The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  “I see.”

  He hesitates, chinking ice in consideration before resuming. “And if that requires such research to be exported to poorer areas, or third world countries, where regulation is not so stringent, and less than desirable effects on the local population are not so noticeable . . . then so be it.”

  I nod, ever his confidant. “Well, those sound like the sorts of things Bryce would have good reason to keep under wraps.”

  “A fact they impress upon their staff in the strongest possible manner.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “You’ve been threatened? What are you going to do?”

  “Others have tried to leave, but they never . . .” He trails off, then takes a controlled sip of his cognac.

  I push him no further, returning instead to the record player to tweak the volume; the Geisterchor is drawing near.

  Some of my contacts had worked for Bryce. My main collaborator, J, barely escaped with his life, let alone the fruits of his research.

  “So what do you think?” I ask. “Do they want to ruin the company by going public? Or are they after money?”

  “Perhaps even the research itself,” he says. “We have competitors who know that we’re close to market—when their takeover bid failed, they offered me double what I earn at Bryce, but I’ve never even considered it. Everything’s locked up in proprietary agreements anyway. I’ve always been careful with security; I just have no idea how they got their hands on my codes.”

  He gulps back the remains of his drink now, still working everything through. The insight is taking its time coming. I could never actually tell him, of course; what a waste that would be. I want to see his face as he realises it himself. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help him along.

  “You really shouldn’t blame yourself,” I lie. “I mean, you only did what was in your nature.” As predictable as that was.

  His eyes narrow as he considers my statement. I stand by the piano, fingering the key in the ornamental lock on the lid.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he says tentatively.

  “You couldn’t help but take me in.”

  His body visibly jerks—and now enlightenment.

  “It was you!” The words rush from his mouth with a burst of spit and air, as though his brain wants nothing to do with them. The balloon at his right hand gleams under the candles. Then a lip flutter and a small jolt forward as the understanding is absorbed.

  “It was you, wasn’t it, you bastard?”

  What a wonderful indulgence, to stand and savour his moment of recognition. What a gift! Sunk deep in that ornate chair, he seems to shrink. Only his brown-flecked eyes acknowledge the clamour behind them. The waxing strains of the third act fall around our strange duel. All the scene needs is for him to drop his glass, have it scatter ice in a slow descent, and then smash on the tiles to spray flickering chunks of crystal at his feet.

  “‘Bastard’?” I smile, mock-offended. His hands shake, but he controls them, gripping the carved arms of the chair. “Samuel, that’s not like you. Here, let me fix you another, help you calm your nerves.”

  “You did it? This whole time . . . This is the sort of thing I expose myself to.” Such a wounded soul, unable to appreciate his sublime mental state. “I trusted you.” He searches me with those irritating dejected eyes. “You little upstart, you . . . parvenu.”

  “You were born a victim, weren’t you, Samuel?”

  “Fuck you. I treated you well. But this whole time you’ve been deceiving me.”

  “You’ve been deceiving yourself. I let you think what you wanted, what you needed. I gave you something to live for.”

  “And you want me to thank you?”

  “Of course you won’t understand, but I do have your best interests in mind.”

  He screws up his face as if he might actually scream, or try to get up, or throw his glass and grant me that shattering of sharpness and light. But passive as always, he reins in the animus and the questions come.

  “Is it money that you want? You could have just asked.” Though he would have preferred the transaction to involve more than that. “And if you’re trying to blackmail Bryce, I’m no use to you now.”

  He’s right. If I wanted money, I could have just fucked him, or killed him, or gone straight to the source. “Of course, but I have all the expensive furniture I need, Samuel. That is, none.” The only motivations he can ascribe to me are his own ephemera. He thinks his trimmings separate him from the rat race he accelerates, but he’s just a different class of worm. Enslaved by their prepackaged appetites for buying, watching, eating, fucking. Fixed in the same tiresome patterns.

