North of Nowhere, South of Loss

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “His pants were too big, they were his brother’s too, everything was his brother’s. Nothing belonged to him, ever, not even standard birth equipment. The rumour was that his father and his brother both beat him. Bruiser, we called him. One-ball Bruiser.”

  “Bruiser? That kid who used to hitch on the tailgates of trucks?”

  “I did it myself a few times. Made fun of him.”

  “Wasn’t he killed?”

  “An outcast from Day One. You know, people get designated that way. Kids get designated, they get marked, and once that happens, it’s only a matter of time.”

  Philippa stared at the windows of Brian’s house. “What is that sound?” she asked.

  “His mother. She called me the night of the funeral.”

  “No. I mean that sound in your house. Is that a dog? Did you get a dog?”

  “She was sobbing. She said she wanted to thank me for being Bruiser’s best friend. Albert, she called him. Albert said you were his best friend.”

  Philippa stared at the windows, apprehensive. She closed her eyes. The sound dropped to a whimper then disappeared. “Didn’t you hear that?” she asked.

  “She couldn’t stop crying. And now I can’t even remember his last name.” Brian jumped up and paced the length of the slanted trunk, back and forth, agitated. “Can you?”

  Philippa listened, but the sound of past names had grown faint. She felt queasy. “I never really knew him. I just remember the accident because it was in the newspapers. When he got pulled under the truck.”

  “Albert would have wanted me to tell you,” Brian said, pacing, pacing. “That’s what she said. I was terrified. I’d never even met her. But she knew, she recognised me at the funeral. If you’re marked, you give off signals.”

  “Brian,” Philippa said quietly. “The only signals you give off are the blips of a high-speed mind in overdrive. Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I’ve been designated.” Brian looked at his hands, where the words lay, studying them.

  “Sometimes,” Philippa said, “you’re a designated pain in the arse, I have to admit it.”

  “Is my mind in overdrive? Do you really think that?” He clasped and unclasped his hands. He brushed cobweb off them and rubbed them in the grass. “It’s true my dreams are speeding up.”

  Philippa counted the broken palings. She saw Brian again, twelve years old: the wild freewheeling swoop down Newmarket Road, the turn into Green Street, the thrill, the legs splayed wide, the crash. No brakes. Brian was still laughing when they reached him. To Philippa, later, he had confessed: It was worth it.

  “Sometimes I’m on a train,” Brian said, “and it’s rushing into a tunnel and I can’t find the phone in the dark. Sometimes I’m in the locker room when it rings, and I’m laughing at Bruiser when I answer.”

  “Brian, everyone’s done it. Been a coward some time. Don’t torment yourself.”

  “They used to flick their towels at his balls. His ball. They’d laugh, he’d laugh. Sometimes I laughed. I always felt sick when I did. The worst thing was, he knew that. He would give me this sad little smile. He understood. He forgave me. I’d go outside and I’d want to hang myself, like Judas. I used to vomit in those bushes outside the school.”

  What is that dreadful noise? Phillipa wants to know. What is that shriek? Is it Darcy? Is it the cyclone barrelling down?

  It’s the tunnel, Brian says. We’re going into the tunnel now.

  Philippa sits bolt upright in the dark. Brian! she calls, panicked.

  I’m sorry, he says. I can’t help it. Whenever I hear a phone ringing at night, I black out.

  Philippa gropes for the sound.

  “Hello?” she says. “What? Who is this?”

  Philippa wakes. Against her window, the feathery plumes of ripe sugarcane toss and shiver. The moon is not white here, but blood orange, the effect of volcanic ash somewhere off to the east, somewhere out in the thrashing Pacific. She has papers to mark, lessons to prepare, it is still pitch dark, and already the school bell is ringing.

  “Hello?” she says, her voice thick with muddle and sleep. “Who? My God, Brian! Where are you?”

  “Have you heard the news?”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Night time. I can’t sleep when I get home from the lab, so I watch the news. I saw it live. President Kennedy’s been shot!”

