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.

[...] All we need to do to guarantee indefinite existence for ourselves is to keep our network contracts running, and make sure a missive goes out every now and then. We could have factories of Chinese workers do it; pre-pay five or ten years by bequest-subscription; give them a bunch of messages to send out in rotation or on shuffle; or default to generic and random ones; I don’t know. It would work, though. Key to immortality: text messaging.

[...] As the litany of falsehoods progressed, I thought about standing up, interrupting it and setting the record straight; the more it continued, the more these thoughts took on a violent hue. I imagined striding to the front, grabbing the minister by his frock, headbutting him to the floor, jumping between the coffin and the furnace and denouncing the entire procedure. Then we would all storm the dais, tie the priest up, urinate onto his font, break Petr’s body out for a huge party that would bring the rafters down, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, we—I—didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited.

The Project’s first phase had gone live: it was up and running, rolled out, operational, whatever. Its implementation had been deemed a great success. By whom? I don’t know. Deemers. And the Company’s contribution had been praised, by praisers, as quite brilliant. And my own input into this had been held up and singled out, by Peyman himself, as particularly productive. All this was going to my head. I even glanced about the restaurant, to see if anybody recognized me. This was ridiculous, of course: the people there had probably never even heard about Koob-Sassen, let alone my role in it. And this, perhaps, was not a bad thing, after all: the thwarted saboteurs that I myself had mobilized then turned my back on, the hit squads of vengeful revolutionaries, wouldn’t know who to shoot when they came looking for the traitor.

14.10 I didn’t let myself be carried through the doors, though: at the last instant, I held back. This wasn’t easy: bodies were wedging me in on all sides. I had to push against them, turn myself around, then hoist and grab at passing arms and shoulders in order to move the other way. At some point, in that final stretch, I’d made my mind up not to take the ferry after all. To go to Staten Island—actually go there—would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality, have solved, or resolved? Nothing. What tangible nesting space would I have discovered there, and for what concrete purpose? None. Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well. And so I found myself, as I waded back through the relentless stream of people, struggling just to stay in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know. I worked my way out to the side, and stood watching the crowd parading by. Their tight-packedness made them edge and shuffle rather than flow, a stop-start rhythm that was nonetheless placid rather than agitated, their stares fixed not on the back of the person right in front of them (although their eyes all pointed there) but rather on some abstract spot beyond this, or, perhaps, on nothing. The thought struck me that I should be filming this scene on my phone for Daniel, or, perhaps, myself—but I didn’t act on this thought. I just stood there, watching. The man on crutches shuffled by; and the one with the wig; and the ones in polyester suits; and the ones in plain, casual clothes. Many had small backpacks, most of which were loose-strung over single shoulders; one young man, though, had a larger one strapped tightly to his back, over both shoulders and around his waist, but hadn’t closed it: cloth-like fabric of a fleshy hue was trailing slightly from its unzipped opening. A woman with striped black and yellow shoes edged past me, and for a fleeting instant I thought it was the Minister. It was my jet-lag kicking in, colliding times and places in my head. I saw, amidst the mesh of limbs and torsos, a large bump on someone’s neck. I didn’t see their face—only their neck, and this just for a second. Helicopters thrummed again; I thought of humming-birds; again a radio crackled, and some children, possibly the ones with the candy-floss, or maybe other ones, processed by. The crowd thinned out; late arrivals scurried past me; then the doors closed; and, almost immediately, the gantries, like the drawbridge to some castle that I’d never enter, were hoisted back up.