The note said:
Notice of Rescheduling/Cancellation
On behalf of: Dr J
Re: today’s session.
Reason: minor repair works in progress.
On the next outing, each of us wandered at our own pace into the bush. I didn’t want to be at the waterhole so I walked past it, further up the creek to a part where I’d never been. I could see the fence where the neighbouring property started. It was a way off, on the other side of a rough paddock full of dips and boulders, the ground a blanket of woody weeds and thistles. I thought I saw the goat on the other side of a blackberry bush so I continued on, the swards of thistles piercing through my socks. When I reached the bush the goat wasn’t there, but I heard a dog barking. I could see a shed on the property now, still in the distance, and then I saw the dog, and all of a sudden I became aware of all the space around me and I felt small like the dog in the distance but as light as air. The ground was uneven but it didn’t seem to matter how I walked; I didn’t stumble or trip. As I neared the fence I could see a quad bike at the shed door and, sitting on the bike, a small boy with a helmet that looked way too big compared with his body. I heard the bike start and watched him ride away, the dog chasing the bike. There were trees behind the shed so I couldn’t see where they went—a house somewhere, I guessed, or to feed the goats.
As the thistles began to dig into my ankles I thought of Mary and her messages, and I felt in my pocket for the Doctor’s note, the paper wearing thin in my fingers, the reason for our cancelled meeting: minor repair works in progress. The words imprinted the way some words do, so that they come back later at unexpected moments. (In this case many years later, after my first and worst marital screw-up: I ventured into therapy in search of an explanation for my unexplained behaviour and some reassuring words about rock-bottom and redemption. When nothing hit the mark and I cancelled all further appointments, the only real salve I came up with was that phrase: minor repair works in progress.)
There was the dent in his wall and his torn curtains—and then there was me, DG, school student, peddler of prescribed and illicit substances. Maybe he just meant the curtains were being replaced, but that isn’t how I read it. Minor repairs. The Doctor was a man playing a strange game, I don’t argue that, but still: there was his ability to pull us back when we tottered on the brink, to intuit what each of us needed to hear, even if just a few words.
Our session, when it finally came, was a bit all over the place.
The office smelled of fresh paint; the furniture had been repaired or replaced, the computer upgraded. I was braced for him to lay into me, ready to counterattack with a demand for answers on the twenty-six videos and whatever the fuck was going on with the boy in the yellow beanie, but there was no reference to my solo visit. He said there was something he’d missed on my school records about my being absent from my last exams. ‘For medical reasons.’
I nodded. ‘My hand.’
Four months before coming to the School, I punched a wall and fractured the fourth metacarpus in my right hand. The incident didn’t happen at school, I told him; it was on my record only because I couldn’t sit the tests.
‘You were at home?’
‘Yep.’
‘Which wall?’
‘Bathroom.’
It was a repeat break. A few months earlier, same wall, same bone. I didn’t tell him that, and he didn’t press for details. Instead he asked me about my classes and the outing. He wasn’t troubled that I’d walked beyond the waterhole and was pleased with the reports from PW about our tutorials.
‘Do you know what he told me last week? He told me that his university students would struggle with concepts that you are picking up in a single class.’
He could see my surprise and seemed to be pondering that when he spoke again: ‘I wish we could show you.’
‘Show me what?’
He smiled. ‘Make you understand.’
Quite suddenly then he got up out of his seat and walked over to the undamaged photograph clinging to the otherwise empty wall. He pointed at the signature in the bottom left-hand corner of the print.
‘Let me tell you something about him, this photographer,’ he said. ‘He was a very successful and famous man. As a child, he had no time for lessons or for schoolyard games. His only interest was nature.’ He stared for a while at the photograph, as did I, the strange bracken in the water like a dark portal to what lay beneath the quiet surface. ‘Do you know what his teachers said about him? They said he was hyperactive, that he couldn’t pay attention. He was expelled from seven schools. And then one day his father gave him a camera, and that was that. The pursuit of beauty, the love of stones and water. And some of the greatest photographs ever taken…’ His voice trickled off as he turned back to me and said he thought that was enough for today.
