The Subjects

by Sarah Hopkins

  Not wanting to get into a compare and contrast between mandarins and tangelos, I said I’d look forward to that. I had an end in mind. To ease into it, I told the Doctor that Alex had shown me his whiteboards. I thought he would be pleased, but instead he nodded like he already knew and got up and sat behind his desk, resting his chin in his cupped hands, his thick fingers cradling his face. I waited for a prompt.

  After a while, he shrugged. ‘You are so keen to ask the questions. Go ahead.’

  I walked over and sat opposite him in a chair at the desk. It was wooden, the back sloping awkwardly, giving me only an option to sit forward. His eyes were fixed on mine, the dark circles beneath them more apparent in the lamplight. When I asked if he was all right, he began to nod, or at least I thought that was what he was doing when in fact he let the full weight of his head drop forward and arched it all the way back, then side to side. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My neck. If you listen…’

  I didn’t want to listen. Today of all days, when my focus was laser sharp, his seemed to have been hijacked by an invisible third presence. As he began to ruminate on the reasons for his restricted movement, I could feel the hi-beta band getting back together—palpitations in my chest, the seed of frustration, the precursor of rage…

  I took a breath. Pulled back. Not today.

  Between the last session and now, I had reinvigorated my risk-aversion strategy—the one from my days of dealing at school. It was a three-step process, simple but effective: define risk (explosive reaction to disengaged Doctor), box risk, move on. The process had been enabled by an emerging purpose. The Doctor and I had been through it before: at school, I had stayed out of trouble because I’d been consumed with the business of selling drugs. It wasn’t just the money, the profit; it was the enterprise and all its parts. Securing product, tapping into demand, managing risk. It was a start-up, every bit of it a struggle, every bit of it my creation. There was no external approbation: a satisfied customer was one who came back; a good day was more dollars in the drawer. Apart from intermittent explosions outside of work hours, I was a highly functional mini-mogul, and that was everything. That was (and is) the nature of my personality.

  Arriving at the School—understanding where I was and what I was doing in the place—that had taken me so far, but even with PW and the brainwaves it was no substitute. It was only in these last weeks that I felt myself climbing back to peak levels. The driver was not commercial but sociological. It was something akin to a new market: my tribe.

  Sitting across the desk from the Doctor, I didn’t want to talk about his neck any more than I wanted to talk about his fruit. I wanted to talk about Rachel. Something about my demeanour must have suddenly reminded him of his promise, but initially he seemed to want to burst my bubble.

  ‘The thing about Rachel,’ he leaned forward, ‘is that Rachel doesn’t talk about what happened to her. She doesn’t tell anyone. No one knows but Rachel, and whoever else was present.’

  I pushed on, undeterred. ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said I’d tell you what I know. The backstory.’

  ‘So tell me.’ I waited.

  He mumbled something to himself. All I could really make out were the words ‘utterly unethical’. When he got to the end of it, he paused, went to speak again and then stopped himself. He was looking at me now as if for some kind of silent assurance.

  I nodded: encouraging.

  He seemed to consider that for a moment, then finally he sat back and shrugged.

  ‘She lived on the outskirts of a small town,’ he began. ‘The father was a miner—disappeared—and her mother was in and out of prison so she was raised by an aunty and ended up in foster homes, a succession of different families. She ran away from the last one and went back to her home town. When DOCS found her, there was evidence of self-harm and other injuries—superficial cuts on her forearm, as well as rope marks on her wrists. She wouldn’t say how she got the injuries, or where—whether it was with the foster family or back in her home town. She was seen twice by a child psychologist but told him nothing. They questioned her foster parents, who appeared to be good church-going people. They couldn’t shed any light, or refused to; nor did they put up a fight to keep her, accepting that whatever happened, it was, as they put it, the Lord’s will. Rachel consented to a physical examination and there were no other signs of interference or injury, so they abandoned their inquiries. She was almost sixteen by then. They couldn’t find other foster parents—it isn’t uncommon when children get to that age—so she ended up in a girls home. She broke into seven houses in three months. And now she is here. That is what we know.’

