4.4 I compiled a lot of dossiers. They weren’t always for clients. The Company gave me carte blanche to follow my own nose when not working on a specific brief. I went to conferences, read (and, occasionally, wrote) articles, kept my finger on the soft pulse of the media — and compiled dossiers. I had a dossier on Japanese game-avatars, and another one on newspaper obituaries; a dossier on post-match interviews with sportsmen and their managers; a dossier on alleged alien sightings and one on shark attacks; dossiers on tattoos, “personalization” trends for hand-held gadgets, the rhetoric and diction of scam emails. These dossiers sprang up spontaneously, serendipitously, whimsically. A situation, a recurring meme would catch my eye, pique my fancy, and I’d start investigating it: following its spore, seeing where it led, collecting instances of its occurrence, assembling an inventory of all its guises and mutations; like a detective keeping a file on a quarry that’s both colourful and slippery, elusive — a cat-burglar, say, or quick-change-artist con-man.
4.5 When I write “dossier,” this might imply some kind of tidy, reasoned set of entries, each held in its own box-file. But the process was much less orderly: my dossiers largely consisted of scraps of paper stuck around my walls, with lines connecting them and annotations, legible only to me, scrawled at their margins. Each one would stay up for a while, then be replaced by the next one. As the scraps of paper came down, I would stuff them, usually unsorted, into large portfolios. Only the ones for clients ended up as neat, legible documents — although whether the personal whimsy-dossiers were actually so separate from the client-ones is another question. Who’s to say what is, or might turn out to be, related to what else? Occasionally, a whimsy-dossier would suddenly and without warning overlap with a client-one, or with a previous whimsy- or client-one, or several of both, in quite unexpected and surprising ways, parities and conjunctions appearing between contexts that, on the surface of things, seemed to have nothing in common. When this happened, I’d feel a sudden pang, a bristling in the back of my neck: the stirring, the re-animation, of a fantasy that, like in hard-boiled novels and noir movies, all the various files would one day turn out to have been related all along, their sudden merging leading me to crack the case. What was “the case”? I didn’t know — but that was the whole point: the answer to that would become clear once all the dossiers hove into alignment.
4.6 In my office, waiting for Peyman to come back to London, I began a dossier on oil spills. The oil spill that had started while I’d been in Turin was still making the news headlines, but I didn’t confine myself to that one: I read about all kinds of oil spill, going right back to before the First World War. An anthropologist’s not interested in singularities, but in generics. Oil spills are perfectly generic: there’s always one happening, or one that’s recently transpired, or, it can be said with confidence, one that’s on the verge of happening. I printed off tables of data, statistics about frequencies of oil spills, their clustering by region, year and company; images of tankers trailing long, black tails; of birds coated in oil; of people in white suits pushing brooms over vinyl-coated beaches. I looped on a spare laptop a video-clip that Daniel found me: it showed a close-up sequence of a few feet of sea-bed across which oil was creeping, carpeting the floor as it coagulated. The film had been captured by a hand-held underwater camera. You could see the diver’s other hand, his free one, reaching down into the shot, its white-gloved fingers feeling their way along this new-laid carpet or linoleum flooring’s edge until, finding a bump or buckle that allowed for entry, the hand slid under and pulled a section of it up. The oil, still unguent, stretched as it rose. Threads, strands and filigrees appeared, thinning as they lengthened before thickening and folding in on themselves as they were gathered back by the black, undulating mass. Every time I re-watched this last piece of footage, I sensed, or thought I sensed, a smelclass="underline" the sweet, familiar scent of homemade toffee at the point — that magical instant — of caramelization. That’s what these pictures, even through the airless medium of water and the odourless relays of fibre-optic cable, through the mangling of digital compression, the delays, decays and abstractions brought about by storage and conversion, managed to transmit to me.
4.7 As I watched this sequence over and over again (it was only about forty seconds long), other recognizable scenes began exuding from it. The diver’s gesture, for example — reaching down and pulling up the solidifying oil — was familiar as welclass="underline" it was the gesture of a priest raising the holy water in his fingers, or a jeweler displaying a valuable necklace, or a zoologist handling a sleek, endangered snake. The diver, naturally, would have held the camera right beside his face, or perhaps in front of it, pressed up against his mask. This point of view produced another strange, confectionary-oriented pang of recognition; each time I watched, I felt my own face and the diver’s run together. I knew the look on his because it was the look on mine — not only then, watching the clip, but also once when, on a childhood holiday to San Francisco many years ago, I’d stood rooted to the pavement in front of a candy-store window in which taffy was being pulled, transfixed by the contortions of the huge, unmanageable lump (what child could eat all that?) as the machine’s arms plied it, its endless metamorphoses in which, despite the regular, repeating movements that stretched and folded, stretched and slapped the taffy through the same shapes over and over again, I knew, even then, that no part of it, no molecule, would ever occupy the same spot in the overall formation twice.
4.8 Eventually, after days spent immersed in this material, I received a call from Tapio upstairs. Peyman’s on his way back, his robot-voice intoned. Come and see him on Friday. Okay, I said. How’s the Great Report coming along? he asked before he hung up. Oh, you know, I answered: it’s finding its form. Five minutes after he’d called, Petr called too. Hey, he said: you know that goiter they were going to take out? Yes, I replied. Well, he told me, they did; and then they cut it up to look at it, and it was cancerous. Shit, I said. Yes, he said. Good thing they took it out, I said. No, U., he said, the goiter’s just an indicator: I’ve got thyroid cancer. Shit, I said again. Yes, he repeated — but it’s not that bad. How come? I asked. Because, he said, as cancers go, thyroid is a pretty lowly one: a lickspittle of cancers, a cadet. It’s almost never fatal. What do you have to do? I asked. I have to drink a bunch of iodine, he said. It soaks up all the bad cells and destroys them. It will make me radioactive. I’ll be going round town oozing rays and isotopes, like a plutonium rod. Far out, I said. Yes, he said: I’ll be able to look straight through girls’ clothes and see what colour underwear they’ve got on. Really? I asked. Of course not, he said. But I will ooze rays. Far out, I said again; I didn’t know what else to say. Yeah, he repeated: far out.