  Philippa blinks and fumbles for the bedside lamp. She knocks something over. “Damn,” she says. “Brian, where are you?”

  “Melbourne,” he says impatiently. “Where do you think I am? They keep replaying bits. Now they’re talking to people who were lining the motorcade route, who saw it happen.”

  There. She finds the lamp, the switch. And the clock. “Brian, it’s 3 a.m.”

  “That’s all you have to say? The American president has been shot in Dallas – it’s still yesterday there – and all you have to say to me is: Brian, it’s 3 a.m?”

  “Let me think,” Philippa says. “No, it’s not all I have to say. I have to say you are as oblivious and obnoxious as ever. You promised you’d call, you bastard, if you didn’t get to the station when I left.”

  “I’m calling.”

  “Ten months later! I got your number from your mother, and I’ve called and called, and you never answer, you pig-headed pig.”

  “Because I unplug my phone when I’m working. If I’m interrupted, a whole project could be lost. Listen, a marksman got him with a high-powered rifle, but I don’t believe for a second it’s a one-man job, do you? The CIA’s behind this.”

  “Why don’t you call the White House and offer your expert advice?” But his news seeps under the foreground haze of sleep and suddenly floods her. “My God,” she says. “The president? Shot? Do you mean …?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shot dead?”

  “Killed. Assassinated. In Dallas.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “They’ve found the sniper’s nest. But there are witnesses who heard other shots from other directions. My bet is the CIA.”

  “Oh Brian, there you go again. The whole world is ganging up against the innocent.”

  “Against certain designated people, yes. Kennedy was marked.”

  “It’s probably some crackpot. From what I read, Texas is full of crazies on the far right.”

  “You get matrixes,” Brian explains, excited. “Fertile mother-pockets where crystals of hate can form and multiply exponentially and link up with each other to make violent superstrings. Texas would be a matrix. I see parallels with the work I’m doing on proteins. You get these multiplying speeded-up reactions. There are certain protein crystals, the ones I’m working on, that only exist two-dimensionally, you can only examine them in suspension, in solution, so you have to –”

  Philippa hears something bearing down from the tunnel of the past, she can feel the disturbing movement of air ahead of it.

  “Brian, Brian, slow down. Are you okay?”

  “I have to go, Philippa, I’m sorry. I just got an idea, I have to go after it. I’ll call you later from the lab.”

  “How do you manage it?” Philippa wants to know. “Do you calibrate time zones with malice? How come it’s always after midnight at my end?”

  “It’s you,” Brian says. “You keep moving further into yesterday. You’re on the wrong side of the Pacific. It’s daytime here.”

  “What I notice, whether I’m in Boston or London or Toronto or Paris, you always manage to wake me up. You do it on purpose.”

  “I am utterly consistent,” he protests. “I call when I’m feeling low.”

  “Or high,” she reminds. “You call when you’re manic.”

  “If you mean that I call when there’s some intense intellectual issue that needs discussion, I plead guilty. You should be honoured that I always choose you.”

  “Purely habit on your part,” Philippa says. “And the fact that I put up with it because it’s the only way to stay in touch with you,
you bastard. Where are you calling from this time?”

  “Japan.”

  “Japan!”

  “Osaka. This’ll be ongoing, for half of each year.”

  “Is it a research company?”

  “Research partner. We’re teaming up. He’s at the university here, but he’ll spend half the year in Melbourne. We just got a huge grant.”

  “So this is a high.”

  “Well …” he says doubtfully. “To some extent. Partly. The living conditions are hell, though. People live in cupboards here. And the noise level’s worse than New York.”

  “So you wake me in the middle of the night.”

  “You understand, of course, that time is a completely artificial construct. It’s quite arbitrary.”

  “I saw this film,” Philippa says, “about Glenn Gould.”

  “I’ve got his Goldberg Variations with me. Wouldn’t travel without. I’m living in a fifth-floor pigeonhole beside a freeway overpass and the noise is unbearable, but Bach at full volume helps.”

