‘Alpha is when you chill,’ I explained. ‘Beta is alert, and hi-beta is when you’re wired, like hyper-focused, but you don’t want to go too high…’
‘And you watch yours go up and down?’ Rachel asked.
‘Well yeah, and I get reports.’
Their reactions ranged from impressed to envious. ‘You lucky mug.’ (Alex.)
‘There are ways to reset how you react,’ I said.
‘Is that what you do?’
‘No. We do OMR. Observe, monitor, record.’ They thought that was funny. ‘And we work on algorithms to determine the source of electromagnetic activity.’ I concede this was an effort to impress.
‘You understand all that?’ Rachel asked.
I nodded. ‘Most of it, yeah.’
Next was Alex and the Human Suffering Project. This took longer to explain. ‘Data and maps and stuff’ didn’t really do the job.
Rachel: ‘You mean like how many people are starving?’
‘Yeah, that.’ He took a breath. ‘That and more, other things.’ He sounded like the kid in the playground trying to be like the rest of the kids. This wasn’t easy for him.
She cocked her head. ‘Why? I mean what’s the point?’
His voice, thin at the best of times, was getting drowned out now by the cacophony of cicadas. ‘So I can get a better understanding of what is happening.’
‘Okay I get that, but…’ Rachel gave no sign of relenting. It started to rain, big random drops on our faces. When Alex put his hand up it wasn’t to stop the drops but to stop her questions. Easier for him would be to show, not tell. As he had done with me, he invited her in.
When it came time, Tod was in the middle of making spanakopita triangles with Magnolia and was loath to walk away from the pastry, so it was just me and Rachel tapping at the door to Alex’s tutorial room. He was head down, superimposing a graph on a map of Nigeria—a breakdown of child labour and hazardous practices, child kidnappings, child sexual slavery.
We stood in silence and watched, Rachel scanning the whiteboards. When Alex was done, he smiled and said ‘welcome’ in a way that made me picture the old man he would never become: slow-moving, squinting, softly spoken. (Rachel and I would argue in later years about whether he was an old soul, or so, so young.) He took her through the whiteboards and the maps, the trajectory and index. He talked too fast and sometimes mumbled when explaining things, but Rachel appeared to take it all in, nodding along. Then she turned around and went back to Nigeria.
‘…three hundred million in child labour? Worldwide?’
‘Yep.’
‘I’m guessing a big chunk of them work with Mum and Dad on the farm.’
He agreed there were different categories, but waited to hear her out.
‘There are worse things, aren’t there?’ Rachel went on. ‘I mean I get that it might not be ideal, but like, define suffering.’
Stepping through the long-term implications of child-supported families, the intergenerational production of poverty, Alex mumbled less and began to point fingers in the air as he spoke. I realised this was Alex in his happy place. Every now and then he’d stop and say, ‘With me?’ and sometimes when she questioned him he repeated a set of words like a refrain—‘disease, injury, illiteracy’, or ‘discrimination, unemployment, exploitation’. When he started in on percentages, he paused and took her over to the trajectory.
‘Yeah, okay,’ she conceded. ‘I think this is good, really good…I’m just trying to work it out: is the idea that you want to do something about it?’
He nodded. ‘Define the size and scope.’
‘But then what?’
‘Then I’ll know.’
She wondered what good that was and when he mumbled something about certainty, she was unrelenting. ‘So you have certainty; that’s nice for you.’ She pointed to the maps. ‘What about them?’
A chasm appeared down the centre of his face as he took in her question, a chasm between where his mind needed to go and where it couldn’t—the hopelessness, the evil that men do…To her credit, Rachel handled him. ‘You need this, size and scope. Feed it in is all I’m saying.’ And when he looked blank: ‘I don’t know how. Just somehow…There must be a million ways to come at it. I mean, who is dealing with this stuff out there?’
‘You could be one of those journos that do horror stories—famines and all that,’ I offered.
