5.9 That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question. As I stepped out of the blind spot back into time and his office, he asked: Have you ever been to Seattle, U.? Behind him, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cranes, clouds, bridges, aeroplanes, the Thames all jostled for position. No, I answered. It’s interesting, he said. Oh yes? I asked. How so? Well, he replied, the truly striking thing about the city is its lack of Starbucks outlets: driving around, you don’t see a single one. That’s strange, I said; I thought Seattle was where Starbucks came from. Exactly, he said; you’d think the town would turn out to just be one giant Starbucks. But instead it’s all Joe’s Cappuccino Bar, Espresso Luigi, Pacific Coffee Shack and the like. So what’s the story there? I asked. What’s the story indeed? he repeated. This is exactly what I asked my driver; and do you know what he told me? Peyman looked up from his device. I shook my head. He told me, Peyman said, his gaze now drifting over to his monitor, that these were Starbucks: stealth ones. Starbucks’ management, their strategists, understand that no one actually wants to buy coffee from Starbucks; they do it for convenience, heads hung low with shame. People crave authenticity, locality and (here his speech slowed down a little, since he’d started typing again)… origin — everything that Starbucks, as a global chain, represents the polar opposite of. So the strategists (he went on) create these “local” figures — Joe, Luigi and the like — and launch a handful of outlets for each, not too near to one another, and see how they fare: real-world R&D. If one takes off, they’ll roll it out nationwide, and across Europe, Asia and the rest — and everyone will flock to it, because it isn’t Starbucks. Isn’t that brilliant? he asked. Yes, I replied; I guess it is.
5.10 He proceeded to brief me on the Project; the Company’s role in this; my own within that. There’d be a meeting with the Minister in a few weeks’ time; he wanted me to come; he wanted me to go to Paris; he wanted me to continue following my own lines (or sidelines) of intuitive enquiry, and report back intermittently on these, as always; there was other stuff. I’m being quite vague, in part because I’m obliged to be; but in part because he was quite vague as well. He’d always been that way: his currency also comprised, as its reserve, a kind of systematic vagueness. Some spaces of ignorance do not need to be filled in—that was another of his aphorisms. His whole knack, the USP on which he’d built his business, was for managing uncertainties, for somehow joining isolated dots into a constellation-pattern people could just—just—recognize, and be seduced by. As I listened to him talk about Koob-Sassen, it all made sense, even if it didn’t. Even the fact that it didn’t quite make sense made sense, while he was talking.
5.11 Later that evening, I saw Madison again. Again we had sex. Afterwards, lying in bed, I found my mind drifting, once more, among images of oil. I moved through dark and ponderous swells, black-cresting waves and fleck-spattered shingles, before settling among pools in which oil, spent and inert, lay draped over rocks and animals alike. When it covered whole rocks and whole animals, it looked like PVC, like fetish gear. The rescue and clean-up teams’ protective suits looked both perverse and prophylactic at the same time. Offshore, where the waves were breaking, I could see a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.
6
6.1 The following week, I organized a meeting with a bunch of civil servants who were working on Koob-Sassen. The idea was that they’d sit in a room and discuss their sense of what the Project entailed, or, more subtly, implied. We had, in the Company’s offices, a room purpose-built for such discussions. It had loungers, sofas, armchairs, even beanbags — all chosen to induce as relaxed and casual an atmosphere as possible, so that the discussion’s participants could just chew the fat while we watched them through a two-way mirror that formed one of the room’s walls. It never worked that way, of course: people always knew that they were being watched, assessed, recorded. It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesis devised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems — the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison — cyanide, say — would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through — well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc, peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.
6.2 Thus it was, after a manner, with the subjects I’d observe through the fake mirror. These civil servants knew without being told what was expected of them — not by me, nor even by their bosses, their immediate superiors to whom they could attribute a name and face and rank, but rather by some larger and much vaguer host of assessors, overviewers, judges, lurking on the far side of some other two-way mirror much, much larger, if less obvious, than this one — and were shaping their contributions accordingly. They kept using the word “excitement” (one hundred and eighty-two occurrences over three hours); also “challenge” (one hundred and four); “opportunity” (eighty-nine); “transformation” (seventy-eight); and, as an upscale variant on this last word, “re-configuration” (sixty-three). They reclined in their loungers, stretched their legs out from their beanbags, tried to exude nonchalance and calm — but to me they transmitted tenseness and unease, like anxious cats.