As I watch cats and dogs flit across LCD screens, and think about all those who are filming their cats and dogs right now, and those watching them on their devices, clicking on smileys, sharing and so on, I wonder: has anyone noticed that we passed the crumbling gate of linear storytelling long ago?
The taxi driver taking me to the airport definitely has. He is looking at the technical monitor, the neon speedometer dial, the flickering lights of the car stereo, the song titles in the running text, the booking chart, the interactive city map, the personal communication monitors and the various clock faces flashing around him, all at the same time. As if we were flying in a time machine. The notion of time should also be used in the plural here. Although I’m travelling alone, he turns on both passenger monitors anyway without a word. As if he knew that I’m thinking about cats and dogs. He’s slurping something from a takeaway coffee cup. Then he checks his pulse on one of the two wrist watches he’s wearing.
The tires screech. The traffic light stops the car. Next to it—a countdown timer showing how many seconds must be spent waiting. Above it—a camera scanning the speed and number plates of all passing vehicles.
The taxi driver doesn’t waste his time. He scrolls through social networks. He isn’t bothered by the fact that different Facebook posts have no connection to each other, or that Instagram photos point to augmented, generated realities that have nothing in common.
The driver isn’t surprised that everything is fragmented, inconsistent, told from different perspectives. He knows we’re surrounded by cameras. CCTV cameras scattered across the cities of the world. Cameras in our devices, sometimes one on each side. Security cameras in moving vehicles. Virtual cameras in computer-generated panoramas. Drones and satellites gliding above our heads, with their radars, sensors and registers switched on. Swarms of people live-streaming from concerts and football matches—a phone in almost every hand. And all those currently filming and live-streaming their cats and dogs, along with all those watching these videos, reacting with emojis and sharing them.
The driver isn’t confused at all by the fact that different “posts have no connection to each other”. He knows they are connected—that all these screens, cameras, sensors and seemingly random messages are part of a new, larger shared reality. He knows that the vehicle he is driving moves through a world continuously monitored and generated in real time by different cameras, sensors and computers—a world that can and must be observed from different perspectives. To him, all of this is part of one continuous, composite narrative, which no longer has space for the “unique” perspective of an individual ego.
The taxi driver knows that this new world, whose dark motorways we’re racing through into the night, is impersonal. Much like the comment about his driving that I’m yet to leave. After paying with a card that isn’t mine. With money that I’ve never seen. He knows that the subject has become an object, that the internal and the external have become alike, that one has divided into two, into three, into four, into . . .
2
What are the first thousand of my names?
“Listen and remember—there won’t be a second chance.” That’s what the descendant of one of the oldest Scottish clans quipped one night, proudly pouring beer in one of Westphalia’s tiniest dives. Thousands of his reflections shimmered in the bursting galleries of beer bubbles.
So, my first, middle, found, given and earned names. War names, names of feathers, internet usernames, nicknames, names of the branches of genealogical family tree and genome sequences. Alice, “the one who knows who she used to be but isn’t sure who she is now”. Buonaventura, for adventures and dust-free roads. Casio, as precise as a clock that beeps every hour. Cheshire, Debbie, from a bee; Emily, Franz, Georgina, Harry, Ines, João, Crawl, Lucy, when you lose it; Ming, Mohamed, Niu, for “she who achieves her goals by assimilating”; Onassis, Ragna, Siri, named for her overly mechanical and precise diction, like an AI. I intentionally left out Sarah—anti-Semites try to detect a Jew in me, while Jews grow wary, suspecting I’m Lithuanian but not Litvak. Hearing this, the older Brits cite in German: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt Deutsch.” The Germans politely shrug their shoulders. But let’s leave the barren northern lands behind and venture to the scorched South. Penelope—fair as milk, or perhaps because I lived on Ithaca Street in Athens. I might as well call myself Odysseus, Xenia, Xin or Yolanda. The X and the Y in the alphabet of my names mutate at the chromosomal level, just like Schrödinger’s cat swishes its half-fictional, half-dead tail. Depending on the country, or the position of the pronouncing tongue, in a moment of euphoria, I might be called Xolanda, Yura or Yuri, and sometimes all within the same day.
