‘You have a computer?’ I asked, surprised to see it.
‘Part of my contract,’ he said, without turning his head. His tone was flat.
‘Are you coming down?’
‘I won’t tonight,’ was his answer. I left it at that until later in the week when I knocked on his door again and we had another version of our conversation: I won’t tonight—Alex seated at his desk, this time with a different screensaver: a waterfall against a backdrop of dense jungle. (I later learned he changed it every morning, first thing, until he didn’t.)
During the day he seemed solid enough. He was a fan of the way Helen’s lessons were panning out: in place of the images we were now given pieces of music. She called them listening lessons. ‘The way you listen affects what you hear.’ No one argued. The first one was Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. As a start, she suggested we follow different instruments. The sisters rapidly (and somewhat freakishly, I thought) identified them all: three keyboards, an electric guitar, two basses, four drummers and a bass clarinet.
‘You hear that? The conga coming in there…’
Grace said it, but Imogen was the one to start banging her desk. And off we went…The intensity of their connection to the music was infectious, and they actively brought us along—all of us, Rachel included. (My sense was that the sisters had come out of a very tough playground themselves and were only now getting accustomed to the relative ease of this one.) During an explosion of trumpet around the thirteen-minute mark, Imogen took a hold of big Ben’s forearm and told him under her breath it was ‘fucking insane’. I think she was grabbing for the nearest thing to hold on for the ride, but Ben didn’t pull away and no one could disagree with the assessment. There was a lot to listen to, and a lot of ways to listen. In the last few minutes my heart was racing and I actually started to sweat. As for Alex, he sat back in his seat with arms folded behind his head. No one was required to speak and at no time did Helen state a purpose for what we were doing. I’d surmise now that if there was an underlying intention, it was to demonstrate that the cacophony in our sometimes-wondrous and often-scrambled brains was reflected nowhere better than in the greatest examples of the musical art form. We were being asked to find our rhythm.
Not long after that, Alex stopped coming to the games room for our sessions, so I stopped too, surprised at the hole that left in my day. And then there was the courtyard: a week or so of just me and Tod and it was losing its sheen.
I cut Tod off in the middle of his journey through the galactic clouds at the edge of the Milky Way (yes, I could see them, sort of), wriggled out of my sleeping bag, and went back to tap on Alex’s door.
Again, he was dressed and seated at his computer, only this time he hadn’t gone to the screensaver. He was watching a video. There was no sound, but when I went to speak his hand shot into the air to silence me and, without looking up, he gave me a simple directive: ‘Don’t come in here.’
It wasn’t just the message that was different; the voice was not recognisable to me. I don’t know how to explain that, only to say it was hollow, like an echo. Thinking Fuck this, I’ve had enough, I went to oblige by leaving, but reconsidered. If I leave, I won’t be back; he won’t be back—my thoughts went something like that, enough to flag to me how much I wanted him back and to make me turn around.
I wanted to see if he would look at me, so I edged nearer to the desk. His eyes were still glued to the video, the light flashing across his profile as it came into view. He made no effort to stop me. When I got close enough, I had to look twice at the footage to make out what it was. Low quality, black and white. A head…the head of a woman buried to her neck in sand, surrounded by men in flowing robes throwing rocks. It was a stoning. The woman wasn’t conscious, her head rolling back and forward as it was pummeled by the rocks. She wore a dark headscarf so it was only when the head rolled back that you caught a glimpse of the mash of blood that was her face.
The video ended. Alex looked up. His eyes were not hollow like the voice, but filled with pain. He had the look of someone in acute physical pain, as though his own head was in an invisible vice and if I spoke even a single word, the screws would turn, making it tighter, more unbearable.
Some part of that constituted the trigger for what happened next. In hindsight, of course, I do not put it forward as a proportionate response. Survivors have a very singular perspective, that is what I can say. The mire in Alex’s head was messing with everything, not the least of which was my first big win in this place (aside from the shower): our friendship. On a kill-or-be-killed level, the pain in his eyes and his apparent penchant for blood were a threat to me, and it was on that basis that I proceeded.
