9.9 While we were back in the main room, looking at a big sculpted figure that the fat, silent porter, on Claudia’s instructions, had lifted from one of the sliding storage-units and laid on the slab for us, Madison called me on my mobile. How on earth does a signal find its way through all this concrete? I asked Claudia. The Faraday cage’s metal acts as an aerial, she said. Who are you talking to? asked Madison. I’m looking at a totem pole, I said. That turns me on, said Madison. I looked down at the figure laid out on the white tissue beneath us. It was some kind of warrior-god, garish, daubed in yellow, black and scarlet, with a phallus stretching from his waist up to his chin; his face was twisted in an obscene leer. It’s like an alien autopsy, isn’t it? Claudia was saying, while Madison elaborated sex scenarios involving poles and savages. Listening to her, I started getting a hard-on, straining at the fabric (denim — selvage) of my trousers. Claudia didn’t notice, but the mute porter did.
9.10 As we drove back to the museum, we traded news about our contemporaries from university. A third of them had gone to the developing world, to work for NGOs; another third were, like me, working in the corporate sector; the remaining third were academics. Claudia was the only one to have involved herself with what she again called material culture. As we crossed a bridge in the city’s centre, I could see, on one side of the river, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank being built; on the other, in a row, the town’s museums — all of them: architectural, cinematic, natural-historical and so on — housed, like the anthropological one, in old villas. Further away, spires of cathedrals that had somehow survived wartime blitzing poked out above modern glass and metal. One of the huge cranes building the Bank’s HQ was turning as we drove; the box from which the cables carrying the crane’s load descended was sliding along the jib-arm, which itself was swinging horizontally across the air. The box was sliding fast, and the arm was swinging fast, and we were driving fast as well; and it appeared, just for a moment, that the box, though hurtling along the moving arm, was staying quite still, rooted to a single spot of air. But only from the speeding car, there on the bridge.
9.11 On the flight back to London, as the stewardess gave me a cup, or I removed a teaspoon from its packet, or folded down and up the tray-table in the seat-back just in front of me, the term material culture played and replayed itself in my mental airspace, like a snatch of a stuck record. I couldn’t help but see these things — this table, teaspoon, cup — as tribal objects. Also adjustable air-conditioning nozzles, slide-down blinds, Velcro-fitted head-rest covers, motion-sickness bags, buttons with human icons on them and the like. Aliens, after all trace of us has disappeared bar the small handful of our corpses they’ll preserve for intermittent laying out on their tissue-coated slabs, will have whole bunkers full of these things, stuffed into naphthalene-laced cabinets, twenty of each spilling out of every drawer, and wonder what the fuck they were all for. Before we’d left the building, Claudia and I had ducked into the other two rooms, those housing the artifacts from the Americas and Africa. These rooms had been similarly crammed with objects — drums and bracelets, loincloths, Día de los Muertos figurines — but in the second room, the Africa one, a particular item had held my attention more than all the others. It wasn’t, properly speaking, an item: just a lump of some black substance, all unformed, whose rugby ball — sized mass consisted of no more than tubers and protuberances knotted and gnarled together every which way. It’s caoutchouc, Claudia had said, seeing me staring at it: rubber, in its raw form. Now, looking through the window at the bulbous clouds that, once again, were slightly smudged, I thought of this caoutchouc; then of Petr’s cancer; then, once more, of spilled oil.
10
10.1 I spent most of the next week honing in my head the presentation that I should have given back in Frankfurt. Consider, gentlemen, the Oil Spill. Oil spills considered as. Considered as a function of or symbol for. When, gentlemen, we consider. No: Consider, then (yes, then, like the consideration followed naturally from the preceding one — although there wasn’t a preceding one: the proposition just confirmed itself, which made it irrefutable) — consider, then, the Oil Spill. Any oil spill. There’s always one happening … In my mind’s eye, the hi-tech modern conference hall morphed into a nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century auditorium: steep-banked rows of wooden benches, an audience made up exclusively of men with bushy sideburns and high collars, pipe- and cigar-smoke mingling with murmurs of approval in air already thick with erudition and just plain old age — although I still had a projector wi-fi’d to a sensor on my index finger, split-second responsive …
10.2 There’s always an oil spill happening, I’d say. Which is why. That’s the reason, gentlemen. Which, gentlemen, is the reason we can name it in the singular: the Oil Spill — an ongoing event whose discrete parts and moments, whatever their particular shapes and vicissitudes (vicissitudes! I’d susurrate the word time and again), have run together, merged into a continuum in which all plurals drown. Click. Here, gentlemen, you see a tanker trailing its long, black tail. Click. Here are vinyl-coated rocks; and here—click—a PVC-hemmed coastline. Nature got up in her fetish gear, her gimp-outfit. Click. Here’s one showing men with body-suits and gloves pacing a taped-off beach the way forensic detectives do at crime scenes. Click. Here’s a video-file: a close-up sequence, captured by a hand-held underwater camera, of a few feet of seabed. Note the way the semi-hardened oil stretches and folds as the diver’s hand lifts it. Can you see the look on his face? Come, now, come: of course you can. It is the fascinated look your own one had when, as a child, you stood (didn’t you?) rooted to the pavement in front of a candy-store window in which taffy was being pulled, transfixed by the contortions of the unmanageably huge lump — what child, I ask you, gentlemen, could eat all that? — as the machine’s arms plied it, its endless metamorphoses as. Stretched and folded, stretched and slapped. Alchemy. Metamorphosis. Material culture.