me from the dying branches of academia and re-graft me inside the febrile hothouse of his company.

  3.6 My colleague Daniel had his office next to mine down in the basement. From time to time, I’d poke my head in there to see what he was up to. He was a visual-culture guy. He’d trained as a film-maker, and turned out a couple of avant-garde shorts before Peyman had hired him. When I looked into his office on the Tuesday of that week, I found him sitting watching a film, projected onto his white wall. It showed, shot from above, a section of a city crammed with traffic. What city’s that? I asked him. It didn’t look like a British or a European one, or North American either: the colours were different, and the vehicles seemed more wild and battered. It’s Lagos, he said. I shot it with Peyman a few months back. President Goodluck Jonathan lent us hi
s own personal helicopter to go up in. Lagos, said Daniel, has the most amazing traffic jams in the world. You mean the worst? I asked him. No, not necessarily, he said; I mean the most amazing. Almost everything in Lagos is public transport: yellow buses, huge blue and red and brown trucks. The streets, he went on, aren’t wide enough for them, so they wedge and squish together. Look, he said: this portion coming up is great. I watched the wall, the footage. He was right: it was pretty awesome. Chains of buses maybe seven or eight long, these rivers of bright yellow, were trying to push their way down arteries that were too narrow for them, while isolated blocks of other colours tried to break in from the sides, insert themselves into the chains. When they succeeded, sequences of alternation and progression started typing themselves out: it looked like those helix-maps of DNA. The wildest thing about it all, said Daniel, is that, in between all these trucks and buses, there are people. You can’t see them from this high up, but they’re there. Won’t they get crushed? I asked (there wasn’t any space between the vehicles). You’d think so, Daniel said—but they slink in and out between and underneath them, like silverfish. Legend has it they’re dismantling them, these people—dismantling the vehicles and reassembling them too: the jam turns into an unending car market or pit stop. These bits you see curling above the road, he told me, pointing at some fern leaf–shaped outgrowths, are highway exits that lead nowhere—the thoroughfare was actually designed for a city where they drive on the left, not the right. The city to whom the designers originally submitted the plan rejected it, then the Nigerian Transport Ministry bought it on the cheap and didn’t bother to flip it around; and so there are these dead-end exit-ramps that all the vehicle parts are laid out in, organized by colour. I followed his finger: above the main road, in the dead-end curls, lay expanded pools in which red turned into yellow, yellow into brown, brown into black. It’s like a palette-menu, isn’t it? he said. The whole city’s like a painting, painting itself as you watch. I nodded; he was right. We sat in silence for a long time, watching.