3.48 p.m.

What evidence can I produce to show that I lived?

Every so often, out of nowhere, in the midst of a moment of peace and quiet, usually at an airport, in a waiting room, or in a hotel room at night after dinner, with the TV tuned to a programme in some foreign language, whether it’s an evening news broadcast in Arabic, English or Japanese, dreaming of a cigarette he doesn’t have, Ivo asks himself a question, always the same one.

What attests to my time here on the planet Earth? Mine is not one of the heads on Mount Rushmore, which are certain to be the human traces that will last the longest in absolute terms, much longer than the pyramids . . . Too bad, Brandani, you won’t be placed on Mount Rushmore, there’s no more room . . . Sure, I worked on that dam in China, and that other one in Africa, I lent a hand on roads and bridges, etc., but where is my name? And what if instead of being a secret falsifier of coral reefs, I had been the builder of Cheops’ great pyramid, would anyone still remember my name? And what would it mean to remember it, since I’d already be dead four thousand years beyond the horizon of space-time? The erasure of Father & Mother’s lifelong stories, their clothing, their objects . . . What will have become of the horrendous oval brooch encrusted with semi-precious stones that I brought her—she was embarrassed at being unable to force out so much as a ‘Thank you, how lovely!’ she hated it so much—from my reward trip to Florence? The sale of the House, the end of everything, the transfer into other hands, indifferent, unaware . . . How much of their lives, of our life, is already in a dump somewhere? How much of it has already been mixed with the unholy infinity of other people’s garbage, the traces of alien, extraneous, sordid, enemy lives? What could I save of them? And why should I have? What objects have survived? Why don’t I have almost any of them? What became of them? What will become of my things, my clothing, my few engravings, my even fewer books?

He hasn’t gone back to Mother & Father’s graves, where they buried Big Sister too, after she was sick more or less for a week, a few years ago.

When did Big Sister die?

He can’t remember exactly. He can’t remember the year, or the month, or the day. It was hellishly hot, that much he remembers. One day—well before Big Sister left the world in such haste, with no children on the face of the earth, nothing but an asshole husband—Ivo, finding himself with time on his hands in the City of God between one business trip and another, had decided on an impulse to pull the car out of the garage and zoom off down the consular road that led to the large Second Cemetery. The Second Cemetery had been built in accordance with the criteria of the more recent city of the living, an enfilade of red buildings, arranged with a certain flair, not aligned according to any principle of perspective or geometric figures of any kind, but quite decidedly at fucking random.

The dead are forced to exist just like the living, in a piece-of-shit city of their own, designed by some unknown piece-of-shit architect, inside their countless columbarium niches, and at night, from the consular road, you can see them all lit up with flickering votive candles, one after the other, like a cheerful little train of red cut-glass candle holders, here and there a cypress tree.

Ever since the day of Father’s funeral, Ivo hadn’t gone back there once, until one day, in the cardiologist’s waiting room where he’d gone to enquire about certain pains in his chest that had been frightening him—‘I can’t find anything, certainly the thing to do is to have an electrocardiogram done under stress, but for that you’d want to go to a public facility, you need to have an intensive-care specialist present—more likely, it’s a hiatal hernia . . . Do you know how many patients come to see me for their heart and it turns out to be a hiatal hernia? Do you know how many come to the emergency room every day for that same reason?’ Fuck that shit, he’d thought to himself, do you know how many people shuffle off this mortal coil convinced they have a hiatal hernia and instead it turns out to be a heart attack?—in that waiting room, which was as nondescript and generic as could be, with the pains in his chest, Ivo had suddenly thought to himself, as he leafed through a greasy newspaper: Who will remember Them? Tears had welled up in his eyes, because clearly the pain in his chest hadn’t been enough. Tomorrow, if I’m still alive, I’ll go. The next day, as he was driving through the immense no-man’s land of the car park in front of the cemetery, it had started to rain hard, with sleet. He’d parked in a spot close to the front gate, where the chrysanthemum vendors, devoid of any shelter, were hastily packing up. The icy pellets were slamming violently onto the roof of the car, he’d put a CD on, an old record of Bill Evans live, punctuated at the end of each piece by the applause of what must have been no more than five or six people. He was dead, Bill Evans, and he’d died many, a great many years ago, and yet his fingers on the keyboard of that piano that night in 1961 at the Village Vanguard would live on over time, still capable of resonating in his ears, still capable of saying: Challenging music, closed up in itself, perhaps not especially welcoming to many but it is to me. And he’d tilted the driver’s seat back and sprawled out, waiting for the downpour to pass. But what had at first just looked like a cloudburst had turned into a hard, steady rain. While waiting, Ivo had dozed off. He could have driven into the cemetery, it was allowed, he just didn’t feel like it. He wanted to walk the whole way but he’d fallen asleep. Once his nap was over, but not the rain, the last notes of Bill Evans echoed in Brandani’s ears without his feeling the slightest desire now to weep over his parents’ graves: Why the fuck would I even go? The CD had started over again from the beginning, he’d driven away, and he’d never again set foot there. Father & Mother, one beside the other in the same loculus, like a couple of Etruscan spouses, but without a sarcophagus, would spend that rainy night there—and the night that followed and the night after that, for all the nights that the City of God would concede them to stay in that place—she stretched out in her coffin, and he incinerated in his plastic urn, while the recycling process of the carbon that had once constituted their flesh, a process that was just beginning, would require centuries before it was compete.

Before, long before the deaths of Father and Big Sister, something unheard of had happened, something inconceivable, the intolerable had taken place. An event that Ivo Brandani, for all the years that he had lived until then, had never ever, not even once, been able to imagine: the death of Mother. The word ‘death’ meant that Mother had vanished for ever from the face of the earth, had become no longer visible, embraceable, no longer sniffable. No more kisses and comforting words, no more of her gentle protection, no caress on the forehead, like when I was little and had a fever, never again would he hear her talking in her classical style of detachment & disenchantment towards something that to him appeared important, absolutely indispensable. Never again the Mother-shield against the aggressions of Father. Being his shield had got her a smack in the face or two, and she’d taken them as the logical consequence of both her submission and of her necessary defiance of her husband, every time that she felt he had overstepped his bounds. Ivo knew that she wouldn’t allow Father to go beyond the exercise—however tyrannical and violent—of what was considered in those day the biological potestas that accrued to him, a sort of inalienable right of vexation, held by fathers over their sons. It had only taken a few months, everything started with something apparently curable, a gallstone, a simple operation, strictly routine. Father chose a private clinic to the south of the City of God. They specialized in abdominal surgeries there, the usual Professor With a University Chair operated there on a private basis, the chief physician of some surgical ward in a major general hospital somewhere. The operation was successful, or so they said, but after a month she still wasn’t feeling well, she was weak, pale, listless. She’d become silent, absent, as if raptly listening to whatever it was her body was telling her: ‘It’s not right, we’re not well, there’s something, a malaise, a pain, something producing tractions and spasms in the redness of my viscera . . .’ Then a nightly fever began, insistent, and not even all that low. It was a dull and sustained source of fear, the beginning for her of a state of solitude that she was going to have to experience right through to the finish, because no one was going to be genuinely close to her, because no one could have believed in her imminent death, because no one actually walks up with you right to the brink of death. And so Mother, despite everything, despite assiduous visits from Father, Ivo and the Sisters, and various relatives, would die alone, like everyone . . . A few weeks later the Professor had operated on her a second time (Why? What was the problem? And had it been resolved? No one on the medical staff ever, to the very end, said a single clear or understandable thing . . .), then they received that unbelievable phone call: Come, Signora Brandani is in a coma. Your mother is in a coma. In a coma . . . The only creature on earth to whom Ivo had felt he fully belonged was there, her face turned unrecognizable by the colour of the jaundice, rendered withered by a suffering that none of them knew how to alleviate. By now, Mother was on the far side of a pane of bulletproof glass. She couldn’t hear, she didn’t respond, she seemed completely taken up with that long process of death. She was sliding down an inexorable inclined plane at the end of which she would be gone. It wasn’t possible to stop her, to restrain her, you could only stand there and watch her die. A few hours later there was one last gurgle, followed a few seconds later by a sudden gush of black blood and Mother died. The instant of her death, that deep last sigh, that rivulet of blood, would resurface for years in Ivo Brandani’s mind. Two more decades would have to go by before that vision began to fade, before the very image of Mother began gradually to be concealed in the curves and crannies of memory. Until she too, the Only One, was lost.

Of all of us who were there in that room, the gates of death swung open for her alone . . . And they slammed shut behind her, and we would never see Mother alive again. Never again . . . We emerged from that room on our own two legs . . . We would go on living but she wouldn’t. She remained behind, waiting to be taken away, alone and motionless in the night. Then they took her downstairs, into the chill of the rooms designated for the dead. From there, she would never again be able to protect me . . . I had been left alone . . .

What had led her to that man? What did she like about him? What had persuaded her that he could become her lifelong companion? The answer is in that picture; Ivo rummages for his wallet in his inside jacket pocket. It’s the only picture he carries with him everywhere. As he extracts it from the compartment where he keeps it, he feels a stab of pain in the back of his head. He sits motionless, waiting for it to pass, while the photograph remains, held between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, as he waits unsure whether to slip it back into his wallet or pull it fully out.

Neck pain . . . Such a sharp stabbing bout of it though, he hadn’t felt it like this in years . . . Here they are . . .

He probably hasn’t looked at this picture for a couple of years now. In the meantime it’s got creased and worn. It’s a sunny day in the City of God, the two of them are strolling in some garden in the central area of the city, you can see only the base of a distinctive street lamp, a tree, a few details of the facade of a nineteenth-century palazzo. It’s cold out, she’s wearing a soft winter coat, possibly brown or grey, that’s not clear, and he’s wearing a military overcoat. Her hair is pretty long, she has on a hat that blends into the background, he’s wearing an officer’s cap, a pair of black shoes, a pair of impeccably pressed cuffed trousers. They’re walking, they seem to be ignoring the camera, she’s looking down and smiling, he’s holding her left arm and speaking to her. He’s smiling too. Both of them are putting out an evident, pulsing, pure vital energy.

It’s carnal urgency, unmistakable, in spite of everything, in spite of the War, the imminent tragedies, life waiting in ambush.

Their gait is light, elastic, seemingly coordinated, both of them are swinging their left legs forwards, Mother’s shoes are classical, high-heeled pumps, not too high-heeled, they look like the shoes that Minnie Mouse, Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend, wore. Mother is beautiful, relaxed, pensive, she’s holding him close to her, she seems eager to welcome him inside her. Father is a good-looking man, even if he already has that nose, tall, apparently relaxed, happy to possess her, to hold her in his grip. It is clear that she is already his, it’s the sweetness with which she clutches him to her, it’s the accommodating bend of her neck in his direction, it’s the fact that she’s looking down with a smile, while Father’s gaze is focused straight ahead, guiding them both as they walk. It is clear from the hand with which he’s holding her arm and which she presses against her breast, Mother’s left breast, which Father can surely feel against the back of his hand, beneath the soft material of the overcoat, a firm, generous breast, as it must have been before her three children: the unconscious posture of a carnal closeness, Mother is his, she’s already delivered herself up to him, she lets him lead her, Mother is happy in the sweet and primordial fullness of the flesh, which demands, imposes, requires. The happiness that stuns them in winter light of the City of God, the shadows lengthening over what seems to be the fine gravel of a park, is nothing other than gratification, nothing more nor less than a surrender to the heated thrust of youth, the same blind, animal, vital, postwar impulse that engendered him . . . Mother’s fine nose, with its delicate nostrils, marks the geometric axis of her face and casts a faint shadow on the other half.

They existed, at the time . . . They were both real, living bodies, warm in the sunlight of the early ’40s, they breathed & they thought, they loved, they felt pleasure . . . They were there . . . And now there was nothing left of them . . . Absolutely nothing, but nothing, remains of them. Oh sure, she liked him, she desired him, she loved him, she didn’t know him well, or maybe she did . . . After all, she kept him at bay right up to the end . . . When she died, I’d already made my escape, I’d left . . . They are my parents, it’s these two right here, I never chose them, I can’t exchange them, I ought to love them both but she’s the only one I love.

Another, longer stab of pain in the back of his neck, longer this time, erases all thoughts from his mind and leaves him there, stunned and suspended between pain and non-pain, as he tries to put the photograph of Father & Mother away in the compartment in his wallet.

All the same, because in his cranium everything is still preserved, there are nights when, before falling asleep, that trace re-emerges in Brandani’s consciousness, and he sees before his eyes that gush of black blood flooding in a death rattle from the adored lips of Mother, lips that were already green in death. Just as one night in a dream he received a threatening phone call from Father (‘But where are you calling from?’ Ivo had asked him, ‘Don’t ask,’ was Father’s reply), and more than once he’d seen Big Sister sitting on her grave, weeping over that poor sparrow of hers, which had drowned in a chamber pot full of nocturnal urine, so many years before. Then one extremely hot summer night Mother too had come back to visit him in a dream, young, a pink Postwar slip hiked up over her bare thighs, she was fluttering in the air, smiling at him, calling to him. He’d woken up with his mouth parched, with a raging erection. Jesus, that was Mother!

In the end, after almost seventy years of living, what is left? What remains on the ground? What has withstood the devaluation, the erasure of time? What still has worth, of everything that was once useful, of all that mattered? What can I hold as still good, still solid, still present in my day-to-day life? The only thing that occurs to me is La Settimana enigmistica . . . the Weekly Puzzler. It remains apparently unchanged, but only in its graphic presentation . . . Certain features, certain puzzles have vanished or are radically changed, such as the ‘Investigation with Susi’: never did understand what that one was about . . . There was a warning at the start that told you: Look out, this is strictly for first rate puzzle-solvers . . . A big cartoon full of things and people and, if I’m not mistaken, in the middle of it all was Susi, in a tight-fitting T-shirt, with pointy breasts, pedal pushers with a side slit at the calf, and those were tight-fitting too, a prominent butt, high heels, and a pony tail . . . She was sexy, Susi was, she looked like Brigitte Bardot . . . There aren’t many other things . . . Coccoina white paste, which you can still buy exactly as it was, with that distinctive aroma . . . People said that they made it by mincing dog carcasses . . . When it comes to glues and pastes, there’s still Artiglio, I have a tube of it and I also have a tube of Balena anchovy paste, another pillar of my life, or like Assa thumbtacks, long since vanished however . . . I still have two Zenith staplers that belonged to Father, dirty and flaking, but they work perfectly, a rare miracle of solid construction . . . When I was small I played with them, I always thought that particular variety of stapler resembled a sperm whale . . . What else? Could it be that almost nothing remains of what once was? The Moka Express espresso pot, sure . . . and then? What ever became of most of the objects I possessed? The scissors? And the pencils? All my pencils, where are they now? For real, Ivo, where are they? Why have they vanished, since I never used them down to the stub nor did I throw them away? Could there be a pencil cemetery hidden away somewhere? Could there be secret paths down which all the objects tired of living trudge, ashamed of their obsolescence? Do the scissors that feel they’ve become outmoded leave our world by way of these paths? What becomes of the hammers that have been part of my life? Since I’ve never lost a hammer, a screwdriver, or a file, why should I have had to buy new ones at a certain point? What became of their predecessors? At what depth and in what dump, of those that have been established over time around the City of God, are the things to be found that belonged to the Brandani family before everything exploded, before Mother and Father so unexpectedly left this world, when death let us know with stunning suddenness, leaving us flabbergasted, breathless, that it would be dealing with us too, before the Brandani home stopped being an impregnable redoubt? What has become of our stories, of our lives? Who transcribed them? Where do we appear? Who will take care of handing down our life stories? No one, absolutely no one . . . At the very most, but strictly as a remote possibility, in some distant future when the archaeologists excavate those immense deposits of testimony, our city dumps, something might come to light, a pair of scissors, a fragment of some object that once belonged to us, a piece of the plastic laminate that once covered the American kitchen that Father purchased in the ’60s, as a tangible sign of prosperity. Or else a document with our name engraved on it, the way it was on the little chain, long-since lost, that was given to you on the day of your First Communion . . . Just as it was on the wedding rings that you exchanged, you and Clara, on your wedding day, those too lost, who knows when and where . . . It was made of gold . . . Most of the gold that exists in the world comes from objects made previously, it has been melted down and recycled and reblended and reshaped over and over and over again . . . That’s the way it was for the gold in that wedding ring, and who knows now in what other piece of jewellery it has been recast, it too coming from who knows when and who knows where, perhaps from a piece of Sumerian jewellery, or Inca jewellery, maybe from a torque found by chance in a prehistoric tomb in Central Asia . . . Whatever became of the old Fiat 600? And the Fiat 1100? And my Lambretta? Ah, and the Moto Guzzi Sparviero? And Father’s Moto Guzzi Falcone? And before that, the Ancestral Norton? And my Bike? And the Swedish Furniture in my bedroom? And Big Sister’s flowered bedcover, what can have become of it? What was its fate? In what way can it have returned to the chaos of everything, if that even happened? Who possesses these objects now? And how did they come into possession of them? I can’t seem to remember, to reconstruct the way in which every trace of my family dissolved, a family that was once so solid, so firm, gathered in the House during the winter nights of the ’50s, when Mother said and repeated: ‘Tonight, may anyone without a home find one . . .’ There was the constant danger of Father, it is true . . . But outside it was cold & dark, and that was worse . . . Little Sister and Big Sister kept a few things, when Father sold the House, because we discovered that he didn’t care about keeping furniture and furnishings and gewgaws, leftovers from the meat grinder that was our life in common for as long as it lasted, insignificant things, so important . . . That light-blue Murano vase . . . I never really liked it and yet it was so much ours, such an antique, dating back to the archaic age of Mother & Father, when they were full of youth and love, carnal curiosity . . . There’s that picture of when Father had just come back from the War and Big Sister might have been two years old at the very most . . . How long had it been since they’d seen each other kissed each other touched each other fucked? I don’t know . . . But it was there, in the days of Father’s Return that they conceived me . . . It disgusts me to think that I was born of his loins, but not to think I was born of Mother’s womb . . . If only he’d just left me alone to live my life . . . He’s been a-borning inside me over and over again for years now, just like the monster in Alien inside John Hurt’s belly . . . Though Mother died too soon, he’s still with me, under my skin, he never dies . . . He has no intention of setting me free . . .

Instinctively he touches his face, he presses his cheekbones, the bone in his nose, his chin. He touches the frontal zone of his cranium, now almost completely bald. Baldness too is a gift from him—he thinks it often. He feels that his skin is oily, he needs to wash his face, freshen up. He can’t stand it any more. He wants to go home, even though there’s no one waiting for him, even though the City of God has lost all its appeal for him (though it can still deceive him with its beauty). Even though he no longer has a single friend in that city worthy of the name . . .

Or anywhere else, for that matter: steer clear of friendship . . . It only works at the dinner table, and on holiday . . . Then, no doubt about it, everyone’s friends . . . But no friendship can withstand the test of love affairs, work, conflicts among the respective interests . . . Not even your closest friend can refrain from canoodling with your woman, if he likes her and he sees even the slimmest chance of success . . . No one ever hesitated to sacrifice a friend in trade for some advantage, say a career advancement, there’s no friendship that will triumph over interests of love, work or the future, never . . . But in that case, Brandani, what are you going to do with your home, with that city? What is left for you to do there? Father is in here, underneath my face . . . I’m only a Mask of Father . . .

Time passes, it’s almost four. The headache comes and goes, the occasional stabbing pain in the back of the neck. He’s enquired a couple of times, no trace of his flight. ‘Technical problems in Cairo,’ the young women at the gate desk keep telling him, they still know nothing about the new scheduled departure. Time drags increasingly slowly. He can’t manage to stay seated, he gets up and wanders around, here and there, he sits back down, constantly shifting position. His trousers are binding in his crotch, his underpants are cramping his balls and his dick, he’s continuously trying to adjust them, but each attempt only worsens the irritation. In the end, shamelessly, he jams his hands directly into his trousers and crudely grabs and manoeuvres the entire apparatus. The manoeuvre doesn’t escape the notice of the young woman sitting across from him.

Whothefuckcares . . . OK, I adjusted my junk, and so what? It’s not like I specifically asked for it, to have a dick and balls . . . I’d have been just as happy to have a pussy, at least it doesn’t get jammed up in your underpants, you don’t have to find it a comfortable position . . . But then you’d have had problems with your tits, Ivo, with the way your bra binds and strains . . .

‘How do you wear it?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘How do you wear it, to the left or the right?’ that’s what the tailor who had made his suit for Big Sister’s wedding had asked him. He’d never thought about it before. ‘How do I wear it? I don’t know. Maybe on the left . . . Is it important?’ ‘Well, you tell me . . .’ the tailor had replied with some irritation. ‘All right, then, I wear it on the left.’ Since then he’d had a new self-awareness as a wearer of his dick-to-the-left. After the shameful rummaging of his balls, he tries to assume a certain demeanour, a level of nonchalance. He could try to do a little work, in spite of his confusion, his headache. He opens his bag and pulls out a couple of sheets of paper stapled together. They contain the technical report he’s going to present in Ecocare in the middle of next week.

The whole thing still needs to be written . . . But the content is there, I have it, the bulk of the work is done . . . Puddu is going to send me the financials and the up-to-date timing tomorrow, in an e-mail . . . He already has the information from the Japanese, he was working on it this week . . . It’s a good thing he has Puddu, it’s a good thing there are people like him in the world . . . The technical and financial report on the work on the ship will be drafted by the people at Ecocare . . . Wednesday in the City in the North we’ll put together the dossier and we’ll construct a PowerPoint, which is definitely something they’re going to want . . . We’re going to have to have it translated into English too, but they’ll take care of that in the company. All right, then, let’s see: a brief introduction on the pre-contractual details, the various understandings with the Egyptians and the Japanese, the overall environmental and technical conditions, on all the preliminary steps that have been taken concerning the biological, morphological, methodological, technological and economic analyses, etc.—OK . . . Then a summary analysis of the technical steps as the Japanese have laid them out, with approximate timing and costs, not including preparation, transfer and positioning of the construction-ship:

1) Identification of area for first experimental intervention, necessary for the final calibration of working methods. There are a couple of potential locations to the north of Dahab: on this decision the Egyptians have the last word. Surface area of the first parcel, roughly two and a half acres. Fine. Installation of the underwater grid in order to subdivide the area into quadrants of one yard by one yard. This is an optimal size dictated by the technical specifications of the scanner. Preliminary photographic survey (already undertaken) with high-resolution cameras, calibration of the colour palette for the final selection of the appropriate pigments. The colours will need to be evaluated in dry conditions. Also fine.

2) Underwater positioning of the 3-D scanner (three hours of work for each repositioning). The Japanese will work with six machines simultaneously. They promise they’ll increase the number once they’ve completely fine-tuned the procedure. OK.

3) Scanning and data-acquisition phase concerning the current state of subject area. Tolerances of one and a half millimetres . . . Fuck, only the Japanese can guarantee you tolerances of this order of precision. Data transmission to Japan where each scanning module will be reproduced in 3-D with a three-dimensional plotter. All the details are in the report from the Japs, which could bisect the asshole of a passing sparrow, as usual . . .

4) Morphological reconstruction of the substrate upon which the fake coral is to be installed, along with all the other species already identified by the team of Japanese marine biologists (see scientific report, attached). In fact: this is the most complicated problem, because there is no actual geo-morphological substrate, the living coral grows and develops on the skeleton of the dead coral and separation is difficult . . . OK. Now, let’s see . . .