  I listened, shook my head. ‘So it was the last family. Where something happened.’

  ‘That would be my guess. Or there were a series of incidents.’

  ‘And she won’t tell you?’

  ‘I haven’t asked.’

  For a minute I sat processing my dead end, my disappointment. ‘She talks in her sleep,’ I finally said. ‘In the corridor we can hear her.’

  ‘Yes, I know. She appears to be reliving some part of an event.’

  ‘Don’t you need to know what happened, to help her?’

  He paused then, the first of his answers that required some thought, and across the space he looked back at me with gentler eyes. ‘Is that why you want to know? Is it the same thing as Alex, you think we are not doing enough for her?’

  I said yes, in part.

  ‘What is the other part?’ And when I hesitated: ‘Do you think it would bring you closer? Is that the aim?’

  This wasn’t what I’d had in mind for the session, but it felt like it was the agreement I had entered into: open dialogue. And I was relieved he was warming to it, that the conversation had at least been kept alive. So I answered him the best I could: ‘It would make me feel good.’

  He got up from behind the desk, picked up his chair with one hand like it was a paperweight and placed it next to mine. ‘But would it?’ he asked, his jugular vein bulging. ‘Without knowing what it is you will learn, how you can you be sure?’

  It wasn’t a warning; he looked genuinely perplexed by the question. As it happened, the answer rolled off my tongue, as though to speak of such matters was the most natural thing. ‘Because I will know her. That is what I want.’

  He seemed to linger on that piece of information, like he was placing it somewhere or using it to construct a path forward.

  Because I will know her…To state it so simply, so directly: That is what I want.

  It was a statement that would replay in my mind over and over in the years to come. My feelings for Rachel over the past weeks—this intangible sense of connection—was driven by the mystery of her, the lure of the infinite and unknown. Love is a desire to infiltrate. If you are strong enough to resist, you have me for life. Rachel: my case in point.

  (Out of pity, she will occasionally throw me a bone. I bury it in a safe place so once in a while, when I am down and out, I can dig it up, retreat into a corner, and chew on whatever is left.)

  During the inquiry, the lawyer pursued a similar vein of questioning.

  Referring to the fact that the Doctor at no stage identified the source of Rachel’s trauma, he stated that he struggled to find the logic in that. To process her experience, surely she needed at some point to confront it?

  DR J: She was confronting it every night; I thought it wise to focus on safer memories…If I might suggest, I think it would be useful if you come at this another way.

  COUNSEL: If you could just answer my questions, please.

  HIS HONOUR: I would like to hear what he has to say. Go on, Doctor. What other way might that be?

  DR J: If we were to focus on the strengths, rather than the deficits…Rachel V was not your average girl. I am not just referring to her academic abilities. In spite of what had happened to her—or perhaps in part because of it—when this girl looked you in the eyes, she emitt
ed a kind of energy. A…presence, that is what I am talking about. The only way to put it is that it was humbling. Look at her progress since leaving us at the School—you’ll see her potential is playing out, and the world will be better for it. So we can talk about all that was wrong with her, the somnambulism, the catatonia and so forth. We can do that, or we can turn it on its head. My approach, the underlying logic, as you put it, is simple—it is to tread with the lightest touch. My rationale—and I am not speaking in hyperbole—is that these minds are as valuable as any resource on the planet.

  In the courtyard that night, it was cloudy and starless and all I could think of was Rachel and the fuckhead families who passed her one to the next, and most of all, the one that made her run. When the wind picked up and the sky cracked open with thunder and then rain, it felt made to order.

  Back inside, I stopped outside Rachel’s door.

