‘He’s going to break his fucking neck,’ Rachel whispered, but neither of us moved.
What we were watching was high-frequency modulation mayhem, but in all its parts—sonic, kinetic—it was magnificent. (The sum of energies in the universe is unchangeable; standing that night amid a collision of a billion moving particles, I couldn’t work out the maths on that.)
And then it crashed. Alex reeled back against the wall and fell to the floor. Imogen dropped the guitar. Grace finished off with an alien vocal, distant, solo…The show was over, Rachel and Glen and me not sure what we’d just witnessed—the nature of the frenzy, what it intended to summon—annihilation or release, agony or ecstasy—each of us sensing that somehow it was all the same.
The only sound remaining was the rasp of Alex’s breath, the only movement the rise and fall of his chest. Should we clap or check his vitals? I didn’t know.
That was the thing with Alex, I never did.
The ferns flash past me as I run, a cosmic green.
The chorus of birds is a vibration; the sound is a cry, crystals transmitted into air. You are good and brave, I repeat, more a plea than an affirmation.
You are good and brave.
On the Thursday morning, I saw the sleeping bags in the courtyard. It was a while since we had connected with Tod; he’d become moodier lately (Rachel said he was just up himself) and I was pretty sure he was fattening up again. But here he was in the kitchen, back at the stove, making poached eggs topped with haloumi and Swiss chard, and it turned out—so I now heard—that they had started up again in the courtyard, he and Alex. Neither was sleeping, and they were talking now about going back to the waterhole.
I couldn’t sleep myself that night. I found Alex in the courtyard, alone. For a while neither of us spoke. It was my favourite kind of sky, a waxing crescent moon—a bare sliver just visible again, the rest of the surface faint and dark and hidden. It made me think of explorers and possibilities and new worlds. Alex was thinking about something else. He began in the middle of a thought, a ramble about the connections between people—the pathways—how some of us exist in a collective and some of us in silos. He talked about how his dad had been able to feel his pain.
‘He said there are transmitters, vibrations; some of us close our eyes and hear it—the hum of human consciousness. That’s how we know things we were never taught or understand things that have never been explained.’
It came across like a rumination on the parables, to which I posited my own explanation: ‘Primordial knowledge.’
He nodded, considering that. ‘The problem is that a lot of people switch themselves off.’
I assumed he must be referring to me and I said, ‘Sorry if I do that.’
At this, his whole tenor changed. He almost jumped on top of me. ‘You have no idea how far off that is,’ he said. ‘You are like a thunderbolt, man—no question, no one in contention. The most switched-on person I have ever met.’
It sounded so bulletproof. That afternoon I’d just got another email from Mary: It isn’t who you are, she said…And part of me thought, maybe if I tell Alex who I am I can still be a thunderbolt.
Instead I deflected. ‘Cool,’ I replied. ‘That’s okay then.’
And I let him link us back to brainwaves and neural transmitters and the colours of the auras he could sometimes see around the back of people’s heads. Eventually—around the time of the first birdsong—he rambled himself into sleep before I got around to asking what my colour was.
Our final lesson, Friday.
We put on our headsets and did as we were asked: ten minutes eyes open, ten minutes closed. The global woman appeared at the door; she entered uninvited and observed us without introduction.
‘Ignore me,’ she said. ‘Pretend I am not here.’
That became harder when she proceeded to walk around checking each of our headsets. Up close she smelled of soap and I could see her eyebrows were just a brown pencil line. Dr J asked to speak to her outside.
In their absence, Alex paid no attention to the exercises set for us, but instead sat glued to the images on his screen—the bird’s-eye view, four horizontal and eight vertical rows of blurred black and white brains resembling large single cells, or walnuts (whichever way I looked I saw faces). Within the shadowy interior were small patches lit up in blue and green: the level of activation, the oxygenated blood flow. Alex squinted as he moved between brains, then clicked into the next page. There appeared the electrical oscillations—pale jagged lines like children’s drawings of mountains; they cut across each other in bursts and spikes, revealing the chaotic maze inside the scanned brain.
I watched him lean slowly into the screen, his face close enough so that the light reflected on his skin, pale and translucent. I watched as he traced his finger over his mood state: a ten-second flow, a flat line on beta—the same way a week ago he had traced raindrops on a window…And in that moment, inside my own body, I felt the weight of what he saw and what he knew, and I realised maybe it is right, what his father said about connections. Maybe there is a pathway between us.
Maybe I can feel it too.
The Doctor’s return, alone, only added further credence. When he needed to, the man could read a room. This was it, I thought: the domino effect of open doors, the universal algorithm of human connectivity…
He saw the boy’s finger over the flat line and sat down next to him: ‘Do you want to know about mine?’