At the door I stopped. It felt like the right time to raise something that would fall outside the bounds of a normal session, outside the terms of our contract. I had just demolished his office without any apparent repercussion. I felt I was on safe ground.
‘You need to help Alex,’ I said.
‘I hope I am helping Alex.’
‘Well, you’re not. He’s worse.’
‘He is suffering, it is clear.’
‘There must be some kind of medication…’
‘Really? What would you advise?’
He was making light of it. I tried to remain calm. To demonstrate the seriousness, I told him about the video I’d found Alex watching, sitting in the dark of his room. He looked at me and poured himself more water.
‘Alex is saddened by the state of things,’ he said.
It was just a tiny opening but it seemed to me a significant one, forming a precedent to talk about the other students. He wasn’t meant to; we weren’t meant to—even then I knew that—and for that reason it felt to me like a glittering prize.
‘He is saddened by the state of things,’ he repeated. ‘Others turn away, or just don’t look. He looks. It isn’t an illness, Daniel. There are no pills for it.’
I thought about what he was saying, the sense in it, and then the nonsense. ‘So you just do nothing?’
Again, he hesitated. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ he eventually said. ‘You ask him what we are doing—what he is doing—and if he tells you, come back then and we’ll talk about what help he needs.’
I didn’t see Alex again that day. He wasn’t at dinner or in the courtyard for the midnight session. I was late, and when I crawled into my sleeping bag Tod’s ‘hi’ was more a sigh of relief than a spoken word. He didn’t ask if I wanted to know what he’d eaten today. Instead, in a more tentative voice he said he’d been reading about black holes.
‘There’s millions of them and some are a billion times bigger than the sun,’ he said, ‘but you can’t see them.’
And that was all, the immensity of his effort to contain further commentary weighing in the air between us with the smell of his sweat and the screeching of distant bats. Later he told me he’d been doing work on his lunar breath—old air out, released, whatever—but the silence was accepted. I was a solo viewer, eyes pinned open to form a screen, a frame for a sky full of everything I could not see.
It took just a few seconds for the outer rim to blur and send my jumbled mind flicking between images—As between the School and DG: from the back seat of the van all the way to the building at the top of the driveway, the curved glass and the pear trees and the shower and the first haze of steam; Tod on his good egg days and his bad egg days, Helen K and her freckled hollow…the boy with the bulbous growth, and the shape-changing man…If he suffered as much as he did, should he die? Should Sado have been let to live? All the clues made up of cosmic dust: Rachel (hallelujah) in the waterhole—the halo of hair, and the rest of her…Alex and his bird-covered chest—out on his limb and gorging on his own bacteria, PW bouncing a handball, the Doctor leaning in to tell me he was wrong, the dog and the boy in the distance. And right now,
whatever the scenes playing out upstairs in the bedrooms of Alex and Rachel, a corpse in the stony earth, wax melting in the fire of the sun, his gratitude, her blazing eyes and her beautiful rage.
For a boy whose survival had been dependent on his separateness, after a period of just twelve weeks I was now in their grip, treading the same biosphere, the same battleground. Coded into my brain was a different set of messages and key responses. There is a regularity of occurrence that forms our primordial perceptions; as I stared up I was suddenly conscious that the regularity had been disrupted, my perceptions altered. Alex and Rachel had each in their own way entered my inner orbit and yet remained profoundly out of reach. And even further still, there at the edge of the dimmest region, lay a speck of antimatter—a third character at the edge of the stage, the opposite of everything, wearing a mask with eyes like mine, like a goat…
I wish we could show you, the Doctor had said.
I wish you could too.
And then they did.
Introduction to Computational Neurobiology
It sounded simple when the Doctor said it: You ask him what we are doing.