According to the Chinese people, there are five, not four, cardinal directions. The fifth is the centre—the place where I am, at the middle, at the core. Where is that? Where do all the egos of the world dissolve? Where do the boundaries of personality melt away, and the “I” appears only as a fictional character? What defines this inner geography, and what steers the needle of this internal compass? In what ways do millions of familiar faces, characters, and countless volumes of biographical dictionaries—read by both known and unfamiliar voices—become visible, reflected in “my” face, which has long ceased to be “mine”? How do different disciplines and careers express their forms in this face? How does it quiver with unconfined, concealed or controlled desires and the anticipation of the future? How does this face, this permanent space of conflict and overlapping biopolitical interests, change? How does “my” face—just one of many, changing, insignificant faces you will shortly forget—emerge in that space? How does the relativity of the language “I” use—“my”, “face”, “is”, “my”, “identity”—affect our conversation?
I’ve been wandering since childhood. First as the younger sister, later as a grandmaster, and then as a negotiator, for I speak languages my parents never knew existed. Different states might declare me genetically modified, a superhuman, a sub-human, the victim of hormonal therapy, a hybrid, a byproduct of the decay of Western Liberalism, an emissary of Eastern barbarism, a menace to their offspring, an emblem of degeneracy and abnormality, an omen of the end of the world as we know it. I often look in the mirror and don’t recognise myself—him, her, them—those “selves” reflected there, and to me, it is a pleasant surprise. I often ask myself: whose gazes meet in the mirror? Then I think about the gaze, many gazes with their myriad perspectives, like the hundred-eyed Greek giant Argus, usually portrayed with hundreds of eyes scattered across his body, and today embodied by drones hovering above cities and directing hundreds of cameras at them. Or I try to imagine my reflection from the perspective of a swarm of bees or birds, composed of dozens of thousands of individuals yet acting as one large organism—how does this polynomial creature enjoy the fragrant flowers in a meadow, its influence on the natural ecosystems, or its flight amongst the skyscrapers of a sprawling city?
But to hell with those perspectives. Let’s return to the shattered mirror—to what keeps shifting within it, morphing through thousands of personality types, sex or gender, sometimes belonging to species the size of an atom, less often the size of a planet, to biological or non-biological entities.
Yet even such a relatively free approach to seeking different perspectives—isn’t it still too human, too authorial, fictional, fabricated, implausible?
Who am I, who are we, when we look at ourselves as an ever-changing creature, at billions of our cells and atoms, with the swarms of electric particles dancing around their nuclei, generating electromagnetic clouds and pulsing through every micro- and nano-second—including this one, and this one—while we, humans, are unable to fully grasp it due to our physical limitations? Which part of us, which swarm, cloud, surge of energy into another electron orbit, cell, eye, flagellum, mouth or nerve dendrite transmits the electrical signal to the tongue? Which desire or ideological impulse works the fingers, which are now typing these letters? What static or dynamic impulses control this story, which of them speak and what do they communicate? What are they hiding, what are their real desires, and what is yet another set of empty rhetorical figures?
Well, here we are, just beginning, and I can already tell you’re tired of listening. Have some coffee, it’s still early morning on the first of April. Or better yet, look out of the airplane window, because we’re about to land.
3
As it goes in the Baltic sagas, ominous lakes would fly over, appearing like great buzzing clouds. They would linger over cities or animal herds, buzzing—imagine a bee the size of a lake—until someone intentionally or accidentally guessed the cloud’s name. That very moment, the cloud would immediately descend and settle as a lake below, in the place it used to hover over, or it would just plummet and drown the herd along with the shepherds who had guessed its name.
Beginnings, initial intentions—what doesn’t affect them?—often transform into something else soon enough, not necessarily successful, important or clearly comprehensible. Take, for instance, the transformation of rainfall into the Nemunas river, sparkling water on the shop shelf, or into frost crystals on an aeroplane window—was this actually the initial idea of the water molecule?
Dawn, revelation and chance, necessity, desires, impulse, journey, intentions, strike, critique, lie, myth, the search for adventure or truth, appearance, needs, memories, reaction, investigation, income, persistence, violet—entrances, gates with thousands of keys and names, seeking to be guessed, just like the flying lakes.
4
Let’s begin with a simple exercise. Try to imagine a geometric shape with a thousand and one sides. In the past, such things were the domain of philosophers. For instance, the French thinker René Descartes (1596–1650) used the chiliagon as an example to demonstrate that certain things can be defined with great precision (“a geometric shape with a thousand sides”—what could be more precise?), yet their complexity makes them almost impossible to visualise mentally. On the other hand, “understanding” or mathematically analysing such regular shapes isn’t particularly difficult. So let’s try and imagine this story as a complex, irregular polygon—one that is easier to navigate as an angular and tangled route—instead of trying to imagine it as a consistent whole.
