The Subjects

by Sarah Hopkins

  The other regular fixture was the games room. To meet our quota Alex and I made a daily habit of meeting there before dinner. I was pretty crap. Alex was merciless. Sitting back on our beanbags and sipping sugar-free sodas from the stuffed mini-fridge, he opened up a bit about his seaside town, how his father moved them there because he didn’t want them breathing poison air. In all Alex said, his father loomed large—a man of strange beliefs but, to his son, the embodiment of everything that was solid and strong. Five years after the move, Alex’s father had a heart attack while bringing the shopping in from the car.

  ‘I did CPR but I think I fucked it up. The ambulance took too long…’

  When he got to that bit, Alex choked up, as he did pretty much any time the subject of his father came into conversation again.

  I didn’t start my tutorials until week four. That was because the school needed time to do an ‘assessment’, or so PW said when he informed me that mine would consist of extra time with him. I couldn’t work out what sort of assessment had been done—no one asked me what I was interested in doing more of—but I thought they’d probably pegged it right, so I didn’t complain. Being the only one to warm to him, I already felt a little proprietary towards PW.

  I closed the door and we both sat on top of desks. He had a water bottle and an apple; throughout this and each of our sessions, he drank the water but never touched the apple.

  ‘So, more Numbers?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ he said, and went on to explain that this was not Numbers or Maths or Science. We would be working by topic not subject, ‘…if you follow me. You and I will be looking at various phenomena in physical science, across key areas: energy, gravitation, magnetism. We’ll begin with an observation, and work out what kind of physical laws apply. And then,’ he actually rubbed his chubby hands together here, the closest thing to an expression of enthusiasm I’d ever get out of him, ‘then we’ll take it to the next level of mathematical abstraction.’

  I was listening, but I wasn’t convinced. And the thought I kept coming back to: this wasn’t in my contract.

  ‘You are shaking your head,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t really have a clue what you’re talking about.’ I was being straight: I didn’t want to set him up for disappointment. ‘I don’t think I’m your guy for this.’ I liked the way things were with Mr PW and I was pretty sure that if I went along with this, it would shatter his belief in me.

  But he wasn’t having it. ‘You understand it already,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know it.’

  I thought that sounded like a crock, but I liked that he thought it.

  ‘Your answers, Daniel, in Numbers—you haven’t made a single error, and in the timed questions, you’re fast. A high-velocity brain with a basic understanding of the sort of equations we’ll be getting into.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d considered they were monitoring our responses on the tablets: of course, it made sense.

  ‘The interesting part,’ he went on, still monotone in spite of the stated claim, ‘is that we don’t just stop with the equations—we look at them as their own entity, with their own meaning and their relevance to other phenomena.’ I was not looking interested, or convinced, but he didn’t seem bothered. ‘As long as you’re prepared to try it, we can begin.’

  I shrugged. ‘What about chemistry?’ I asked. ‘I like chemistry.’

  His response was definitive. ‘Too easy.’

  There is no need for me to craft any defence of PW. There has never been any cloud over his methods or his role at the school. You couldn’t have said his approach was conventional, but in essence he taught in parallel, at least, with a curriculum: we moved through subjects and circled back on the knowledge I had gained. Later, at university, I looked back and pegged him as a cross between my lecturer in pharmacology (brilliant, methodical) and a laboratory guy called Mike who assisted in medicinal chemistry with the awe-struck wonder of a child.

  My sense is that I owe PW a great deal. After I left, I arrived in time for the annual exams at a new school. There was a level of disbelief (on both sides) around my results, and at the beginning of my final year a man came from the other side of the country to offer me a scholarship at a university, where I somehow stumbled into an advanced stream. And still the influence of PW played on when I picked the wrong elective in a pot-induced haze (by now I had joined the merry throng), ticked bioinformatics rather than biology, and found myself back in the land of algorithms. I sat in the first lecture wondering what the fuck the list of linear models all meant, but when I went to the office to change to biology, something stopped me. A couple of whispered words: too easy.