Over the next few days I started framing the question, but every time I got near Alex, it jumbled with a bunch of reasons not to ask. His eyes were gooey, and not just in a sad way. We thought it was conjunctivitis but turned out it was an infected tear duct. He tried to clean it up but at breakfast there was still a pearly film over the bottom half of his pupil and yellow gunk caked in his eyelashes. Rachel said it was disgusting and could be contagious and he should go back to his room. For me, it just heightened his weakness rating, and my aversion to hard questions in case they made him cry.
And: who was I to ask?
And: maybe I didn’t want to know.
And (of course): I got distracted by other things.
When I came in for my next lesson, PW was sitting straight-backed at one of the desks. In spite of his colourless demeanour, he affected a series of well-worn retro tie-dye T-shirts featuring designs and decals ranging from iconic to kitsch—Michael Jackson, Darth Vader, Malibu sunsets, an acid house smiley face that I thought was a Pac-Man. For a minute, in the beginning, I thought he was gay, but he didn’t feel gay, and I didn’t dwell on it. Today it was a V-neck Snoopy in shades of purple and fluoro blue. Wearing a headset plugged into my tablet, he continued to tap and swipe as I sat down next to him, and then cleared the screen and removed the headset.
‘Something different today,’ he said. ‘You ever meditate?’
Do I look like someone who meditates?
He saw my lip curl but was undeterred, tilting his head and staring at me too long like he was processing a new data entry. I knew what the others meant about PW, but I saw something like the way a dog stares when it wants to be part of the human race. ‘Or not,’ he said, ‘not yet…I’ll lead in.’
I shrugged.
‘Let’s make the links.’
Whatever.
‘A couple of weeks ago we were talking about magnetism and electrical currents, and we got on to the electromagnetic activity in the brain. You remember that?’
‘Sure.’
He did the recap thing at the beginning of every lesson, reeled off a set of facts and paused when he wanted me to fill in the word:
‘So, the human brain contains about a billion…’
‘Neurons.’
‘And the neurons are electrically charged by…’
‘Ions.’
Sometimes he threw in an oddball like: ‘Last Monday I was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of…’ ‘Wonder Woman.’ I had a jackpot memory, he said (deadpan; the same way he’d break the news if I had an inoperable tumour).
‘What it means for us is that we can record activity, neural oscillations, better known as…’
‘Brainwaves,’ I interjected. He hadn’t even told me that.
‘That’s right…Through a technique called EEG. Heard of it?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
His tone changed at that point. He paused, weighing up what should come next, then when he spoke it was tentative, like he was trying to sell me something without being exactly sure of the product. ‘It is limited, what we can do. We can observe different levels of activity, create cluster maps; but we need to know the source. We have only really just started to do that, develop the algorithms. We’ve come a fair way with sleep stages…’ He tilted his head again, gauging my reaction. ‘You with me?’
I nodded. ‘Sort of.’
He nodded back. ‘You can imagine the complexity,’ he said. ‘The last algorithm to determine the signal location of a brainwave was half a million lines long—’ He broke off into some of the mathematical concepts for a while, then stopped himself mid-sentence and picked up the headset. ‘May I?’
I assumed he was going to put it on, but instead he reached over to me (he had a lemony smell) and placed them on my head, pressing gently on the forehead and behind my ears. Nothing went inside my ears; there was just the headband.
‘Where are the earpieces?’
‘You don’t need them.’
‘So how will I listen?’
‘You’re not listening. Watch.’ He plugged it into the laptop. And then tentative again: ‘Its function’s not audio. It’s biofeedback.’
He was observing me to see if I understood, as he would have if he’d been explaining trigonometry. When my face remained blank he turned his attention back to the computer, pushed a few keys. After a minute or two he said, ‘Not quite,’ and then: ‘Yes, there you are!’ It was language I’d heard before, from Helen. Hold off, not quite there yet, okay, there you are…
On the black screen there appeared a series of animated data visualisations. The first was a bar graph, separated into different bands of fluoro colours labelled theta, alpha, beta, delta and gamma, each bar in constant flux. He pointed his marker to it, and he tapped his hands on the desk as though mimicking a drum roll.
