‘Show me,’ I said. ‘Where are we in here?’
He shook his head. ‘I told you. You are not in there. You are different. Daniel, please, you need to come sit.’
I looked down at my legs, my shoes and pants caked in mud, the scratches on my arms. But I didn’t move. I didn’t want to play. ‘How are we any different? This may as well be a jail, out here in the middle of nowhere—part of some weird fucking experiment…’
He shook his head. ‘This isn’t the experiment, Daniel,’ he said. ‘I rescued you from that. You’re not in there because you’re here with me. I told you, you’re different from them. You are lucky…’ His voice started to trail off but came back stronger. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’
The words so jarred with my sense of what was happening that they broke something in me and when I reached the chair, I fell into it.
‘You let him loose. You let him die. Is he lucky?’
‘We could have given him drugs; we could have put him in a hospital. But you know yourself, he didn’t want that.’
‘You don’t know what he wanted,’ I spat back.
He leaned forward in his chair. ‘What do you think I have been doing in here with Alex all this time? He sat where you are sitting now, or on the floor at the window…All our sessions, all the days leading to this. They all led to this…’
There was an emphasis on the last word, an inflection that attributed to it more than just acceptance, but something purposeful, something momentous. And it twigged.
‘You think what happened, this…you think it is the right thing.’
He took a while to answer. ‘What I think is that Alex was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever met. I think that being the person he was while he was here—that is what he wanted. That is all he wanted.’
I got up, walked to the window. Outside it was just Greg and the ambulance now, everyone else gone.
‘You don’t know that,’ I said. ‘You don’t know the first thing about us—about him, about me.’ After all this time. ‘You think you do; you sit there and watch me move the pieces around. All your bullshit about contracts and stages and players and you still missed it, Doctor—you never worked it out…’
This was my only card to play. My proof, my truth, my story.
He reached over to the table and poured water into the glasses. By the way he looked up at me now—squarely, unblinking—I already knew I was wrong.
‘You think I don’t know, Daniel?’ The voice quiet again, resolute. ‘You think I don’t know what you did?’
For a moment he let the words hang between us, until he could see the meaning sink in. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I knew it the first time she called here. I heard it in her voice, in her silence—the fear, the relief that her son was somewhere far away. And you, Daniel, every time we have talked about her it is etched across your face.’
When the tenants have come and gone, Daniel, when it is just the boy and his mother, what happens then?
My mind cast itself back to the session when he told me she had called, to all the sessions after that, hour after hour, and to what he was telling me he had known all along—how the tenants left and I banged on walls and kicked through doors…What happened then, the event itself—the day she found the files, my customer files, and said it had to stop. The detail didn’t matter to him, only to me. My barricade of lies, how she wanted to tear it all down.
How light she felt, like a doll.
I don’t see red. I see yellow and it is blinding. Sometimes I slump to the floor and make noise, however loud, for however long, and there isn’t anything else but this…There is one way to be rid of it, different versions. This was my worst version. There was nothing to pull me back, just a long line of people with other versions of the same thing.
I held her by the neck, her back against the wall. She screamed when I let go and I hit her in the face with my fist and when she fell I kicked into her body and she turned her face at the wrong time and there was blood and milk on the kitchen floor. When I came back she was still there and I held her head in my hands. I held my mother’s head in my hands. She asked where I had been, like it was any other day and I was any other son, and we talked about making a plan.
You can get to hell and back, Mary said, as long as you have yourself a plan.
I stepped away from the window, out of the light, but it was the fact of the matter, that all our days had led to this.
Sometimes we need to be seen.
In the waiting room outside the Doctor’s office, I was startled to find the global woman sitting at the desk. Strands of loose hair falling from the ponytail, her fingers hovered above the keys of her laptop as though I had interrupted her typing. For a brief moment she looked at me that way, like I was an interruption, before rearranging her demeanour and closing the screen. Nodding to herself and softening the edges of her mouth, she got to her feet.
‘I am sorry,’ she said, without any inflection, any clue as to whether she meant it by way of condolence or apology. The only observation I could make was that she seemed somehow less bothered than she had been in the preceding days, less hostile. Looking on me now not as an object of annoyance or sympathy, but as an irrelevance. When she tucked the strands of hair behind her ears and sat back down again, my sense was that her job was done.
Outside, amid voices, an engine started. I strained to listen, to keep hearing the sound as long as it lasted until it died in the distance.
This isn’t the experiment…I rescued you from that.
I had assumed that day that he meant prison: that is what he rescued me from. Now I have a better idea. I have read the transcripts, I know his story and now it is all in front of me. In his mind, he had taken me out of the asylum. By being there at the School, all of us, we formed the group they refer to as ‘the control’.
Macroeconomics
A few years ago I came across a reference in a journal article to a study that commenced in the same year I was at the School. The article was entitled ‘Crime Prevention in a Pill?’ and the study considered the impact of drug treatments on underlying causes of delinquent and offending behaviour. It was a lifetime study based on a number of juvenile subgroups; by ‘life’ they meant tracking progress until age forty-five. There had been some promising early results with regard to attention deficit disorders and adolescent bipolar; the long-term benefits had been called into question.