Without waiting for an answer, he told us about the days when he questioned every decision he made, ‘All the little meaningless ones—what socks to wear, whether to close a door behind me—because with every decision is the potential that it is the wrong one. What that means is that some days I cannot move. When you don’t see me, Alex, it isn’t that I have gone to the city or I am somewhere else. I don’t turn up because I can’t, because I’m unable to move from the floor of my bathroom.’
It took a while for Alex to nod, but he did, and as he did, he turned his tablet over on his desk. He then removed his headset, and without looking at the Doctor, he said: ‘If it’s all right with you, I am not going to wear these again.’
There was something definitive in his delivery. My take on it then was that he was over the worst of it; the fever had broken. You are well positioned to call me dead wrong, but that is how it felt.
Have you heard the story of the man who serves a twenty-year prison sentence and breaks out the day before he is to be released?
The next day Alex was gone.
On the other side of the bushland, the goat scurries away, his back legs disappearing behind a blackened hollow log. Images scramble like a song played backwards. Images of Alex and everybody who got it wrong.
Everybody got it wrong.
When I glimpse what is to come, I choke for breath, unable to propel myself forward.
There is the sound of a tractor in the distance…That is the reason I move. Because I am close enough for him to hear me. Because between us there is a pathway of packed earth.
I shout his name. I am screaming.
The morning air is misted, like a dream.
Friday afternoon, passing the dance room, I saw the global woman again. She stood at the door with Greg, her head cocked to one side, looking in to the room. I just caught what she said.
‘You do what the Doctor says…You do nothing.’
At the sight of me, she moved on, Greg in tow.
At dinner, Alex was in the kitchen. I don’t remember what we ate. I remember they talked about going back to the waterhole, he and Tod. We reminisced about the first time we’d got out there at night. I said I’d come and I thought I would, but later I stopped at Rachel’s door and I knocked and she let me come in and lie on the floor and we talked until I fell asleep.
Some time after dawn, startled by something—I went to check the courtyard. The sleeping bags were there: two of them laid out, empty. I saw the kitchen light on. It was too early for that, but there was Tod, sitting
at the table with a platter of food in front of him. Cut-up fruit and sandwiches, cheese and crackers and tubs of yoghurt, enough to feed a table but feeding only one.
‘How did you open the door?’
‘I found a way,’ he said.
‘You went to the waterhole?’ I asked.
He said he didn’t go. And before I even asked the next question he nodded, yes. Yes, Alex had gone. Alex had gone alone. He didn’t look at me as he said it.
‘Is he back?’
He shrugged.
The first thing to come into view is the willow branches. Then, over the rise, the unmoving surface. If the reflection was broken by the fall, it is complete again now, a grand sweep of dappled green. It is the simplest form of light–water interaction.
I see a part of him—pale flesh in shallow water, an arm; no, a leg—and then the rest rising above the surface on the rocky outcrop, captured in the act of pulling himself from the water as he has done so many times before. For a split second I believe it: he is climbing out. (It is a feat, what our minds are able to fit into those moments, the burst of thought: he didn’t hear me, he is asleep, what I would sacrifice…) As I come closer I see what is really there. I see that his arm hangs down into the water, impossibly broken, and I see that his eyes are open. A picture I don’t want to enter, a story I don’t want to tell. But already I am part of it, the boy running to his friend, to save him…
The air suctions out of my lungs: like I have been hit and can’t breathe back in.
I don’t know what it feels like to have a brother or a son or a father, but I know that when I saw his eyes there was a severing of time in that moment—of life before and after.
His bedroom was empty, the bed made, a T-shirt folded on the pillow, nothing out of place. The screensaver was back to the waterfall, the sound on high, a trickling piano. The volume made me sit down at the computer and click into the desktop. Across the top of the screen were minimised versions of the whiteboards, not scanned but reproduced in adaptive graphics. Last was Rachel’s whiteboard, the Trajectory of Human Suffering: Solutions. She had used the ‘good news’ board as a starting point from which to work backwards: improving trends in HIV, reduced malaria mortality rates, better schooling for girls in Sri Lanka. Then she moved on to dot points marking enablers for change: scientific advancement, international treaties…I had seen it before in the tutorial room; we had watched her sketch it out, Alex nodding along.
Back in his own room, here is what he had done: he had formulated the argument for the negative and added a second wheel, a second heading—Barriers—and circling around it, the list of them, all the reasons why the solutions were piecemeal, the human blockages to change, our human failings—‘in no particular order’:
• self-interest
• corruption
• ineptitude
• forgetfulness
• the forces of evil
Arrows linked back into Fragmentation and Ignorance and an NB: We are not talking theory here.
In his own quiet way, Alex had had the last say.
‘You go,’ Tod said when he saw me back at the door to the kitchen. ‘You’ll be faster without me.’
I turned, and ran.
