Satin Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

it squished and slid.
    3.8 On the way home from meeting Petr, I picked up one of those free newspapers again. Its fifth or sixth page brought more news about the parachutist whose death I’d read abouttwo days earlier. It turned out that the police had been quite right to be suspicious: an examination of the dead man’s gear had unearthed evidence of tampering. The rig, or harness, he’d had strapped onto his back contained two parachutes—three if you counted the small, handkerchief-sized “drogue” that, once deployed, is meant to suck the main chute from the rig—and it had transpired that the cords attaching each of these to one another, to the rig and, ultimately, to him had been deliberately severed. The severing had been carried out with expertise and cunning; all the chutes had been repacked correctly afterwards, so that no outward sign of any interference would be visible. The deed could only have been done by an insider: someone connected to the airfield and the club, who knew the rigmarole of parachute-assembly, the protocol of jumping and jump-preparation—packing, storage, safety-checking and so forth; in short, by another parachutist. It was now a murder story. Arriving home, I drunk-phoned Madison, who didn’t answer; then I passed out on my sofa.

4.
    4.1 On Lévi-Strauss. He was my hero. He would roam around the world—twice: first slowly, physically, by boat and train and donkey; then all over again on fast-track as, writing his findings up, he zapped from continent to continent, culture to culture, travelling through worm-holes of association till he’d remade the entire globe into a collage of recurring colours, smells and patterns. Patterns especially: the painted patterning on tribesmen’s bodies; the layout, concentric or congruent or concyclic, of village huts; the symmetry or asymmetry of caste systems, their transgenerational rhythms of exogamy and endogamy—he saw all these as co-related, parts of larger systems lying behind not just a single tribe but also the larger one of all humanity. If we had some kind of grid that we could lay across it all, he reasoned, we could establish a grand pattern of equivalences. Describing sunsets, he saw spun webs of lit-up vapour, a whole architecture of reflective strands that both revealed and hid the source that lay behind them; even landscape seemed to him to withhold, in its layers and strata, some kind of infrastructural master-meaning of which any one layer was a partial, distorted transposition. This stuff bewitched me.Master-meaning! Concealed revealment! I spent my twenties wanting to be Lévi-Strauss—which is ironic, since he spent most of his life wanting to be somebody or something else: a philosopher, say, or novelist, or poet.
    4.2 Also ironic: the very first brief I was given when I started working at the Company. I was, Tapio informed me, to compile a dossier on jeans. The client was Levi’s—or, to give the company its full name, Levi Strauss. A little research unearthed more than just coincidence behind the nomenclatural overlap: the jean-maker, like the anthropologist, had been an Ashkenazi Jew; both, leaving Europe under vague or not-so-vague threat, had turned to the Americas, and built their fame on what they did there. Levi-no-hyphen-Strauss was German; but the fabric he sold came, like Lévi-Strauss, from France—from Nîmes, down in the South. Serge de Nîmes: denim. Nîmes serge has unique fading and dyeing properties. I spent my first three weeks of gainful employment interviewing teenagers, mid-life-crisis-riven men and garment workers; assessing the subtle code-spectrum of turn-ups, buttons, zippers, creases; generally breaking down how jeans, and Levi Strauss ones in particular, connoted. I got really into creases. Jeans crease in all kinds of interesting ways: honeycomb, whisker, train-track, stack … I catalogued no fewer than seventeen different crease-types, each of which has slightly different innuendos. To