  I have not seen or heard anything of Mr PW. The only thing I’ve since learnt about him was a notation I found in my computer file last week with the name of the tutor—the answer to the name behind the initials. He was not Mr anything. P was for Professor, and W for Wise. His name was Professor Michael Wise.

  At the end of week six, I’d spent my first sessions with PW rolling a bunch of different balls around the room and making observations. We even cleared the desks and played handball with them at one stage. When I needed a break we took turns in throwing up some numbers and seeing what the other came back with.

  ‘Like what kind of thing?’ Tod asked in the corridor one night when I attempted to explain what we were doing.

  ‘Patterns, denominators, whatever—just anything that means something. Like word association, only numbers.’

  Every night since the signing of my contract I had joined the sleepless wanderers and tried to open the screen doors at the top of the stairs: still locked. I returned to Dr J’s office to complain about the withheld courtyard access but he wasn’t there. Then that night the lock turned and the screen opened and in a smooth, sliding motion it disappeared into the wall.

  I started down, then turned back. Alex was on the floor and Tod was shuffling towards him. ‘I’m going downstairs,’ I said. ‘To the courtyard. He’s unlocked the doors.’

  Tod was hesitant, but Alex’s eyes widened like he’d just woken up: ‘Right behind you.’

  Outside on the stone tiles, lined up side by side, were three mats and sleeping bags and pillows. The boys looked at each other as though they’d stumbled across a pot of cash. ‘This is you?’ Tod asked, and without waiting for a reply: ‘This is good.’

  And there was our sky. I climbed into a sleeping bag and stared up. It was different from the one I knew. There is a city sky and a country sky; I hadn’t figured on that. It was as though until now I’d been seeing it through a cropped and foggy lens. There was no highrise to cut my view, no city lights, and tonight, no moon; it was a clear, blue-black panorama, bulging with clusters and constellations and shadowy faces forming in clouds of white dust. Tod asked me questions I couldn’t answer, which star was which, where were the planets, what were the dark patches—how far away was it all? I shrugged them off; I’d looked at it enough but I’d never set out to become an expert.

  ‘The dark patches are nebulae,’ Alex eventually said. ‘The dust of exploded stars—it blocks out the light from the stars behind it.’ It turned out his dad used to point it all out to him from their front lawn. ‘We didn’t have a TV.’

  As the night went on, it grew colder so we pulled the bags up over our noses and it muffled our voices. It was the first of our midnight sessions, the three of us out there, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet; sometimes we slept. I told them about lying out on the walkway at home, on the nights I couldn’t sleep. I told them stories of what I heard on the floors above and below. They wanted to know more, about the drug deals and the screams—best of all when the two combined, the deal gone wrong; the best of those the one that ended in a body. I had to go through it twice, how I heard the rising voices down in the courtyard, what sounded like a single punch and the sounds of animal howling, then running footsteps. When I got down to look, there it was, the body. It wasn’t a punch. It was a knife. The blood was still th
ere the next morning, like paint on tiles. It was Rob, who was my friend Sam’s dad. Sam didn’t have a mum so he went to one of those homes, or maybe he found a nice family (that’s what Mary said). As I got to the end of the story, I realised the whole childhood picture was starting to sound a bit grim, so I added stuff about the good bits, the other friends I made (there were a few; they’d just moved on) and the games we’d played (brandings from the walkways) and how sometimes old Nina made me baklava and it stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  For a while then we were mainly just quiet. From time to time one of us would comment on celestial matters—the brightness, the haze, the distance, our minuteness—referring questions back to Alex. Tod raised the need for a midnight snack and I brought out oat cookies.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘In my room. I’ve got food. I’ve got a fridge. I put it in my contract.’

  ‘You fucker!’ It wasn’t jovial; it was the first time I’d seen him genuinely pissed off. ‘I never asked for any of that stuff.’

