Satin Island Read Free Page A

when someone on a higher floor spoke loudly while they happened to be standing next to a return-vent, their words carried to the space in which I found myself, like the voice of a ship’s captain sending orders through a speaking tube down to the engine rooms—orders, though, whose content became scrambled, lost in the delivery. Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise—or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas. Sometimes these patterns took on visual forms, like those that so enchanted eighteenth-century scientists when they scattered salt on Chladni plates and, exposing these to various acoustic stimuli, observed the intricate designsthat ensued—geometric and symmetrical and so generally perfect that they seemed to betray a universal structure lurking beneath nature’s surface, only now beginning to seep through; and I, too, in my basement, sometimes thought I saw, moving in ripples on the surface of a long-cold coffee cup or in the close-up choreography of dust-flecks jumping on an unwiped tabletop, or even on the fleshy insides of my own drooped eyelids, the plan, formula, solution—not only to the problem with which I was currently grappling, but to it all , the whole caboodle—before, waking with a jolt, I watched it all evaporate, like salt in a quiet breeze.
    2.5 When I returned from Turin, I slept for a couple of hours, then showered, then made my way into the office. It was a clear day, one of those crisp ones in winter when the sunlight seems to penetrate the thin, cold air more sharply; the glass and metal carapace of the Company building was flashing blue and silver, as though laced with an electric charge. Inside, too, the place seemed all charged up: people were moving briskly, with a bounce and purpose to their gait. It was the Project contract, of course, the Company’s landing of it, that was generating this excitement. The name Koob-Sassen was being spoken in the lobby, in the lift, along the corridors; even when nobody was speaking it, it seemed to hang about the air and speak itself. Arriving in my room, I called up to Peyman’s office on the fifth floor, and was put through to Tapio. U., Tapio said; you’re back. He spoke in a robotic Finnish monotone, but still he seemedsurprised. Yes, I said. Peyman’s not, he told me; he’s still stuck in Vienna. (The airspace there, it turned out, was backed up much worse than it had been in Italy.) He’ll be back tomorrow though, Tapio continued; come and see him then. He hung up, leaving me alone in my basement, disconnected and deflated.
    2.6 On that day, of all days, I left the office early. Rather than go back to my flat, I went to Madison’s. She lived in Westbourne Grove. On the tube on the way there, I picked up one of the free newspapers that lay about the seats. The front page carried an update on the oil spill. The containment booms hadn’t worked; oil was, slowly but ineluctably, encroaching on those shorelines. The paper had reproduced a chart that showed the way the currents circulated in that particular spot: they moved in a large circle, or, to be precise, ellipse, one of whose elongated edges intersected the coast and at whose antipodal point the broken pipeline sat, uptake and delivery of its effluvia thereby rendered all the more intense and concentrated by its and the coast’s perfectly corresponding positions on the circumference. (There were, ironically, stretches of blank ocean lying much closer to the pipeline that were unaffected.) Looking at the chart, its directional arrows, I thought of those two boys, those brothers or not-brothers: I pictured them still running, sliding, plying their oval loop—not in the airport anymore, but on some other floor, a kitchen’s or a school refectory’s or playground’s. Flipping onwards through the paper, I found my attention caught by a small item halfway through. Aparachutist had died