She looked at me like it was a bad example but then launched deeper into the realm of the ridiculous. ‘Or get out and do a talk that goes viral and get a million shares…’ And on she went: aid agencies, academic posts, ‘Go on Australia’s Got Talent and start reeling it off. I once saw this twelve-year-old do the history of the world—the sixteen-year-old human suffering guru.’
Alex laughed. I chimed in, ‘We should let him get the data right first.’
That was enough for now. It felt good. Among this talk of all that was wrong with the world, somehow something was more right than it had been before. We all felt it. We went to dinner. We slept in our beds. By morning, around the kitchen table, we listened to the sisters complaining about a joint project they hadn’t finished for their music tutorial and we all had the same idea.
Alex said it first. ‘Let’s do the tutorials as a group, the three of us together. Tod too, if he wants.’ There was a brief discussion about the inclusion of Tod (even in the morning these days he was MIA). Rachel wasn’t in favour (too many stupid questions); neither Alex or I really went into bat for him. He’d keep coming to the midnight sessions if he wanted to show. That was enough Tod.
I was nominated to take the proposal to Dr J. He listened as I went through it: ‘We alternate between human suffering and brainwaves Tuesday to Thursday, and we keep them separate Monday and Friday.’ (At her direction, we left Rachel to her solo sessions in remedial English—‘I suck. You don’t want any part of it.’) Dr J agreed to it before I’d even finished. I was so upbeat about that, I wasn’t bothered that he showed no surprise at anything I went on to say—just nodding when I told him that after all this time Rachel had come out with her story. I felt that in this I had trumped him somehow, her choice to tell us and not him; we knew and he didn’t. I almost expected a pat on the back.
I didn’t get it. ‘How did you react to it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, how did it make you feel, hearing about what happened to her?’
I hadn’t thought about it. ‘I don’t know. Angry, I guess.’
‘Did it make you feel closer to her? Knowing?’ And when I hesitated: ‘I recall that was a motivating factor for you.’
I question now if it was a typical therapist’s question, or a case of emotionally inept foraging. At the time, I took it as par for the course. ‘Sure, in a way.’
‘Your instinct was right, then. That’s something to remember next time.’
I wasn’t sure if he meant for me or him. I was thinking back to what Rachel had said at the waterhole, the picture of the room, and how I’d reconfigured it in my head. I told him how my version ended, in her escape.
‘I did it like the stage, like you said.’ My question now was: ‘Then I changed it. Why haven’t we done that?’
‘Changed it?’
‘Yeah—instead of just moving them around, the people, the pieces, the stuff you’ve told me to do, you know…’
‘I’m not sure I’ve told you to do anything.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Sorry, I’m not following.’
‘Okay, so you just said to put them in place and see what happens. So they stand in a room, sit on a couch—waste of time. I could have changed things.’
‘Like you did with Rachel, you mean…’
Somehow, I persisted. I didn’t name the player, just gave more generic examples. ‘Like I get to the scissors first. Or I don’t let him up again. Or I crack a chair over the back of his skull…You know, like change the ending. Why didn’t we do that?’
He nodded, s
miled. All the while he had been creeping up from behind.
‘We can do that,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s what you just did.’
It was his slam-dunk moment. I get it, the theory behind it. I got a sniff of it even back then (it isn’t rocket science). How we deal with the past: it happened to us, and now we’re fucked. Done and dusted. Or we have some control.
It allows you to go near something you have sealed tight and inject some oxygen around it; it lets you put out your hand and touch it. It isn’t like you become friends or anything. It is just something you can coexist with. That’s the theory anyway. I wasn’t there yet, and I’m not saying I buy into it. It has the obvious flaw: every time I put myself into a hero act it just reminded me of the anti-hero I was, forever stuck with the fact of what I failed to do, and what I did.
‘Try it with the next one,’ he said.
I baulked.
‘You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need to hear it. Just do it in your head. Go back to the worst of what happened, and change it. Get to the scissors first.’
