‘You know, Alex,’ Tod said after only a few seconds of silence. ‘You can talk to us about things you might think we don’t want to hear.’
‘Thanks Tod,’ he replied. ‘That is good to know.’
In an effort to avoid boring anyone, Tod stuck to questions. His persistence eventually bore fruit, Alex telling us stories about his father and their hinterland house.
‘He reckoned we should live at one with nature,’ he said. ‘We had this big old macadamia tree outside the kitchen. It was too close to the house and the roots messed with the plumbing but Dad wouldn’t touch it, said it’d been there longer than we had…And he had a thing with birds. He filled the balcony with grevilleas and then left the doors open so the birds could come right inside. We got a nest of blue wrens in a wall vent once. Even when it brought rats, Dad said they had a right to be there.’
Tod sought clarification. ‘You mean the birds?’
‘Birds, rats…whatever. I guess it sounds pretty weird.’
As I’d been listening I couldn’t help but compare it to the flats. ‘Sounds exceptionally cool to me,’ I said.
‘You’re right, Dan,’ Alex replied. ‘It was. He was.’
A couple of weeks after his comeback, Alex flagged me in the corridor and said he was behind on his video game hours. I was too. Off we went like a pair of old chums, settling in for a session of Dark Souls Rising. It was Alex’s favourite. You are a bank teller in a shopping mall that is infested with chainsaw-wielding zombie killers. Pretty soon the place is plastered with decapitated heads and nude body parts. Alex was right: the graphics were ‘out of the park’, the howls of the injured so real you wanted to go back and put the poor bastards out of their misery.
Sitting back in defeat, the blood-smattered screens seemed an obvious segue into the as-yet-untouched subject of the time I busted him on blood porn. But where to start?
‘That night on the computer, the video,’ I said. ‘What the hell’s that all about?’
During the silence that followed our eyes remained fixed on our scores. I sensed that he went to speak a couple of times, then finally: ‘You think I’m fucked up.’
‘I guess it depends on why you watch it. Like, yeah—if you’re getting off on it, I think it’s fucked up.’
He laughed, then stood up. ‘It might be better if I just show you.’
My first thought was that he had a little library of videos and he was planning to share, but when I started to decline he told me to get up and I dutifully pushed myself out of my beanbag and followed him. We walked around the low-lit corridor, the courtyard still dipped in the orange glow of twilight. When we stopped at the door to his lesson room, he turned around and bit his bottom lip. I felt a nervous, almost erotic excitement. His head cocked at an awkward angle, his pupils just a pinprick in his blood-rimmed eyes.
‘I’m not sure if this is a good idea, showing you this…I mean, like you might just think I’m fucking crazy.’
He was looking at me for an assurance, and I was drawing a blank. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea either. But when he started stepping back I realised I wanted very much for him to open the door. The words of Dr J came into my head: You ask him what we are doing. And then come back and we’ll talk.
When I spoke, my voice was surprisingly firm. ‘You are showing me this because I want to see it,’ I said.
He looked relieved, grateful. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well that’s that then.’
The room was dark. When the light came on, I just stood where I was and took it in: a series of large whiteboards, some handwritten or hand-drawn, others with printed maps and diagrams, each of them dotted with hundreds of coloured magnets and post-it notes filled with unreadably small text. It seemed I wasn’t the only one spending my days charting new worlds. This is what he had been doing, day after day, all those hours.
I stepped closer, moving from board to board, Alex by my side all the while, watching me, waiting for a cue. I could hear his tentative breaths, feel his eyes following mine.
‘The thing on the computer,’ he said. ‘This is why.’
On the biggest board was a series of colour-coded world maps, each with the same legend at the bottom of the map with a range from Data not Available (pale green) to Extreme (blood red). There was no explanation of subject matter, so I pointed to the one closest to me.
‘Child slavery,’ he offered.
In the bottom right there was a bar graph of the corporate perpetrators. He tapped a red country with a black spot. ‘Cocoa farming—to make the chocolate bars for the kids in the yellow countries.’
Something about what I was seeing brought to mind the children in the videos on the Doctor’s computer—the boys playing handball and the girls at the art table; the different classrooms. But Alex had already moved to the next board.
‘Landmine fatalities.’
Then malaria, then drought, then school shootings…
He is saddened by the state of things.
On the second board was an index of countries—Zimbabwe sitting at extreme, all the way up to Denmark. On the third were two more maps: the percentage and growth rate of the world’s evangelical population (North America out in front on percentage; fastest growth: North Korea), and last, a whole map and index just for Yemen.
‘The woman you saw the other night,’ his voice wobbled. ‘That was Yemen.’
Others turn away, or just don’t look. He looks.
Alex shook his head. ‘Yemen,’ he repeated, like it was enough just to say the word.
I nodded to confirm that it was, suspecting he might offer more of the detail or pull up another video. Sparing me that, he braced himself and stepped over to the last whiteboard. This one offered a closer analysis. There were labels, so I had a go at interpreting it myself.