The smell of mud. I plunge in, I am swimming, I swallow water… When I pull myself onto the rock beside him I am coughing. I look down. Cushioned against the green moss, his face is at an angle to the surface of the water, as though he bent down to view his reflection; to contemplate a plan. And there it is, the perfect reconstruction of a perfect profile, disappearing as I pull him over so that his eyes are looking at me and looking at nothing. There is the beginning of a smile, like he knew how he would land and he knew that I would find him:
Come on, Dan—you know me by now. This is okay with me; this is good.
I nod back, and pull him into the water.
I did not leave Alex’s body as I found it.
Instead I floated him across to the other side, dragging him up onto the bank, all the way up to the place I knew he liked to sleep, his spot, where there was grass to soften the bed and a boulder the shape of a pillow—the same boulder the wombat had dug his burrow behind—and I lay down beside him, and I put my hand over his hand and remained that way because I felt sure he wouldn’t want me to leave him there alone.
There was a cut the length of his arm, a red, jagged line.
Waiting on the bank, we lay still, as we had done when things went quiet and we let ourselves think. After a while, I couldn’t say how long—time was playing tricks—I thought I felt his hand press up on mine. I sat up. I looked down for other signs but even when there weren’t any, I made the call: there was nothing to lose. I leaned down over him and did what I could, pressed my mouth to his mouth, cold spongy lips. I didn’t remember what else, how many chest presses. I wasn’t listening for that bit. With each blow I wondered if I was killing any last chances of him living. I wondered about that right up until I read the transcripts.
The answer was there, on the very first page.
Cause of death: transection of the fifth cervical spine on impact.
And manner: self-inflicted death with the intention to end life.
Social and Emotional Wellbeing 1.1
It was more than an hour before they found us.
I stared through tears at the sunken pit in his sternum, a blur of tattooed birds, the shape of their eyes more human than avian; I imagined him balancing at the end of the highest branch, raising his arms out to the side and high above his head, the moon casting light through the leaves and framing his silhouette against the sky. It struck me then, the significance of the detail—his bare chest: Alex had taken his clothes off and hung them on the rock.
The concept of intention at law has a broad sweep. When it comes to the killing of another human being, the law takes great care to distinguish the gradations of intention or recklessness or negligence. When the life we have taken is our own there doesn’t seem to be quite the same rigour applied. The proceedings address a narrow set of questions.
When I considered all this at the time of reading the transcript, I thought it probably right that the level of intent in this case fell somewhere in the middle. The phrase I’d read once or twice in the newspapers—in describing some death or other—was reckless indifference to human life. As regards my friend Alex, it stuck in my mind as both so true and so utterly false.
What I have ended up with in the final round is another legal term. Alex took himself alone to the waterhole that night, he walked out along the highest branch of the willow tree and he stood upon it facing an uncertain depth below. In the lead-up, there existed a set of circumstances: at best, an absence of effort to contain the risk; at worst, facilitation. I have questioned who, in his final days and hours, played a part. Alex took off his clothes not because he intended to die, but because there was a chance he would survive; there was a chance that he would swim. It was a toss of the coin and, ultimately, it was his toss, I accept that. But that does not negate the responsibility of others.
You do what the Doctor says. You do nothing.
There is another term that has stuck with me. It is the doctrine they call common purpose.
They knew to bring a stretcher.
They closed his eyes and tucked his arms in by his sides and carried him back through the bush to an ambulance waiting at the top of the driveway. The others gathered there, all but the Doctor. All but the man in charge.
I walked back inside, through the waiting room, and opened the door to his office. Sitting in his wing-backed chair in the yellow light of the tulip lamp, he was dressed and ready, it seemed, for the remainder of this most terrible day—in his jacket and tie, his hair combed into its side part.
‘Daniel,’ he said in his quietest voice. ‘Come, sit.’
I did not sit. I went to the window and pulled the curtain open and looked out to the group, some gathered at the back of the ambulance, some sitting on the ground, heads buried in their
arms. I felt separate from them, separate from their pain, and from mine.
The Doctor came and stood beside me. When he put his hand on my shoulder, my legs went weak and I stepped back, away from him. I don’t know what kept me standing; anger was the closest thing.
‘You did this,’ I said, my voice calmer than I thought it would be. His eyes looked paler in the light, the scar at the corner of his mouth a deeper purple, more prominent. ‘You could have stopped it.’
‘They are two different things.’
The veins in his temples surfaced as he clenched his jaw and held my gaze. There was a challenge in it. Think this through, his eyes seemed to be saying. But I couldn’t think; I couldn’t feel. I was watching this from a different vantage—this boy and man, their strange connection, and in the van outside, just metres away…
I took a last look at the ambulance before I walked over to the computer on the desk and tapped the keyboard. There they were again, the children, different ones, or maybe the same, hundreds of faces on a screen. I scrolled back and forward, clicking into other icons, finding graphs and numbers but not what I was looking for.
The Subjects Page 23