5
Although it feels like this polygonal shape is somehow connected to the purpose of this journey, the purpose is not to draw a new geometric shape and neither is it to search for one. On the one hand, we need to find an answer to a fairly simple question—perhaps even a riddle. On the other hand, to solve that riddle, we need to lose our way in that polygonal shape, to get lost, forget about its existence, move away from our regular selves, leave our comfort zones, cross the boundaries of our everyday logic as if it were an apartment in a familiar block of flats, harness the irrationality and intoxication of language, tilt over a balcony, teeter on the edge, dangle our legs, take a dizzyingly deep breath, look around—and, hop là—slide, drift, fall.
6
As we fall, let me ask you—have you ever heard of Vilius Abu Park? I ask, though I don’t expect a yes. While this story is about a dissolving ego, travelling through the mazes of reality’s polygons as if through the sewers or water supply pipes of a city, I would still like to introduce you to a character. This introduction will unfold slowly, gradually, as introductions often do—you meet someone once, twice, three times, you think you know them already and then it suddenly becomes clear that this “knowing” was only an illusion conjured by their egotism.
But there has to be a start somewhere. So I’ll mention that Vilius Abu Park’s name appears in search engines exactly once. As if it weren’t enough, the text which mentioned Vilius, the text in which Vilius is mentioned is a semi-fictional story about an artist going through a crisis of authenticity. Yet this journey is not entirely sunken in the clouds and mists of secrets.
7
While descending the aircraft stairs into the dawning morning of the first of April, I realise that I must close my eyes to the physical reality at this latitude. Sticky snowflakes, blown by the sleeting wind, penetrate into every open crevice. My second step on the pavement of Vilnius in high heels—dangerously slippery. Only my suitcase helps me regain my balance and prevents me from falling. The information it holds reminds me that it’s better not to entirely ignore physical reality while I’m here. The first impression turns out to be wrong.
While waiting for the last passenger to board the bus that will take us from the plane to the airport building, we stand together, huddled close, looking different ways as if afraid that our eyes would meet and our personal realities would crumble. But the last passenger moves annoyingly slowly, as if on purpose. He knows that he’s being waited for.
I sigh. A snowflake flies into my mouth.
8
I have never met a person from whom I haven’t learned something.
The customs officer at the Vilnius Airport, for example, in her booth. Her forties unfold in the morning. Dyed hair, her uniform in a hybrid colour of unripe eggplant and cold metal. Without looking at me, she extends her hand towards the slot in the window. Her hand speaks. A plain wedding ring, nails painted in a subdued office colour. The nails don’t smile. Her hand with its beckoning fingers signals for my identity documents. She gets my passport, flicks through it. Her fingertips check the quality of paper, then the holographic inserts. She swipes the passport through an electronic scanner, and inspects the photograph. I managed to read the officer’s calendar hanging in the booth: today, the sun rises at 06:52, sets at 19:55, daylight 13:03, it’s April Fool’s Day and International Bird Day. The officer flicks through the passport once more. She doesn’t ask who I am, why I have come, or whom I am visiting. She drops the passport without lifting her eyes. It seems to me that I could have arrived dressed as a giant buzzing bee, and no one would have noticed.
Merci. My tongue utters in French. The officer finally raises her cold eyes. Whose voice is this? The bee’s voice? April Fool’s voice? Why does it sound like this? Did I speak in a voice too low for someone in high heels? Or did I, perhaps, speak in the officer’s own voice? By speaking French, did I too plainly reveal where I had come from, and that my passport “tells the truth”? I could have stayed silent. I wasn’t the winner of this brief power game.
Overwhelmed by a fleeting bitterness of defeat, I decide to remove my makeup and change. In the arrivals hall, I find the women’s toilets and lock myself in a cubicle. While changing, I notice the message scratched into the door: “Men are from Murmansk. Women are from Vilnius.” I swap my high heels for a pair of comfortable trainers and pull on a warm woollen skier’s beanie. I stick on a fake moustache, and cover it with my palm as I pass by the women in front of the mirror.
Then, in the waiting area, I watch the arrivals and those who have come to meet them. I observe the local pace and rhythm, the way people express their genders, the economy of glances, the dynamics of self-confidence—though not necessarily in that order. I spread my legs slightly wider. I slouch a bit more. I let my fists stand out. Only then do I approach the sign with my name on it. Catching them off guard, I give the person holding the sign that says “Sarah” a familiar tap on his shoulder from the side he didn’t expect.
