More fiction in progress, continuing from here. I don't know what this is yet, but I am enjoying working through it.
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Ella Makes a Decision
In her room on the other side of the house Ella is awake and choosing what she wants to wear. Yesterday she was travelling, and dressed in anonymous, comfortable grey cotton, but today the others are arriving and they will be spending time together that night; actually this is the first real night of the trip, so she takes the time to think about how she wants to look and be seen by her friends. She generally approaches this question with an all-or-nothing attitude, and when she decides to take it on seriously she finds the whole thing intensely pleasurable.
She has bought with her: a mid-length dress made from pale chiffon, with thin straps that nicely frame her collarbones; a plain set of linen shorts and a matching top, light-coloured; a beautiful, wool-blend, box-cut jacket, with raglan stitching and pearls sewn in along the piping—the fabric of the jacket is mostly off-white, but offset throughout with thin red and blue threads, so that its colour shifts very slightly under changes of light. With this more elaborate piece she would wear less jewellery, perhaps only a matching set of pearls at her ears. No makeup. She also has a few sets of basics, cotton-synthetic sweatpants and tops, which go with anything, and which can be brought out as necessary. Today she will wear the dress. She considers layering the jacket on top, but decides that this is excessive, and that anyway it is much too hot. Since the dress is quite muted, she selects some jewellery to go with it. She chooses a short necklace that will nicely frame her collarbones, a chain of worked, flat silver sections, tarnished black in the deeper details but with its surfaces brightly polished. Then she puts on the earrings that go with it; small, silver rosebuds with the same tarnishing and polish, and the same hue of silver. Hair and makeup: her hair is dark brown, cut mid-length, she uses to clips at her temples to keep it off her ears so that it frames her face. Makeup understated, barely visible, the softest pink at the eyes. All of this sounds casual, and it is casual really, but it takes her almost an hour because she is having fun with it. She does not remember her nightmares from the previous night at all.
We have mentioned two pairs of earrings—the pearls and the rose buds—and one of her necklaces, the silver plateresque chain. In her bag Ella also has a very short necklace of pearls, nearly a choker, with a silver clasp, and a third set in gold, a thin chain without a pendant and two small hoops.
When she is done she heads out to the kitchen, sees Michael, and suggests that they make a concerted effort to locate the nearest supermarket—they walk up together, to a the complex that services this part of the town, and buy bread, cheese, fruit and vegetables, oil, coffee, and also paper towels, toothpaste, toilet paper, all the other necessities. They buy enough for seven of them, for at least a couple of days, and Michael makes a point to buy ingredients for that night’s dinner, when everyone will be together in the house for the first time. He asks Ella if she likes pasta and she says of course, who doesn’t like pasta? So they also buy expensive sausages, onions and garlic, ripe tomatoes, basil, roquette, and vinegar for a salad. They buy six litres of water and another six litres of sparkling water, and they buy four bottles of wine and a case of beer. Then they realise that they won’t be able to carry the whole lot back with them so they enter into a halting and mostly charades-based conversation with the cashier, trying to indicate that they will leave half of the shopping behind the counter and then return for it in fifteen minutes. The cashier shakes their head firmly, with an inscrutable expression. Take it with you, they say, in accented english. They look angry, for no reason that Ella or Michael can immediately understand. Before they can launch into another explanation of their situation, a second worker in the store, possibly a superior, tells them that it’s fine for them to leave it. The original cashier is absolutely stone-faced, and says nothing, won’t even look at them. Michael almost tries to address them directly in a conciliatory way but Ella stops this by grabbing at his shoulder, and they exit the store, confused, with half of their purchases in bags. The day is getting hotter. They walk back to the house together in a strange, disaffected silence, and when they get in they pack everything in its correct place, either in the fridge, or into likely-seeming cupboards. As she does this Ella says, almost to herself, that spending this amount of money on a place to stay should entitle you to at least some olive oil and some coffee, some salt. The kitchen is nearly suspiciously bare, like whoever owns the house actually cleaned out the essentials before they arrived, for reasons best known to themselves, almost certainly miserliness. When they are done they walk back up along the road to collect the rest. The air buzzes with heat, and they are now both sunk into their own distinct foul mood. Michael rallies a bit and tries to break them both out of it; he asks Ella about the story she is writing, how far along is she? What does she think the work still needs? But when she tries to answer Ella remembers her nightmares, and the conversation they had the night before, beneath the stars and the slowly tracking satellites, and finds that she can’t talk about it without slipping into a savage, almost deranged, anger of her own. She starts by saying that what the work needs is a programme, a procedure. That what it has now is characters and a plot, but that it has no structure that comes from itself. ‘Does that make sense? It has to suggest its own structure, it needs to develop this on its own terms; experimentation kills this. Everyone wants to experiment with form, but experimentation for its own sake is useless, actually worse than useless.’ Then she sees his face and immediately apologises and starts trying to explain that it’s not him that makes her angry, that she has a lot going on at the moment. Michael’s expression is placid as the Archangel. He could be carved from stone. He is polite and understanding; he even apologises to her for asking. Ella wants to scream, or to hit him, which is totally unlike her. She says ‘It’s totally unlike me to get angry like this for no reason at all. I’m really so sorry. It’s good to see you. And I’m sorry about last night, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’ His composure cracks a bit, and he says that it’s fine, and that he understands what she means about structure coming from the work itself, growing out of its complex web of decisions and images. That this is actually exactly the kind of thing he looks for in fiction in his job as an editor. You can always tell when you’re reading a piece of writing when the writer is letting the work suggest things to them. Ella nods and they lapse into silence. They are now back at the store, standing out the front, and, since neither has anything more to say, they enter and collect the rest of their shopping, making sure to thank the cashier in their effusive, gestural way, for looking after it all.
The walk back is free from the influence of all of this strange energy and striving, which, when she looks at it from this calmer position in the future, which of course is now the present, Ella imagines must have come down on top of her from somewhere far up in orbit. She imagines the spectre of it floating up in the frozen air, like a heat haze, or like an invisible angel made from glass, outside the belts of terrestrial atmosphere, waiting to ambush her on her morning grocery run. She had no control over it at all—about this she is very clear. She asks Michael if he knows much about satellite weapons, which makes him laugh, and he says that he knows about them only in reference to science fiction stories; that when he hears ‘satellite weapon’ he thinks of the final scene in the film (or the first scenes, if it’s that kind of story), of beams of light that reduce skyscrapers to ash, or that kill things too large and durable to be dispatched with more conventional attacks. Ella says that there have been various plans from various states at various times to launch payloads up into orbit on satellites, mostly missiles and kinetic weapons, not beams. She tells him about tungsten rods, each about the size of a telephone pole, which she explains are massy enough that when you drop them from orbit they impart energy equivalent to a small nuclear bomb. Michael nods as she speaks. He is watching the sea behind her head. ‘You can get five or six of these rods on a satellite, and once you have enough of them up there, something like fifteen thousand, you always have ordinance in position over any arbitrary strike point, so you can drop one on any point on the planet immediately.’ He is still nodding, and they spend the rest of the walk back this way, her explaining, and him nodding along in good humour and letting her speak, watching the sea, watching the sky, letting his own thoughts out and up, into the bright and friendly sunshine.
When they get back, they see immediately that the others have arrived.
The Guests Arrive, Continued
The taxi is still in the driveway, and Caitlin is unloading suitcases from the back and talking to the driver, asking him if he takes payment by card. They wave as they approach and she waves back, smiling broadly. Caitlin is short, with thick glasses and huge quantities of thick hair that she ties behind her head and which, seen from the front, looks like a strange sort of halo. She pays the taxi and gives Ella and Michael a kiss each. Ella notices that there is still only one car in the driveway, and asks whether anyone has heard from Parvel yet, and Caitlin says that they haven’t, or at least she hasn’t, and that she guesses he must be getting in later that night. Then she says ‘I like your dress,’ which makes Ella smile. The strange Ella/Michael mood has almost entirely dissipated with the addition of a third party. Michael hugs Caitlin and says that Ella has been telling him about satellite weapons which makes her grin widely and ask which ones. Ella doesn’t quite blush when she says ‘tungsten rods’, but she does search the older woman’s face for something as she says it, possibly some sort of psychic assurance that she is not being made fun of.
‘Ah, yes,’ says Caitlin. ‘The classic.’
