The Mark and the Void Read Online Free Page A

the second offers no rating at all, and consists solely of the line ‘On no account should you lend money to this man.’ Beyond that, there is nothing. As far as the wider world is concerned, for the last seven years he might as well not have existed – which is consistent with what he told me about hitting a wall.
    I go on to my balcony, try to look out with the eyes of a novelist. My apartment is in the International Financial Services Centre, a stone’s throw from the bank. The city centre lies upriver; if I lean over the rail, I can glimpse the Spire, jutting into the darkness like a radio transmitter from the heart of things, but it’s only on rare evenings, when the wind is blowing in a particular direction, that I hear its broadcasts – the whoops, the screams, the laughter and fights – and even then only faintly, like the revelry of ghosts. Usually, when night has fallen and only a few lights remain, chequering the dark slabs of the buildings, it is easy, looking over the deserted concourse, to believe the world has upped stakes and gone, followed the baton of trade west, leaving me here alone.
    Before I came here I knew little about Dublin. I had an idea it was famous for its dead writers; I remembered the name of the river from arguments in school over whether it’s
Liffey
or
Lethe

the singer floats down in ‘How to Disappear Completely’. I entertained vague notions about Guinness and authenticity.
    It turned out to be very different from what I expected. At university, I had read about the
virtual
, the simulated world that abuts and interpenetrates our own – ‘real without being actual, present without being there’, in the words of the philosopher François Texier. I didn’t think, after graduating, that I would require the concept again; I certainly never dreamed I’d find myself living in it.
    That said, there is some argument as to whether the International Financial Services Centre is truly part of Dublin. It lies only a few minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street, but the locals don’t come here; many of them don’t even seem to know it exists, in spite of the torrents of capital that flow into it every year. It was built twenty years ago as a kind of pacemaker, an ingenious piece of financial and legal technology embedded in Dublin’s thousand-year-old body. A jumble of stumpy glass buildings, it stretches along the river like a pygmy Manhattan, on what used to be docklands. Its main function is to be a kind of legal elsewhere: multinationals send their profits here to avoid tax, banks conduct their more sensitive activities with the guarantee of a blind eye from the authorities. Many of the companies here have billions in assets but no employees; the foyer of Transaction House is crowded with brass nameplates, all leading to a single, permanently empty, office. They call this shadow-banking, and the IFSC is a shadow-place – an alibi that will say you are here when you are not, and cover your presence when you don’t want to be seen.
    Could you really set a book in such a place? In a city that is not a city? Filled with people who are paid not to be themselves? He says he wants to find the humanity inside the machine, to track down the particular amid the golden abstractions; he says he can see something different about me, and standing on the balcony I thrill at the thought that I might see it too. But what
if he’s wrong? What if he holds up the mirror, and nothing is there?
    Jurgen shares none of my reservations. ‘An author?’ he exclaims, when I mention it casually after the Monday meeting. ‘A real-life author? And he wants to put you in his book?’
    ‘Yes,’ I say.
    ‘You?’ Kevin the trainee says.
    I shrug. ‘It seems that I just … fit the bill, is that the phrase?’ (In fact I know perfectly well it is the phrase.)
    ‘Do you think he’ll put us in it as well?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I will ask him.’
    ‘Doesn’t it sound a bit weird?’ Ish is