The Subjects

by Sarah Hopkins

  And as the reason for the contraction inside of my ribcage these last days began to sink in, for the first time I considered the question: what does Rachel think of me?

  After a few slow rounds of the corridor, I stopped outside her door—not to answer that question, but to listen. I leaned back against the wall and waited. Silence. Still, I felt something, some connection here. I slid down to the floor. At this angle I could see just a fragment of night sky through the top branches of the pear tree. There was a hyperreal glow to it now that lit up the remaining leaves. It felt like there was some kind of meaning in that; I read it as a nod to stay: to wait, to listen.

  In the quiet dark of the corridor, I felt alert. Nocturnal. Different from the day people. I imagined the leaves were not leaves but shadows of leaves and that I was sitting on the rim of a pretend world—a parallel narrative—and I was waiting for the word. The word would come from the other side of the door and it would make everything real again. I counted how long I could keep my eyes open without blinking. I counted how long I could hold my breath after the exhalation. I put my ear against the timber panel of the door. Still nothing, no whispers coming from inside. And here, outside, just me and the silence in the corridor with no beginning or end.

  That went for quite some time.

  Finally, it came. I heard it! Not a single word but a staccato whisper. I couldn’t make it out…What did she say? Everything seemed to hinge on it. In a panic, I stood up. Did I really hear it?

  I kept my ear to the door but there was nothing more.

  What came to me then was not the image of Rachel in the waterhole, but Rachel in the classroom sitting alone at the window, staring at the sky and then at me. Her desperate eyes; pleading—was it a plea? Standing outside her door, it was only now I could interpret it: she knew something was wrong with her but she didn’t know what it was. I could help her understand. I could take down all the words and decode the message and I could tell her what was wrong and how to fix it (in some sense, a predictable plot twist: boy on mission, boy saves girl).

  I can’t remember making a decision to open Rachel’s door that night. I could say it was in the delirium of sleeplessness; that of its own accord my hand rose to turn the handle of her door. But the truth was I had never felt more wide-awake, more alive with purpose. It wasn’t that I was justified; I was compelled.

  I open the door, and step inside.

  In the misty darkness of her room, there is only the sound of my heartbeat. When it slows I am calm because it is right to be there; I am invited. That is what her whispers were. Still, only my eyes move. As they adjust to the darkness I see the room is larger than mine. I see the bed and I can see that it is empty—the bed is empty! White sheets strewn to one side and a cover on the floor. I scan the rest of the room, the outline of a bedside lamp, pale curtains along the opposite wall.

  I gasp. There she is, standing in the furthest corner. The sleepwalker. She is not looking at me, but down at the bed.

  She doesn’t turn at the sound. Her hair is all to one side, partly covering her face. For a few minutes neither of us moves. Slowly, then, she raises an arm and walks towards the bed, and the whispering starts again.

  I can hear the words now.

  ‘Only the sun, trembling. The father, like him…’

  Pieces of a sentence.

  ‘…your father likes him…be there for the fire.’

  When she stops I step closer, each small step a limbic cartwheel, and with each heartbeat, the liquid presses against the walls of my arteries, a contraction, paralysis. I stand at the other side of the bed as the volume increases, and she is spitting the words, commanding me. Her eyes are open, ablaze—the whites flashing blue against darkness; she is a zombie killer, but I am not scared. I am soaring through the air. I am falling.

  I am in love.

  Abstract Mathematics

  When I stood face to face with a somnambulant Rachel and silently declared myself, I was going with my best guess. I felt it rising through my groin and my gut, into my chest and my throat (in that order) so that the words formed in my brain as a conceptualisation of the physical journey: I am in love…these exact words, despite the absence of any real illustration of the concept in my life to date.

  Back to the timelines.