  For Samuel, the secure repetition of professional success and private disappointment, unable to recognise the singular quality that sets him apart. Unable to take those habits and impulses as a target and work on them for his own improvement.

  There’s even a tempting carnality to my business, to which many end up chained. To survive in this game, you must elevate yourself above those short-term opiates and focus on the only goal that matters: the becoming of one’s art.

  “Unless you only want to take us down. Who are you working for? NooGen? Temporal Globe? Or are you some crusader for goddamn truth and morality?”

  I can’t stand this pathetic groping. “What you’re missing here, Samuel, what hasn’t even crossed your mind, is that maybe I couldn’t care less about your disease mongering, or how you got the job done. How many Africans you experimented on, how many vagrants you harvested. You should consider this: there might be some for whom merely ingesting nootropics to enhance cognitive function is fucking passé.” I mouth the last word priggishly in my best imitation of his faux-French.

  It takes a second for that to sink in, yet still he won’t accept it. “What do you mean?”

  “Imagine being able to learn a skill or language, to implant a memory or knowledge, simply through ingestion.”

  His hand twitches on the glass as he considers my comment. Eventually he settles on scorn. “Memory transfer? You actually think that works? I told you, that rubbish was discredited! It never even really worked with simple worms, let alone organisms of greater complexity. It’s ridiculed these days as an object lesson in bad science!”

  I laugh. “What, you’ve done the experiments, have you? No, of course not. You think you’ve stepped over the line with your little slum trials, but you couldn’t even begin to take the necessary steps. You still deprive yourself of the means to determine the precise effects of your own timid drugs.”

  He scoffs. “Today’s scanning technology is amazingly sophisticated. Short of dissecting the brain, there’s . . .” He stops in response to my impassive gaze, then continues with emphasis: “As in, killing one’s subjects.”

  “Well, as J would say, that archaic prohibition is precisely what’s preventing neuroscience from truly entering the twenty-first century.”

  He runs his hand through his thick grey hair.

  “I know, Samuel, it sounds unbelieveable. But we’ve got data, objective results that would blow you away. Christ! We’ve got the product.” I lean down to open the pocket of one suitcase and remove a pill bottle to shake in his face. He stares at the case as if I’d only now shattered his hopeful illusion, until the rattling breaks his reverie.

  “Are you trying to tell me . . .” he says, but I interrupt him.

  “Actually, no. I’m messing with you, Samuel.” I roll the bottle around in my hand. “Of course, these don’t really provide the content themselves. They’re much like yours—Bryce’s. They help it on its way. Which is why we wanted your research, see. We’re still a long way from isolating the appropriate engram and facilitating its delivery. No, I still have to consent to become like those lowly worms, reduce myself to the task of ingestion—unpleasant, old-fashioned, but effective.”

  After a pause, he says, “Not the pills.”

  “Straight to the source.”

  He twitches at the jowls, blinks twice.
It’s gratifying to watch the acquisition of enlightenment, however slow and sporadic. “You mean through eating brain matter? That is simply not possible.”

  I open my hands. “À la mémoire de mon vieil ami Bruno, je dois objecter. Je parle Français avec son hémispherè gauche.”

  He baulks. The orchestra pauses before the strings once more unfold, awaiting the hunter’s chorus. I watch the tremors of his facial nerves until he ultimately shakes his head and pushes further.

  “Are you even aware of the dangers? Have you heard of kuru? A mental disease savages acquired from eating each others’ brains! It’s just like BSE.” He reverts to his patronising scientist’s tone. “You know, mad cow disease?”

  “Oh, I know,” I say. “I’d certainly be worried if I was working with cannibals.” I offer my best ironic smile. “But as you well know, among us civilised folk the risk of sporadic prion disease is the proverbial one in a million. I mean, you’re a special boy, Samuel, but . . .”

  He tries to scoff at my dismissal, but ends up coughing and spitting into a handkerchief. He sips at the cognac to recover.

  “Nobody knows the risks of what you’re taking, Adam. The documented harmful side-effects that I’ve had to conceal are bad enough.”