  With the sound of the storm killing any chance of hearing her coded invitation, I opened it, telling myself it was just to check, to listen, to help, but even when I heard nothing, still I entered Rachel’s bedroom for a second time and closed the door behind me. Looking back now, I could try to explain my perverse and moronic logic, but it is best summed up by saying that in the tangled web of the adolescent pre-frontal cortex, I resided in a universe of one. And at the time it seemed like a good idea.

  As my eyes adjusted, I scanned the room. She was not standing in the corner but lying in bed, peaceful, asleep, her limbs splayed against the white sheets. Outside, the storm had picked up and gusts of wind rattled the windowpane. I stood at the foot of the bed and stared down at her, feeling now for the first time like a predator. I imagined the scenario, a stranger crawling on top of her. I imagined her broad-shouldered silhouette emerging from the struggle and rising up…

  And then I tried to imagine her version, the real version—what it was that she saw when she stood night after night and stared down at the empty bed: who occupied it, what was happening to them? What happened to her? I started running the script through my head.

  I watched. Waited.

  After minutes of near-perfect stillness, she rolled onto her right side. There was a brief lightbulb moment when I thought it might be time to get the hell out of her bedroom, but the very next instant Rachel opened her eyes.

  She opened her eyes.

  It isn’t easy to explain where I went with this. It just seemed that, while for the rest of the day Rachel was a minefield, a deadly obstacle course, this was the time when she let me come close. Unconsciously, but still. This was our time. So I repeat: with me on the verge of retreat, she opened her eyes. I could find only one way to read it—the first pass in a wordless dialogue:

  Don’t go.

  Motionless, she stared up at the ceiling. There was a long minute of that before she pushed herself up and rose from the bed. Her brown skin disappeared in the dark, leaving just the pale grey singlet, a floating torso, and the whites of her eyes. Now that I look back on it, it was fantastically creepy. In anyone else’s imagination it could have been a quest-line in Dark Souls Rising, the girl as something other, a thing that feeds on souls.

  But like I said, my younger self had a particular take on it. When you want something bad, the brain is a beast of its own—a primitive neural network deactivating critical pathways in search of reward—so this was my parallel imaginary vision: The girl stands in the middle of the room, and things are different between them. Her ferocity has ebbed into something softer, more accepting of the visitor in the room. In a silent acknowledgment of his presence, she flicks a strand of hair from her face and stares down at the pillow. Her singlet is hitched up on one shoulder, the neckline plunged more on one side into the crevice of her cleavage. The whisper when it comes is barely audible, but she is trying to tell him something.

  ‘…the wax melts in the fire,

  ‘the blood and the only sun.’

  The details the Doctor had shared with me were scant, but they formed a link between us, a connection across different states of consciousness. When a branch thrashed the window, I didn’t flinch in case she woke and found me there. We were ready to move ahead, to move together. I willed it. And as though to script, she looked up, away from the bed. At me! Anything was possible. She took a step forward, her first step, the beginning…A drop of sweat rolled slowly down the curve of my spine, the chamber of air between us too thick to breathe. She spoke again, still no more than a whisper.

  ‘Your father like him.’

  Hallelujah.

  In the perfect silence of the room I replayed the highlights of everything she had ever said to me, every story, every put-down, every question.

  I don’t mean like the ones they chew. I mean dead dogs. Their bones.

  I am not crying you fuck-knuckle…Why do you stare at me all the time?

  You swimming?

  When I stepped closer, it was no longer a conscious decision. I was encoded to her. She wanted to bring me in; she wanted me to understand. I stepped closer again, the blood rushing inside my head and a torrent raging in the narrow space between us. And Rachel, the glisten of her skin against the ribbed cotton. Again, she began to whisper. This time so close, so slow, I could make it out, every word. I was wrong. It was not ‘the sun’. Rachel stood inches from me and put it all together:

  ‘As wax melts before the fire,

  ‘May the soul be redeemed by the blood of the lamb.

  ‘By the God who gave up his only Son and created man in the Father’s likeness.’

  His only Son.

  The Father’s likeness.

  The blood of the lamb.