‘You mean do it now?’
‘Now is good.’
I dropped my head, thought about the pattern of the carpet at my feet (mottled grey-green diamonds). ‘Okay. I did it.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t. I just don’t think you did.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. I might do it later.’
‘Okay, let me know how that goes.’
‘If I do it.’
‘Yes, Daniel. If you do it.’
I had plenty of other things to occupy my time.
The group tutorials were up and running—one day comparing brainwaves (starting with the blink and the water bottle, moving through to meditation and algebra) and the next, wandering around in the multi-dimensional deprivation index of various third-world countries. Alternating between a kind of virtual exhibitionism (watch me, watch my brain!) and the scene-setting stage of a quest to save the world.
The three of us canvassed causal factors of white nationalism, globalism, big government, free markets, the alt-right. We dredged up some great stuff about organ harvesting in refugee camps and gang rapes in South Sudan—Rachel called them fun facts. For her benefit and his own piece of mind, Alex took it on himself to add a whole new category to the Trajectory of Human Suffering—there, in a space above the absence of God: the presence of God—as well as adding fundamentalism and fanaticism into the spidergrams of fragmentation, ignorance, war, injustice and mental pollution. Like little terrorists we started plotting cyber-action through dark web cartels. We were running out of blank space. Rachel asked Helen for new stock and we started whiteboarding problems into solutions. That was the only way she could ever come at it: we are not talking about theory here. I heard echoes in her later work: This is not hypothetical—this is urgent and this is shameful. Helen took it up in lessons, loading our screens with offensive political memes and the heads of global citizens good and bad and ugly; the slums of South Asia; cluster maps of social media activity.
Rachel gave us another reason for pause one day. ‘Shouldn’t we be looking at any positive stuff? There must be something good happening.’ And when we sat dumbfounded: ‘I mean like medical discoveries…Some of this must be getting better.’
Alex looked at her with an air of ‘way to ruin a good time’, but he was ready for it. When he went into the zone—as he did now—I wondered to myself if his diagnosis put him on the spectrum. ‘Improving trends in HIV and child mortality, malaria…Schooling for girls in Sri Lanka. There’s a machine that can convert sewer sludge to drinking water; that could be big—2.5 billion lack access to safe sanitation. There’s a nanosheet that absorbs oil spills.’
It was his suggestion to put all that up onto a separate whiteboard.
Tod made a joke of missing his invitation to the ‘new groups’ but didn’t seem to mind. He needed to ‘stick to his own thing anyway’, which we assumed was the diet and exercise routine; we assumed he’d been having trouble staying on the wagon. Then he stopped coming to the midnight sessions. He said it was because he was sleeping. I didn’t really buy that; it looked like he was having some issues beyond weight gain—I saw him arguing with Greg outside the waiting-room window—but there wasn’t any reason to dwell on it. Magnolia had taken over in the kitchen and embarked on a festival of curries. The midnight sessions were winding down, now by arrangement only. We had all started sleeping.
There was one night—just one—when it was only Rachel and me. Straight up she placed a ban on any talk about brains and misery (enough already…) and asked instead about the kids at my school. I shrugged, said there were two camps: ‘potential customer’ or ‘irrelevant to my existence’. She appeared appropriately impressed when I told her about my business profits, turning on her side to face me, but was equally firm that I needed now to cease all operations. I turned to face her too, immediately deeming our new positions as a natural and destined progression—not just side by side, but face to face, soon to be a single entity in a changed universe. The next move was mine; that is how I read it, wriggling closer in my sleeping bag so there were just inches between us. When she eyeballed me my entire chest cavity pulsated in a way I hadn’t imagined it could, and as she reached over to put her hand on my bare arm, I remember wondering how more people didn’t die doing this.
Seen in that context it’s possible her next words saved my life: ‘This—us—is never going to happen.’