  “It’s called Thirty-three Short Films about Glenn Gould”’

  “I know. I’ve seen it.”

  “He used to drive around Toronto all night and call his friends from payphone boxes. He’d talk for hours. He could only connect with other human beings by phone.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the film about six times.”

  “Made me think of you.”

  “What? There’s no comparison. He was a genius, but he was really screwed up. I have a whole other life when I’m not on the phone.”

  Philippa laughs. “Do you?”

  “What do you mean, do I? When I’m working, when I’m in my lab, I’m alive two hundred per cent. There’s nothing like it.”

  “Can I hear sirens?”

  “I remember once, when I was a kid, losing control of my bike on a steep hill. Well, on Newmarket Road, as a matter of fact. You probably don’t remember. It was fantastic, the speed, the rush. I knew I was going to crash, but it was worth it. My work’s like that.”

  “Brian, am I imagining it, or can I hear sirens?”

  “What? Oh, all the time. Freeway traffic. It drives me crazy. I’ve had to invent my own white-noise machine. And this is university housing for full professors with grant money. Imagine the living conditions of the junior faculty and graduate students.”

  “How many firetrucks are there?”

  “They’re ambulances. Looks like a whole convoy from here.”

  “Sounds terrifying. Like a scream choir from hell.”

  “There’s a writer for you: emotive and imprecise. No objective or neutral observation. Nothing of the decent reticence of the scientist. It could be said of you, Philippa, that no matter what your senses take in, all you see and hear are words.”

  “As opposed to numbers and equations. Brian, listen, speaking of hair-raising sounds, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask. When we were kids –”

  “Kids? Philippa, you should realise that childhood is something I work hard at not remembering,” Brian says.

  “I don’t know if this is something I imagined or not.”

  “Who would know?”

  “But it’s important. Sometimes at your house I used to hear, I think I used to hear, someone, or something, in pain. Wailing, moaning, I don’t know how to describe it.”

  Osaka ambulances streak across Philippa’s room, her lamp flashes blue blue blue, her walls weep. She hears a fence splinter. She counts flashbeats, heartbeats, white vans. They are years and years long.

  “Brian?”

  “Yeah.” He sighs heavily. “It was my father. War nightmares.”

  “You never seemed to hear anything, you never seemed to know a thing about it.”

  “My goal has always been to know everything,” Brian says passionately. “Everything. Preferably before anyone else.”

  “I heard it again, just once, years later. The most awful sound. It was the day before we both left Brisbane. You acted as though you couldn’t hear a thing.”

  “I heard it,” Brian says. “I always hear it. But you couldn’t have, Philippa. Not then. That was a few years after my father had died.”

  Philippa curls down into her bed and hugs the receiver. Her room is careening through the dark. Brian, she whispers, or tries to. Where are we? She clutches the headboard, her fingers white, but the slipstream is fierce. I can’t catch my breath, she says. I’m afraid I can’t hang on. I’ve got vertigo. Where are we rushing?

  It’s the tunnel, Brian says. There’s no way out.

  * *

  “Philippa?”

  “Hhnnh.”

  “Philippa? I can’t hear you. Are you there?”

  “Hnh.”

  “Are you awake?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. For years. I’ve been wanting to ask you for years.”

  “Mmm?”

  “The high-speed thing. Sometimes I’m scared my mind’s overheating. If the brakes fail … you know, if anything should happen, would you do something for me?”

  Philippa’s eyelids are weighted down. She concentrates, concentrates, tries to lift them. “Do what?” she mumbles.

  “Be the curator of all my stuff.”

  “Huh? Sure, okay. What stuff?”

  “Everything. I’m leaving everything to you. Research, prizes, nightmares, everything. I want someone who’ll cherish it. Make it make sense, that’s all I ask. Otherwise it’s unbearable.”

  “Philippa?”

  “Oh God, Brian, what time is it? I have to fly out in the morning to give a paper and I haven’t finished writing it yet.”

  “Is it too late?”

  “It’s horribly early. I’ve been working all night. Where are you?”

  “Melbourne.”

