8.8 They didn’t find a match, said Petr, the next time I met him. Who didn’t? I asked. The Greeks, he said; the lab. Bummer, I said. Yeah, he answered; useless fucking humming-birds. There’s one thing, though, they still want to try. What’s that? I asked. Orange juice, he told me. Apparently my cells twitched, or cringed, or did something or other, when exposed to Jaffa-orange extract. Not enough to blast them, but enough for them to want to try to flush the bad ones out with orange juice. Flush them out? I repeated. How do they do that? They inject the stuff into my veins, said Petr. They shoot you full of orange juice? I asked. Not any orange juice, he said: they have to be Jaffa oranges, from Israel and the Lebanon, or Gaza, Palestine, the Holy Land — whatever you call that part of the world now. I’ve got to go, he said a moment later, and took off; but the thought of him being filled with Middle Eastern orange juice stuck with me for a day or two. Where, before, I’d seen Grecian caves and temples, now my mind’s eye gave me hot, cracked hillsides on which orange groves were planted. Far from presenting an idyllic landscape, these hillsides and these orange groves were dotted with gun emplacements, capped with observation posts from which surrounding villages could be monitored and showered with mortars. Walls, made not of old stones but of ugly modern concrete topped with barbed wire, hemmed these groves in, cutting some of them in two. Beneath them, and beneath the villages, down in valleys that stretched as far as the eye could see in every which direction, oil wells burned, their smoke-plumes blackening the sky — and blackening the orange groves as well as they drifted across these, leaving tarry deposits on trees’ barks, on leaves and on the fruit itself. When that scene came to me, when I pictured all its hatred, all its violence, all its blackness, being injected into Petr, I knew — instinctively and with complete certainty — that he was going to die.
8.9 The day after I met him was a Saturday. Awaking at home to a free diary and no hangover, I sat down at my desk to plan some kind of outline for the Great Report. It was time, I told myself: time to begin this in earnest. Not the Report per se, but rather its schema, prolegomena, what-have-you. I installed myself at my desk. It was a good desk; it had cost me quite a bit of money. It had an elegant teak body on whose upper surface sat a leather desktop of a dark-blue tint; set in the leather was a large rectangular writing surface with a blotter backing. That Saturday, I cleared the desktop thoroughly and ruthlessly: every object had to go from it; each notebook, stapler, pencil-holder, scrap of paper; the telephone, the clock (especially the clock); rubbers and paperweights — everything. After I’d cleared it I cleaned it, wiping the leather with a cloth doused in a purpose-made detergent that I’d bought at the same time as I got the desk. One day, I’d told myself, I’ll need to clean it properly and thoroughly, transform it into a tabula rasa upon which I might compose a great, momentous work. I’d been right: that day was now. I cleaned it, then I dried it with a tea-towel. It was so clean it almost shone — although the darkness of the leather muffled any sheen, reburied this instead inside itself, which seemed, in turn, to give the desktop more intensity, bigger potential as a launch pad for the task at hand. The smell that rose from it was almost natural, like the smell that comes from lawns and meadows when long grass has just been mown. Sitting at it, I looked out of the window at the sky. This was blue too — clear blue with the odd wisp of cloud. I angled myself so as to face the largest uninterrupted stretch of sky, then turned so as to align myself exactly with the desktop, so that the borders and perimeters of this ran parallel and perpendicular to those of my gaze. I sat there for a long time, luxuriating in the emptiness of first one space then the other: desktop, sky, desktop. It was definitely time.
8.10 My window looked out over a rectangular, communal garden within which a pond, also rectangular, was inlaid. Neighbours crossed this garden as they left their flats from time to time. There was a family with two small girls. One of the girls, the younger one, had slipped into the pond a few weeks earlier, between the concrete flagstones that spanned this, and I’d come out of my flat to pull her out. Her parents had brought flowers round the next day. The girl wouldn’t have drowned: the pond wasn’t very deep, and the mother had arrived on the scene just a few seconds after my sub-heroic intervention. Nonetheless, they’d thanked me, borne me floral offerings. The parents and their daughters passed through the garden today, on the way to ballet class, or so the clothes the rescued daughter and her elder sister wore suggested. Another neighbour came out with a small dog tucked beneath her arm. She wasn’t meant to have a dog: the estate was dog-free. She’d had an order served against her, a writ from the corporation, which she seemed to be ignoring. I was torn between annoyance at this old woman for keeping the pet, since this displayed an arrogant disdain towards her other neighbours, not least me; and admiration for her solitary, resolute defiance of the forces of the law which were being brought to bear on her. Was she a rebel or a die-hard bourgeois individualist? I chewed this question over as I sat at my teak and leather desk. The dog was a Chihuahua — barely a dog at all; more like a guinea pig or hamster. Its owner teetered (she’d had a small stroke a year earlier) as she carried it across the garden in a shopping bag, like a degraded version of some Hollywood star. When she’d passed from view I looked back at the empty desktop. How much time had passed? I couldn’t tell, since I’d removed the clock. But time had passed. And I was hungry. I decided to go out for lunch; or brunch; or breakfast; whatever. No Report had been commenced, no frame or outline set up, but that was okay. I didn’t need to force things. I had staked a claim, made space: that was enough.
8.11 One day the following week, I visited Daniel’s office again. This time I found him watching a projection that showed Muslim pilgrims performing the Hajj inside the giant mosque in Mecca. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them knelt and stood in neat, concentric rows; as these static rows converged towards the cube, itself the size of a large building, that lay at the centre of the mosque, they turned into a swirl of slowly moving bodies circling the object. Did you film this? I asked Daniel. No, he said; I found it on the Internet. It had a soundtrack, he said, prayer and music, but I turned it off. You know what this is called? he asked me. No, I told him. Tawaf, he said: circumambulation. They move anti-clockwise round the Kaaba. Anti-clockwise? I asked. How come? I don’t know, he said. Something to do with heavenly bodies: galaxies and planets and the like — some theory of universal movement. We watched some more. As pilgrims shifted from kneeling to standing positions, all in unison, the image’s whole texture changed. When, nearer the centre, they all started circling, they became a spinning comet, petals on a flower, bright water flowing down a plughole. At the very centre, the smooth movement met with some resistance as hands reached out to the cube and got some traction on its granite, if just for a second, before being swept onwards as new hands replaced them. The process seemed endless, self-perpetuating: as each static row of white-robed figures was picked up and swept into the swirl, the next row moved up one to take its place, and each row behind this one did the same, a new row forming at the back, more pilgrims waiting behind this, and more behind. The hands grabbed towards the granite passionately, almost desperately, the angles, tautness and extension of the arms beneath them all exuding longing and abandon. We watched, as was our wont, in silence.