  I can’t help but smile at his admission. “Spare me your hypocrisy. And spare Hippocrates, too. You are kind to worry after me, though. Thankyou. But no-one is more aware of the dangers. I’ve found that with care and proper procedure, the risks can be minimised. And the gains maximised. Speaking of which . . .” I open the pill bottle and count three into my palm. “The human brain—so complex! So much potential! And so adaptable. Well, sometimes. When we try. Plasticity—that’s the term you guys use, isn’t it? J certainly does, all the time.” I roll my eyes. “Of course, as you say, it’s impossible to precisely separate the relevant areas, at least at this stage of our knowledge. As convenient as a map of localised function would be, so much turns out to also be distributed. Especially with procedural memory. That’s both the beauty and bane of the whole project. You wouldn’t want to leave out parts that might hold important information—like, say, Heschl’s gyrus. There’s nothing worse than gaining a skill piecemeal.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “But on the other hand, you have to be careful of acquiring too many unwanted elements. I should know. God, you make one mistake as a rookie and you pay for it over and over.” Though I’d been doing very well. Before tonight, I hadn’t bitten my nails in months. I know, now, it’s a matter of planning, and of hard ascetic work after the fact. It’s the unforeseen ones that get you. “You don’t have any secret habits I should know about, do you?” I ask, peering into his face.

  The Rosamunde crescendos as he stares at me, the melody leaping beyond the harmonic groundwork.

  “You—you’re a psycho! You’re like some . . . Hannibal Lecter tryhard!” Again with the projection. “Actually, no, Dahmer’s more like it.” Wish-fulfilment now. I hold up a hand to placate him.

  “Please,” I say. “Give me some credit.” Samuel almost looks relieved. “It’s nothing like that.”

  It takes a second before he asks. “How so?”

  “Well, no offense, but excuse me if I don’t crack open a big Amarone. As valuable as your brain is to me, it’s far from a delicacy. Or a fetish. Sorry.”

  The colour drains from his face.

  “As a matter of fact, the whole process is quite the ordeal.” If only he could appreciate how severely I struggle with the chore. “But Samuel: I don’t do it to degrade you—or restrain you. I wish to exalt you, my virtuoso worm!”

  He flinches again. Another slip in perspective. It’s finally forced its way through. Back straightens, hands twitch, and his brain competes in a fiery battle until it overwhelms him and he’s basking in his new awareness.

  He knows he’s going to die.

  I walk the length of the lounge, and turning back, I’m transfixed by the panic sharpening his few deep-set wrinkles.

  “You’re going to eat me. You actually intend to . . . you . . .” His finger taps the rim of his near-empty glass; his other hand is stretched over the carved chair-arm. “What will you do, just eat my brain?”

  There is nothing to do but laugh at such simplicity. “Of course.”

  “Why?” He looks down at his hands in a moment of melodrama. “What is it about me that you want?”

  It can’t be pleasant to think you’ve left nothing behind. That this is it. But I couldn’t expect him to comprehend his true value, to accept his sacrifice for the higher beauty. Few do. But really—after having resigned himself to this timorous life, death couldn’t be much worse.

  “Everything I know, all my research was in the computer system,” he pleads, “and you obviously already have my password! Whatever you want, there are easier ways. Just ask!”

  “If only I could, Samuel, but I’m afraid that anything of real value demands risk, effort, anguish—of us both. This is how it must be.”

  Feeling the sweat of my palm, I realise the pills are still in my hand. “J tells me these will be especially helpful for this project. ‘Accentuate the appropriate faculty,’ he said.” I swallow them and turn away, fingertips once more on the still-closed grand, waiting for what might come out of his mouth now.

  Then I hear him lunge from the chair and feel him thud into my back, slamming me into the piano and cracking the wood of the lid. I swing my arm around and knock the glass from his hand as he brings it down towards me. It smashes on the rug, glinting as he pummels me, his chest heaving with the effort of his panic. I shove him off and he collapses on the floor.

