I started to put it into words. ‘Whenever we wore them, whenever we wear them…’ He waited for me to finish my thought, a glimmer in his eyes urging me on. (I am not really sure why, but through all this, there was never a minute I didn’t feel that that PW was on my side.) ‘Whenever we wear them,’ I repeated, as it sank in, ‘we are being tracked.’
He nodded. ‘OMR,’ he said. ‘Observe, monitor, record.’
Thinking on this now, I will generalise and say that adolescents have very particular concerns with privacy: lay a finger on their phone and they’ll rip your head off; covertly track the inner machinations of their mind, and they’re cool with it. In questioning PW as the plot revealed itself (or as he revealed it to me), the feeling was more excitement than anger—excitement that I was the one uncovering a hidden truth. We all knew there was one; but I was getting the scoop. And it fitted with my narrative, or at least I could work it in: handpicked youth, handpicked brains…I accepted it all without prodding for purpose—that wasn’t my priority. This was: ‘Are you showing the others?’
‘No.’
And the big question: ‘Why me?’
He took a while on this one. ‘He asked me to.’
I don’t have to tell you how good this made me feel. Me. Handpicked out of the handpicked. My next question was more just to test the boundaries. ‘What if I tell them?’
‘You mean what would happen to you?’ He looked away; the sense I got at this point was that this was very much someone else’s game and someone else’s rules. ‘You’d have to look at your contract.’
And of course, there lay the answer. I couldn’t discuss my treatment: as between the School and DG, and as such it must remain. I’d had my warning, so it would mean I was out, once and for all. I had a flash of home, and then I looked around the room, envisioned beyond the door and through the curved corridors: all this for my silence. And what I thought was, open and shut case. Fair trade.
I wish we could show you.
For the weeks that followed I met with PW and put on my headset and watched as the software broke down the millions of neural signals according to their cycles per second. He took me through the basic science of wave propagation and psycho-acoustics and I got to know my patterns—when I blinked, when I focused on a thought or tried to clear my mind of them, and finally I agreed to give it a go: to meditate myself out of hi-beta. PW knew more than he’d let on, guiding me with chakra points ‘like mental stepping stones’.
‘Chakra points. You buy that shit?’
He shrugged. ‘I think it’s useful for things like this. You see that?’ he said, pointing to the alpha jumping up and down. ‘That is spontaneous wandering.’
‘That’s bad…’
‘No, it is a default activity. It is good. It processes your experience. You need to do that.’
My issue was when I had too much beta. I went beyond hi-beta, PW said, into hyper-beta (the resting state of paranoid schizophrenics, I later learned).
‘You should see what happened when you got to the end of Miles Davis.’ The others went into low alpha, but me, I surged into hyper-beta. He almost smiled then. ‘It’s like you were wrestling every bar of it to the ground.’ (I remembered finding the last part a struggle.)
That brought me to the question: ‘So…when I lose it? I mean like lose it…’
He nodded. ‘Any kind of explosive behaviour, sure, we’d see a beta spike. Any kind of over-arousal, hyper-alertness…But remember we see the same kind of spike with complex thinking. It isn’t all negative. If we could track the brains of the dead geniuses we’d see a trail of hi-beta. Isaac Newton, massive rage issues.’
‘Kurt Cobain,’ I added.
He nodded. ‘Kurt too.’
‘What about this here?’ I asked. It was the last of the band frequencies, a lime green that barely registered.
‘Gamma.’
He explained the deal with gamma: it is so high we can barely detect it and we don’t know what part of the brain it is from or how it’s generated. Some even question its existence. ‘It is a bit of a Mecca of brainwaves.’