“Is that your name?” he asks me in surprise.
“Yes, it’s mine. One of many. I can be anyone. I can be a cloud of names. Just say any of my names and you will have guessed it.” I smile through the freshly unpacked, dark twenty-year-old’s moustache. In return, I am given the keys to an automobile—though no one calls a car like that here.
It is the customs officer’s fault that I neither greet them nor apologise for being late. She has just taught me to not speak under a name that isn’t mine.
9
Usually, upon arriving in a new place, I like to carefully observe, to sense where the peculiarities of a new landscape lie and what kind of machinery determines the unique features of local identity through the interplay of nature and society. Some generalising, cursory questions might be: what is the connection between the cold gaze of a customs officer and the fact that XXL-sized snowflakes splash onto the pavement on the first of April? But a far more important question is: how is it that, in this young democracy that fought for independence through songs and peaceful protests—a democracy where passions over historical truth still run high, where the files of the Second World War and the deportations, the Jewish genocide, the resistance, the KGB crackdowns, the TV tower takeover on 13 January 1991 and so on, are still being examined—no one is really concerned that, allegedly, not so long ago, the gates of this airport saw the CIA military SUVs pass through, unchecked by the officers and unnoticed by the media, most likely illegally transporting terrorist suspects from airplanes whose flight charts traced geometric figures between hotspots in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and elsewhere, to secret CIA premises—referred to by some public sources as covert interrogation prisons, which, under such conditions, also meant “enhanced interrogation” sites—more specifically, to the Lithuanian facility, active in Antaviliai between 2004 and 2005 and code-named Violet?
10
“Recharge”, or, depending on the translation, “reload in Vilnius”—this is the official English slogan of the Vilnius Airport. I have just under twenty-four hours for recharging or reloading.
Local residents and passengers are waiting for the bus with me at the bus stop. One of them, a man in his thirties, jolts awake from the bench as the bus arrives. He runs over, his watery eyes darting in a daze. And, with a frozen jaw he starts talking to me as if I were an old pal. Then he stiffens—friends are all gone. Realising his confusion, he apologises. The slick glaze in his eyes reveals that he’s not coming back from abroad, but from his dealer. He vanishes staggering into the thick curtain of snowflakes.
Another passenger doesn’t look like an air traveller either. Kazys—he’s fifty-six. He stands, supporting himself with wooden crutches planted firmly into the ground, waving his grade-two disability certificate as proof. To protect his feet from the damp, he wrapped his boots in violet plastic bags from local supermarkets—resistant to recycling and impervious to bacteria—emblazoned with the slogans: “Everything Is Taken Care Of” and “Just What You Want”. Three intertwined conversational truths become clear after a brief exchange: first, he would like to upgrade his disability certificate to grade one, which would mean that he would be diagnosed with an even higher degree of reduction of working capacity and would secure more advantageous benefits; the second truth is a direct conclusion of the first one: the resources of justice are running low in this world, at least in his world, and raising his crutches for his social security is no longer enough; I had never considered the third statement in this context before. “The cells of a human body renew every seven years”, he says, aiming the crutch at his foot but striking one of his bags instead. Bottles and cans clink inside. “Things and people”, I say while brushing my damp moustache and rephrasing the sentence in alphabetical order. “People and things here are quite talkative with strangers,” I reply to Kazys.
“People Talk” echoes a telecommunications advertisement on the side of the departing bus, but the conversation is drowned out by the groaning sound of the airplane taking off.
11
Watching airplanes is not the meaningless waste of time or escapist activity it might appear to sceptics. For example, planespotting played a crucial role in exposing the scandals surrounding the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme. As is well known, the main activity of planespotters is to systematically photograph the planes and record technical data in journals. This is why their photographs and logs, which include aircraft tail numbers and exact take-off and landing times, became valuable documents which enabled the media and the human rights organisations to request the flight records from airports in different countries and provided a basis for demanding more information from the governments of the countries involved in the scandal. All this activity uncovered some interesting facts and some even more interesting stories behind them.
Here’s one such story. The Spanish planespotter Josep Manchado took a photograph of a Boeing 373 with the tail number N313P, thinking that a US millionaire had arrived at Mallorca airport. He posted the photo on airliners.net and forgot about it. A few days later, Manchado received emails from activists and journalists interested in the extraordinary rendition programme. An anonymous man offered him a substantial sum for all his photographs but, before even getting Manchado’s address, disappeared. A few more months later, he received a phone call from Germany’s ZDF television. It turns out, Manchado had photographed the aircraft that was possibly carrying Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen abducted that day in Macedonia.