  On the first day of Grade 6 Mrs Pyke put a timeline on the whiteboard of defining moments in the history of Australia in the decade from the First Fleet to Bass and Flinders’ circumnavigation of Tasmania. ‘We are talking, children, about what shaped our nation.’ At the end of the class she said she wanted us to go home and make our own timeline of defining moments in our lives. Ours would be for eleven years as we were all eleven except James Mildren, who was twelve because he repeated kindergarten. She wanted us to bring our timeline back next week and share it with the class—a historiographical ‘get to know your classmates’ session. The handout with the blank timeline was headed: What Shapes You?

  Mrs Pyke was a new teacher and I assume she had come up with the ingenious idea all by herself, not accounting for the fact that a third of the thirty-three kids in her class were from the Commission flats. It could have been worse. No one included the really bad bits—sudden disappearances of parents or dead junkies on doorsteps. Ben Jones didn’t put the day his sister got raped. Basically, everyone lied. We all lied and we all knew we lied. We just served it up and played along when Mrs Pyke broke us into groups of five to share. It was mostly stuff about births of siblings or deaths of grandparents, broken limbs or operations, learning something or winning something.

  Why I bring it up is that the day she assigned the task I did in fact go home and think about what I would have said if I were doing it for real. I didn’t have to think long; it was just Dad moving out and then a series of names:

  1. Josh

  2. Gary

  3. Brian

  They were my events. What shaped me was who was living with me and Mary in the flat. It all depended on the tenants. (Not ‘stepfathers’ or ‘boyfriends’—none of them was a father or friend to either of us. ‘Tenants’ was the best I could come up with.) Before they came, when it was just us, Mary and I had a level of control over our lives. We could plan a day, work out a budget, hang out, whatever; all of which was blasted away the moment a tenant bunked in. I kept trying to put my stamp on things but after so many obliterated plans I got used to not making them. Mary too. Brian had only just moved in when Mrs Pyke set the task. By the time Brian left, Mary had got used to not going out at all. At first she didn’t; then she couldn’t. Even when it was just us.

  The word love didn’t get thrown around a lot, or in fact used at all, not by Mary or the tenants. It was never put forward as a justification for their unwelcome and at times terrifying presence in the flat. Subsequently, my understanding was that in real life people coupled because that is just what they did, and if a coupling severed it was replaced by another coupling that was usually worse. (I didn’t have any firm view on the universality of the pattern: Josh—Gary—Brian could as easily have been Gary—Brian—Josh, though my hunch was that the Brians usually come last.)

  In any event, my perception of human connection was of a random set of energies moving people around, one to the next. The horseshit in the movies never even vaguely resonated with me, and when kids at school started holding hands and texting emojis I felt the same way about them as I felt about the kids that went to church: dupes, sucked into the orbit of the big lie.

  What I shared with my Grade 6 group about my timeline:

  1. The day I started school (I couldn’t even remember it);

  2. Falling off my bike and breaking my arm (that wasn’t how I broke my arm);

  3. Catching my first wave (that did happen, true story, and when I was in Grade 6 I still got tingly thinking about it).

  I am in love.

  Whatever they meant, the words imprinted that night. For the next four months the fact of them formed a significant part of my reason for being—I’d
put it at about sixty per cent. There was a lot going on—appointments with Dr J, tutorials with PW, midnight sessions with the boys—so sixty constituted a sizeable chunk. I wasn’t then, nor have I ever been, one to buy into the notion of a hundred per cent. Now that I have a lens on my overall pattern of proficiency, I can state that Rachel was (and is) my peak. I have been called many things—a narcissist, a liar, a solipsist, a loser—and I’ve never come back with a good retort. I am not a narcissist, but that occasion wasn’t the right time to explain the difference between narcissism and nihilism. There was already broken shit all over the kitchen floor.

  Tremble, bumble, tumble…

  Rachel’s words tapered off into a series of indecipherable sounds before she fell silent. For a few minutes she stared more closely at the bed as though she were reading a message printed on the sheets, then she climbed back in and pulled a pillow over her head. I wanted to stand and watch the clump of her but I retreated. I went back to my room and completed the task at hand by writing down all the words and the different orders in which they’d been spoken, the combinations coming together like a poem or a prayer.