I had no ambitions of Mecca. I was just happy to have my own label. I was a beta-boy. That gave me plenty to focus on, playing through the events of the last few weeks and pinpointing my beta bursts—the obvious ones: in the corridor with Greg, my midnight session in the Doctor’s office. But others too. Bush-bashing on the first field trip, sitting outside Rachel’s door, moving wooden animals around an imaginary stage, and yeah, Miles Davis… All those times the heart started beating faster and I could feel it moving, gravitating, some kind of energy, good or bad, good and bad…the buzz in the brain, the electric charge. Every adrenaline rush, every shower session, the beginning of a berserko: hi-beta, hyper-beta—whichever way, I had too much. In hindsight, of course, it raises more questions than it answers. But give me a sixteen-year-old who delves deeper into their motivations than the pattern of their brainwaves and I’ll eat my laptop.
The short of it was there was a profound and liberating simplicity to it. Beta was the reason I did what I did—beta was the reason I was me.
For the next few weeks, a load was lifted. That was my initial takeaway from the meet and greet with my brainwaves: I was off the hook. It was hands down the best tick-a-box diagnosis I’d ever had, because this one I had seen for myself. There was the odd day when I didn’t have enough of it, when I dipped into the mental fog (Ritalin is all about the beta boost). But whichever direction I moved—morphing according to voltage—I noted it and brought it back to my sessions with PW.
I jumped in too deep. When I should have been in the now of alpha, I was assessing oscillations. It was all I am experiencing the release of neurotransmitters. I am in the drop zone. Never just I am.
And then it started slipping out in conversation.
In the courtyard: ‘Way too much talk, Tod—hi-beta…’
‘What the fuck?’
I didn’t realise I’d said it. ‘Nothing.’
My new world started leaking through into my old one. Even without the headset, I started visualising the activity, estimating the amplitude. Like the separation between church and state, there is a sound structural reason to let the executive centre do its thing. Observe, record, interpret and decode, all that, but do it at a distance. The self-monitoring started to swallow me up. When I put the headset on, it was like I could hear it, the infrasound.
Looking back on it now, I see it was an early warning sign of what happens when a guy like me messes with different levels of consciousness. The end of my first year of university, in a cannabis-induced rut, I met a woman called Fiona who suggested that I keep a notebook by my bed and write down my dreams every morning. Because I very much wanted to get into Fiona’s pants, I dutifully did that, my regular reports back to her providing a justification for ongoing contact. Day by day I remembered my dreams with increasing clarity, able to scribe page after page of stuff and nonsense from the garbage pit of my subconscious. Then a strange thing happened. The dreams started to appear throughout the day—like visions, mundane and outlandish—as though a portal had been opened and a black, viscous substance was seeping through into my only sunlit place. In a perplexing blurring, I began to question whether memories were dreams or dreams were memories, until day seven when I started babbling like a garbled mess and Fiona stopped taking my calls. I never even copped a feel. (I probably don’t need to paint a picture of my psychedelic bender with a bucket of magic mushrooms in the summer of that same year.)
Anyhow, it was something akin to what happened with me and my brainwaves. A portal leakage. I got too close. Staring up at the night sky I felt myself putting beta to bed, slipping into the hypnagogic drumbeat of delta, queasy on the crest of a slow-motion undulation…My chakra points vaporised in the border zone, leaving just the echo of a mantra:
I am an ocean…I am an ocean…I am an ocean.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Tod staring. I’d done it again.
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He reached over to pat my hand. ‘Sure, why not?’ Even on the question of sanity, he was prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘I am an ocean too.’
Suffice to say, by the end of a six-week intensive with my brainwaves—in spite of the answers they offered—I was feeling a bit suffocated. They were the invisible new friend sitting on my shoulder; or, in this case, a group of semi-clad back-up singers lounging against the cushion of my meninges. Like any relationship, things had been great in the beginning, fresh and new, but it turned out there was no off button. First with Tod, then with Alex and even Rachel, for a couple of weeks I was just watching people’s lips move while the nag in my brain jumped up and down: ‘Look at me, look at me…’ I even gave up a shower session to sit cross-legged on my mat and try to find a way to get past my root chakra, the pelvic plexus.
