When I resisted it was only because it was expected of me: ‘I don’t think I was really talking about anything…I think you were just trying to make us fit into this bullshit theory of yours about sub-parts.’
‘Sub-personalities.’ He got up from his seat and came over to the wall and waited for me to look at him. ‘The thing is, Daniel, I know and you know it isn’t bullshit.’
I shrugged, asked him what they talked about after I left.
He paused, nodded, accepting the question as a way forward and positioning himself into his next move. ‘Funnily enough, we talked about the photo you’re staring at now, about where we’d put ourselves if we were in the frame.’
He wanted me to guess what they said. I thought about it and got it right both counts: Alex in the woods, Rachel climbing high up in the mountain.
‘And you?’
I stared at the lake, at the section with the bracken floating on the surface of the water. I thought it would be the deepest and I imagined other bottom feeders. It is the only place they can live. All around the bracken, the lake reflected a dense canopy of branches so that the water was black and bottomless.
When he spoke his voice was gentle and quiet. This was his move. ‘You don’t need to tell me, Daniel. But you can.’
I did. I started.
I told him to ask the questions.
‘Who is there?’
‘The two of them.’
His lips are not moving but I can hear all his words like he is inside my head. Filthy durry-muncher. Fat horse. The days blur, the things he said, and did. The Doctor could read me: ‘Just pick one, Daniel, one day, one thing he did.’
‘He hated the stink of smoke on her skin.’
‘Where is he?’
‘On the couch.’
‘Where is Mary?’
‘Coming in from outside.’
Brian said she’d been smoking; she said no. He found her packet and made her take one out. The Doctor asked where I was. I told him: I am listening from the bedroom. I get up and stand at the door. He has her by the hair. I don’t come out, but I want to.
‘So step through the doorway, Daniel,’ the Doctor said. ‘He can’t get you here.’
You come closer and I’ll drop her and kick her teeth out.
If she likes the taste of it so much…
It is slow. The boy watches. She swallows the paper and tobacco but spits out the filter. She is coughing, gagging, and Brian has gone. I get her water and she sticks her fingers down her throat.
Later, I said he had to leave; she had to kick him out. But he had said sorry and started piling crates and paying rent money. I said I’d move out, then; I’m not living here with him around. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You’ve got nowhere to go. You don’t have any money.’
She was wrong; I had money by then, but I couldn’t tell her that. I slept a night in the spinning ball at the park. It was nice in the spinning ball. She said if he did anything again it’d be over. ‘I promise.’ For a couple of weeks it was best behaviour. He fixed the light in the bathroom and made burgers.
‘What do you feel when you think about him?’ the Doctor asked.
That isn’t the right question.
He told me to start again and make it different, the way I wanted. But I shook my head. Why I couldn’t do that is because what I remembered—the dark enfolding my core—was not how much I hated him, but how much I hated her.
Narrative Structure and Technique
The waterhole on a clear day, warm and still; their voices a background noise. The willow branches reflected on the water.
It was different from the lake in the Doctor’s photograph. I stared at the prism of colour—the perfect reconstruction like a secondary existence. I picked up a stone and threw it and the image fractured. Only moments later, as the ripples faded, there it was again, re-formed, gloating—like the Terminator blasted in bullet holes, healing up to kill again.
When light hits a surface there are a number of possible outcomes: it is diffused and absorbed, it is transmitted through the surface, or it is reflected back. It is linear algebra, a pretty simple multiplication. Reflectivity is a ratio. (Although there are a lot of factors that mean that some days things just look different.) I could explain in a great deal more detail how this (reflection and refraction) fits in with electromagnetic theory—think of light as an electromagnetic wave and you are halfway there. The reason I won’t do that is because I am like a dog whose chain has been yanked every time I pull that way. I bore people, often—the members of my family most of all. The reason I do this is that everything comes back to the spectrum in one way or another and it frustrates me (deeply) that people lack even a basic understanding of the concepts, despite the fact that our brains are wired to grapple with that and much, much more.
(It is said that my timing is bad and my subjects are not age-appropriate—that when she was twelve, for instance, my daughter did not need to understand how electromagnetic currents travel through her body. If she is to understand the hormonal cycle, I argued, the role of electromagnetic currents is both essential and unavoidable. I am told I picked the wrong moment because this was an important ‘talk’. I also told her she would begin to have the desire to touch the opposite sex. Things got heated. The twelve-year-old left the table.
I am further told that smoking a joint in the back garden with the now-sixteen-year-old is not an appropriate father–daughter milestone. I counter that it is a critical moment of shared internal reflection; we are the better for it. And I maintain my stance.)
Refraction. On some level, I think that is what we were doing: bending light.
On our second attempt, we nailed it.
It was a dark and windy night. (The Doctor suggested that as a scene-setter and I ran with it.) I enter stage right, the only door. The lights aren’t on, but I hear a sniffle, a whimper. I am alert to danger, prepared.