I know this ended up in the transcripts as confirmation of a previous diagnosis, but to me terms like ‘explosive’ and ‘uncontrollable’ miss a critical step, which is that there is a moment you re-enter, a familiarity in the surrounds—an acceptance that this is you and a rejection of the rest of it, the sham. You are back; all of you is back. Welcome back. Welcome. When you say it out loud it sounds textbook, trite, but here it is: it is a good place. There is a reason to return. We don’t snap or explode; we choose. We develop intentions.
What I did was this: I took hold of Alex’s chair and with all of my strength I threw him out of it onto the floor. When the chair landed between us, I kicked the backrest as hard as I could so that the whole thing lifted slightly, one of the legs catching the top of Alex’s ear as it torpedoed over him. The odd part, and what I remember most clearly, was that when he looked up at me again, there was something different in his eyes. Not the pain, not horror or rage, but something gentler. What was in his eyes as he lay there, head on the floor with a ripped and bleeding ear, was gratitude. I know that is what I saw because it fed me, bolstered me.
The demon that Dr J had talked about? I didn’t visualise it. I didn’t really know how big or how old it was. But I knew what charged through its veins, after the violence and before the self-loathing. Righteousness. People say they wonder how men can justify the horrors they do. Not me. It is a switch that some of us have: flick it and, for a brief and shining moment, we are soldiers in a holy war.
I left Alex and went to Rachel’s door. I stared at it for a moment before giving it a moderately hard kick and walked on. Next, I proceeded downstairs and looked through the glass at the fat kid talking to himself in the courtyard, and then made my way through the waiting room to the office of Dr J.
It felt bigger in the dark, cold. I walked to the computer at his desk, mainly because it was the single light source in the room. When I looked down at the screen I think I was half-expecting to see Alex’s video replaying, but that is not what I saw. Instead, shining out of the dark, the screen was split into twelve frames, twelve camera feeds.
Video surveillance, but not of us and not of this place. I scanned from frame to frame and saw no one and nowhere I knew: a group of boys playing handball in a fluoro-lit corridor, others lying on a concrete floor—it was daytime there, a white sky—and then there were classrooms, more kids in a kitchen, and on they went, each image numbered.
I clicked on a white arrow on the right of the screen and another twelve appeared, and again, until I got to number twenty-six. In the last frame two boys sat at a table painting a picture and ignoring a third boy standing in the corner behind them. He wore a yellow beanie that was too big for his head and he looked somehow misplaced, unreal, almost like a projection. He appeared younger than the other boys, not more than twelve or thirteen, and after a few seconds of me watching, he looked from the floor directly up at the camera, as though our eyes had locked. I had a weird sense there was a moment of mutual recognition, compounded when he stepped forward, raised his middle finger and mouthed a remarkably intelligible fuck you. After that he said something to the boys at the table and they flicked blue paint at his face.
Boy in corner: I later found the face etched in my memory. At the time, I didn’t pause to think any more about him, about an
y of them. Instead I stepped back into the centre of the room and I imagined my headphones were back on. I picked my track and followed the instruments every which way. And I did what I did; I did what I’d come to do.
Starting with the bookshelf and finishing with the computer that screened the boy in the beanie, I tore up the room.
When I was eleven, just before I finished primary school, we received an eviction notice due to damage to property. I was the one who opened the envelope. The public housing people always took a lot more interest in what was happening in our flat than the police did. That was in the equation for me early on, in terms of measuring impact: what gets a reaction—harm to property or harm to person? That was my takeaway.
Dr J had his own peculiar slant on the whole incident.
It got its share of pages in the transcripts. In the early hours of May 9, a student broke into the office…The inventory of damage: shelves of books destroyed, curtains shredded with scissors, the upholstery of two chairs slashed, water glasses smashed against the wall, a desk upturned, drawers turned out. A computer destroyed. They focused on the fact that even though they had CCTV footage of the perpetrator of the crime, the Doctor did not notify the police or the courts, and in fact appeared to have taken no action at all. From his perspective as my therapist, what were the Doctor’s thoughts on what I had done?