El-Masri’s story is only one of many cases in which people unwillingly became part of the extraordinary rendition programme. On 31 December 2003, due to the resemblance of his name to that of an Al-Qaeda suspect, he was stopped at the Macedonian border while travelling by bus to Skopje from his home in Germany and detained by security officers. He was then taken to a hotel in Skopje, where he was kept guarded day and night by changing security officers for thirty-two days, with no contact to the outside world, his lawyer, family or representatives from the German consulate. He was repeatedly interrogated and coerced into confessing that he was a member of Al-Qaeda.
After spending several weeks at the hotel, El-Masri, handcuffed and blindfolded, was taken to Skopje Airport. He is told that a medical examination would be performed. Instead he was punched from all sides and beaten with something resembling a stick. His clothes were cut off, leaving him in just his underwear. Later, he was ordered to remove them as well. When he refused, he was beaten once again and stripped naked. He heard the sound of a photo camera. It turns out that photographing naked suspects was a typical practice of this CIA programme. Then, he was pressed against the floor with a foot, and a small hard object was inserted into his anal cavity.
When the blindfold was removed at some point, a spotlight temporarily blinded him but, after a while, he made out seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. One of them put a diaper on him. Then, he was forced into a short-sleeved jumpsuit. His legs and arms were chained to a belt around his waist. He was blindfolded again. His ears were plugged.
With chains cutting into his ankles, El-Masri was escorted to the plane, where he was thrown face down onto the floor. His arms and legs were spread apart and shackled to different walls of the aircraft. He felt an injection in his shoulder and became dizzy. Then, he received a second injection, after which he teetered on the edge of unconsciousness.
The masked men dressed in black belonged to the CIA’s “black rendition” team, operating under the previously mentioned US extraordinary rendition programme. The plane transported El-Masri to a secret CIA black site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. There, he was subjected to further violence—slammed against walls, kicked and force-fed after declaring a twenty-seven-day hunger strike. He was held in the Salt Pit for four months without ever being formally charged. He never saw a judge, had no contact with his family or German consulate, or anyone beyond the walls of the prison, and was denied medical assistance. During his detention, he lost thirty kilograms.
All of a sudden, on 28 May, El-Masri’s belongings and passport were returned to him. He was flown on a CIA-operated Gulfstream jet, tail number N982RK, to a military base in Albania. After being driven for several hours, he was released without any explanation or apology. Immediately afterward, Albanian authorities arrested him and took him to Mother Teresa International Airport near Tirana, from where he was sent to Frankfurt on a regular flight. Upon returning home, he discovered that his wife and children, having received no news from him for months, had moved to Lebanon.
But let’s return to Mallorca. After receiving the photograph of the N313P aircraft from Josep Manchado, ZDF television persuaded Skopje air traffic control to disclose flight plans. It was revealed that N313P belonged to the US corporation Premier Executive Transportation Services, Inc., managed by another US company, Aero Contractors Limited. The records also showed that the plane had flown from Las Palmas to Skopje, then to Baghdad and Kabul. Later, it was discovered that the same aircraft had been involved in other abductions under the extraordinary rendition programme. Manchado’s photographs eventually became key evidence in the European Court of Human Rights.
In June, after receiving El-Masri’s complaint, the Munich prosecutor’s office launched an investigation. Witnesses confirmed that El-Masri had indeed traveled to Macedonia, as evidenced by the stamps in his passport. Scientific analysis of his hair further revealed that he had spent a significant amount of time in South Asia and had endured prolonged periods of inadequate nutrition.
On 6 December 2005, during a press conference alongside then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that the United States had admitted to making a mistake in El-Masri’s case. However, high-ranking US officials who had traveled with Rice later contradicted Merkel’s interpretation.
On 13 December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that in El-Masri’s case against Macedonia the latter had violated the rights under the European Convention on Human Rights and equated the treatment he endured at Skopje Airport to torture. All of this could only be reconstructed thanks to data collected by planespotters. Meanwhile, the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General also investigated El-Masri’s case, though with less success. Although the Inspector General concluded that “there was no legal justification for El-Masri’s rendition”, responsibility for the violations was placed on a CIA analyst and a lawyer. The analyst was later promoted, and the lawyer got away with a warning.