Then a perspective shift: it is Brian and Mary; they are in the kitchen. So that’s it then, the three of us in place, three shapes in the dark. (In the flats, there were always hundreds of others around you but when it mattered, just a single, silent witness.)
It was a dark and windy night.
‘I said that already.’
‘That’s okay. Keep going.’
They don’t hear me or see me because I am prepared and I am like a shadow.
What I see: first, their shapes. He is holding her over the kitchen bench with her arm behind her back. The gas burner is on and there is a pot on the floor. The volume turns up and there is a different register of sound, low and high, animal, human…I move across the room. I am like a shadow, that is how.
‘Go on, that’s fine.’
I am there in the kitchen, behind him. I don’t turn back. I form an intention. I lift the pot from the floor and raise it over my head and in a single, sweeping motion I crack it against the side of his skull, the thud of metal on skin on bone. It is a vibration more than a sound. The man falls forward against the kitchen bench as the woman becomes free.
His hand is in the fire.
We can smell his skin.
This time, his skin.
It was late in the afternoon, the Doctor and I standing in the gentle yellow light. He was close to me, close enough for me to feel the heat of him. I didn’t move away, and I wasn’t surprised at what he said next.
‘But that isn’t it, Daniel, is it?’
Over the years, Rachel has been careful in what she gives me, like dosing a sick child. But one time she asked to meet my mother. ‘For God’s sake don’t take it the wrong way.’
She saw the burns. Mary held them up for her to see and told her that I saw how it happened. ‘He saw a lot. He did his best.’
Like a shadow. That is her story now. We all have one.
But move it any further forward:
Mary places a hand on my shoulder and the other cups the back of my neck.
I flinch.
‘I know you’re angry
with me. I know this is hard for you.’
You don’t know the first thing.
Later she is holding my laptop. She is logged in, and she is shouting. ‘Who is V? Who is X?’ I lunge forward.
Hate is a substance that accumulates and hardens. When they were gone, it was just me and Mary. I don’t know how to change that. Hate doesn’t listen when you tell it to move.
Now I try this:
Around the bed there are four of them, two sitting down, two standing back. Hands tied to the bedposts, it isn’t a girl. It is the right person this time. It is me.
May the blood of the lamb…
May you tremble and flee.
I dive down. Past the mathematician and the scientist, the husband and the father, until I am sitting on the kitchen floor.
It is a different day. Her head is in my hands.
There is an area in the brain known as the septum that sits in the midline between the two cerebral hemispheres. It connects into the hypothalamus, deep in the unconscious regions. The science is inexact, but circuiting between the two are the nerve cells that house our circuits of aggression, our biological roots of rage. Somewhere in that buzzing mess lies the bomb in the brain.
Her hand is resting in spilled milk and the blood makes pink swirls. I am looking at that because I can’t look at her face. I am crying and she says she is all right. It will be all right, she says. I pick up pieces of broken plate and tell her I am sorry.
Tell me, Doctor, what part of me did that?
What I like to think about sometimes are the million points in the brain that never light up on any scan. It is true for every single person. In my mind, I connect us into one shared neural network—each of us forming such an infinitesimal part of something so vast and unknown that our imprint is invisible and our individual actions are wiped away.
Music: Sounds and Silences
I click on the names of strangers, the names of friends.
Case studies, all of us. A series of diverging and replicated experiences: metrics, not narratives.
Now I am starting to see that what matters is the purpose for which it is all collected: the proof point. What is the larger story they are trying to tell?
On one of our last nights at the waterhole, Alex told us about the day he first walked home from school alone.
He was eight years old. He and his father had just moved away from the city, and Alex had ‘gone quiet’. At first his dad said that was okay; but it had been long enough, and now it was time for him to ‘claim the place’ and ‘own his path’. The first step in achieving that involved them standing together barefoot in the bush behind the house, closing their eyes and imagining roots springing out from the soles of their feet into the ground, as far down into the earth as their minds would take them, and then permitting the energy to reverse and surge upward into their bodies and arms, to eventually sprout out through the tips of their fingers. In effect, to become trees. This, his father assured him, would foster their own growth and sense of belonging.
Step two was easier for Alex to grasp as a concept but a much greater challenge: to walk home alone from school. It was six kilometres, and his father calculated that if he maintained a steady pace it would take him about an hour.
He did not underestimate the size of the challenge for his son. In the lead-up to the big day they marked out the best pedestrian route (four backstreets, two sets of lights, one long winding road to the front gate), and on the day itself, he dropped Alex at school and handed him a printout of the directions. (Knowing full well the boy’s chief concern was not getting lost, but getting home alive.)
What are you afraid of? his father would ask when he found Alex in various states of paralysis. And the answer?
Death. In his more fluid moments, he could put it into words. ‘I am dying.’
The answer—we all are—did not, of course, cut it.
As Alex spoke, we didn’t interrupt him, not even Tod. He traced his steps that day as though every tree and pothole were etched in his memory, starting as he walked out the gate of his school. By the first street corner his heart was pounding in his ears and his body was like a leaking tap—‘I was sweating and crying and I kept needing to take a piss.’ He started counting, like his dad had told him to. He got all the way to a thousand.