DR J: I had a number of thoughts, but if I were to pick one, in terms of my immediate reaction at the time, I would have to say that I found it helpful.
COUNSEL: Helpful? As in, time for a spring clean?
HIS HONOUR: If we could skip the sarcasm, Mr Byrne. DR J: I meant it was helpful in that Daniel was being up-front with me.
COUNSEL: Up-front?
DR J: Yes, clear in his message.
COUNSEL: I see, and what was that message?
DR J: This is me: that is what he was saying. Do we end it now, or do we continue?
COUNSEL: I can think of other interpretations, along the lines of ‘Take your school and your therapy and shove it’. How can you be sure that wasn’t his message to you?
DR J: The landscape. He didn’t touch it. There was a landscape photograph on the wall in between the paintings. The paintings were destroyed but the photograph was untouched…The reason I am sure is because I knew him. I knew what he was telling me. I couldn’t have been surer had he taken me by the throat and shouted the words into my face.
The fallout was not what I had expected.
At breakfast it was business as usual. Tod made buckwheat crepes with blueberries, and he’d started a green juice thing; it tasted like vomit but I drank it. Alex had a bandage on his ear, clocked up by everyone as a day in the life of a teenage self-mutilator. We headed to class, passing Greg in the corridor. Greg was rarely seen in the corridor, but there he was, his eyes locking onto mine for just a second before I looked away. I didn’t try to read it. I went to class, sat at my desk and waited.
Helen started as soon as Alex and I sat down—the rest of them already seated with their headsets, Rachel’s the only seat empty. We were about to embark on Mass in B Minor but first we needed to get through a couple of Latin phrases and some basics on tempo and metrics. The sisters’ know-it-all eyes glazed over, but the rest of us were working from a zero baseline, swiping through the screens, nodding our heads, taking in what we could. The last picture was an image of the man himself, Johann Sebastian. Helen talked about him for a bit, how he composed the mass over a lifetime until he started going blind.
That was where she was up to when Rachel appeared. She didn’t sit down but stood feet apart at the front of the room next to Helen and cast her raging amber eyes over each of our faces, her lips arched into a snarl. She was incandescent: magnificent.
To start, the voice and the language were strangely contained. ‘Who kicked my door?’
No one spoke. She gave us a full ten seconds. I looked to Helen K, expecting her to step in and override the interruption. She didn’t.
‘There is a dent,’ Rachel went on, less contained, then totally unleashed: ‘in my fucking door!’ The crescendo came in the echo of the initial question: ‘Who the F-U-C-K. Kicked. My. Door?’ The power of it wasn’t in the volume, it was in the sharpness of the consonants and the length of the pauses. The stringing out of each of the six words, so the rest of us were leaning forward in anticipation by the time she got to the end of it.
When she did, Helen K gave it a few moments and then, finally, stepped in. ‘Good morning, Rachel.’
Rachel didn’t respond; it was like she didn’t even hear it. My sense was that she’d be suspecting it was a sister, but her eyes glanced over both of them and settled on my face, the same eyes that had stared straight through me in her room, now fixed on mine, a tractor beam of truth.
I stood up.
She stepped forward. Between us there was just a few inches, and a heat like I had never felt before. Helen—bravely I thought—put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Can I suggest you two take this to the courtyard?’
And out Rachel spun in a reverse storm, me in train, my heart liquefying, pouring out through my ears and dribbling down the side of my head…As if I could have loved her any more.
The surrounds of the courtyard were on my side, her anger immediately diluted in the translucence of the amber autumn leaves, their dappled shadows on the mossy concrete, the soft chorus of bugs and birds. She sat down on the bench between the trees. When I sat next to her, she swung her legs over so that we were facing opposite directions. I stole a glance at her profile, and saw there was a tear on her cheek, a perfect single teardrop like it had been drawn onto the skin.
