DR J: I encouraged him to curl into a ball, and assured him he would not die.
Alex was not speaking figuratively.
Let me explain what it looked like in practice, on the concrete floor of the classroom, under the second whiteboard. One arm clutched at a knee, the other leg outstretched, a hand cradling his ear, eyes open, unblinking. It was a shape similar to the one I’d seen that day in his dance class, then with the teacher kneeling beside him. Because I’d seen it then, and because Rachel had pretty much lived it, we weren’t overly alarmed. I did what the teacher had done, knelt down. I was nervous about touching him, but I did; I placed a hand on his shoulder and when he didn’t flinch, I moved closer and put my whole arm around him. Rachel came down on the other side and held on to the outstretched leg with both her hands. It was an odd configuration, but it felt like what we needed to do for him to know we were there. There aren’t that many of them, the times when what you do really matters, when you can change the course of things. We said his name. We said he’d be okay. We said we weren’t going anywhere.
We are here. We repeated that a lot.
I lay down on the floor to get to eye level. It was what I had seen before, as he stared into a computer screen late at night, but when the noise came it wasn’t something I’d heard before. There is a sound that is made when you rub your finger around the rim of a half-filled glass. It is like a musical note that is held. It is a sad song, low-pitched, clear and beautiful. It is the vibration of crystals transmitting into air. That is the sound that emanated from him now, the sound that had always been there, waiting. It was telling us something but we had no way to interpret it.
Rachel and I looked at each other in an unspoken pact: now that he had us, we would make it go away again.
It is what is known as the pointy end of the proceedings. Was the management and treatment of the children appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances? Helen K was recalled to give further evidence about the research project, how and why it came about.
COUNSEL: So you embark into a universe defined by everything terrible, everything that might lead a young man to conclude there is no point in living.
HELEN K: As I said, we couldn’t ignore what was in his head…
COUNSEL: What was in his head; yes of course, you took such good care of what was in his head. You support a course in which a boy with a history of chronic clinical depression is taken off his medication and you feed his mind with stories, depictions, of child sexual slavery and the public stoning of women…
HELEN K: I did not provide him with those stories. Our focus was statistics and mapping.
COUNSEL: No stories, no videos?
HELEN K: That is right.
COUNSEL: What about this one?
[Video played in court]
There were four pages of questions on how Alex got hold of the Yemen video. It was not through Helen. It was a USB drive on his computer. Before this, Dr J had been asked the same questions and provided the same answers. At no time during the proceedings did they get to the bottom of it.
If I could go in to bat for Helen for a minute—because I’m not sure she did such a good job of it herself—it wasn’t that she didn’t try to steer Alex a different way. He just always found his way back.
An example: a lesson like any other, we pulled out our tablets and headsets. The intro (a response, I assumed, to Rachel’s request) was a few images: Hitler, Superman and shelves filled with thousands of brains in Petri dishes. According to script, we worked through how the Führer had used Nietzsche to justify mass extermination—taking ethics out of it and keeping the focus on excellence, seguing neatly into the possibility that we were all being drip-fed, our values manufactured in a meta world, the brains-in-the-vat theory. Like the Matrix. Our version of the world fed to us through neuro-electrical signals. (I’m not saying we started light, just that it was Alex who led us into the dark.)
We were getting into some mind-bending fun facts when Helen stopped to pose a set of questions, which she asked us to consider through a number of different lenses—historical, scientific, philosophical. These and subsets of the same: Who am I? What is time? Is it okay to grow brain-dead babies to harvest their organs? We embarked pretty merrily on that. Whether or not fish could reason morphed rapidly into whether it was okay to have sex with animals (animals more generally, not just fish).
Some questions didn’t generate much heat: what happens after death is that we cease to exist, agreed. A little more on whether we should start putting terminally ill people out of their misery. Rachel came in hard here that we couldn’t trust people to make decisions for other people. Alex? No surprises there: as soon as we’re brought into this world we must have the right to leave it. And then a question of his own: should we have a right to give birth when we don’t have consent of the child that it wants to exist.
