12.9 One evening, I confided to Madison my dream of vandalizing everything, of using my insider status to wreak sabotage upon the Project. I knew a boy like you once, she said when I’d finished. Nobody had called me a boy in a long time. It was strange; I kind of liked it. But the thing is, she continued, turning from me in the bed, it won’t be you doing the wreaking and the vandalizing. Oh? I said. Who will it be then? She turned half-back again, sat up, lit a cigarette and said: It isn’t revolutionaries and terrorists who make nuclear power plants melt and blow their tops, or electricity grids crash, or automated trading systems go all higgledy-piggledy and write their billions down to pennies in ten minutes—they all do that on their own. You boys, she said, as once again I felt a double-pang of compliment and slight, are sweet. You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain’s factory that he’s just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion’s taking place already—it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice …

12.10 I sat facing her in silence. I didn’t know what to reply. I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette, scrunching its small stub onto a saucer lying beside the bed, then went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, though, thinking about what she’d said. Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact—the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies—for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture—the one that’s turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization’s perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind’s face.