‘Oh fuck, don’t cry. I’m sorry…’
‘I am not crying you fuck-knuckle,’ she said, flicking the tear away. She did call me a fuck-knuckle. I am not making that up. ‘Stop staring at me…Why do you stare at me all the time?’
There was my opening. I wanted to tell her the truth and I wanted her to tell me about the wax and the sun and where the fire came from and why the father liked him, liked who? I wanted to be her cure, and I wanted her to be mine. That is why I kicked her door. Instead, I was staring at the formwork of the building and doing my numbers. (Between storeys there were 3 rows divided into sections, each with a varying number of plugged holes, like domino pieces but without obvious pattern: 4, 7, 9, 3…)
‘I don’t,’ I eventually said. And when she turned to face me, and cocked her head: ‘Okay, I do. But I…’
Her eyes softened. ‘It’s a bit psycho, that’s all. You’re dealing with real people here. Do you even get that?’
The question stopped me. There was a familiarity in it, a knowledge of me she didn’t have; only somehow she did, and somehow I knew that already.
‘Yep, sure,’ I said, ‘yeah, sorry. I’ll stop.’ Or at least I meant to say something to that effect; I’m not sure if it came out as actual words. The fact she was still there beside me had triggered an acute stress response that seemed to momentarily suction the saliva to the back of my throat and paralyse the base of my tongue. Unable to keep looking at her, I could see in the corner of my eye that she was nodding. Overwhelmed by the kindness of that simple movement, I felt I owed her the truth, or at least a subsection of it.
I regathered. ‘I sat outside your door one night when I couldn’t sleep, and I heard you talking…’
She stiffened, said nothing. When I turned to her she had screwed up her eyes; now she dropped her face into both hands. After a minute or so she raised it up again. ‘Why did you kick my door?’
‘Dunno. It was there.’ That is what I came up with. It made her laugh, more than was probably warranted but I laughed too and it felt like the right response. I was back staring at the formwork. Getting the holes to a total and section average gave me a place to look other than her face, and made me brave enough to get to the next bit.
‘We come out here at night. They give us sleeping bags,’ I said. ‘I might get kicked out of here,’ (it was about fift
y-fifty, I thought) ‘but if I don’t, if I stay, one night you could come out too.’
You could come out too. There, I’d done it; I’d asked her.
That was when I noticed Greg standing in the corridor, again, watching me. I thought that meant curtains: he was taking me to pack my bag. Suddenly it felt like the final, precious minutes, so I launched ahead.
‘I kicked your door because I want to know what happened to you.’
What I saw in her eyes in that moment was first a flash of terror and then something hard-shelled and slow-moving. I felt it, our connected inner demon. Or so I thought.
‘You have your own shit, Daniel,’ she said. ‘You keep yours; I’ll keep mine.’
I took it as a no. But even in that, I misread her.
Dr J wasn’t wrong in what he told the inquiry, but nor was it the whole story. In tearing up his office I was laying down the gauntlet, no question, but there was despair in it, too. That I had been duped into thinking a connection could count for something, that this was a place that could hold us, that we could be transported by a night sky: Alex’s face as he watched that scene in the dark had made a mockery of all that. The act of vandalism was my ejector-seat button, knowing he could either watch me hurtle out of the cockpit or override the controls: take me as I was. I expected that I’d get at least an indication over the next few days, but there was nothing. It wasn’t until the time of my weekly appointment that Greg came into class and handed me a note. He didn’t make much of an effort to disguise his disdain for me these days. The skulking in the corridors had continued, every morning between the kitchen and class. Tod never passed him without a greeting.
‘Looking good, Greg,’ ‘You take it easy, Greg,’ ‘Top of the morning to you, Greg.’ To which Greg gave a move-on head-flick. I wasn’t that bothered. I never figured Greg to matter much.
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