  The next morning I woke up to a wave of intense nausea. I assumed it was something I’d eaten until I saw Rachel in the kitchen at breakfast and my gut flipped into my throat. My symptom, it turned out, was the physical manifestation of our newfound connection; my heart was sending signals to the vomiting centre in my brain (there is one, seriously). Years later when I had developed a better understanding of physiological responses, I worked out it was the same feeling I get with jet lag: as night flips to day, so too a hypodermic rush into a life with love. You are a million miles from take-off, upside down in the drop zone.

  I walked into the kitchen. Tod was standing at the table, and Rachel sat opposite him. She looked at me like it was any other day: same place, my existence an ongoing irrelevance.

  ‘You look like shit,’ she said.

  I must have stared at her for a while because she told me to fuck off and Tod flicked my cheek. I couldn’t even eat his three-cheese omelette. I remember turning around and walking out of the kitchen with the thought: This is not going to be good for me. Cease now. The further I got away from her it seemed feasible—that I could back-step out of this hopeless, unrequited nausea. I passed Alex in the dance room on the way to class. He was alone, sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees and his eyes closed. When I tapped, he looked up.

  ‘You coming?’ I asked.

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been told,’ I said. ‘You coming?’

  ‘Nah,’ he replied. I was starting to work with his signals, when he needed to be left alone. It didn’t mean I liked them, but I had other things on my mind. As soon as I got to the classroom, there was Rachel, two desks across and being stared down by Grace, and I was back in my own bilious fog. For relief, I tried to focus on Helen K’s chest as she told one of her weird tales: Garuda, born to a mother who was a slave to a thousand snakes. The picture was some kind of humanoid bird; I just took a glance at it before turning my eyes back to Helen’s wondrous freckly cleavage, but the sad fact was I couldn’t smell her anymore. As though she’d caught on to that, what was happening with me, her eyes filled with a gentle pity.

  As for the nausea, the fog, it settled over the next few days into something milder, like the feeling you get sliding down from an amphetamine high, about midway from the peak. On the next field trip I managed to stay a decent distance behind Rachel, and to wait at the rock where I met my goat while she got herself into the water. Mercifully she wasn’t floating face up when I waded in; she was moving around with half her face under the water, her eyes unblinking, a crocodile.

  I was so hard it hurt. That had never happened to me in cold water before.

  Meanwhile, my sessions with PW continued.

  We had started on magnetism—the observations: poles repelling and attracting. He was stepping through the physical laws when he saw that I was getting impatient. Even then I was always keen to skip through the laws to get to the abstraction. He understood that, of course, and empathised. PW liked to use the word ‘beautiful’ when it came to the numbers—the axioms, theories, algorithms—‘beautiful’ or ‘very elegant’ or ‘grand’ or, my favourite, ‘the magnificent edifice of mathematics’. The reverence was just the fact of the matter, always delivered deadpan, no particular emphasis. In the same way he would occasionally slip in his spin on the meaning of everything. Intonation gave you no clue. All the while he would remain his seclusive self and yet some days, somehow, he’d climb inside my head and turn the light on.

  Like this one day.

  Reducing information on my tablet into whiteboard dot points, his heading was Magnetic Monopoles and the content was there are none. Next: the magnetic flux through a closed surface. Content: zero. I was trying to get my brain around it when he stopped.

  ‘Before we complicate things too much,’ he said, ‘might we backtrack…’ There was no question mark but still he waited for my assent. ‘What sits behind the physical laws,’ he went on, ‘are your own innate perceptions. The word is “primordial”.’ He lingered on this word as though someone had flicked his slow-motion switch; he did this sometimes—I assumed when he liked the sound of something. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  I did not.