  “Can I call you back in three days?”

  “You know you can’t call me,” Brian says, agitated.

  “Right. I know I can’t call you. You keep your phone unplugged, except for calling out.”

  “My work,” Brian explains.

  “Right. Your work. Let me struggle to be circumspect and just say one little thing: this is uncalled for, Brian. I have the greatest respect for your work. Have some for mine. I’m not up for interruption tonight.”

  “Philippa, wait! I’m in a pay phone box. I’ve been driving round for hours.”

  “So keep driving. Call someone else.” She hangs up. She stares at the phone. She picks it up again, frantic. “Brian?” She hears dial tone, train wheels, the hollow rush of wind in a tunnel. “Brian,” she pleads into the dial tone. “Keep your phone plugged in tomorrow. I’ll call.”

  How many times, Philippa wonders, can an unplugged phone’s ringer ring before the ringer wears out? Once, masochistic and curious, she counts one hundred chimes, a shrill tocsin, the tolling of guilt. Ask not for whom the telephone rings, she says into the receiver. She keeps listening. If a butterfly moving its wings in Brazil can cause storms in Maine … She is comforted, slightly, by the sense of connection. In Melbourne, fibre-optic cable vibrates in his walls.

  She calls his secretary at the university and leaves a message. Brian, you may call at any hour.

  She lies awake listening for the phone.

  She dials his number again and talks to the ringing in Melbourne. I’m trying to tell this, Brian. I’m curating your life. I’m trying to cherish each detail and make it make sense.

  She calls his department again. “I think he’s in Japan,” the secretary says. “We never know. He’s got teaching leave because of the grant, so we never see him. We have email connection, but in his case, you can’t count on a response.”

  Philippa sends distress flares by email. Brian: Where are you? I miss you. On my honour, you may call whenever you want. Love, Philippa.

  A week later, she tries again. Brian: A curator needs cooperation. I’m trying to preserve everything, all the way back, but dread is interfering. It’s affec
ting what I recall. It’s affecting the order, it’s affecting what I set down. If you called, I could tell it differently.

  She posts cyber bulletins daily. Often, late in the night, she speaks to his phone jacks in Melbourne. She leaves messages in the air of his room.

  There are no answers.

  When the ringing comes out of the dark, Philippa knocks over the lamp.

  “Listen,” Brian says, “I’ve got good news. I’ve remembered Bruiser’s last name.”

  “Oh Brian, thank God.” Gusts of laughter, like the riffs at the edge of a cyclone, buffet Philippa. She finds she is crying. “If you ever do that again,” she says, “I’ll kill you, mate.”

  “Do what?”

  “Go silent for over two years.”

  “For over two years?” Brian repeats the words slowly, interrogatively. He might be reciting Latin, translating to himself as he speaks. “Was it?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been tracking down data. When there’s a gap in the mourning chain,” he explains, “it’s like a black hole. It sucks everything into it. If someone has never been adequately mourned, my father, for example, or Bruiser – Albert Brewster, that was his name – that creates an event horizon, are you with me? It’s a question of absolute density. Once the event horizon has been crossed, game’s over. Everything’s pulled into that hole and crunched up.”

  Philippa’s lungs feel tight. “Something terrible’s the matter,” she says. “I can tell from your voice.”

  Brian laughs. The sound frightens Philippa.

  “I crashed,” Brian says. “I’ve been in for repairs.”

  “You’ve been ill again.”

  “One word for it. I’ve been living inside a funnelweb, eye to eye with the spider himself. But I got out again. I’ve been patched up. I’m okay.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  “I don’t think I told you my second wife left me. Maybe that was it. And the children. She got custody.”

  “Oh Brian. I’m so sorry.”

  “And then, I don’t know, things speeded up too much. The brakes failed.”

  “I don’t know what to say. How are you now? How are you really?”

  “I’ve lost ground,” he says, anguished. “That’s the unbearable part. I’ve lost too much ground. Lost my research partner, lost my place on the team. I don’t know if I can ever catch up.”