Inside, Sally and Simone are unpacking their own bags of shopping into the now extremely well-stocked fridge and cupboards, and Beth is standing by the sink with a glass of water, chatting, staying out of the way. When they see Michael and Ella walking in with even more bags of groceries all three of them start giggling. Sally says that they should have been in better contact about what the plan was tonight, but that at least now they have options. He makes a big show of not knowing where to put everything. Then he asks them if they have heard from Parvel and they say that they haven’t. Maybe he’s getting in later tonight? Everyone nods.
Once everything has been packed away the six friends head to the back garden to walk around and admire it, and then to sit beneath the canopy and catch up, talking about work, about projects, about love and desire and dating, about books, about films, about ideas, and about the state of the world, which they all agree is terrible and getting rapidly worse.
Sally is comfortably in his element. He is a tall man, dressed casually in a way that flatters his face and proportions. He knows how to do this, and how to be in his element, and has a lot of practice with both. He voice is loud and friendly. When he speaks he sounds like he is smiling. He is very careful not to speak over people, and sometimes gets excited and ruins this carefulness in his excitement. During gatherings with friends he will occasionally stop talking entirely (only if he feels that he has said his piece) and simply watch the others, content, free to reengage at any time, but happy for now to hold back. At the moment he is talking with Michael about magazine work, about what the ambitions are for the next few years in terms of the type of fiction it would like to publish, and Michael is explaining that his own position on this is different from the other staff—that because of this he is considering looking for somewhere else to work. He says that what he wants more than anything is for the magazine is to develop a taste that is recognisable but not predictable, and that their ideal reader might learn to trust and appreciate. This reader is not anyone in particular, it is the perfect reader of history. He would like to found this process in the development and promotion of a stable of writers whose trust he would earn over time, in the steady championing of their work, in its insulation from trends and other useless garbage. His is rueful: his colleagues are, apparently, only superficially supportive. Sally tells Michael that he has always respected his editorial taste. Sally is a painter, apparently a successful one, since he does not have other work that anyone here knows about. He has shows now and then, and pays rent, and, by extrapolation, must sell paintings.
Simone is Sally’s partner, and also a painter. In some ways she is like him: tall and confident, at ease in the company of her friends. She is always smiling. In other ways she is very different. She has cropped blonde hair and large, intense blue eyes. When you get close to her she smells of sweat. She gives, generally, the impression of being in less than full control of what she says—not because she is impulsive or stupid, but because she has practiced a nearly automatic process of thinking and expressing her thoughts, and has worked to make the lag between these two things essentially non-existent, with the result that she occasionally says things that upset people badly, but that she will also usually immediately and sincerely apologise for upsetting them, and explain what particular thought or chain of associations she was following to arrive at the offending position. Nothing in this chain is ever mean-spirited or bullying. She will assert a position, examine it after pushback, find it untenable, and then reject it, without this process causing any disturbance or tearing in her ego or internal processes. Because of this she is blunt and crude, and abrupt, but also very graceful. She does sell paintings, not in the sort-of-assumed way that Sally does; she has shows and sells paintings often in the city, loudly and visibly, for good money. She occasionally watches the people around her like a cannibal might. What does this mean? You know what it means. You know what that face looks like; its curiosity and its subtle calculation. It is not immediately clear what exactly she would devour, metabolise, and shit out again; probably not the body, but the body is also a possibility. She gets along very well with everyone, even when she offends them. She is much bigger up close than you expect her to be, and the smells of her body are more intense—you don’t notice the sweat-smell at all until you are right next to her, and then it is overwhelming.