It was brain-bending stuff. From a single dot point in the bottom right-hand corner labelled A Guide to Human Suffering, faint lines reached out to other nodes, each with a theme and a subset of branching lines: a spider diagram. There were twenty or more on the board, like the map of a starry sky, the themes ranging from social disorder, infertility and ignorance through to war, injustice and the absence of God. The graphics were a dog’s breakfast, the tiny text decipherable only at close range, but the content was strangely compelling. The subsets drilled into the primary theme. From human death, for instance, sprang not just starvation, cannibalism and urban fires, but also inadequate riot control, child martyrdom, unnecessary gynaecological procedures and dangerous toys. There was a messy crossover into human disease and disability, which extended itself to include desynchronisation of bodily rhythm by international travel. (Who knew?) Crime encompassed erosion of moral values, addiction, urban slums, antisocial behaviour and late-night entertainment and finally, in the case of mental pollution—the least populated of the themes—it confined itself to individualism and ugliness. Ugliness?
‘Where did you get this stuff from?’
‘Websites. And some of it she gets in for me.’
‘Helen?’
‘Yep.’
Me and my beta waves, Alex and the human misery project.
I remembered one night in the courtyard he talked about when he was a little boy and he had ‘bad thoughts’, how he wrote them down on scraps of paper and folded them up and stashed them around his bedroom. A decade later, and this: what was real instead of what was imagined, whiteboards in place of folded notes.
After a pause, I said, ‘Awesome,’ because it was. He peered back at me as if to gauge that I was genuine before allowing himself to smile, proud of his work.
‘It is good, I think,’ he said, ‘to set it out like this—to get a handle on it.’
Again he was seeking confirmation from me, which I gladly gave. I sat down and listened to him flesh it out: how many people in how many countries suffering in how many ways. He was doing that thing where he slowed it down, slow enough for someone to take notes: ‘They haven’t done the estimates in a while, so with the co
nflicts and refugees and the sea levels, it would be higher again.’
Next he turned to a laptop on the desk and scrolled through another set of tables (human trafficking, vitamin A deficiency, malaria, teen suicide) to a page where the numbers were constantly ticking over.
‘And this one,’ he said in a tone of wonder, the crimson rising into his cheeks, ‘this is real-time, per second—see here, these two: as of this morning there are 670 million obese people in the world, while just today, twenty-five thousand have died from hunger. And it’s only 5.48 pm.’ Tick tock.
Alex wasn’t finished, rolling us now into the fastest-growing causes of death. There was more; there was always going to be more. As his audience, it started to feel to me like gluttony. As his friend, I began to see the shape of the beast that he was feeding. Placing my hand on his shoulder, I looked around at the hundreds of scribbled thoughts, and back to the blazing eyes of their brilliant creator. It isn’t an illness, Daniel. There are no pills for it. The question I’d had in my mind—and we need to know all this because?—was answered. Same reason I’d got swallowed up in my brainwaves—same reason, same strategy:
Know your enemy.
Know all there is to know.
The same strategy, I thought, just a different target. His enemy was the world around him; mine was within. When it was time to go he found me staring into one of the spider diagrams in the Guide to Human Suffering.
I pointed at a spot: at the centre was ‘behavioural deterioration’ and around it the branches of traumatisation, conflict and malevolence.
‘I guess we work out where we fit,’ I said.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘I never thought of that…’
With a tilt of the head, he looked on me gently, if briefly, and then ran his finger across the board, pausing midway. ‘I think where you fit would depend.’
‘Depend on what?’
He squinted, hesitant. ‘On whether you’re talking about what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you?’
I don’t think Alex would have put the question directly to me. Alex felt no need to unpeel other people’s problems. He was more high-level than that. What he was framing now was an empathetic response to my query within the scope of the broader project. He must have felt me stiffen.
‘I mean, where you fit depends on that…I imagine there is a bit of overlapping.’
If anyone cares to ask me these days about my thoughts on human connectivity, the first thing I’d say is that I don’t think we really see each other. I don’t mean that necessarily as a criticism. My sense of it is that most of the time we are pretty happy with that—sneaking around in the shadows, until we are not happy at all, alone, misunderstood, invisible. (Some of us seesaw more rapidly between the two extremes.)
By and large a shadows man, it wasn’t until I got to the School that I considered the value of transparency. Through Dr J and then Alex—the way he was looking at me now in front of his whiteboard—the School was my introduction to the fact of the matter: sometimes we need to be seen.
Through his lens—from his angle—as the seconds passed, a perspective emerged. Alex didn’t just see the problems of the world; he saw mine too, more clearly than I had ever suspected.
What you’ve done or what’s been done to you.
The overlapping…
For the first time, it entered my mind that they were one and the same thing.
Microeconomics
As we fell into our formations over the next weeks, there was an unexpected development.