I read the article during a period when I was not my best self. In no position to argue the point, I had given everyone a breather and gone to stay at the mountain house (shed, really), as I do from time to time. That is my solution; it does not receive universal approval. I explain that it is in everyone’s interests; I take it too far and question why we insist on living as human tenements: there is shouting. I miss birthdays and award ceremonies and dental appointments. If we all just got up and fucked off…In reply, I nod and mumble and pack my things.
I read the article over again. I stared out from my narrow porch into the maze of silver-grey gums and thought about the School. Our little juvenile subgroup, our midnight sessions. Over the years I have spent many hours recreating the best of them in my mind. On bad days I draw a blank, but at least I can sit on my porch and let the vibration of birds and cicadas bang around my cerebrum and keep any unwelcome reflexive response contained. (I bought the place for next to nothing on account of the density of the tree canopy blocking the light; I don’t mind a bit of dark, and the acoustics are bar none.)
What I had reminisced about less was my relationship with the Doctor. True to form, I maintained my rage, seating blame for Alex’s death with him, partly because I didn’t know where else to put it. Thinking about our conversations generally made me feel like there was a light shining in my face; that I had things—everything—to hide. At the same time there was this hankering sense of loss. When that became acute there were select parts I liked to replay. If I was careful, it helped.
There was a ref
erence letter he wrote for me that was quoted by prospective employers every time I applied for a new position. That, of course, was welcome. And in a way, I always felt his influence. Go rogue. From the moment I left the university, from assistant to researcher to group leader, I made it my practice to reject labels and re-examine definitions, to be suspicious of universal truths and, most critically, to work outside other people’s ethical frameworks. Heading the largest genome research group in the region, I am the stem cell man. (Now that I have equity in this thing, it is a very lucrative business. I can see how hard it must have been for the Doctor to walk away.)
He only once made direct contact with me: during the time of the inquest when I was on the other side of the world. I was twenty-four. The head of my department forwarded me an email that turned out to be from the Doctor, attaching the scanned brainwave reports I left in my room when I walked out of the School seven years earlier. The three-line email itself extended an offer for us to take up where we left off. To the extent that it is possible. I would like your brain on something.
My response was to try not to think about what he meant. I printed off the email together with the reports and tucked them into a manila folder stashed in a bottom desk drawer. Later, I added my notes from the transcripts. Once or twice a year I pulled the folder out and closed it up again. A mental seal.
Rachel was different. They kept in contact. Whenever she brought it up with me, I did my best to shut her down. There was one time she dragged me into a project she was working on (I would have swallowed nails for her, and this time I sort of did). It was a stint at the Centre of Youth Development. For eleven months I matched survey reports with third-world satellite pictures and developed algorithms to predict juvenile health outcomes at the level of individual villages. Afterwards she hinted that it all had something to do with the Doctor—‘his lifetime project’—and I said it was a shame he hadn’t made it his project to save ‘the life of one boy’. We were drinking tea at her kitchen bench.
Her eyes flashed with anger and she was about to say something. Then she softened. ‘I think he probably saved mine.’
She waited for me to look back at her.
‘You tell me. Where would you be now if it wasn’t for him?’
I cleared our cups and said nothing. On my way out to the car she called me an emotional amoeba. It was only when I was safely staring at the odometer that I was able to think about the cause of the blood rushing between my midbrain and ribcage. It wasn’t her assessment of me, but her assessment of herself. I think he probably saved mine. I began to imagine the Doctor’s sessions with the other students: what played out in parallel with my own as the Doctor delved and sidestepped and discovered inroads, as he paced and mumbled and pointed to contracts. What unfolded in each of them, and how it must have been as intricate and extraordinary as what had unfolded in mine. As I so often did, I landed back with Alex, his sessions, week after week—only now with the simple and inescapable conclusion that some of us, no matter what the effort, could not be saved.
By the time I arrived home, I’d began to feel an opening in my chest cavity, a sense of forward momentum. The opening was more a re-opening—taking up where we had left off. I pictured the Doctor’s face in my mind, and rather than scramble to mute our conversations, I let snippets of them linger. I went on to script what we might now say to each other, and what he would see when he looked at me. It was something I had done in the months after leaving the School but it had started getting too glary. Now, all this time later, we were back in session.
It wasn’t until I saw the article about the study and placed it on top of the other papers in my file that I re-read the email he had sent me—now more than fifteen years ago—and found myself drafting a reply. That took some time; in the end I asked simply if he was still there. I received an immediate response: the Doctor was out of office. Timeframe unspecified.
In frustration, I began adding to the file. I dug out information online about Dr J’s early success. I searched his name, his university, his places of employment, but could find nothing about his current whereabouts. Finally I sent a message to Rachel, who was in the UK for a work trip. I didn’t hear back.