Beth is a slight woman, and a quiet woman. Most of the time she seems serene and imperturbable. If you didn't know her you might think that she was tired; she has eyes are full of a strange, great fatigue, and also a great deal of humour and discretion. In fact she is probably the person here most capable of sustained, high-energy work. She is the only one of the friends who did not study art; she works in logistics, in shipping, procurement, transportation, and sometimes in production, operations management, roles like this. She is used to directing teams of employees. She is actually, right this moment, at a strange tipping point in her career—for nearly two decades she has been making a good salary, and, after putting in this time, and being good at her work, she is on the cusp of making much, much larger amounts of money. Her friends are only vaguely aware of this, and also only vaguely aware of what she actually does day-to-day—Caitlin is the only one with an applicable frame of reference for her job, but Caitlin and Beth sometimes have trouble relating to one another; troubling finding anything to say, Beth with a sort of beatific retreat or surrender into comfortable silence, and Caitlin with a good deal of frustration. Beth is neatly dressed; mostly in vaguely-professional black designer clothing, but with accents that work to signal her taste excessive to this persona (a necklace of cowrie shells)—her capacity to inhabit it without issue, and also to move beyond it whenever she wants. She has had many discreet surgeries—quite a few of the friends have actually, but she has had the most—without thinking much about it. By instinct she has avoided having work done on her eyes, which keeps her strange, infinite fatigue, which, it has to be stressed, has nothing to do with her work, which might actually lessen it. It is charming and disarming. Beth is a notably beautiful woman.
This is everyone, except for Parvel. Parvel the pornographer, the landlord. But Parvel isn’t here yet, so we will defer description to the appropriate time.
They are all seated. There is no food yet, but the light is bright and clear and the wind is sweet-smelling. It cools them, and the smell of it calms the nervous system. The atmosphere on sunlight island is so clear that any of them could look down the garden, along its structuring architectures, and see the ocean, the city, the buildings and signage and boardwalks traced out in crisp and perfect definition— small, difficult to make out, but no haze or distortion at all—or, with equal ease, look back upwards towards the black stone peak of the volcano behind the house, and see it the same way: crisp and perfect, framed in vivid and endless cornflower blue, its every detail traced as with the blade of a stylus.
Caitlin, who has seated herself next to Ella, tells her that tungsten kinetic weapons on satellites were never seriously pursued for cost reasons. It’s very expensive to put things into orbit, especially at the kind of scale imagined by the people that thought it up, who were actually science fiction writers. The benefits compared to a straightforward missile launch exist, but are minimal. Ella does blush then, and says that she is of course no specialist, and Caitlin laughs. She says that the more seriously pursued model is a sort of sheaf or beehive of hundreds of thousands of heavy, cheap projectiles made from lead or depleted uranium, each about twenty centimetres long. They are kept in ‘nest’ pods on the satellite, and fitted with a cheap and extremely rudimentary guidance system. They don’t destroy bunkers and cities, they are designed to kill a single person in a crowd—actually the satellites are designed to talk to intelligence analysis and targeting systems, to acquire and track specific people, and then to ensure that one of these projectiles is above them at all times, waiting for a kill order. You can give the system as many targets as you want, and it will work to make sure that all of them are ‘covered’ this way. They won’t go through concrete, but they will certainly go through the roof of a house or a car. ‘How horrible,’ says Ella, and Caitlin nods absently.
Then she asks how the book is going, and Ella says not very well actually, that progress has stalled. But that this always happens at some point, it’s to be expected. Her usual pattern is to work in long, sustained bursts of inspiration when everything is easy, and then struggle through fallow periods where she goes back and edits what’s already there, or just works on something else, or, occasionally, loses herself to despair. These periods can last for months sometimes, which of course is torturous. Caitlin asks what the issue is, why things have stalled, and Ella considers getting into it the way she did with Michael earlier that morning, talking about structure and formal experimentation, but instead finds herself saying ‘Sometimes I just can’t think at all. Sometimes I’m not capable of forming a single coherent thought, or even of arriving at a feeling or an emotion that is clearly anything. I feel like a doll, or like a corpse.’ Caitlin says that yes, she gets that way too every now and then, and then she smiles and says ‘But I wouldn’t have thought to express it in those terms, I wouldn’t have thought to say “corpse.”’ Ella checks the other woman’s face again and decides (courageously, in her own estimation) that she doesn’t believe her, though she doesn’t say this.