  I told him I didn’t think he really wanted food in his room, given the nature of his mission.

  ‘Yeah, okay, but other stuff…’

  ‘I was thinking about that,’ I said. ‘What you said the other day about getting more days outside. You need to sort that out.’

  ‘He won’t do it. He won’t change the contract. I told you, I asked.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but you just need to frame it differently. Make it one of your tutorials. You’ve done the stuff with Magnolia and Mr T, all good, but now you want to walk. Make it earnest—you feel the need to connect with nature, to get outside your head—that sort of bullshit. If he tells you that would mean a system change, tell him you want it anyway. He can sort them. Getting out here needed one, some crap about the locks being automated, but here we are…’

  I stopped because I heard a rattle in Tod’s breathing and turned to see that he was snoring. It was the sort of sound you’d expect from a baby animal and not a great lump of a boy. Either way, the night sky had done its job: he was asleep. Apart from the snoring, it was quiet—the hum of a generator, a cooing night bird, the intermittent bleat of an insomniac goat…the sound of our breathing. It was a strangely intimate scene, Alex and me, staring up at the stars. I wondered, now that he’d mentioned his dad, if he’d try to get personal. It even crossed my mind that his hand might creep across to cop a feel.

  But that wasn’t where he was headed.

  ‘Suck the cum out of your own midget cock!’ he said. ‘What the fuck was that?’

  ‘He’s a dick.’

  ‘Sure, but the only time you’ve bothered to say it is when he went for Rachel.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘And the only time she’s ever floated in the waterhole like that, by the way, was when she knew you were coming.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘Hah. It’s not.’

  ‘What is happening with her, anyhow? That shit in class…’

  ‘Yeah, I dunno.’

  ‘…that’s extreme. Like how many hours was that?’

  ‘I know. Messed up.’

  With not much more to say about that we changed subjects. He asked me about the drugs, what I sold.

  I started listing them off: ‘Ritalin, Adderall, Oxy, Valium, Klonopin, Xanax…’

  ‘You tried all those?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I test them.’

  ‘As any good dealer would.’ With this he propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me like I was the most interesting specimen in the world. ‘It took a lot to do what you did—hats off. I mean it,’ he said.

  He seemed to want me to acknowledge that I understood what he was saying before he launched into more questions, all the details, where I sourced it all, how I delved into the dark net.

  ‘There’s no great trick to it,’ I explained. ‘You download a site, link into the right address and you’re on: your very own cryptomarket. I rented a PO box—that’s where I fucked up; they got it through one of my vendors and I’d put it in my own name.’ The questions kept coming and I happily gave it up. It was like anything online—you browse. Price, quality, origin: it’s all laid out with user reviews, star ratings, online forums. ‘It’s another world; it doesn’t matter who you are—you’re just a username with a bitcoin wallet. It’s all encrypted, then the police crack it and another site pops up, and you’re on again.’

  ‘So why not order some out here?’

  I laughed, said I didn’t even know where we were.

  ‘Easy enough to find out.’

  ‘And it will arrive in the mailbox and they’ll just pass the envelope over.’

  ‘Yes, okay. It needs some thought. But it’d be a nice time to have something to send us up into that cluster.’ He pointed upward and stared for a while in what seemed like an effort to get there unassisted. ‘Just saying…’

  When he spoke again the tone had shifted. ‘I’m not complaining. This is good, Daniel, this is fine.’ There was a warble in his voice. It sometimes happened when Alex was talking, mid-sentence, mid-thought, like something cracked and the ground dropped away, swallowing him up into the silence. Mary would have told him to stop being a sad sack, but I figured if I just left it for a while he’d come back.

  ‘I don’t think Rachel’s right,’ I eventually said. ‘What this place is.’