So we just die out now?
He didn’t seem opposed to the idea, and there we had it: the downward spiral, the millions of babies born into a core of pain and suffering…
‘Okay, Alex,’ Helen said in a last brave attempt: ‘But is all suffering bad?’
‘Maybe not,’ he replied, ‘but let me give you some recent examples of bad.’ And none of us could stop him.
Perhaps I willed the distraction; anyway, at some point during that lesson I heard voices outside and I went to the window. It was raining, the view to outside skewered through the foggy glass and the rivulets of rain. The window looked out to the driveway. I rubbed the glass and pressed my forehead against it.
I could see someone standing at the gate next to a blue car, twenty or so metres from the building. It was Greg. He was facing the direction of the front door, shaking his head, talking to someone who was out of our view. Rachel and Alex came up behind me and Alex put his finger to the window, chasing the drops as they fell. I rubbed the glass again but when the other person came into the frame, we stood back from the window so as not to be seen. It was Tod. He walked right up to Greg. They were arguing again, their voices rising against the clatter of rain. It was getting hard to see. At one point, Tod pointed in his face and I think Greg laughed and I remembered what Tod had done to his teacher. Whatever the reason he was taking Greg on, I was glad of it. A part of me wished he would lash out. He didn’t. He turned back; Greg got into the car and drove away.
That was the same day I saw PW for the last time.
A couple of weeks had passed since Dr J had taken over his lessons when I glimpsed him sitting at his desk. It was otherwise empty, all his bits and pieces packed away.
‘Hello, Daniel,’ he said. His T-shirt was pale pink, a skeleton wearing a bandana. ‘I think you’ve grown again.’
‘Yep,’ I said and pointed to the backpack on the floor. ‘You leaving?’
He nodded. ‘I am.’
He looked unhappy. I told him that.
He said, ‘How have your classes with the Doctor been going?’
I sat down and walked him through what we’d been doing, my struggle with sub-personalities…He was shaking his head and smirking, then he started getting a bit weird, putting on an American accent and spinning lines:
‘You too can improve your mind
‘It’s as easy as checking your pulse
‘A window into your brain…’
It was sort of funny but not. He looked sorry when I asked him what he was talking about.
‘I don’t know. I actually don’t know…’ He went quiet for a while and when he started again he seemed to be making his best effort to explain: ‘I had this girlfriend once,’ he said. ‘I thought she was perfect. And it went to shit. She wasn’t what I thought. Same kind of thing. I loved this place. You hear what I’m saying? I just think I should get out of here.’
Neither of us said anything. I had a sick feeling in my stomach about what he could tell me if I asked.
‘I saw his computer,’ I said, ‘when I smashed up the office.’
PW looked at me, waiting to catch on. I told hi
m about the videos, the other children, the other places.
‘How many were there? How many videos?’
When I told him, he nodded like I was confirming something for him, but when I asked who they were, he stopped, stood up and pulled his bag onto his back. I felt a sudden surge of panic. I didn’t want him to go.
At the door he turned back and smiled and waved his hand.
‘Should I be getting out of here too?’ I asked. ‘Honest answer.’
‘Honest answer,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
The bell sounded, now a kookaburra. Last lesson of the day.
I knew decisions were being made in distant places, and I knew that the basis of those decisions was not the fostering of our well-being—our education, rehabilitation, treatment—whatever you want to call it.
What we could never have suspected, and what seven days of legal enquiry never even touched on, was that at some point right around now, a set of circumstances necessitated a shift in the corporate objective: the endgame. It is concealed somewhere here in the database. I have looked, searched through subject headings, guidelines, operations. There is no manual I can find…But somewhere it is there in the missives between mothership and satellite, a change in direction: from the laissez faire—‘let it play out’—to a more determinative outcome: to demonstrate failure.
Alex was Case Study #1.
Chemical Reactions: Combustion
I am running light-footed the way she told me to run.