In Ella’s febrile and notably imagist imagination Caitlin is a type of avatar, nearly inhuman, and her face is a cypher for closeness to and the exercise of power. She has abilities and capacities that are nearly supernatural: she can borrow large sums of money as she needs it, and can organise loans like this for others; she can keep control of conversations with anyone-whoever; she can intimidate people if she wants to, she is impossible to bully. Her relationship to cruelty, violence, and brutality is that of a professional; her response to it can be modulated as necessary and appropriate. It is as though she can choose the distance from which she is affected. Nothing in her can be induced. Ella has told Caitlin all of this before, and when she did Caitlin laughed and said that she learned all of it in art school, at the same time as she learned how to paint, and how to talk about painting with collectors and curators, about how to place that practice and its production inside the great, glittering arcs of dispersal and transmission and mutual infection that properly frame it. Her later forays into professional life and consulting were built on that foundational education, which, she feels, was significantly concerned with power and its operation.
Ella imagines her friend as a soldier, a spy, a hitwoman, a trench raider and tunnel fighter; sees her engaged in lonely missions and contracts that are invisible to other people. Caitlin looks this way even in Ella’s memories of her as a much younger woman, during their degree, when they were all so much less capable of sober self-awareness, or any sophisticated understanding of cause and effect. Loneliness is a key component in this image, or perhaps alone-ness. So are detachment and humour—humour that is soft, self-deprecating, and self-directed.
There is something incomplete in this mental portrait of her friend, and Ella is aware of this. She is not sure if it is because she herself cannot see something important, maybe owing to lack of subtlety, or if Caitlin has decided to amputate or obscure something of herself; to make herself incomplete. She sees a reflection of a woman in a mirror, in a room growing darker as the light fades at the end of the day. The face is turned away from her. And she sees the back of a distant figure at the end of a long, long corridor, walking away from her and ignoring her calls (or perhaps unable to hear them), moving unstoppably into the future. She asks how work is going, and Caitlin grins and says that it is very busy, and a little depressing, but that this is nothing new.
The taxi is still in the driveway, and Caitlin is unloading suitcases from the back and talking to the driver, asking him if he takes payment by card. They wave as they approach and she waves back, smiling broadly. Caitlin is short, with thick glasses and huge quantities of thick hair that she ties behind her head and which, seen from the front, looks like a strange sort of halo. She pays the taxi and gives Ella and Michael a kiss each. Ella notices that there is still only one car in the driveway, and asks whether anyone has heard from Parvel yet, and Caitlin says that they haven’t, or at least she hasn’t, and that she guesses he must be getting in later that night. Then she says ‘I like your dress,’ which makes Ella smile. The strange Ella/Michael mood has almost entirely dissipated with the addition of a third party. Michael hugs Caitlin and says that Ella has been telling him about satellite weapons which makes her grin widely and ask which ones. Ella doesn’t quite blush when she says ‘tungsten rods’, but she does search the older woman’s face for something as she says it, possibly some sort of psychic assurance that she is not being made fun of.
‘Ah, yes,’ says Caitlin. ‘The classic.’
Inside, Sally and Simone are unpacking their own bags of shopping into the now extremely well-stocked fridge and cupboards, and Beth is standing by the sink with a glass of water, chatting, staying out of the way. When they see Michael and Ella walking in with even more bags of groceries all three of them start giggling. Sally says that they should have been in better contact about what the plan was tonight, but that at least now they have options. He makes a big show of not knowing where to put everything. Then he asks them if they have heard from Parvel and they say that they haven’t. Maybe he’s getting in later tonight? Everyone nods.
Once everything has been packed away the six friends head to the back garden to walk around and admire it, and then to sit beneath the canopy and catch up, talking about work, about projects, about love and desire and dating, about books, about films, about ideas, and about the state of the world, which they all agree is terrible and getting rapidly worse.
Sally is comfortably in his element. He is a tall man, dressed casually in a way that flatters his face and proportions. He knows how to do this, and how to be in his element, and has a lot of practice with both. He voice is loud and friendly. When he speaks he sounds like he is smiling. He is very careful not to speak over people, and sometimes gets excited and ruins this carefulness in his excitement. During gatherings with friends he will occasionally stop talking entirely (only if he feels that he has said his piece) and simply watch the others, content, free to reengage at any time, but happy for now to hold back. At the moment he is talking with Michael about magazine work, about what the ambitions are for the next few years in terms of the type of fiction it would like to publish, and Michael is explaining that his own position on this is different from the other staff—that because of this he is considering looking for somewhere else to work. He says that what he wants more than anything is for the magazine is to develop a taste that is recognisable but not predictable, and that their ideal reader might learn to trust and appreciate. This reader is not anyone in particular, it is the perfect reader of history. He would like to found this process in the development and promotion of a stable of writers whose trust he would earn over time, in the steady championing of their work, in its insulation from trends and other useless garbage. His is rueful: his colleagues are, apparently, only superficially supportive. Sally tells Michael that he has always respected his editorial taste. Sally is a painter, apparently a successful one, since he does not have other work that anyone here knows about. He has shows now and then, and pays rent, and, by extrapolation, must sell paintings.