‘Meet your brainwaves.’
When I say drum roll I mean just tap-tap-tap. This was all very calm and careful and normal. If they were after someone to deliver this new information without causing alarm, PW was their guy.
I was only now starting to twig. Stage one in the penny dropping: there you are. The headset—this is me, my brain—the different bands rising and falling, and the larger graph—a circular shape with ten axis points representing the same bands, from high to low, the chart constantly morphing in colour and shape.
This thing on my head is monitoring my brainwaves.
‘It measures the voltage intensity and fluctuations. The software is breaking down the millions of neural signals according to their cycles per second.’
He gave me a minute to take it in, looking relieved when eventually I came up with a question. ‘So what does it mean?’
‘They represent the levels of activity, the different frequencies. Twenty words or less: beta has the fastest frequency, delta is your deep sleep; alpha and theta are somewhere in between.’
‘They’re all going at the same time.’
‘That’s right. There are several patterns interacting. The predominance of one pretty much determines your state of mind.’
It took a while, and even then there wasn’t a lot to my response: ‘Out of control…’ I said.
He took it literally. ‘Not really.’ And he dived into an explanation of how different areas of the brain emit different signals. ‘That’s where the algorithms come in, trying to locate the source. Once we know that, we can find ways to better interpret the meaning. There are certain structures, in the subcortical region—’ He pulled up the brain map and circled a section with his finger. ‘There are well-known patterns we can detect here. But, like I said, it is limited, what we understand about the neural sources. We know beta is left hemisphere and theta is right, but it is as broad as that.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘There are people working on it.’
By now his voice had faded into a background noise. I didn’t real
ly understand what any of it meant, but already I was somewhere else, mesmerised by the dancing rainbow on the screen.
PW had to tap my arm to snap me out of it. ‘So try doing something,’ he said. ‘See what happens.’
‘Like what?’
Returning to his opening play: ‘Meditating is a good one.’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t know how to do that. Can we do something else?’
‘Sure. Focus on something, an object…’ He put his water bottle in front of the computer.
‘You want me to think about the bottle?’
He shrugged. I didn’t get the sense he had any real plan. ‘As best you can.’
I stared at the bottle trying to keep one eye on the screen. On the bar graph my beta shot up and the circular shape pulled to one side and flatlined.
‘Is that bad?’
‘No, it means you’re focused.’
‘So that’s good? That’s what you wanted me to do.’
‘Well, you are hi-beta.’
‘So that’s…not good.’
‘It indicates a state of agitation. If it is persistent, it isn’t good. It is a stress response. A stress hormone is flooding your brain.’
‘So that’s bad.’
He shrugged. ‘It is notable, that thinking about a water bottle brought it on. The theory of brain plasticity is that there are things they can do, to tune, reset….’ He saw me stiffen. The shape blew out into a sort of starfish. ‘That’s not what this is about. This is about you being able to observe it and get a better understanding. That is all.’
To prove it he moved back to the maths. ‘Let’s talk about the algorithm. If we go back to the ionic currents,’ he minimised the screen and turned to the brain map on the whiteboard, ‘here, in the frontal lobe…’
And there was the shift: just like that, I thought, from lab rat back to student. I started taking off the headset. He stopped me.
‘You can leave them on, if that’s okay.’
I obliged, wearing my headset as we worked on the whiteboard. It was only then that the realisation came. Stage two, the bigger picture, our story here at the School: we weren’t watching my brainwaves anymore, but this thing was still on my head and someone else was watching, or recording. Someone sitting at a different interface, in a different room. I thought back to the day I first put the headset on. Noise-blocking, surround sound, Tod had whispered. And then just the pretty noises that switched off once the images started. Later there were the video games and the music, so it seemed to come with a legitimate purpose. But that was not the purpose, not the music or the games. The function isn’t audio. It is biofeedback. And I was the bio; we all were. We were dutifully putting on our hi-tech headsets, because what teenager wouldn’t, and—
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