I know where to enter, the path now well-trodden. I know it in the dark so it is easy in the day, but I watch for every rock and ditch and tree root. That is my focus, to get out the other side and not to fall. Low cloud skims the top of the trees and cocoons the bushland. I run with the thought I will get there in time because it is the only way I can run. I run with the lie.
The primary purpose of the inquiry was to address a subset of questions: to establish identity, date, place, manner and cause. When it came down to it, they could tick them off, like the symptoms of a diagnosis.
Alex P, sixteen-year-old Caucasian male.
On Friday 9 August, between midnight and dawn. (He had been in the company of student Tod M in the courtyard until 11.45 pm. I arrived at the waterhole after 6 am.)
In the area of scrubland known as the waterhole, falling within the parameters of lot 257: property of Mindsight, a subsidiary of Neuropharma Inc.
How is cause and manner.
While cause is a physiological concept (the reason the organs shut down), manner relates to circumstances, including the question of intent, or lack thereof. What was in the mind of the deceased? Evidence was called from a number of witnesses in an attempt to shed light. Dr J talked about his last one-on-one session with Alex. He recalled that they talked about the concepts of heaven and hell but ‘noted nothing out of the ordinary’.
‘You took notes?’ the lawyer asked.
Mental notes, it turned out. Helen K concurred with the Doctor, stating that beyond the phosphorus experiment incident and injury, she did not see any evidence of a ‘rapid descent’ as had been put to her—more a ‘plateau’. After a period of nonattendance, Alex was engaging in class. There was nothing in either his demeanour or behaviour that required an ‘acute response’.
In terms of the circumstances, I begin on the Monday.
He was in the throes of it, no question. I liken it to the virus taking hold—swarmer cells colonising the amygdala, mutating into the prefrontal cortex. (If you want a case study of virulence, look no further than a major depressive disorder.) His response levels varied, depending on how close we were trying to get: he was either comfortably numb or holding himself still while we pushed pins in his eyes.
The lawyer framed it as a rapid descent, but that isn’t my version.
On the Monday afternoon, when he hadn’t shown up in the morning, I found him again on the floor between the whiteboards, sitting cross-legged, hunched over. He didn’t look up as I came in. I slid down alongside him on the floor and filled him in on what he’d missed over the last few days—my session with Dr J, what Tod had been cooking, Greg’s latest weirdness. He didn’t give me any indication he was listening, instead studying the surface of the floor, a dark layer of scum that had congealed around the foot of a whiteboard stand, which he began now to scrape with his fingernail, ploughing the shavings into a single straight line. It was gross; I told him it might be toxic. He looked at me sideways—like I give a shit.
I moved around so we were face to face. ‘Maybe you should be taking something, some kind of medication.’
He looked at me with gentle eyes. He reached over and held my sleeve and told me he didn’t have a great record on pills. I persisted, said there were a lot of different kinds he could try. His focus returned to the shavings, which he was now rolling into a ball between his thumb and forefinger. For fear it was heading for his mouth I flicked it into the air.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I will explain what happens to me when I’m on pills. They make me calm enough to just think “fuck it”…I think “fuck it” about a hundred times a minute. What is that, like a billion times a day, yeah? After a few days, it becomes hard not to listen.’ He was looking at me now, seeing if I understood. ‘Can I tell you something?’
I nodded.
‘I tried it twice. I mean like really gave it my best—both times on different medication.’
Why was I not surprised?
I went to see the Doctor to raise my concerns.
He said if not pills, then what? I suggested maybe hospital; he rejected it outright: ‘That isn’t what we do here. Think it through, Daniel—you really want to hand him over to whoever’s on duty in the nearest psych ward?’
‘So you do nothing? He’s tried to kill himself and now he is stuck in this place in the middle of nowhere…’
‘He can leave here at any time.’
‘He won’t leave here.’
‘So then he stays.’
Round and round. I didn’t want to hear it. It got me thinking about my contractual rights—full and frank disclosure—so I demanded he tell me what happened with PW.
Pouring me water: ‘He left of his own accord.’
‘Why?’