I could relate to his fear of the streets—like the bush to me, a minefield in the mind, a series of horror-flashes of what is real, what is imagined…The sound of a dog barking: yellow teeth puncture flesh. A roar of acceleration: body dragged into the rusted underbelly. Any sighting of people on foot or behind wheels: chloroform and knives and white vans—every bad story he’d ever heard about bad people.
And with each image, he was falling into the bottomless well of non-being, cold and airless, his mind a blank, his organs failing: something akin to that happened eleven times between Alex walking out of the school gate and turning into his street. With the stops and starts it had taken him almost two hours. His shirt soaked through with sweat, his head pounding, he was at the point of collapse. It wasn’t until he reached the next door neighbour’s house that he saw the figure standing at the gate. As Alex approached, his father motioned him through in a definitive gesture and commenced a series of deep breaths, continuing until Alex could repeat at least one, and then: ‘After me,’ his father said, as he began to pound his chest with both his fists, slow and rhythmic. ‘Come on, with me…’
And Alex did what he asked. He pounded his chest. He lifted it up, to the extent that he could, and pounded it again, and again, until his father was satisfied the motion was driven by his heart and not his hands.
They sat on the front steps for a long time, the silence broken only when his father turned to look him in the eyes and said: ‘You are good and brave.’
Alex leaned his head on his shoulder and fell asleep right there and then.
Four years later, when Alex’s father died in front of him, he took his son’s fear of death with him. Partly because whenever the fear crept in, his father loomed up in his psyche and no part of Alex would allow himself to be anything but good and brave. (Most times he conjured the image of himself pounding his chest in time with his father; once he even caught himself doing it.)
But another factor was more transformative. Death was now his most-loved father’s permanent state of being—so as time went on, and Alex missed his presence more and more, he hankered to be closer to it: to find a deeper understanding, a kinship. He embarked on a comprehensive research project to consider death from every angle and resolved that there was nothing to fear because there was, in fact, nothing to come. That a decomposed corpse was simply a nutrient for the soil.
In time, it was Alex’s continued existence that formed the subject of his dread—specifically, the uncertainty around the duration. For young people the term of life can feel like a life sentence. What Alex required was a way to exercise control. The basis of his second project was his need to know that in whatever circumstance he found himself, he could end it. He needed an exit pass.
He began to consider his surrounds, scoping heights and sharp edges, bodies of water. Imagining the shape it might take. When he was satisfied his death was possible in a practical sense, he could relax. In the idea of non-being he found his solace. Death was his friend and confidante—dare it be said, his soul mate.
And that was before he started the next project.
I am trying to think now when I sensed Alex was no longer marching beside us. He put on a good show, I can say that. Later I thought about his father at the gate and I realised that, day in day out, coming to lessons, walking us through his whiteboards—that is what he was doing: being good and brave. He was convincing enough to let us believe we were mapping a collective future, marching with the fervour of purpose…It was just a matter of time before he had to show it up for the made-up story that it was, before he had to show us what was real.
A couple of days in a row he said he was tired, and then he didn’t show
up for a session with PW and I remember I was more disappointed than concerned. It was the last day of an exercise to track gamma, and Alex and I were trailing way behind Rachel. PW had taken on a whole new aura around the three of us. Smiling, he’d shake his head and repeat, ‘You guys…you guys…’ Not dismissive, but in a marvelling kind of way, sometimes resting a hand on our shoulders.
And then: no Alex. No big deal. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. When he came in to breakfast a couple of days later, it was to tell us he’d be skipping PW’s sessions.
‘I am doing more Doctor,’ he said.
He kept coming to the whiteboard sessions, but even then, he wanted to work more alone (a seven-slide PowerPoint on hazardous waste in Honduras): fixated on a particular problem, more granular than ever before.
What ‘doing more Doctor’ meant—I learned this only on reading the transcripts—was that twice a week over two weeks he sat in a chair in his office while the Doctor collected a baseline of twenty-one sites of his brain. There was some argument in the proceedings about the need for this, given the precariousness of his mental state, the Doctor providing cogent reasons as to why observing the patterns of one’s own brainwaves might produce positive clinical outcomes. There were pages and pages on the risk assessments that were performed or not performed and how the decisions were made—the decision not to medicate, the delay in treatment, and then back to the results of the tracking.
The overall theme of the questioning was that whatever he was doing, the monitoring and the feedback, whatever combination, whatever magic potion, it didn’t work. The Doctor disagreed. It was during those sessions, he said, that Alex was at his most frank and open.
COUNSEL: Could you give us an example of that, of something he imparted to you in one of these discussions?
DR J: I can. He said he wanted to curl into a ball and enter into a state of non-being.
COUNSEL: You mean die?
DR J: That is what he meant, yes I think so.
COUNSEL: And your response to that?
The Subjects Page 21