Then two months ago, at a conference in Singapore, I was reading an American newspaper and there he was. That strange and wonderful face, his wide-set eyes staring out above a paragraph on page twelve. The once-celebrated neuroscientist, pioneer of groundbreaking drug treatments for millions of adolescents worldwide, was found in his home after a sudden heart attack. Aged seventy-six. Survived by his sister and his son.
I checked my phone. Text from Rachel: He is dead.
It took me some time to digest. For three days—the remainder of the conference—I sat in my hotel room with the television blasting and made my way through a lavishly stocked mini-bar.
There was no relief in the thought that my childhood secret was buried with him. I was back to where I started. Outside of victim and perpetrator, the story did not exist—which is what spurred me to put this together. Spreadeagled on stained hotel plush pile, I resolved to create my own record.
It was what happened next that shifted my purpose from a private to a public one; that raised a different set of questions.
I went back to the article and checked for links to the study. They were no longer there. It was only due to the persistence of a colleague that I was able to obtain a copy. The title was ‘Drug Treatment and Adolescent Mental Health Disorders: Implications for Crime Prevention’. With a sudden sense of urgency, I flicked to the executive summary.
Across the globe, a total of more than 2500 young persons took part. The eligibility criteria applied to all participants across the twenty-six sites: each had been a resident of a juvenile detention facility for a period of not less than six months.
At the end of the summary there was a disclaimer. There had been a control group, but it had been disbanded. Buried within an appendix, another nugget of information. Instead of drug treatment, participants in the control group took part in an alternative program whose core components included, but were not limited to, therapeutic sessions, narrative therapy, neural monitoring and access to the natural environment.
The principal investigator of the entire study was a woman by the name of Madelaine T, global team leader at Mindsight, subsidiary of Neuropharma Inc.
A few days later I received a package in the post, addressed to my office. It was ten-year-old copy of the Mindsight Annual Report, no return address on the envelope. I checked with my helpful colleague and he knew nothing about it. Had I not seen the death notice, I might have assumed it was from the Doctor; as it was, the source remained a mystery. I flipped through. Towards the back there was a table headed International Network which set out research sites along with offices, contacts and locations, including Sydney, Australia.
It was only then, as I skipped to the final page, that I noticed the company logo: three blue capsules. In the place of the top half, a plant sprouting green leaves. I rifled through my transcript notes and pulled out one of my old brainwave reports from the back of my folder. There it was: the same logo. I placed them side by side.
I don’t forget numbers. There were twenty-six sites; we were number twenty-seven.
It was not difficult to find.
The Mindsight address was a ten-minute walk from the Housing Commission flats where Mary and I had lived, long since torn down in the name of gentrification. The neighbourhood now was an incongruous grid of childcare centres, vegan cafes and nail salons.
It was a double ground-floor office in a multi-storey building: generously proportioned, with massive walls shrouded in plants and creepers—all good when it is thriving, but overall I’d think a risky business. I pressed a buzzer and waited. Eventually a young man opened the door. He wore loose jeans and expensive visible underpants and looked like he needed sun. When he saw that I was empty-handed he said I must have the wrong address. I looked at the logo on the opposite wall. This on
e was big. Three big blue capsules.
‘No, this is the right place.’
He squinted, seemingly unaccustomed to visitors, but when I spoke again there was a noticeable double-take.
‘My name is Daniel G. I was a student at the School…The facility…’
‘Ah.’ His eyes widened. ‘Yeah, I know who you are,’ he said, glancing now over my shoulder. ‘You better come in.’
It was a single room with a closed glass door through to another office. Three desktops, state of the art: planet earth screen-savers zoomed in and out of oceans and land masses. Apart from two chairs, the room was empty. Underpants Boy took one of the chairs and introduced himself. His name was Jordan and he ‘did the data stuff’, he said. He didn’t look much older than my gap-year daughter.
He pointed at the computers. ‘This is the Hub.’
I walked over and tapped on a space bar. He did nothing to stop me; just said, ‘You need a password.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going to give it to me.’
He shook his head. ‘He’ll be back any second…Let’s just wait.’
I didn’t argue, surprised he was even this accommodating. I took a seat. How long had he worked here? He said four years.
Next question: ‘Do you know who you work for?’
‘Of course I know.’
‘And exactly what they do?’
He seemed to contemplate that more seriously, but at the sound of footsteps he shrugged. ‘I’m just the data guy.’
A figure appeared in the doorway, and my breath stopped. Thirty years on his face and thirty kilos off his frame, his hair now a sandy white. I think I mouthed the name rather than said it out loud.
‘Tod?’ He had thinned into an oddly handsome man.
‘Daniel. Nice to see you.’
Stepping forward, he seemed genuinely glad. For a minute, I wondered if he was going to give me a hug, and for a second I almost wanted him to. It stirred good things, seeing Tod, a cavalcade of memories only jarring to a halt when the questions came flooding in, none of which I could find words to ask.
The Subjects Page 24