I needed space. PW picked up on it. We stopped looking at the charts and graphs, and moved away from anything to do with oscillations and waves.
‘I think we need to put it in perspective.’
It was a sound strategy: pick a subject to show me and my brainwaves up for what we really amounted to: an infinitesimal speck in the universe. Physical cosmology. He launched straight into it, pulling up an image of the farthest galaxies, each dot of light an individual galaxy some ten billion years old. He grounded us down in particle physics and the Big Bang and the mystery of dark energy and we went gangbusters, safely fumbling from the basic ratios through to equations denoting the cosmological constant and the expansion of the universe…It wasn’t a great leap to get back to where we started (from the vibrations in the fabric of space-time to my own mind-body vibrations) but it was the circuit-breaker I needed. Me and my brainwaves back on level ground.
There was just one thing that kept niggling, whenever I put the headphones on: the fact that someone, somewhere, was watching, recording, making judgment.
For that I came up with my own solution.
Up until this point, Dr J and I had largely stepped around the subject of my brainwaves. When I brought it up after PW’s big reveal, he had been interested in my reaction and said we could incorporate it into our ‘work’. When I then resisted coming back to the ‘work’, i.e. the task of recreating my fucked-up childhood on the imaginary stage, he asked me to consider my reaction: ‘Imagine the headset is on. What would the graph tell you?’
‘You watch it?’ I asked. ‘The graph?’
He shook his head. ‘I get reports.’
He talked about my ‘range’, and my ‘little peaks of theta’. During video games there was a distinct levelling out in fluctuations and when I listened to the Beach Boys I sat on the alpha-delta cusp for eleven seconds. But he didn’t want to dwell on my brainwaves. He didn’t want us to go too far ‘off course’. The course for him was still the same. We were up to Brian.
He held firm.
‘What happened, what he did…I want to bring it a bit closer to the surface.’
I thought of the old western movies, a knife plunged into the gut of a staggering cowboy, and I remembered watching them and thinking—just pull it out. But you can’t. You can’t just pull it out, because it might well kill you. And I wondered now if it was worth the risk, and I felt that longing that I felt all my life: you would do it if someone could just tell you it will be all right.
I was trying to read that into his words when he suggested a way forward. ‘Let’s come at it another way: you be Mary.’
More out of exhaustion than anything I sat back down. I hadn’t been Mary before. I let him go. He asked her the same questions and I gave him answers or I just thought them to myself:
Horoscopes. David Attenborough. Madonna. Yum cha.
Just meet him, baby. He’s different. He was; Brian was different. He looked better, sounded better. He bought her a necklace and took us to laser skirmish. He didn’t use; he didn’t even drink. His dad had overdosed in prison. He told the story and Mary cried. That poor little guy…He started staying over that night, then he brought his things. I asked him where he lived and he said he was between places. There was a bend in his smile but she didn’t see it. She wanted to believe; so did I. It didn’t start with a push or a cut and there was never any sorry or any crawling back. He made her crawl. And I watched on. He lived with us for eleven days.
And the third question. The day he left. ‘You’re in the flat… Where is he? How do you feel about him now?’
‘That’s two questions,’ I said. ‘He’s in the kitchen.’ And we left it at that.
It was my turn.
‘The brainwaves: why did you tell me?’ Everything seemed suddenly to hinge on it. My place, my existence here, my survival… Why me?
‘You look concerned,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t be. Trial and test, that’s all.’ Then came a broad smile. ‘Here’s something: your measurements. I have an explanation for that appetite of yours. In just over two months you have grown 3.6 centimetres.’
He could see he had my interest, and he could see that I was pleased. But it wasn’t just measurements I needed.
‘I want a report,’ I said. ‘Like you get. I don’t want to watch the graphs anymore. But I want the report. I want to see what you all see.’ When he hesitated, I pointed to the contract on the table. ‘It’s in there: School to provide student with copies of written records and reports…’
He nodded, impressed. ‘So it is. Fair request.’
