11.8 Christmas came and went. Parties; provincial exile; a return to London more relieved than joyous; more parties. On the 1st of January I found myself sitting, once more, beside my desk and blotter, looking through the window at the dawn. I always wake up early after drinking. It was a clear dawn, a good one to usher the new year in. The first phase of the Project would be going live this year. I looked at the pond, this site (since I’d rescued the girl there) of a minor resurrection, and thought of Vanuatans once again. On New Year’s Day, the men ride out on horses or just run about a stretch of pasture firing arrows up into the air: straight up, more or less vertically. The arrows, naturally, fall back down, with pretty much the same velocity as that with which they flew up in the first place. The men ride or run around until an arrow lands on one of them and kills him. Then they stop: the ritual demands that one man must be taken every year. Hungover, jaded, generally un-invigorated by the world, I found myself, in reverie, wishing — just as I had as a child when jumping from my sisters’ bed — that I could be one of these Vanuatan warriors, galloping about the fields, new-year’s wind biting at my cheeks, death whistling all around me, whistling me to life …
11.9 Still sitting at my desk and blotter, I looked up at the sky and thought these thoughts. At the same time, I thought about my parachutist once again — with the result that the two scenarios, the Vanuatan new-year arrow-shooting ritual and the fatal sky-diving escapade, merged into one. And suddenly, as though out of the sky itself, with all the speed and penetration of an arrow hurtling to earth, a major revelation came to me. In that instant, I saw the truth behind the parachutist case with total clarity: it was a Russian Roulette pact! The members of the club, or at least a clique within their larger congregation, had made an illicit deal among themselves. No longer satisfied with the adrenaline-hit they got from simply jumping from a plane, they’d upped the stakes, the ante, upped them to the biggest one imaginable, by secretly agreeing to sabotage a single parachute and throw it back into the general pile of packs. No one would know which pack they’d sabotaged, since they all looked the same. And there’d always be surplus packs, of course: the bad one might lie around unused for a year, two years, forever. Or, of course, it might be used at any time: on this jump, right now … They’d never know: that’s why they did it, just like Russian Roulette players. I was certain of this. I was more certain of it than of anything before or since. The triangles, the lines and vectors all made sense now: it seemed to me, in that instant, that I’d solved not just a private puzzle but a fundamental riddle of our time. And not just a single riddle either: the Canadian case, the Polish and New Zealand ones — these, I was certain, were Russian Roulette pacts as well. It was a cult, dispersed, like my own covert anthropologists, around the globe! The realization was enormous — almost as visceral as the ritual it unmasked. It made the blood rush suddenly to my head as I shouted Fuck! Fuck! — not in anger but in awe; to no one, in the middle of my living room: the same reaction I’d had when I watched the Twin Towers falling down on live TV. I paced about quite frantically; I couldn’t sit, or even stand still. What to do with this incredible knowledge? Go to the police? It was bigger than that, bigger than solving a crime; bigger even than the (now-defunct) Great Report. I’d made a genuine discovery, a breakthrough, on the scale of Schrödinger’s or Einstein’s. Of this I was quite certain. Fuck! I shouted, one more time; then I sat down, shot through with revelation. The year would be a glorious one.
12
12.1 Petr was admitted to hospital in mid-January. The cancer had spread all round his body. It was particularly bad in his lungs. They’d started to fill up with fluid, which meant he couldn’t really breathe. So the doctors had drilled holes in his chest to drain the fluid out through. When I visited him, in a ward full of people who were obviously dying, he was propped up in a bed with these tubes leading from his chest (one from each side) towards a translucent plastic receptacle about the size and shape of a car battery. He had other tubes extending from his arms too: insulin-drips and morphine-feeders, things like that. He looked like Caesar in the famous dream his wife Calpurnia describes: a perforated statue from which streams of bright-red life-blood gush forth, irrigating all of Rome; only the fluid flowing out of Petr’s chest was pink — a lurid and synthetic pink that had an effervescent quality, like Cherryade. We chatted for a while, and as we did, whenever a part of him, a shoulder or a shin or a bit of chest, protruded from under the bedsheets, I would notice various smudgy, dark lumps pushing up beneath the skin. He had one just above his ankle; it was more than dark — it was black. The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all. This upset me, much more than the fact of Petr’s illness did. For crying out loud, I felt like shouting to the nurse, ward manager, whoever: if you can’t save these people, at least clean the windows.
12.2 The next week brought a massive disappointment: I discovered that my parachutist theory didn’t work. It was bogus; full of shit. The basic logistics of packing and storage, the security measures put in place to prevent tampering, and so forth — all this rendered it impossible. For example: divers, all divers, use only their own, personal packs, for which they are at all times responsible. They keep these in a special locker, to which they alone hold the key; when the packs are out of this, they never leave them unattended, never let them slip from their sight. I learned this from a piece of correspondence I’d started a month previously with a parachute-club safety officer. I read his email as I sat in the same spot in which I’d first made my “discovery,” my dud one. The shock and disappointment I experienced as I read it were worse than those I would have had had the email told me my house and goods were all being confiscated, or that, as a result of some maternity-ward mix-up, I wasn’t actually who I thought I was. It, too, was visceral; it made me feel first sick, then utterly depleted. After I’d read the email, I sat there for a long time, looking through the window. The sky, now, was grey and murky. It was cold. It was only January, but the year already seemed jaded and old. I felt a deep depression coming on.
12.3 Write Everything Down, said Malinowski. But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. Walk down any stretch of street and you’re being filmed by three cameras at once — and even if you aren’t, the phone you carry in your pocket pinpoints and logs your location at each given moment. Each website that you visit, every click-through, every keystroke is archived: even if you’ve hit delete, wipe, empty trash, it’s still lodged somewhere, in some fold or enclave, some occluded avenue of circuitry. Nothing ever goes away. And as for the structures of kinship, the networks of exchange within whose web we’re held, cradled, created — networks whose mapping is the task, the very raison d’être, of someone like me: well, those networks are being mapped, that task performed, by the software that tabulates and cross-indexes what we buy with who we know, and what they buy, or like, and with the other objects that are bought or liked by others who we don’t know but with whom we cohabit a shared buying- or liking-pattern. Pondering these facts, a new spectre, an even more grotesque realization, presented itself to me: the truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but — quite the opposite — that it had already been written. Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script — that that’s what it was. And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. This Great Report, once it came into being, would, from that point onwards, have existed always, since time immemorial; and nothing else would really matter. But who could read it? From what angle, vantage-point or platform, accessed through what exit-jetty leading to what study (since all studies and all jetties were already written into it), could it be viewed, surveyed, interpreted? None, of course: none and no one. Only another piece of software could do that.