6.8 The Great Report: this needs explaining. It was Peyman’s idea. When he first hired me, as he shook my hand to welcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. The Great Report? I asked, my hand still clenched in his; what’s that? The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? Could you elaborate? I asked. Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins’ mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only as an abstract concept, like adultery for children; and, waving with big, gap-toothed smiles, they send you back to your study — where, khakis swapped for cotton shirt and tie, saliva-liquor for the Twinings, tisane or iced Scotch your housekeeper purveys you on a tray, you write the book: that’s what I mean, he said. Not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name.
6.9 His phone rang at this point. He took the call, and spoke in German (fluent) for five minutes. When he’d finished, he looked up at me and asked me if I saw what he was driving at. I do, I told him. But, I started — then I faltered. But what? he asked. Your version, I said … vision, I mean, depiction — then, striking upon the right word—characterization, of the anthropologist … What of it? he asked. Well, I said, it might have been an accurate one a century ago. But now there are no natives — or we’re the natives. I mean … I know, I know all that stuff, he said, cutting me off. I’ve read your clubbing-tome: kaleidoscopes; personae; passing out in toilets; it’s all good. And it’s exactly the situation you describe, he carried on, that makes our era’s Great Report all the more necessary. Shifting tectonics, new islands and continents forming: we need a brand-new navigation manual. But also, I tried to tell him, now there is no study, with its housekeeper and Scotch and tisane. I mean, there are universities … Forget universities! he snorted, interrupting me again. These are irrelevant; they’ve become businesses — and not even good ones. Real businesses, though, he said, his hand describing in the air above his desk a circle that encompassed the whole building: these are the forge, the foundry where true knowledge is being smelted, cast and hammered out. You’re right, U.: there is no tranquil study. But the Great Report won’t be composed in a study; it will come out of the jungle, breaking cover like some colourful, fantastic beast, a species never seen before, a brand-new genus, flashing, sparkling—fulgurating—high above the tree-line, there for all to see. I want it to come out of the Company. We’re the noblest savages of all. We’re sitting with our war-paint at the spot where all the rivers churn and flow together. The Company, he repeated, his voice growing louder with excitement, is the place for it to come from; you, U., are the one to write it. He carried on looking straight at me, into me. He was smiling, but the way his dark eyes fixed me made it clear that, smile or no smile, he was deadly serious. What I want you to do, he said, is name what’s taking place right now. To name it? I repeated; like the princess does with Rumpelstiltskin in the fairytale? Yes, he said: exactly. What do you want this Great Report to look like? I asked. What form should it take? To whom should it be addressed? These are secondary questions, he said. I leave it to you to work them out. It will find its shape.
6.10 Had it, when these events (q.v.) took place, found its shape? It was finding it—finding it in the same way we might say that we’re looking for an object rather than that it’s lost or nonexistent. Shapes were happening inside my thought; or, rather, shapings, a preliminary set of shifts and swirls, coherences and separations of the type that, in their overall movement, seem to promise shape and structure somewhere further down the line. Frames, contexts, modes, tones, formats would suggest themselves — pipe up, step forwards, as though volunteering for a task — then, no sooner than they’d made their willingness and presence known to me, fall silent again, slink back into the crowd and disappear. But these spectral presences, and the promise they (like all ghosts) carried that they might return, helped add momentum to all my enquiries, each of my dossiers, no matter how isolated and idiosyncratic their subject-matter seemed: after all, might this or that one not turn out, in addition to whatever other function it performed, to be the spur to set the Great Report, by happy accident, agalloping? Although I had done nothing concrete to begin the thing, simply being under starter’s orders in this way lent a background radiance, a promise of significance, to everything I did. At the same time, it sent my general levels of anxiety, already high, still higher.
6.11 Back in my basement, in between various new tasks demanded of me by the Koob-Sassen Project — and against the constant, second-level mental puzzling laid down for me since my first day at the Company by this separate, all-important charge, this Great Report — I started a file on parachutists. Dead ones: ones whose parachutes had failed to open. It’s surprising how many times the story, or a variant on it, pops up: like oil spills, it’s generic. Even when I’d first read, on the tube, the initial three-line article about the episode, I’d had a sense of déjà-vu, a sense of having read this article, or one very like it, at least once before. Oh, a dead parachutist: one of those. Everyone can recognize and understand that situation. Before I’d ever heard of Vanuatans, the first joke I learnt to tell as a child was about a classified ad for a used parachute, “no strings attached.” To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon — only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype. The parachutist story, in the stark, predictable simplicity of the circumstance that it presented, in the boldness of its second-handness, was refreshing: in its unashamed lack of originality, it was original.
6.12 The strange thing was, the more I started looking for dead parachutists, the more they started cropping up — in real time, I mean. Sure, I unearthed instances of parachutes failing to open, and suspicions being aired as to the cause, running back fifty years. There’d been a case in America where both main chute and reserve had ripped on opening, despite the odds against this happening from fabric fatigue alone being about ten million to one; and another one in Australia where a harness had quite inexplicably caught fire in mid-air; and so forth. But, in the very period during which I was compiling these cases — a period of no more than two and a half months — no less than three more stories hit the news involving parachutists slamming into the ground chuteless. They weren’t in England: one took place in New Zealand; one in Poland; one in Canada. And, of course, the particulars varied — but they all involved suspected acts of sabotage; and none of the cases, over this same period, was resolved. The replication, or near-replication, of these situations started buzzers ringing all over my head — and made the case of my own parachutist, the unfortunate soul whose death had snagged my interest in the first place, all the more gripping: an originally un-original event becoming even more un-original, and hence even more fascinating.