  ‘It is what is built into your brain: your instinctive sense of space, distance, motion…When you put your hand out to touch something, you know when to stop. When you bounce a rubber ball, you know the amount of force to exert. Since you entered the world, there has been a regularity of occurrence. You have interpreted it. You have innate cognitive mechanisms and over the course of your life they have developed a colossal internal database. As we learn, we are tapping into that, into our primordial knowledge. You know it, you just don’t know you know it.’

  He wanted me to nod along. ‘But I am not a magnet,’ I said.

  He countered with the electromagnetic fields emanating from my brain. I never won with him.

  There had been a regularity of occurrences over the course of my life, that was true. You only needed to look at the key events on my timeline, the tenants, all three: different versions of the same thing.

  I don’t remember a lot about Josh but my sense is he was the pick (if you had to pick). He took us to the beach once (first wave). I remember Mary walking on the sand with the grey ocean behind her; she was laughing because her curls kept blowing over her face. Some time after that the kitchen got smashed up and he gashed her arm with the scissors. Next came Gary. He asked to borrow ten bucks and she said she didn’t have it which he said was a lie and he shoved her onto the floor. A shove, and I remember thinking it was better than Josh, better than a gash. But it got worse after that, banging and screaming and bruises, all outside my door. Then Mary laughed at him at breakfast because he liked Glenn Campbell and he punched her in the face and I charged him down and he fell and hit his head on the corner of the table and I tried to run but he grabbed my foot and dragged me back and Mary jumped on him and the blood from her nose dripped on my face and all over the muddy carpet, his blood, her blood…I copped a whack in the ear and my loose tooth got looser. It was him on top of Mary, holding her down with his fist up behind his head ready to swing, and I was pummelling him and he spun around and somehow had us both pinned, both of us crying and howling, and in the middle of all of it I heard the song. It was about the lineman searching for something in the sun.

  Gary must have heard it too. He just stopped and let go. Sat back against the couch and said, ‘Oh fuck this.’

  I told him to ‘fuck off out of here’ and Mary didn’t tell me not to swear. He said it was a perfect song. He didn’t fuck off for a fair while. I should never have told him to go, because then there was Brian.

  And now he is part of my database.

  My primordial knowledge.

  I remember later lying in the courtyard and thinking about what PW had
said in the lesson that day, trying to work out what he was telling me, the phrases rolling around inside my head: innate cognitive mechanisms, your internal database…our primordial knowledge. In the end I concluded it was something simple. I think what he was trying to tell me is: ‘Feel your way.’

  Personal Health and Development 1.2

  When I headed into my next session with Dr J, Greg was at the desk in the waiting room, ready to take my height and weight.

  I had been at the School nine weeks ‘to the day’, he announced in a marvelling-at-time-passing way. In between measurements there was an awkward level of attempted eye contact, like he wanted to take a bite of me. I hadn’t warmed to Greg; I didn’t see much of him, but I still wanted to head-butt him when I did. It wasn’t like a snapping thing, just an instant physical revulsion. I’m not suggesting I had some kind of crystal ball, but I sensed something. That’s as high as I can put it.

  I was glad to see Dr J signalling me at his door. Feeling pretty good about myself, I took my seat. I’d been here a couple of months. I had made a friend. I was in love. The curved corridors and the courtyard had become my habitat; the stretch of land between us and the waterhole the accepted confines of my universe. True, I had the lingering sense that these people were strangers with candy (every day I wondered who was watching this play out and for what purpose) but this was candy none of us had ever tasted before or were likely to taste again. The confines of this place were what kept us from our former lives; the confines were our freedom.

  Dr J didn’t ask for any kind of progress report. Instead, he went straight ahead and tossed the bomb: ‘Your mother has been in contact again; this time she has sent you an email.’

  As he poured us both some water, I said I didn’t really want to read it. He watched me, waited. Over the years I’d become good at not giving much away, but it was harder with the Doctor; his eyes circled my face, like he was taking a reading. When I didn’t budge, he leaned forward and cupped his chin with his hand. ‘Are you not curious to know what she said?’