We sat for a bit, mulling over where we had landed.
Finally: ‘I’d like to keep this up,’ he said. ‘Any other questions you have…Turn this more into an open book, so to speak—a sort of conversation among equals. How does that sound, Daniel?’
It sounded fine. And I had a question ready.
‘You told me you were wrong—when I asked why you’re here. What were you wrong about?’
The answer was that he thought he could find a cure for something, but it was not a cure at all.
‘Was it a drug?’
‘It was a new way to name things, a new way to use old drugs.’
I shrugged. ‘So now you find the right way.’ I could tell there was more to it, but there was another question I wanted to ask. ‘You say I can ask anything?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Within reason.’
The boy is untied and taken to a room. A man in a suit enters. He asks him to think about the purpose of his existence, and offers him just one wish. It takes the boy only six seconds to decide what it will be.
It wasn’t just a wish. It was an acceptance of his offer. Basic bargain theory, quid pro quo…
‘I want to know what happened to Rachel.’
Social Demography and Global Citizenship
At this point everything opened up in a way that had me searching for an underlying logic, some kind of universal algorithm around human connectivity, the domino effect of open doors.
While around us the evergreen bushland was unchanging, in the courtyard the pear trees were bare, leaving a last layer of crimson red leaves scattered on the pavers. In the morning when it was quiet the currawongs flew down to forage in the leaf litter and the benches got splattered in bird shit.
As for Rachel, my focus had been on making good on my undertaking to stop staring and to mind my own crap. My recent plunge into the world of brainwaves had made that a lot easier than I’d anticipated. Whenever she appeared in class or in the kitchen, even at the waterhole, I managed to hold my gaze steady and estimate the impact of her presence on my oscillations. The brain varied day to day; the heart was constant. All that was left was to wait, as I did each night, for her to take up my invitation and come to the courtyard.
Greg hand-delivered the first of my weekly reports.
‘As per your request,’ he said in a tone I disliked.
I thanked him (fuck you), closed the door and sat down on my bed with the orange envelope addressed to me, c/o the School. The document inside had a cover sheet with my name and date and a small image like a company logo: the bottom
half of three blue capsules sprouting green leaves. The second page was a series of sketched headshots—aerial view—colour-coded and set out in table form, five by five, with horizontal and vertical descriptions cryptic enough for me to scan them and turn over into the explanatory text. In just over three pages, it addressed two things: my areas of high-level under-arousal, and my areas of high-level over-arousal. The fact that the lingo sounded more sexual than neural made me suspicious. Without reading on, I jumped up and performed my umpteenth search for hidden cameras in the area of the shower recess.
When I resumed my reading, my concerns were dispelled. This was strictly about my brain—and, more particularly, what personality traits my brainwaves were producing, or not producing. Nothing came as a surprise: in the domains of fogginess (their word), easily hurt feelings and low self-esteem, I barely rated; at the other end, I was pretty much off the scale in impatience, agitation, and holding of resentments (again, their term; I liked that one). By the final paragraph it was starting to read to me like one of Mary’s weekly horoscopes. And there was definitely an unfair focus on the surplus and deficits—too much, too little—but I wasn’t bothered, and Greg could go to hell. It was mine, my brain dysfunction, in my hands. I wouldn’t have let go of it for the world.
Outside of the report there was more. My growth spurt continued (another 4 mm over two weeks), and Rachel actively sought out my help with a calculus question after PW refused her any. (‘He is a complete cock,’ she said, loud and powerfully alliterated.) Tod had started making gnocchi with burnt butter and crispy sage—I’d never eaten anything like it, nor do I think I have since. And on top of that, Alex was making signs of re-entering the biosphere. He still spent most of his spare time in his lesson room with the door closed, but in class or in the kitchen he was a living, breathing presence again (as against the rotting amoeba cluster he had become). And most importantly, he returned to the midnight sessions. One night he just showed up, commented on the almost-full moon and crawled into his sleeping bag.
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