‘A difference of approach…’
‘I liked his approach.’
‘Yes, so did I.’
The explanation—when I pressed him for it—was that PW had ‘an issue with management’. I asked him who the ponytail woman was and he said he wasn’t exactly sure of her position title. ‘She is the global head of something or other.’
‘Global? So the videos on your computer, the other—’
He cut in. ‘The School is part of a larger operation.’
‘There are other schools?’
He flinched; I was getting warm but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know when to drill.
‘There are twenty-six sites around the world,’ he said.
‘Including us?’
He shook his head. ‘We are a sort of outpost. We are number twenty-seven.’
Even when I had the transcript in front of me in print years later, I skimmed the pages on the particulars of corporate structure and responsibility. They didn’t give much away. Submissions were made in the absence of witnesses: corporate liability of the parent company went beyond the scope of the inquiry. The School had been repurposed as a research centre so there was no issue regarding its continued operation. At some point the lawyer referred to grounds for a civil action, but there was never anyone on Alex’s side to take it up. In any case, my interest was not in the structure, but the other children.
‘How many are there—other students?’
He took a long while to answer and seemed cautious when he did. ‘They are not really students, the others. They went to court too, but they didn’t have the same kind of option you did in this place. They are in custody, juvenile detention, or other facilities… And the sites are bigger. A couple of thousand all up, I’d say. That is h
ow many.’
They are not really students…
A couple of thousand all up.
In digesting this I imagined a wide-open space populated with two thousand teenagers in different-coloured tracksuits; some of the faces I had seen, my boy in the yellow beanie front and centre. To get a sense of the scope I sectioned them in twenty blocks of a hundred, each block a square of ten-by-ten. While up until now I had them as part of our story, they now formed a narrative parallel to our own. Out of formation, I scattered them again across twenty-six sites, a shadowy and disparate backdrop of young people like us, but blank-faced, without purpose. Somehow, I already sensed it was a story no one was willing to tell. I felt sad for them, but separate. Sad was as far as I went.
‘So what was the global woman upset about?’ I asked.
He said it was a misunderstanding, about the meaning of a term in his contract. ‘It was badly drawn.’
‘You have a contract?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I have a contract; we all do.’
He looked a bit weary and asked if that was enough for today. When I stood up, he smiled, and then followed me to the door, determined, it seemed, to end on a positive note: ‘You’ve grown again, Daniel, did you know that?’
On the Tuesday night I was in the kitchen with Rachel finishing off Magnolia’s Chinese chicken when Glen came to the door.
‘Come. You should see this.’
We followed. When he stopped at the music room I hesitated.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘They asked him in.’
Opening the door, I saw that the him was Alex and that he was standing against the back wall, eyes closed and swaying to guitar music, played by Imogen. She wasn’t holding it like a normal guitar; instead it was almost vertical, the body resting on the chair between her legs as her fingers slid up and down the strings. The sound was Spanish, Latino…I shouldn’t have been surprised by the way she could play; over the months I’d heard bits and pieces, but actually watching the speed and flurry of her fingers left me floored. The whole scene was a bit surreal. The corner lamps bathed the room in a pinky light, like dusk. Grace sat next to Imogen at the synth keyboard, watching Alex, waiting. When his arms came out to the side in a wave-motion she added sounds, first the ring of bells then birdsong, and when he ramped it up so did she, adding a set of eerie, robotic pulses. After a minute of that Alex dropped suddenly into a squat and sprang back up into a series of moves like the ones I’d seen before in the dance room—scarecrow, ragdoll, rubberman. Imogen improvised her way through it, ending up with a set of frenetic downstrokes that sent them all into the next phase. First a pause: Alex stopped, the music did too. He held his arms loose by his side, his knees bent, and just his head moving back and forth, slowly at first then speeding it up, unleashing. Grace throwing in a manic reverb of sirens and drills, Imogen some kind of mad, techno flamenco. At the top of the movement Alex surged into full head-banging whiplash then spun it into windmill, round and round and round…his sweat spraying into the air.
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