Satin Island (16 page)

12.18
On 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.

12.19
Petr’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.

12.20
But 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.

13.1
About 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.

13.2
I pressed her further, of course. I felt that I was finally getting somewhere. She corrected herself a little now: it was really her boyfriend of the time who’d been the activist, she told me. He and his friends and associates, his general social circle, would descend on all these big G8 events. This time, they had converged from all around the world on Genoa. They’d stayed with scores of people, in a school building in the middle of the city, where the classrooms had been turned into dormitories, independent media centres and discussion rooms. It wasn’t only protestors: there were journalists and academics too, she said. The gathering had the air of a big carnival, a circus of ideas. Sounds fun, I said. It was, she said, until the police arrived. They kicked down the school’s doors in the small hours of the morning, when everyone was asleep, rushed up into the dorms and started attacking people in their beds. Shit, I said. Yes, she answered. As soon as people on the top floor realized what was going on, we ran out to the fire escapes—but police were waiting on these too. The raid was well-planned. So what did you do? I asked. We held our hands up and surrendered, she said. But that didn’t matter: they attacked us too. They stamped on people’s legs, and heads, and chests; I saw this one guy’s chest crumple as they stamped on it—and heard his ribs cracking too. It’s a strange sound, she told me; a bit like those old chocolate bars—the ones with the synthetic honeycomb inside, that used to crunch when you bit into them. Crunchies? I asked. Yes, she answered, that’s right: Crunchies. Those were good, I said. Yes, she concurred; I’m not sure you can get them anymore.

13.3
Why have I never heard about this episode? I asked. I’ve never spoken about it before, she said. No, I said, I mean why didn’t I read about it in the press—especially if there were journalists there, staying in the very building where it happened? U., she said, this took place in the late summer of 2001, just before September the eleventh. After that, all other news was blown out of the water: no one was interested in what had gone on in Genoa, or anywhere else. It was as though it had never taken place. She paused, while our main course was laid in front of us. I’d ordered pork; she’d chosen chicken, I think—either that or duck. We sat in silence for a few seconds after the waitress had left, tasting our food. Then Madison picked up where she’d left off. Sometimes, she said, I even wonder if it actually took place myself. Are you still in touch with people from that time? I asked. My boyfriend’s circle, you mean? she asked back. I nodded. No, she said: I don’t have any contact with them. And besides, I don’t think they’re a circle anymore.

13.4
The Project’s first phase had gone live: it was up and running, rolled out, operational, whatever. Its implementation had been deemed a great success. By whom? I don’t know. Deemers. And the Company’s contribution had been praised, by praisers, as quite brilliant. And my own input into this had been held up and singled out, by Peyman himself, as particularly productive. All this was going to my head. I even glanced about the restaurant, to see if anybody recognized me. This was ridiculous, of course: the people there had probably
never even heard about Koob-Sassen, let alone my role in it. And this, perhaps, was not a bad thing, after all: the thwarted saboteurs that I myself had mobilized then turned my back on, the hit squads of vengeful revolutionaries, wouldn’t know who to shoot when they came looking for the traitor.

13.5
Did you get stamped on? I asked Madison. I got pushed down the fire escape, she said. I bruised myself, but it wasn’t that bad. And that was it? I asked. Did the police leave after that? Madison laughed into her food: a sudden, short laugh that was like a cough. No, U., she said; that wasn’t it at all. That was just the beginning. So what happened next? I asked. The police rounded us up, she said. They got us all into a courtyard, about a hundred people, and they hemmed us in and formed a human square around us, two or more thick, and took it in turns to wade in to the middle of this square and club people and stamp on them some more. Then they made us walk out to these trucks that were parked just outside. Hadn’t you heard them pulling up? I asked. No, she replied. They put us in these trucks, and drove us to a police station. They unloaded us into some other courtyard there, where there were lots more police, fresh ones, all fired up and ready to let loose. Which is exactly what they did: they clubbed and stamped on people to their hearts’ content. And all the time, more and more captured demonstrators were arriving: people I didn’t recognize, who’d been staying in other places—hostels, houses, student dormitories. Truck after truck would pull up,
and these people, all bruised and bloodied just like us, would be led out of them, and fed into the middle of this square whose sides were made of policemen, and then beaten up some more.

13.6
How long did this go on for? I asked her. It’s hard to tell, said Madison. Perhaps an hour. When new people stopped arriving and the ones already there couldn’t stand up to be beaten anymore, or didn’t even react much when they were kicked and stamped on, the police eased off a bit. New officers came out of the main station holding sheets of paper, instructions or something, and after consulting these for a while, they started organizing all the people in the courtyard into groups. I don’t know what the logic of it was: it’s not as though they just divvied the crowd up into blocks where we were standing. Instead, they’d make five of us go and stand in one corner of the courtyard, then bring two more people over from some other part, and two more from a third, and make us stand in rows of three, like soldiers—three rows of three, so there were nine in every group. Then they might move four people out of one group and make them join another group in the far corner while they brought in three from yet another group and one more from another still to bring the number up to nine again. Whatever rationale was behind it, they carried out this sorting quite assiduously, for a long time. Then, eventually, one by one, the groups were marched into the station building itself.

13.7
Our plates, largely untouched, were lying in front of us. The waitress had skirted by a couple of times, to see if everything was all right. It was a good restaurant. Most other diners were on their dessert course, or their coffee. The ones paying their bills and leaving weren’t being replaced by others; it was well into mid-afternoon. What happened when you came inside the building? I asked Madison. Well, she said, everyone was singing. Singing? I repeated. Yes, she said. The police were singing? I asked. No, she said; mainly the demonstrators. Protest songs, you mean? I asked. God no, she answered: they were singing songs the police were making them sing. Someone in Madison’s group, an Italian guy, had whispered to her that they were fascist songs, from Mussolini’s time. The cops had been leading the singing, moving their batons like conductors do. If anybody didn’t sing, Madison explained, or didn’t sing loud enough, the police would jerk the batons’ ends into their midriffs, upwards, from below—which would knock the wind out of them, of course, but then they had to sing immediately afterwards, wind or no wind, or they’d get another jerk. What if you didn’t know the words? I asked. They taught us the words, she answered—like in nursery school: it was a sing-along. While it went on, they carried on dividing up the groups: breaking them down into smaller groups of about five people, then separating these out into clusters of two or three. We had to sing while they were doing this to us, she said. It was so strange. Eventually, I found myself with just one other woman. She was German, I think. She couldn’t really say much since
her jaw had been all smashed up. And besides, we couldn’t talk: we had to keep on singing—singing Italian words. This woman couldn’t do this very well, of course; but since the cops would baton-jerk her if she stopped, she forced the words out somehow, without really shaping them properly in her mouth. I got the sense that she was German all the same, said Madison, just from the way the sound came from her throat.