  I bend down, hovering at his throat, my face millimetres from his.

  “You fuck,” his voice strains. I drag his chair over to the damaged grand and lift him up to sit back in his proper position. I retrieve some tape from a case and bind his wrists to the scrollwork arms. Not the conventional pose for a fenestration, but it’s important to keep things familiar.

  “You have to learn to relax. Just accept this.”

  He kicks out pathetically, then sinks back, sobbing, into the hardwood. I take out my plastic mats and lay them down.

  “As I was saying, Samuel, I have accumulated a number of effective techniques. Like stimulating the relevant neural pathways.”

  I draw the curtains and gather the candles behind him one by one, trailing the rich, floral scent of narcissus. “The light would only be a distraction.” I turn the volume of the Schubert to full.

  Instantly, it sparks through my body and echoes, throbbing, through the room. I feel I can clutch the mournful notes from the air, breathe in their patterns and allow myself to be smothered.

  I open the cases, put on my scrub suit and gloves, and lay out my equipment: drill, scalpel, receptacles. There is something reassuringly pleasant about the arrangement of steel.

  “Fourteen-hundred and twenty grams, Samuel. That’s how much Schubert’s brain is said to have weighed. Quite unexceptional, but we know full well now, it’s not just size that counts. And my, the things he did with it!” I flourish my scalpel like a baton, tracing a surge in the refrain. “What a consumption that would have been. But alas, the substrate always decays. Which is why I am so grateful for the enduring gift of his genius. And for you, Samuel, its present vessel!”

  He spits and wrenches his neck, a last show of life. Such an unbalanced composition. But his true talent will survive him, just as the Rosamunde did the worthless play it was written for.

  Just as all Schubert’s music did the 1420 grams of grey matter that spawned it. And here it is now, incorporated in the spongy folds cradled by this stout but penetrable skull. So precious.

  The rich treasure and its glorious hope, no longer buried. True immortality, beyond the decline of legacy, the betrayals of children, the faltering of memory. We will perish together and be reborn beyond, emerging, purged, on the other side.

  I blink. Filigree waves encircle me, filling the ro
om. They vibrate in perfect harmonies. The sonorous figures move, build, enter my head, intense and pure. I can see Samuel’s fingers dancing on the arms of the chair in his suspense before the event.

  As I circle him one last time, I can even see the resignation in his eyes as he atones to the music.

  “That’s it, my friend. Relax. Listen to the harmony, the footsteps, the breathing. No more wretched isolation. This is your greatest moment. You always wanted to be inside me.”

  I grew up to the sounds of cars and planes. Pop music. Radio talkback. Debased noise everywhere—but still it suggested a world beyond. I took a few guitar lessons when I was eight, but they didn’t last long. I had the feel, I knew the music, I’d make up songs in my head. God, the music in my head.

  But I never had the discipline to learn an instrument, nor the straight-backed mother with stifled musical ambition and a cane. Such a missed opportunity.

  The spread of shattered crystal on his multi-hued rug refracts the muted candlelight as he plays. He hardly needs my encouragement; he can’t help but revert to his true being. Schubert’s genius, worked into him through years of practice. I can see it at his fingertips, struggling to be free.

  The bliss is on him now, like a spark against the void. He is one of the lucky ones, to avoid the scrap heap. To have his essence survive.

  He is worth learning.

  I approach his exhausted frame from behind, and steadily trace the scalpel from behind his right ear over the crown of his head. But he twitches, ever so slightly, and I withdraw my hand. Practicality must prevail over symbolism. I lean him back from the piano and lay him onto the floor like a mated king. I pull away his antique chair, an arced spatter of deep red now staining its hand-embroidered upholstery.

  He is still now, his head resting snugly on the cutting block, ready for his ascent. I finish the incision and return the scalpel to its place beside the drill. The Rosamunde is actualised in the cloying air, strands of still lightning waiting to enter me.

  We will make such beautiful music together.

  Slow Cookin’