Simone is Sally’s partner, and also a painter. In some ways she is like him: tall and confident, at ease in the company of her friends. She is always smiling. In other ways she is very different. She has cropped blonde hair and large, intense blue eyes. When you get close to her she smells of sweat. She gives, generally, the impression of being in less than full control of what she says—not because she is impulsive or stupid, but because she has practiced a nearly automatic process of thinking and expressing her thoughts, and has worked to make the lag between these two things essentially non-existent, with the result that she occasionally says things that upset people badly, but that she will also usually immediately and sincerely apologise for upsetting them, and explain what particular thought or chain of associations she was following to arrive at the offending position. Nothing in this chain is ever mean-spirited or bullying. She will assert a position, examine it after pushback, find it untenable, and then reject it, without this process causing any disturbance or tearing in her ego or internal processes. Because of this she is blunt and crude, and abrupt, but also very graceful. She does sell paintings, not in the sort-of-assumed way that Sally does; she has shows and sells paintings often in the city, loudly and visibly, for good money. She occasionally watches the people around her like a cannibal might. What does this mean? You know what it means. You know what that face looks like; its curiosity and its subtle calculation. It is not immediately clear what exactly she would devour, metabolise, and shit out again; probably not the body, but the body is also a possibility. She gets along very well with everyone, even when she offends them. She is much bigger up close than you expect her to be, and the smells of her body are more intense—you don’t notice the sweat-smell at all until you are right next to her, and then it is overwhelming.
Beth is a slight woman, and a quiet woman. Most of the time she seems serene and imperturbable. If you didn't know her you might think that she was tired; she has eyes are full of a strange, great fatigue, and also a great deal of humour and discretion. In fact she is probably the person here most capable of sustained, high-energy work. She is the only one of the friends who did not study art; she works in logistics, in shipping, procurement, transportation, and sometimes in production, operations management, roles like this. She is used to directing teams of employees. She is actually, right this moment, at a strange tipping point in her career—for nearly two decades she has been making a good salary, and, after putting in this time, and being good at her work, she is on the cusp of making much, much larger amounts of money. Her friends are only vaguely aware of this, and also only vaguely aware of what she actually does day-to-day—Caitlin is the only one with an applicable frame of reference for her job, but Caitlin and Beth sometimes have trouble relating to one another; troubling finding anything to say, Beth with a sort of beatific retreat or surrender into comfortable silence, and Caitlin with a good deal of frustration. Beth is neatly dressed; mostly in vaguely-professional black designer clothing, but with accents that work to signal her taste excessive to this persona (a necklace of cowrie shells)—her capacity to inhabit it without issue, and also to move beyond it whenever she wants. She has had many discreet surgeries—quite a few of the friends have actually, but she has had the most—without thinking much about it. By instinct she has avoided having work done on her eyes, which keeps her strange, infinite fatigue, which, it has to be stressed, has nothing to do with her work, which might actually lessen it. It is charming and disarming. Beth is a notably beautiful woman.
This is everyone, except for Parvel. Parvel the pornographer, the landlord. But Parvel isn’t here yet, so we will defer description to the appropriate time.
They are all seated. There is no food yet, but the light is bright and clear and the wind is sweet-smelling. It cools them, and the smell of it calms the nervous system. The atmosphere on sunlight island is so clear that any of them could look down the garden, along its structuring architectures, and see the ocean, the city, the buildings and signage and boardwalks traced out in crisp and perfect definition— small, difficult to make out, but no haze or distortion at all—or, with equal ease, look back upwards towards the black stone peak of the volcano behind the house, and see it the same way: crisp and perfect, framed in vivid and endless cornflower blue, its every detail traced as with the blade of a stylus.
