rainy Sunday afternoon, a documentary—an old one, from the early sixties—about South Pacific islanders. These people, Vanuatans, engaged once a year in a peculiar ritual: the men would climb a high and rickety-looking wooden tower and, goaded on by their womenfolk, who chanted songs of exhortation, leap from the top of this, head first. They wore vines round their ankles, cut to such a length that they would tauten just before the men’s torsos crashed into the earth below. After watching the documentary, I’d climb up my younger sisters’ bunk-bed and, fastening T-shirts and pyjamas round my ankles and the bedpost, leap repeatedly, head first, towards the carpet. If a Vanuatan hesitated or refused a dive, his womenfolk would whip themselves with thorns and nettles, to shame him into action; I made my sisters whip themselves with flannels. I performed the ritual for several days, until a dislocated shoulder and my parents’ veto brought an end to it—but by then, the documentary had done its work. From that time onwards, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them: anthropologist .
6.7 So, with this parachutist: I’d already, as I mentioned, figured out the crime’s location (the sky). The question remained, though, of timing. In other words: at what precise point in time had he actually been murdered? When the equipment had been sabotaged? If he’d survived the fall—been greeted by a sudden upgust of ground-wind, say, or landed in soft, deepsnow, or in the branches of a fir-tree that, pliant and supple, had broken his fall incrementally as he tumbled through them, each layer shaving a little more velocity away until the last layer rolled him gently onto needle-covered earth—if any of these miracles (of which popular lore is, after all, quite full) had taken place, the act of sabotage wouldn’t have constituted murder. Yet, as at least one article I read stated, the man’s death was, in this instance—in this country devoid of tall pine trees, this terrain quite unamenable to upgusts, this snow-less season—a foregone conclusion from the moment the cords had been cut. Thus, although he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours—days, perhaps—of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it) been murdered without realizing it. I tried to picture him walking around in that state: already effectively dead, his body and his consciousness, his experiences, and, beyond these, his experience of his experiences—his awareness of himself, his whole reality—mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams.
6.8 The Great Report: this needs explaining. It was Peyman’s idea. When he first hired me, as he shook my hand towelcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. The Great Report? I asked, my hand still clenched in his; what’s that? The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? Could you elaborate? I asked. Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins’ mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only
6.7 So, with this parachutist: I’d already, as I mentioned, figured out the crime’s location (the sky). The question remained, though, of timing. In other words: at what precise point in time had he actually been murdered? When the equipment had been sabotaged? If he’d survived the fall—been greeted by a sudden upgust of ground-wind, say, or landed in soft, deepsnow, or in the branches of a fir-tree that, pliant and supple, had broken his fall incrementally as he tumbled through them, each layer shaving a little more velocity away until the last layer rolled him gently onto needle-covered earth—if any of these miracles (of which popular lore is, after all, quite full) had taken place, the act of sabotage wouldn’t have constituted murder. Yet, as at least one article I read stated, the man’s death was, in this instance—in this country devoid of tall pine trees, this terrain quite unamenable to upgusts, this snow-less season—a foregone conclusion from the moment the cords had been cut. Thus, although he hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours—days, perhaps—of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it) been murdered without realizing it. I tried to picture him walking around in that state: already effectively dead, his body and his consciousness, his experiences, and, beyond these, his experience of his experiences—his awareness of himself, his whole reality—mere side effects of a technical delay, a pause, an interval; an interval comparable, perhaps, to the ones you get down phone-lines when you speak long distance or on Skype: just the hiatus created by the passage of a command down a chain, the sequence of its parts; the interim between an action and its motion, like those paralytic lags that come in hideous dreams.
6.8 The Great Report: this needs explaining. It was Peyman’s idea. When he first hired me, as he shook my hand towelcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. The Great Report? I asked, my hand still clenched in his; what’s that? The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? Could you elaborate? I asked. Well, he replied, finally letting my hand go so that he could gesticulate with his; you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them, shiver from their fevers, drink strange brew fermented in their virgins’ mouths, and all the rest; then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one that they kind of know exists, but only
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