  All that was left was the final command: ‘May you tremble and flee.’ And then she started again at the beginning.

  I remembered what the Doctor had said—her last foster family were church-going people—but my focus was not on her words, it was on the energy humming now between us. It isn’t possible to feel more than this, I thought, and yet I wasn’t going to explode or melt or turn to water. I was solid, and I knew why. It was a brain state beyond anything I had experienced. It was gamma. From the thalamus through to the hippocampus, gamma waves were sweeping my brain, neural clusters firing in a progressive rhythm—and beyond the brain, signals shooting, surging into every part of my body. I was here and I was everything, and Rachel and I and the rest of humanity had connected in a unity of consciousness. When she looked up, our eyes locked and burned. It was now.

  It is now.

  I reached my hand up to her face, and with the lightest touch, I brushed her cheek.

  In a surprise to me, her skin was cold. Her skin was cold and mine was burning. It was the first clue: the disparity in our temperatures. As it happened, I had no time to interpret it and respond. I don’t have much of a memory of what happened next—just the widening whites of her eyes as her head flung back, and the cracking pain as her forehead slammed into mine, sending my gamma crashing against the orbital ridge of my skull, and my world temporarily into darkness.

  Ancient History

  The morning after my tête-à-tête with Rachel, I slumped in my chair, more than happy to go with the flow.

  Classes continued to consist of guessing games about cryptically related images followed by seemingly random discussions. But the subject of history was not altogether ignored; it was designated to that part of our curriculum known as E-learning, consisting of tutorial sessions on our tablets, through our headsets, in the comfort of our own rooms. The topics included Japanese isolationism, the unification of Italy, the causes of World War II, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. We were to complete two of the four topics, and for each topic there were three two-hour sessions. By ‘complete’, I mean put on the headset and push play. Nothing was said about the order in which we listened to them, and no questions were asked about any of it. It didn’t seem to be a problem if we slept through the lot. All we were really told was if we had something to raise we could bring it to class. No one did. Except this one time.
<
br />   In front of us today was a black and white drawing of a glorious, round-bellied woman with hair spinning down all the way to her milky thighs, naked but for three crescent moons positioned over box and breasts. She was superimposed over a mandala wheel with her feet planted in the centre ring, where a series of detailed images depicted life on earth: mountains, vines, people pushing barrows. Springing from her hand was some kind of rod that shot up into the outer ring of stars and clouds and cherubs.

  After giving everyone a crack at it, Helen K revealed that the woman was called Sophia. I was disappointed to learn that she was more concept than flesh and blood—a feminine entity that gave birth to the material world, a power surge from the galactic core. Lately, Helen had been getting pretty loose with this stuff, and never more so than now as she explained the theory behind Sophia, the way in which the currents of living luminosity burst forth the origination of the human genome, ‘her spiral arms enfolding opalescent shafts of light…’

  Tod drew a doodle of the divine vulva. (It wasn’t bad.) Rachel side-eyed it and groaned.

  The second image was similar to one we’d seen before, the blue and yellow dots (in which I’d read yellow blossoms and blue sky and Fergus had seen pus), only these were encased in the shape of an oval against a black background.

  ‘It is a map of light,’ Helen explained, ‘a photograph taken by a space telescope of a glow of radiation: a fourteen-billion-year-old echo of the big bang.’

  The bubbles and dots were micro-radiation, the different colours determining which parts of the cosmic pool would form our universe. We settled here for a while. Continuing in the same effusive manner, she took us through the timeline of a single point: explosion, cooling, cosmic evolution, ‘all from a ten-million-degree sea of neutrons and protons, giant clouds forming the stars and the galaxies.’

  While I flicked back to Sophia and mentally removed the little crescents (wondering what it would take to stir her currents), Alex fixated on sterner things post-big bang, the impact of dark energy on the expansion of the universe. Unsurprisingly, he had his teenage brain around the theory of it, positing his personal slant on the inevitable annihilation of the planet as a merciful end to millennia of human suffering.