Undeterred, undeflated (not even close): It already is happening. That was my thought. But I didn’t use words to argue the point. Instead I hovered my hand over hers, so that she could feel it too, the voltage transmitting cell to cell…and in that electromagnetic moment, I became certain of two things, both of them pivotal in defining the shape of things to come.
It would happen (however, whenever). And I would never in my life deal drugs again.
Design and Technology
I see faces in things. We all do sometimes, but I see them several times in a day. In cloud patterns, agar plates; in the skin on the back of my hand. We were looking at the whiteboards this one time—the dot points of suffering—and even when I looked away and back again, I could see it: a charcoal profile with eyes cast down to the ground. A face that carried the despair of the world.
Soon after that it came up in one of our sessions. I was looking at the black lake in the photo (no end of faces in that pond), and he said I was finding meaning in random patterns.
‘Some would call it a form of delusional behaviour, a precursor to schizophrenia.’ Startled, I took a couple of seconds to see that he was smiling. ‘Or maybe you just have a thing for faces,’ he said.
He was messing with me and at the same time serious: This is the rubbish we are dealing with.
I remember looking back at him and starting to piece it together in my mind. What had led him here: the photograph on the shelf—a proud moment, a discovery and a prize—and then a realisation. I was wrong, he had said. And something else: To hell with them…There was an us and a them, and he was up against it. He was going rogue, and he was bringing me in; taking me on to his ride. That was the sense I got that day, that he was setting a challenge for me.
Go rogue.
Later when I read the transcripts, it was clearer. Early in his evidence they questioned his qualifications for his role at the School, pointing out that he hadn’t worked directly with young people for ten years.
DR J: That is right. My immediate experience related to developing drug treatments for children and young people.
COUNSEL: Groundbreaking drug treatments—many would describe them in that way, isn’t that so Doctor?
DR J: Many would, certainly.
COUNSEL: What would you say?
DR J: I would say that I saw the results. I am still seeing them, and I warn you, we are yet to see them all.
In spite of the scope of that statement, there were no more quest
ions about the drugs—nor was there any mention of the School being in some way externally controlled. When I came to read the transcripts, I was surprised by that. What happened at the School and how it operated was the subject of extensive cross-examination. On reading it, one would have thought that it was Dr J on trial—his vision and his methods, all under fire. But there was never any mention of two camps within a larger operation, and never, not in a single question or answer, was there any hint of the magnitude of it. Of course, the reason for this was simple. The judge and the lawyers and the bit-part players: none of them knew.
The revision of the curriculum started about five months in, when PW didn’t show up to a tutorial. Ten minutes after starting time, in walked the Doctor, looking unusually dishevelled and hurried. With strands of loose hair falling over his shiny forehead, he kept one eye on the door as though expecting any minute to be interrupted. It crossed my mind he had been drinking.
‘I’ll be taking the class for a few days, people, if that’s okay,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to bring you together.’
When I asked why, he replied with a cryptic smile: ‘Strength in numbers.’
He smoothed the hair back off his forehead, pushed up his sleeves and sat on the desk in front of us. ‘There is a piece of information I think you are entitled to know, so…Where do I start?’ Picking up Rachel’s headset, he searched our faces as though we could offer some guidance. There was something reassuring in his physical proximity, his physical strength. We leaned in.
There followed an explanation of what I had already been told: beyond our sessions with PW, the headsets were a device to record and monitor our neural patterns: the lessons, the music, the video games, the E-learning…all of it. Reports were kept and analysed.
‘Your tablets are networked to a central database…Without your knowledge, I accept that. It amounts to poor practice, and I allowed it to happen.’
The last refrain he repeated: he allowed it to happen. It was his confession and he was seeking absolution. Rachel was not forthcoming. She called it for what it was: ‘fucking sneaky’ and ‘for sure illegal’. Throughout the length of her rant—what right do you have?—I remained silent, and Alex laughed. He said it was the sickest thing he’d ever heard. Whatever the reactions, nothing seemed to have much impact on the Doctor’s script, with which he continued.
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