Caitlin, who has seated herself next to Ella, tells her that tungsten kinetic weapons on satellites were never seriously pursued for cost reasons. It’s very expensive to put things into orbit, especially at the kind of scale imagined by the people that thought it up, who were actually science fiction writers. The benefits compared to a straightforward missile launch exist, but are minimal. Ella does blush then, and says that she is of course no specialist, and Caitlin laughs. She says that the more seriously pursued model is a sort of sheaf or beehive of hundreds of thousands of heavy, cheap projectiles made from lead or depleted uranium, each about twenty centimetres long. They are kept in ‘nest’ pods on the satellite, and fitted with a cheap and extremely rudimentary guidance system. They don’t destroy bunkers and cities, they are designed to kill a single person in a crowd—actually the satellites are designed to talk to intelligence analysis and targeting systems, to acquire and track specific people, and then to ensure that one of these projectiles is above them at all times, waiting for a kill order. You can give the system as many targets as you want, and it will work to make sure that all of them are ‘covered’ this way. They won’t go through concrete, but they will certainly go through the roof of a house or a car. ‘How horrible,’ says Ella, and Caitlin nods absently.
Then she asks how the book is going, and Ella says not very well actually, that progress has stalled. But that this always happens at some point, it’s to be expected. Her usual pattern is to work in long, sustained bursts of inspiration when everything is easy, and then struggle through fallow periods where she goes back and edits what’s already there, or just works on something else, or, occasionally, loses herself to despair. These periods can last for months sometimes, which of course is torturous. Caitlin asks what the issue is, why things have stalled, and Ella considers getting into it the way she did with Michael earlier that morning, talking about structure and formal experimentation, but instead finds herself saying ‘Sometimes I just can’t think at all. Sometimes I’m not capable of forming a single coherent thought, or even of arriving at a feeling or an emotion that is clearly anything. I feel like a doll, or like a corpse.’ Caitlin says that yes, she gets that way too every now and then, and then she smiles and says ‘But I wouldn’t have thought to express it in those terms, I wouldn’t have thought to say “corpse.”’ Ella checks the other woman’s face again and decides (courageously, in her own estimation) that she doesn’t believe her, though she doesn’t say this.
In Ella’s febrile and notably imagist imagination Caitlin is a type of avatar, nearly inhuman, and her face is a cypher for closeness to and the exercise of power. She has abilities and capacities that are nearly supernatural: she can borrow large sums of money as she needs it, and can organise loans like this for others; she can keep control of conversations with anyone-whoever; she can intimidate people if she wants to, she is impossible to bully. Her relationship to cruelty, violence, and brutality is that of a professional; her response to it can be modulated as necessary and appropriate. It is as though she can choose the distance from which she is affected. Nothing in her can be induced. Ella has told Caitlin all of this before, and when she did Caitlin laughed and said that she learned all of it in art school, at the same time as she learned how to paint, and how to talk about painting with collectors and curators, about how to place that practice and its production inside the great, glittering arcs of dispersal and transmission and mutual infection that properly frame it. Her later forays into professional life and consulting were built on that foundational education, which, she feels, was significantly concerned with power and its operation.
Ella imagines her friend as a soldier, a spy, a hitwoman, a trench raider and tunnel fighter; sees her engaged in lonely missions and contracts that are invisible to other people. Caitlin looks this way even in Ella’s memories of her as a much younger woman, during their degree, when they were all so much less capable of sober self-awareness, or any sophisticated understanding of cause and effect. Loneliness is a key component in this image, or perhaps alone-ness. So are detachment and humour—humour that is soft, self-deprecating, and self-directed.
There is something incomplete in this mental portrait of her friend, and Ella is aware of this. She is not sure if it is because she herself cannot see something important, maybe owing to lack of subtlety, or if Caitlin has decided to amputate or obscure something of herself; to make herself incomplete. She sees a reflection of a woman in a mirror, in a room growing darker as the light fades at the end of the day. The face is turned away from her. And she sees the back of a distant figure at the end of a long, long corridor, walking away from her and ignoring her calls (or perhaps unable to hear them), moving unstoppably into the future. She asks how work is going, and Caitlin grins and says that it is very busy, and a little depressing, but that this is nothing new.
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