6.3 The way iodine works, said Petr when we met later that week in the same pub as last time — what it does, is it recognizes thyroid cancer-cells and zaps them. Say each cancer-cell was like a coin — a certain type, from a specific period, with an exact denomination — well, iodine is trained to spot this coin and melt it back down, take it out of circulation. That sounds pretty straight-forward, I said. You’ll be cured, then. Ah, he replied: in principle it sounds straight-forward. But in practice it turns out to be a little harder than I thought. He paused. How do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, say one of these coins is degraded, or a little different, through some quirk of the mint — the way a machine-part was lying the day that it was pressed, a piece of grit that found its way into the mix, a hundred other permutation-causing factors we could mention: then the iodine can’t recognize it, since these variations haven’t been included in its recognition-software. So the coin, the cancer-cell, not only stays in circulation; it sets up its own mint and prints new copies of itself, each one corrupt, unrecognizable as well; and then these introduce new variations and new mint-quirks of their own, until the iodine has no idea what it’s even supposed to be looking for, throws its hands up, mutters Fuck this! and heads off home. It’s a systems problem, Petr said. If we had a better database, then I’d be out of danger.
6.4 One afternoon, while sorting through the transcript of the civil-servant dialogues down in the basement, I poked my head into Daniel’s office again. This time I found him staring at footage that showed hundreds of legs gliding through city streets. I say “gliding” because that’s what they were doing, rather than (say) walking or running. The legs, I realized after a few seconds, belonged to roller-bladers: lots of roller-bladers, skating past the camera — which itself, since it was moving, was (presumably) being held by somebody also on roller-blades. How’s the Great Report coming along? Daniel asked. Oh, you know, I said: it’s coming along slowly; still finding its shape. Look at the way they move, said Daniel, without turning his head towards me. I looked: the bladers’ heads all angled forwards, focused on a spot beyond the picture’s frame, some point on which they were advancing. It wasn’t a race: there was no urgency to their pace. More like a Friday-evening meet-up (it was dark; the streets were lit), with most people just ambling forwards, or sliding from one side of the moving column to the other, or letting the column’s body flow ahead of them a little as they waited for an acquaintance to catch up, or checked their phone for messages, or fiddled with the music they had plugged into their ears.
6.5 I shot it in Paris, Daniel said, still facing away from me towards the wall. I’m going there next week, I told him. It’s an MSP, he said, ignoring me. What’s that? I asked. Manifestation sans Plainte, he answered. That’s the legal term for it, as set out in the license granted by the Paris mairie: a Demonstration With No Complaint. Oh, I said; and we watched the footage in silence for a little longer. The roller-bladers kept on gliding by. They didn’t have to make much of an effort to progress, since the street’s surface was quite smooth. This gave them all a kind of languid look. Paris, Daniel explained when I commented on the pavement’s texture, has the smoothest street surface of any major European city. It’s because of sixty-eight, he said, the general uprisings, when revolutionaries pulled up all the cobblestones to throw them at the cops. They even had a slogan stirring them to do this: Underneath the paving stones, the beach! After that, he explained, the authorities replaced the paving stones with tarmac — which had the unforeseen effect of turning the city into a paradise for roller-bladers.
6.6 I kept thinking about the dead parachutist. The circumstances of the incident recalled a chapter from my own childhood. I can pinpoint, with complete precision, the episode that set me on my career path: it occurred when, at the age of seven, I happened to watch, one rainy Sunday afternoon, a documentary — an old one, from the early sixties — about South Pacific islanders. These people, Vanuatans, engaged once a year in a peculiar rituaclass="underline" the men would climb a high and rickety-looking wooden tower and, goaded on by their womenfolk, who chanted songs of exhortation, leap from the top of this, head first. They wore vines round their ankles, cut to such a length that they would tauten just before the men’s torsos crashed into the earth below. After watching the documentary, I’d climb up my younger sisters’ bunk-bed and, fastening T-shirts and pyjamas round my ankles and the bedpost, leap repeatedly, head first, towards the carpet. If a Vanuatan hesitated or refused a dive, his womenfolk would whip themselves with thorns and nettles, to shame him into action; I made my sisters whip themselves with flannels. I performed the ritual for several days, until a dislocated shoulder and my parents’ veto brought an end to it — but by then, the documentary had done its work. From that time onwards, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them: anthropologist.
6.7 So, with this parachutist: I’d already, as I mentioned, figured out the crime’s location (the sky). The question remained, though, of timing. In other words: at what precise point in time had he actually been murdered? When the equipment had been sabotaged? If he’d survived the fall — been greeted by a sudden upgust of ground-wind, say, or landed in soft, deep snow, or in the branches of a fir-tree that, pliant and supple, had broken his fall incrementally as he tumbled through them, each layer shaving a little more velocity away until the last layer rolled him gently onto needle-covered earth — if any of these miracles (of which popular lore is, after all, quite full) had taken place, the act of sabotage wouldn’t have constituted murder. Yet, as at least one article I read stated, the man’s death was, in this instance — in this country devoid of tall pine trees, this terrain quite unamenable to upgusts, this snow-less season — a foregone conclusion from the moment the cords had been cut. Thus, although he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours — days, perhaps — of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it) been murdered without realizing it. I tried to picture him walking around in that state: already effectively dead, his body and his consciousness, his experiences, and, beyond these, his experience of his experiences — his awareness of himself, his whole reality — mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams.