Free Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

scope of any single point in the command-chain, had the effect of moving the whole intricate scheme towards its glorious realization, at which point all would become clear, to everyone, and ants would see as gods.
    7.2 I had this vision often; as the weeks and months progressed, the edifice within it neared completion, its plan and outline growing more apparent. There were still unfinished bits, though: gaping lacunae where the carapace gave way to reveal guttery of half-laid floors, bare wiring, strata opening onto sub- and super-strata, down and up and every which way. The distances, the heights and depths and spaces in between, were huge—it was an entire metropolis, a Tower (and here, of course, the Company’s own logo wormed its way into the picture) of Babel. Peyman would always be there, in these visions: he’d be standing on the plain, perched on a balcony, or leaning against a half-completed buttress, consorting with engineers and princes, architects and sheiks and viziers, tweaking somefiner point of the overall plan, or going over the logistics for the next phase, or some such activity—there in the thick of it, connected; and I, through my association with him, felt connected too. Even if this isn’t what the Project actually involved, this is how it presented itself to me, as I sat down in my basement, rode the tube, or drifted off to sleep.
    7.3 The meeting with the Minister took place. It’s odd to spend time in the company of somebody with power—I mean real, executive power: to hang out with a powerful person. You would imagine they exude this power at every turn, with each one of their gestures; that their very bodies sweat the stuff, wafting its odour at you through expensive clothes. But in fact, the thing most noticeable about this Minister was her lack of powerful aura. She seemed very normal. She wasn’t physically striking in any way: neither particularly tall nor particularly short; neither fat nor thin; neither attractive nor ugly. Her accent bore no traces of excessive privilege, nor of its masking. She must have been about my age, early forties. She was wearing sober, business-like clothes, with the exception of her shoes, which had small faux-fur tiger-skin stripes on them. We were sitting around a table: Peyman, Tapio, myself, this Minister and two of her staff. The way we were positioned allowed me to see these shoes, and what she was doing with them. As first one, then another person presented, responded, queried, clarified, proposed, counter-proposed and so forth, she rubbed one of her feet against the other, so that her right shoe’s toe, its outer edge,moved up and down against the side-arch of its neighbour. She performed this activity non-stop throughout the meeting, even when she herself was talking. I thought at first that she was scratching herself, that she had a bite or irritation on her left foot that was itching. Twenty or so minutes into the meeting, though, I had to abandon this hypothesis: while even low-level scratching has a kind of franticness about it, an angry, stop-start rhythm, her movement was so regular and methodical that it seemed almost automatic. With each upwards motion of the toe against the arch, the tiger-skin, its fur, would be drawn upwards, ruffled until its hairs all separated, each one bristling to attention; with each downward or return stroke these hairs would all lie back flat again, losing their individuality amidst the smooth, sleek flow of feline stripes.
    7.4 After the best part of an hour, I realized what this Minister was up to: she was attempting, with her right foot, to undo her left shoe’s buckle (which, unusually, fastened on the inward- rather than the outward-facing side). This, I realized as I watched her, was a quite ambitious undertaking. Buckles are finicky; once you remove hands from the equation, mastery of them becomes well-nigh impossible. Yet this is what her right foot, with a persistence and determination that I found