11.3 In the basement next to me that week, Daniel was watching pretend zombies. They marched across his wall on one of those parades; lurching slowly through the streets, their heads lolling from side to side, their eyes, like Madison’s and the video-file’s fishes’, vacant. There were young ones, old ones, even children taking part. Some wore business clothes, some military uniforms, others firemen’s outfits, evening gowns, tracksuits, pyjamas. There were nurses, bridal couples, traffic wardens, fast-food restaurant workers, skateboarders, mothers with zombified babies, hospital patients, clowns. Some of these pretend zombies carried pretend brains, or hearts, or limbs, which they would gnaw at intermittently. Stewards in yellow jackets, themselves daubed in pretend blood, kept the procession to one side of the road, away from traffic. The odd mounted policeman could be seen as well. The pretend zombies lurched past offices and cafés, across traffic intersections, petrol-station forecourts, bridges, civic squares. What city’s that? I asked Daniel. What does it matter? he replied. They have zombie parades everywhere now.
11.4 Then, after holding and questioning him for forty-eight hours, the police released the pall-bearing best man. They sprung him without charge, making it clear that they no longer thought he was in any way accountable for his friend’s death. In his place, though, they arrested a second member of the club. This one, also well-known to victim, wife, best friend and all, hadn’t been on the dive; but he’d had access to the room in which the rigs had all been stored. They also held and questioned him for two days — then released him, once more without making any kind of charge. Over the next two weeks they made four more arrests, each of which ended in an unconditional discharge. They arrested the club secretary; then a senior instructor; then the cleaner; then a member of the canteen staff. Eventually they stopped making arrests: presumably they’d run out of people to slap cuffs on. They started looking down the suicide route instead: exploring the possibility that the victim had sabotaged his own chute. This, too, proved a false traiclass="underline" the man turned out to have been happy, and to have shown no melancholic tendencies. After this, the whole thing started going quiet; news pages and newspapers all dropped the story. To plug the gap this left in my life, I transferred my attention to the skydiving mysteries in Canada and Poland and New Zealand. Nobody in the media seemed to have noticed, or at least attributed any significance to, the fact that the episode, its variants, were appearing concurrently on three separate continents. This, too, excited me: that I alone was starting to pick up the outline of a set of permutations, to discern a morphology at work. I say “concurrently,” but in fact the overseas cases weren’t quite in kilter with the British one: they lagged slightly behind it, and one another. Nonetheless, a similar sequence was playing out in each: a flurry of arrests and speculation, then a dwindling away as all the trails turned cold.
11.5 The Great Report. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts how, after spending months on end among the Nambikwara, with no prospect of escape in sight (the rainy season, rivers flooded and un-navigable, all the perks he’d brought with him — food, wine, bottled water, cigarettes — consumed or traded off, clothes damp and rotten as the hut whose dripping walls and ceiling beat out the slow, metronomic rhythm of his days), bored out of his skull and starting to fall prey to what he later called a “mental disorder” that can afflict anthropologists, he started to compose an epic drama. For six days my hero wrote from morning till night on the back of sheets of paper containing his research notes. The drama’s plot involved a Roman emperor and his assassin, and a grand exploration of the themes of glory, power, nature and annihilation. I picture him writing it, cold and rheumatic on interminable afternoons. No, scratch that: what I actually picture is the paper that he writes it on: on one side, columns of Nambikwara words and phrases, transcriptions of tattoos, diagrams of the village’s huts’ layout, with attempts to correlate these with the tribe’s wider myth and kinship structures, which he’s extrapolated and laid out in graphs and tables — then, on the other side, the play. On one side, scientific, evidence-based research; on the other, epic art. If my Report had come to be completed, which side of the paper would it have been written on? More to the point: to which side does this not-Report you’re reading now, this offslew of the real, unwritten manuscript, belong? Perhaps to neither side, but to the middle: the damp, pulpy mass that forms the opaque body at whose outer limits, like two mirages, the others hover.
11.6 You still haven’t told me how you came to be in that airport, I said to Madison as we lay in bed one evening. There’s lots of things I haven’t told you, she replied. If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world. If knowing everything about a person were the be-all and end-all of human interaction, she said, we’d just carry memory-sticks around and plug them into one another when we met. We could have little ports, slits on our sides, like extra mouths or ears or sex organs, and we’d slip these sticks in and upload, instead of talking or screwing or whatever. Would you like that, Mr. Anthropologist? No, I told her; I don’t want to know everything about you. This was true: I hadn’t asked her very much about herself at all — her family, her background, any of that stuff — not back in Budapest when we’d first met, and not since, either. Our liaison had been based throughout on minimum exchange of information. I don’t want to know everything about you, I repeated. I just want to know what you were doing in Turin. I wasn’t in Turin, she said again. Torino-Caselle, I replied; whatever. Why? she asked. I’m intrigued, I told her. What, professionally? she goaded me. That’s right, I said: professionally. Well then you’ll have to pay me, she said.
11.7 Back at my flat, over the following week, objects started impinging on my desktop clearing. At first it was coffee cups; then letters, which brought bills and take-away menus in their wake; then, once these had pitched camp on the leather, plates of half-eaten food and handkerchiefs and random pocket-contents came blithely by and stayed, since I no longer had the will to evict them. It wasn’t laziness, but something much worse. I’d begun to suspect — in fact, I’d become convinced — that this Great Report was un-plottable, un-frameable, unrealizable: in short, and in whatever cross-bred form, whatever medium or media, un-writable. Not just by me, with my limited (if once celebrated) capabilities, but fundamentally, essentially, inherently un-writable. It wasn’t just the fact that there could no more be a Lévi-Strauss 2.0 than a second Leibniz; beyond this, I grew exasperated every time I tried to picture, even in the most abstract of ways, a mechanism capable of managing and arresting, let alone pinning down and mapping the dynamics, processes and patterns — social, anthropological, historical, micro- and macro, what-you-will — that the Report would have to somehow turn into its content, these entities that kept proliferating every which way, from every which turn and juncture, at every which moment. My exasperation led me, each time, to the same conclusion: that it simply wasn’t possible. Peyman, it struck me, must have known this; he was too clever not to. Why, then, had he commissioned it from me? Paranoid thoughts started popping up inside my head. I pictured Peyman back, once more, with all his moguls, mover-shakers and connectors, laughing at me, laughing at the thought that I could have believed, even for a moment, he was serious … Even when I reasoned these last, deranged notions back out to the fringes of my mind, I was still left with the immovable fact of the thing’s un-writability. This filled me with anger, and a feeling of stupidity, and sadness, too — grief not for an actual loss but, worse, for a potential or imaginary one: this beautiful, magnificent Report; this book, the Book, the fucking Book, that was to name our era, sum it up; this book that left the format of the book itself behind, this book-beyond-the-book; and, beyond even this, the tantalizing and elusive possibility of transubstantiated now-ness, live-ness it was to inaugurate — the possibility, that is, of Present-Tense Anthropology™. All that was gone. Which, in turn, raised the question: What was I still there for?