10.7 The atmosphere inside the auditorium was, by now — each time — ecstatic. With the casting-out of this sad bleater, a new society, bound in brotherhood of truth and love of oil spills, had been founded. In anticipation of this moment, I’d cued up a second video-file that showed dead fish lolling around congealed oil on the sea’s floor. The slowness of this scene (it had been edited by Daniel for maximum effect) was lulling, soothing. Look, I’d say in a quiet voice after we’d all watched the footage, mesmerized, in silence for a while; look at these fishes’ eyes. They’re black and opaque. And rightly so: for aren’t eyes windows to the soul? If you cut open these fish — ichthyomancy, I believe, is the correct. In former times, the appellation for this would have been. Wolfskin-clad men who. If you cut open these fish, you would find oil inside their liver, kidneys, brain and heart. It’s what’s most intimate to them — what, of them, has survived. Look at the mild underwater current roll them slightly one way, then another. See how their bodies seem to merge with the black mass, then to emerge from it again: belly, gill or tail-edge first, producing strange, outlandish, not-quite-fish shapes. Does it not look as though they were regressing to some previous stage in the evolutionary cycle — not just their own, but that of the whole universe? To some interim state of mutation, one in which all forms are up for grabs? Dice in the air, the roulette ball still zipping round the wheel’s rim: anything is possible! God’s first act, we are told, was to conjoin and divide as he moved through the waters. This, then, is the primal deed replaying itself — but godlessly, driven and orchestrated by the whims of matter alone. It’s all the more sacred for that, gentlemen, because all the more true. Nature is senseless. And nature is dirty.
10.8 My fifteen minutes? I’d say, noticing the organizer in the wings, hidden from the audience’s view but not from mine, fidgeting with his watch or walkie-talkie, the next scheduled speaker standing awkwardly beside him. What is a quarter-hour, or century, compared to this? Is not the flow of oil the flow of time itself: slowly but inevitably crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline? It embodies time, contains it: future, present, past. How many epochs (with this word I’d pause, as though distracted by the slight, fleeting intrusion of some parallel universe, before pawing the thought away) — how many epochs of pre-history are lodged in this Paleozoic ooze? What back-catalogues of Vendian biota, proto-Cnidarians and Ediacara, their amalgamated urolites and coprolites and burrows, their trace-fossils? To genuinely contemplate, gentlemen, even the smallest drop — to attend to it faithfully, exhaustively — would be to let time expand beyond its Ordovician and Precambrian borders, till it overflowed all measurable limits. When oil spills, Earth opens its archives. That it takes the form of vinyl when it hardens is no chance occurrence; what those men in body-suits on beaches should be doing is not brushing it away but lowering a needle to its furrows and replaying it all, and amplifying it all the while to boot: up and up, exponentially, until from littoral to plain to mountain, land to sky and back to sea again, the destiny of every trilobite resounds. Thank you. Thank you. I’d step back from the lectern and begin to leave the podium, but the cheering would be so clamorous that I’d be forced to come back time and again, to take another bow. Delegates would be surging forwards, address books open, business cards stretched out towards me, their numbers overwhelming the security personnel who tried to hold them back. Thank you, I’d say. Thank you. Thank you once again. I’ll see you in the sauna. Thus passed the week.
11
11.1 Sensational development in the skydiving murder case: the police (the following week’s news pages informed their readers) had arrested one of his pall-bearers. The suspect, the victim’s best friend, had been on the same dive. They’d been inseparable; the suspect had even been the best man at his wedding. No more details could be given at this point: the thing was presumably sub judice. There was, however, one more sentence tagged on at the end; a sentence that, while seemingly just factual and neutral, managed to imply a wealth of supposition. It announced that the dead parachutist’s wife, herself also a parachutist, was “helping police with their enquiries.” The insinuation, of course, was that she’d colluded with the pall-bearing best man — who, it would follow, was her lover. A love-triangle, elevated from the altar to the sky! I marked its various vectors on my walls: lines linking DP (Dead Parachutist) to BM (Best Man) to W (Wife); and each of these to H1 (Harness One), H2, H3; and SR (Storage Room) to AP (Aeroplane); BR1 (Bedroom One, the conjugal one) to BR2 (its adulterous counterpart)… It was more than just a triangle: it was a web, a tangle of competing sections, intersections, blind spots, unfolding like so many strands till now compressed and hidden in a parachute’s sealed bridle; lines that eventually converged, like cords descending from a canopy, on a single spot at my diagram’s base — a spot that represented, naturally, not love but death.
11.2 A trip to Stockholm helped bring into focus a small insight I’d had into Madison, the workings of her mind. Each time I’d been abroad, she’d phoned me, full of lust and longing, to demand my swift return; yet, whenever I’d actually been with her, this lust and longing had been missing. We’d had sex, of course, but even then she’d given the impression of being absent, somewhere else. Each time we did it, I’d watch her face. Her eyes would remain closed for most of the encounter; then, as she approached her orgasm, they’d open. But that didn’t mean she’d look at me, or at anything else for that matter: as her eyelids slid up, the eyes themselves would roll up with them, and continue rolling after the lids had stopped, until their centres, those small circles of intelligence and colour that you think of as the apertures leading to what’s behind the eyes, to their owner’s being or essence or whatever, were almost completely occluded — just two small, gelatinous segments remaining, moons of pupil thumbnailed by the overlay of skin. Each time this happened (and it happened every time), I’d find myself transported back to Turin Airport: to that laptop screen on which her face had first appeared and then been frozen in mid-gesture. The expression was the same. It got so that I felt I was penetrating not her but rather, through her, that other moment: that long, stretched-out moment, its endless buffering. I would think, again, about the shroud, the not-Christ figure’s upturned eyes; and I’d remember Madison telling me that she, too, had visited that airport, back in 2001, and her not answering my question as to how this came about. The result, the upshot of this repeating cluster of associations, was that Turin, Torino-Caselle, took on over time a kind of sacred aspect: this airport, this slow-spinning hub, this thorn-crown of delay, became, for me, the site of a divine mystery. Approaching and re-entering it, crossing, time after time, its portal, I, too, would become lost in spasms of paralysis.