Twist

by Colum McCann

Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Ta-Nehisi Coates

it was a time of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.

The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.

The days had piled into weeks and the weeks had piled into months. Not much sang to me: no characters, no plotlines. The world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward.

All the truth, my father told me, but none of the honesty.

What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.

nearly all the world’s intercontinental information was carried in fragile tubes on the seafloor. Most of us thought that the cloud was in the air, she said, but satellites accounted for only a trickle of internet traffic. The muddy wires at the bottom of the sea were faster, cheaper, and infinitely more effective than anything up there in the sky. On occasion the tubes broke, and there was a small fleet of ships in various ports around the world charged with repair, often spending months at sea.

nearly all the world’s intercontinental information was carried in fragile tubes on the seafloor. Most of us thought that the cloud was in the air, she said, but satellites accounted for only a trickle of internet traffic. The muddy wires at the bottom of the sea were faster, cheaper, and infinitely more effective than anything

On occasion the tubes broke, and there was a small fleet of ships in various ports around the world charged with repair, often spending months at sea. Was I in...

It was fascinating to think that an email or a photograph or a film could travel at near the speed of light in the watery darkness, and th...

cable-laying bids with Facebook and Google—both of which were due to lay huge cables in the seas around Africa—and possibly thought that an article might raise their profile.

It turned out that they owned a number of the world’s working cables: their insignia was a purple globe wrapped in spinning coils of wire.

It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass. In glass made from sand. In sand that has sifted through time.

The depths hum with just about everything imaginable.

tube no bigger than a garden hose. You are here one moment. And then, in a nanosecond...

If there was a clock inside him, instructing time, it was ticking slower than the timepieces inside the rest of us. It wasn’t that he tamped down the moment, or tightened it, or obscured it. On the contrary, he gave air to it, let it hover, made it new.

I had seen men like him before, troubled and angelic all at once.

Conway had that secret chord—the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.

am not sure what I had expected from a man whose job it was to be in joint command of an internet repair ship, the chief of mission no less, but I certainly thought he would be older, grayer, and at the very least have an aura of the smartphone about him. But here he was, a creature from the unplugged side, or as unplugged as he could get.

inescapable bores

He mentioned the aberration in the White House

“It’s amazing, really,” he said as the waitress walked back across the bar, “to watch the people who do the actual work of the world.”

“These cables have been around for hundreds of years. A hundred and fifty, actually. Not a lot has changed. I mean, it’s fiber optics now, but they’re all essentially the same. They carry the same thing.”

“News, I suppose. Other times, other places.”

The ones who believed in the permanent idea of faster faster faster.

“The disease of our days is that

we spend so much time on the surface.”

You know if the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.

When she got to the ocean floor, she said, she saw the most spectacular things—blind fish, sharks that glowed in the dark, sea anemones with eight-foot tentacles, sea squirts, shrimp, salpae,

all manner of undersea beauty—but when she looked out into the narrow beam of murky light that the submersible shone into the depth, near the absolute bottom, she had seen a tiny piece of plastic floating.

A huge flood then, beneath the sea, and a break in the cable.

cable was carrying at the time, all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories, the chess games, the sea charts, the histories, the contracts, the divorce papers, the computer hacks, the wild lies, the voices, the terror, the nonsense, the known, the unknown, the promises, the porn, the alphabet of flesh, the singsong of skin, the million wisps of disinformation, the flotsam of our

longings, the jetsam of our truths, all of it, all, suspended in a series of wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor, and who could tell what was traveling

The druggy heat shimmied in the air and insinuated itself into every synapse.

Most of us never thought of information coming through cold, wet wires under the sea.

The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.

The Irish way. Whatever you say, say nothing.

There are birds that switch off half their brains and sleep as they fly. How Conway kept from falling down with exhaustion I will never know. Each sweep of the ocean floor took almost fifteen hours.

There was no quit in him.

He remained cool and so, therefore, did everyone around him.

There’s nowhere we haven’t fucked up. The words returned to me on that ancient swing. Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.

them. Their music was younger. Their bodies, younger. Their reflections, younger. The mirror told me all this, but I took a secret satisfaction in not having to pluck my T-shirt away from my stomach as I had done a month before.

The curse of fame in the exponential age. It had all happened so quickly. She had captured something of the zeitgeist, or something of the zeitgeist had been captured in her, and it wasn’t going to let her go.

“Faster faster faster,” I said. “And,” he said, looking out the porthole window, “What hath God

wrought.” “As a question?” “You know what Zee wanted to do?” he said. “She just wanted to go out there and say some things about the shit that we’re in. That’s all.” “And you’re here—” “And we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another. What we wrought…” He recapped the pen with a snap. “Everything gets fixed,” he said, “and we all stay broken.”

Conway had come to some edge. He was out there hunting, and maybe he was just hunting himself.

The same corporations who controlled the cables controlled the information too. It was a well-dressed shell game. All the myopia. All the greed. A new cable would make billions of dollars for its owners. It was also quite possible that

the information within was owned or tapped, or both. The old colonialism was dressed up in a tube. It snaked the floors of our unsilent seas.

had written an article about the great expansiveness of global information, the world unfurling through a wire, the acute sense of time meeting

time, and here I was, in a sort of advance lockdown.