Ever since Miles Davis, big Ben had gone quiet in class. It seemed to me more respectful than disengaged. When the sisters came out for a courtyard science session one day, he ditched the video games and came too. Taking his place next to Imogen, he complied with Helen’s directions even before they were out of her mouth. It was interesting to watch. Ben and Imogen edged closer to the foaming beaker and closer to each other, the experiment quickly becoming an all-engrossing joint enterprise which blossomed into something bigger, and for a week or so Grace could be found in the back row with Glen and the other boys. Then one sun-filled day they all came together—the sisters and the boys—into a single contented cluster: one big happy gang. Thus embraced, Grace and Imogen seemed to let go of their gripe with the world and their inhibitions more generally. As I watched them hooking up with the boys between the pear pots, a few things became evident: they were not lesbians; Ben and Imogen were not possessive people, and when it came to physical contact, none of them were constrained by contractual conditions.
That left Rachel and Alex and Tod and me: as the other group came together, it seemed to firmly ground our own. Outside of class the two groups did not commingle. We ate in the kitchen and they took their meals to the courtyard. We claimed the waterhole; they stopped coming out on field trips altogether. There was a background and a foreground: them and us.
A Tuesday morning class. The theme, Helen announced, was phosphorus.
The intro was not her usual. No gods, no paintings; instead of an image, Helen played a segment from Special Ops, a third-person shooter video game. The narrative is the elite Delta Force wiping out enemy forces with zero regard for military conventions. In our short grab, the lads were making some morally ambiguous decisions about the use of white phosphorus munitions. The mission was to take out a Middle-Eastern stronghold, but it turned out the site was in sad fact a makeshift hospital. All round, a very bad error. There was a lot of screaming as defenceless civilians including a number of young children either burned to death or choked in toxic smoke.
The game was in Alex’s top five, the narrative right up his alley (I was already envisaging a new asterisk on the whiteboard), but his focus wasn’t on the screens. It was on the set-up for the experiment on the bench—specifically, on the contents of the first glass beaker. Helen had outdone herself today. She had the real deal right there: tiny pieces of precious phosphorus. Wearing her white rubber gloves (I loved it when she wore those gloves), she called us to attention, tweezered out a piece and placed it in the second empty beaker, then asked Rachel to measure out a hundred mils of carbon disulfide. The phosphorus dissolved in the liquid and she used a dropper to release it onto a piece of filter paper. We watched as it evaporated, then kaboom, a burst of flames, the moment of spectacular spontaneous combustion. Our eyes lit up. I heard Alex swallow. It was as Helen turned to the board to represent the process as a mathematical equation (P4 + 5 O2 = P4 O10), that he leaned in and swiped a bit of phosphorus from the first beaker (no gloves, no tweezers), and shoved it into his pocket. Rachel elbowed him but he didn’t wince. We waited for the last slides, for the one with something cryptic and sad and beautiful, but it never came. It ended on the maths, and Alex made his getaway.
Later in the day when I saw blisters on his palm he said his pocket caught fire. I could see it really hurt and he confirmed: ‘like nothing else’. I also said it would be worse if it got infected and he said, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ It was irritating but I shrugged it off as a case of Alex being Alex. The next day the blisters had spread up his forearm and they had to get a nurse out from the nearest town.
(The transcripts were abuzz with all this of course—an incident of self-harm put forward as evidence of a tendency, as part of a series of events during which an intention was formed. It was characterised in different ways by the various witnesses. In hindsight, Rachel summed it up best when she first caught sight of the pustules in the kitchen the next morning: ‘You and your retard brain are going to get you killed.’)
Rachel got seriously pissed off with Alex when he did this kind of stuff. Boys will be boys? She never copped that.
‘You think it’s a bit of fun? You’re a fucking moron.’ She said it with such force he almost looked apologetic.
When it came to Alex, I was focused on the whiteboards. In showing them to me he had opened things right up: a shared secret, and a connection I nurtured as a prized asset. We never referred to it in the presence of
the others, even in the midnight sessions. But when it was just the two of us it was our default. He’d launch into the daily stats, recent massacres, earthquakes, anything else playing on his mind—more a flow now, less a lecture, his disembodied voice soft and silvery under the night sky.
He moved his focus into projections: how bad things will get in a decade, in a century; venting frustration on the limitation of current calculations, the neglect of so many subsets of misery. No one was making predictions about child martyrdom, youth suicide, school shootings—at least not in any systematic way that he could find. I started thinking about how we might be able to do that. PW was happy to bring it into our lessons and we started mapping trends and identifying variables to develop predictor algorithms. Waist-deep in the top ten ways children across the globe were taking their own lives, I started to feel the black hole in my chest fill with what I needed most: the putty of fresh purpose.
On that firmer footing and with my acceptance of Dr J’s offer to share, I could step into my next and most challenging project.
The first thing I noticed when I entered Dr J’s office was the fruit bowl. It was filled this time with a darker, larger, more spherical citrus. He had not, it seemed, forgiven the mandarins. He saw that I noticed.
‘Would you like one?’
‘Maybe later.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find them quite delicious.’
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