5) Construction of an industrial shed in Japan, or adaptation of an existing structure, with a surface area of half an acre, a structure devoid of intermediate supports, the preliminary design has already been drawn up by a mixed working group from Fakenature and Ecocare, where the plottered modules will be laid down one by one. Crucial to comply with norms concerning secrecy: word must not leak, all the installations must be masked by other activities, all personnel will be contractually bound to absolute confidentiality (dossier from the Japanese, attached).

6) Once the first modules have been positioned, the next step is to proceed to full production of the fake organisms, adapting them to the substrate after demolishing the skeleton of the recently dead coral. They’ve already done a number of test runs. The procedure is comparable to that followed with dental prostheses: detachment of the dead coral, cast of the substrate, construction of the prosthesis with adaptive testing on the cast, final installation of the prosthesis with specific fastening techniques . . . This ought to be placed in the introduction, as an explanatory summary.

7) Every section of seabed, exactly one square yard, will have its own prosthetic coral. Each piece that is reproduced will be catalogued with a serial number for reference, and set aside. There is a minimum range of morphological variations beneath which it will become clear what is going on, so for each species it will be necessary to come up with at least two or three hundred models (details to be determined in the final contract). Materials, techniques, and pigments have already been more or less developed and tested for every species, but of course the full and final test will be carried out on site, and no less than five years after the installation of the Falsification. Etc. Fine.

8) Then on site demolition of the dead coral, section by section, and its replacement with a copy, not necessarily identical. The organisms that are still alive will be left in their current location, but we cannot say whether they will survive. Only subsequent monitoring will be able to say. A vast stretch of the sea around the experimental area will be placed off-limits to fishermen and all other kinds of activity, both underwater and on the surface, for an appropriate period of time. On this point, the Egyptians insist there will be no problem.

9) There is no point in concealing the fact that the counterfeit seabed will require maintenance and cleaning. An immense undertaking, which the Egyptians will have to take on entirely. And for that matter, they already do so, with the genuine coral.

10) We will provide:

a) fully equipped ship;

b) equipment not directly specified by Fakenature, in accordance with appropriately negotiated terms;

c) all materials and installations that prove necessary;

d) the specialized workforce to set up construction sites;

e) the underwater and surface technical substrate;

f) connections and logistics;

g) the management of whatever subcontracting and specialty contributions may prove necessary;

h) healthcare, housing, catering, and management of all the inevitable pains in the neck that might arise with the Egyptians.

The Japanese and the Egyptians don’t get along particularly well . . . Ecocare’s mediation will be fundamental . . . On this point I’m going to have to be as precise and accurate as I can, even though any attempt to assign numbers and costs to the labour force that will be required would still be wholly premature. But I do already have an idea of the type of people that will be required . . .

11) If everything goes according to plan, the Egyptian government guarantees us five more parcels of two and a half acres each. For now it’s only a tentative agreement. But they know that, with the prices we’re offering, we can only make a profit if we manage to get going at full efficiency with subsequent work. My idea is that this guarantee should be included in the contract, with specified compensation in the case they should change their minds . . . In short, there’s work here through at least 2030. But after all, it’s the people at Ecocare who are going to make those decisions . . . If they want to run risks in order to keep the Egyptians happy, they can be my guests . . . In fact, on this point it might be advisable for me to keep my lips zipped. It’s not part of the expert advice they’re paying me for. Amen.

The whole thing will need to be spiced up and seasoned with the facts and figures on timing, costs, and technical issues that they have at Ecocare. In three days I can write the whole thing. Meeting on Thursday afternoon: I have less than a week . . . To me, the thing that kills me is the time . . . I want my time back, I want time to turn back into something that belongs to me, the way it did during the Great Summers by the Sea in the late Postwar Years . . . Back then, yes, that was life. In the water of the Postwar Years, there was all of life’s truth, everything that you needed to know . . .