14
14.1 The following week, I flew off to New York, and this symposium. I didn’t have to give a presentation or a lecture or anything like that — just sit on a bunch of panel discussions. To my surprise, I found myself (in stark contrast to Frankfurt) being fêted at every turn. Peyman had clearly put the word out. Despite saying almost nothing in any of these conversations, I was accorded almost sycophantic reverence, simply for being (as it was stated time and again) one of the Koob-Sassen Project’s “architects” or “engineers.” Any protest I made about the grotesque exaggeration contained in this label, any confession of my utterly diminutive contribution to the whole thing, of how my little subterranean scratching-around had formed a tiny piece of a huge jigsaw, and so on — all these were written down to some notion of quaint British modesty, and had the opposite effect to that intended, boosting my presumed rank and prestige even more. The trade press were all over the event; after each panel, there’d be short interviews, at which off-the-cuff utterances, none of which I can remember, were extracted from me; then I and the other panelists would be ushered to limousines and whisked off to meals in restaurants so expensive that they didn’t print the prices on the menus; not that we were paying.
14.2 On the third day of this, several hours before I was due to fly back out of JFK, I managed to extricate myself from this circus. I thus found myself with a fair stretch of time, free time, and no desire to fill it up with anything. I rode the subway for an hour or so, getting off here and there, walking a few blocks, then burrowing back down into the next lettered stairwell that I came across. I followed no route in particular — just crossed and crisscrossed, switched back, re-traversed the same stretches of track; but all the same, I found myself being drawn, like some weak dowser’s rod, lower and lower downtown. Eventually, abandoning the illusion that this descent was taking place by chance rather than design, I took the decision to do what I’d already been doing half-intentionally: that is, to travel right down to Manhattan’s very base, and to the ferry terminal perched on its southernmost tip.
14.3 South Ferry is the subway station serving the terminal itself; but for some reason it was closed, so I got off at Rector Street instead. A sign at one end of the platform directed passengers towards the 9/11 Memorial; another, at the far end, read Ferries to Staten Island. It was odd to see those last two words printed out, in public, big and bold and official, after having stared at them, or their variants, in private for so long — as though I were now physically moving through one of my own dossiers: past its coordinates, along its arbitrary channels of association. Beyond the sign, a narrow staircase carried me up to a street bathed in late-winter sunlight. Old buildings bordered this. One of them had its name emblazoned above its portico: New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Others, untitled, had the look of civic buildings too: tax offices, perhaps, or public records depots. Above these buildings, dwarfing them, the half-completed Freedom Tower’s crane-studded skeleton rose up. The thrum of sightseeing helicopters hung about the air; behind the Motor Vehicle building I could see one taking off, its glass nose sniffing the ground to which it glided parallel for a few metres before peeling away laterally skywards; another hovered, its head angled more aloofly upwards as it waited to land. The intermittent beep-beep-beep of reversing buses broke up the chopper blades’ deep, gut-vibrating frequencies, or at least punctuated them. Buses were everywhere: MTA buses turning around or idling at their downtown end-point; tour buses disgorging tourists or awaiting new ones. Men in yellow jackets hawked tickets for these buses, for the helicopters and for boats: aerial and ground tours of Manhattan, cruises to Ellis and Liberty Islands. No one, of course, was selling tours to Staten Island, since the crossing was free — and, even if it hadn’t been, no tourist would have wanted to go there.
14.4 I wanted to go there. Why? I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything? I was, as I’d anticipated I would be, depressed. I’d been this way for months. Despite the Project’s evident, or apparent, success; despite my own “pivotal” role in the Company’s contribution to this monumental undertaking, all the plaudits it was winning me (there’d doubtless be a raise, an elevated status in the Company, perhaps even a high-up, or at least above-ground, office — how I’d miss the sound of ventilation!) — none of this meant anything to me. Nothing meant anything to me. Present-Tense Anthropology™? The Parachutist Mystery? Trashed, pulverised, dissolved back into the whimsy-froth from which they’d bubbled up. The Torino-Caselle Enigma? Madison’s story was, like Lévi-Strauss’s tribe, just fucking weird. What dot-codex could be salvaged from that? And yet the rich and vivid island-dream had stayed with me, cached itself somewhere deep inside, and was now growing, pulsing as it rose back to the surface, radiating with a prospect, with an overwhelming promise, of significance. Something, I told myself with an assurance that I can’t explain, nor could I then, but which all the same, perhaps for that very reason, seemed completely watertight — something would happen if I went to Staten Island. I didn’t know what; but something would. And something would make sense — if not the whole caboodle, at least something. Something is not nothing, even if it isn’t everything. Like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood, or a gambler down to his last chip reaching for the dice to take one final roll, I’d gravitated down here, to the bottom of Manhattan, armed with nothing more than an idea of getting on this ferry. Would I come back on it again? Perhaps; perhaps not. Anything seemed possible.
14.5 Skirting the edge of Battery Park, I managed to pick out a couple of small signs for the ferry terminaclass="underline" cheaply printed ones, clamped onto lamp-posts, jostling for space with better, more official signs pointing to Battery Park, to Bowling Green, or to a second Memorial, this one for veterans of Vietnam. I had to weave and thread my way through queues, lines, gaggles, general throngs of people speaking Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Mandarin and who knows what else, before, behind a broken veil of pretzel stands and gyros trucks, the terminal loomed into view. The building itself looked new: all glass and metal, not unlike the Company’s headquarters, with giant, steel-cast, three-dimensional letters mounted above the entrance, boldly announcing STATEN ISLAND FERRY. As I followed the path round towards the building, more food stands and lamp-posts, passing through my field of vision, temporarily erased some of these letters, so the sign read SATE I LAND, then, a few seconds later, STATE IS ERR. This intrigued me; I started moving back and forth erratically to tease new couplings out by eliding some letters, restoring others. I got SAT AND FRY, SANS LAND, TEN SANDER, TEN IS LAND … The letters were like Scrabble pieces rearranging themselves in an attempt to form a legitimate word; or like the numbers on a combination lock, revolving singularly and in series through their permutations, each click bringing with it the chance that the correct sequence, the true number, will eventually reveal itself, crack open whatever safe it’s protecting, spill its contents. FER. AIL. END. S A I L — then, to my great excitement, on the fourth or fifth pass down the same ten-yard stretch, S AT I N. An irrational elation overtook me as this last word spelled itself out. It was short-lived, though: soon the word morphed into STA I N; then the roof’s overhang eclipsed all but the first two letters: ST. Coincidentally, at the same moment I became aware of a man’s voice off to my left pronouncing, over and over, a word that sounded like a contraction of Starbucks: Stix or Stycks. He said it in an interrogatory manner. Turning round to where the voice was coming from, I saw that its owner was an old-style confectionary vendor selling candy-floss out of a street-cart. He was asking two kids whose dad was buying them some whether they wanted it in a bag or on (and this, of course, was the word I was mishearing) sticks. The kids chose sticks. After he’d handed them the billowing, synthetic stuff, they stood munching it silently, staring back at me with hostile, sticky faces.