  He took so long to answer I was starting to give up, but in the end, he went on to give his version—more abstract than concrete: ‘They bring us here and set it all up, the field trips, the sessions, the lessons and we’re all sitting here asking: what is this all about? They’re turning us in on ourselves…And now you get us this.’ He raised his arms to the sky. ‘I mean, this is everything that is beautiful. But I don’t think it changes anything, if any of this does.’ His voice started trailing off. ‘Or it makes it worse. It doesn’t matter, or it is worse…’

  I took the bait. ‘What is worse?’

  ‘All of it,’ he whispered. ‘What happened, what is happening, what will happen.’

  This was the thing with Alex: he kept moving the posts, but there was something so gentle in it—so thoughtful—that he brought you with him. He never offered it up, always waiting for me to ask, and then holding it back, until it felt like the most important thing in the world to know what was in his thoughts.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I mean the bad stuff—all of it, everywhere.’

  What I learned that night as he continued to answer my questions was that so far he’d just been fiddling at the gate. On the other side of it—inside his mind—was the entire and endless gamut of human suffering. He began to step me through examples. Sexual slavery across Europe, public stonings in the Middle East, the bombings of schools, of hospitals, mass abductions and gang rapes—sometimes with dates and places, sometimes just the abstract horror…bloody corpses and mutilated women, strewn limbs of children. When I say he stepped me through it, I mean slow steps. He spoke like someone trying to overcome a stutter, careful to convey the weight and meaning to be attached to each word. He moved from one to the next and then back again, to clarify and correct, like he was memorising facts for a test.

  There were twelve on a bus

  He was the last doctor in town

  It was market day

  There were four sisters…

  I tried to bring us back. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Enough of the heavy shit.’

  But by then I don’t think he even heard me. ‘No, that’s not right,’ he said, frustrated at not remembering something, tapping the centre of his forehead with his fist. And then there was a break in his voice—the warble—and to close, a trickle: ‘For every star…’

  For every star.

  Somehow above us now was not the most extraordinary night sky I’d ever witnessed, but a panoramic testament to the magnitude of human suffering, each cluster of stars a scatter of pain. Alex was sitting up now, in just his singlet top. It was cold, fucking cold
; when I told him he was an idiot and to get back in the sleeping bag, he climbed up the rim of a planter pot and hiked himself onto the branch of a pear tree where he swayed side to side and let his head hang back, his mouth open wide like he was trying to catch invisible rain. I closed my eyes and tried to block it out. This part of it I was getting used to, ever since he licked his own bacterial growth off the agar plate, the jump into the waterhole (he’d started doing a balancing act on the higher branch), any chance to put himself at risk. Last week it had been fire—at breakfast he’d singed the hair off his right arm over the cooktop, then later worked on his eyebrows with the Bunsen burner. Sometimes it was sort of funny, like a kid’s prank, sometimes irritating; more and more so, like now…When I looked up again he was lying back against the branch, perfectly still; I thought I could see a smile on his lips. And then suddenly his body was shaking. I watched him shaking on the branch, thinking he was a sick boy.

  Sad sack, sick boy.

  And I was heavy with the thought that I was losing something—a potential or a promise—and the longer he shook, the less likely it was ever to materialise.

  Tod snapped me out of spectator role. He woke up and saw Alex and freaked. Reckoned he was having some kind of fit; I said he was just cold. Whichever way, we ended up taking him back inside. Alex had gone a bit pale but he was okay.

  Tod put him to bed and told me to go too.

  But I couldn’t go to bed.

  I started my rounds of the corridor.

  Preliminary Physics: Magnetic Poles

  It was not the stories of global horror that kept me from sleep. It was the two things Alex had said about Rachel.

  The first—that my crack at Glen was in her defence—was only half-right. It was more just to go one up and get her to look my way. The second part—reading something into her way of floating—I felt certain was bullshit. But still, the licence it gave me to play it back a hundred different ways: the sight of her body at the centre of the waterhole as I came over the hill…