Connect

by Julian Gough

  But she can say goodbye, before she reaches the mountains. Before the mountains reach her.

  She puts down the syringe.

  She has to tell him, something, the obvious stuff. It has to be said.

  She falls slowly across his body, and her face is against his face and she kisses his cheek, and it is still hot; and she kisses his lips, like she used to do when he was a child, like he used to do to her until she told him that was for grown-ups. A decade before. But he’s a child again now, all dead people are children; helpless, needing to be picked up, and held, and told they are loved, and put to bed in the ground.

  And we tell them stories, as we put them to bed, we tell them stories that we know aren’t true, stories to make them happy; but they can’t hear us, they are asleep.

  Stories of a better place than this. Stories of a perfect world.

  No, we tell those stories to make us happy, to cheer ourselves up. Because they are not asleep.

  They will not wake up.

  They are dead.

  He is dead.

  And as the mountain of white ice and black stone topples towards her, miles high, she feels a chill on her lip; the evaporation of a tear.

  ‘Heat and airflow across a surface are the chief determinants of the rate of evaporation from a surface.’

  But I didn’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

  His breath.

  Beneath her chest, his heart gives one slow beat, and rests.

  Another.

  She watches over him, as he is transformed.

  The glaciers melt.

  The mountains retreat.

  She’ll have to face them one day.

  But not yet.

  63

  ‘It is clear that in the condition of search the possibility of anticipating events must sometimes make the difference between life and death. A capacity for anticipatory reactions must therefore be one of the greatest assets evolution can bestow on an organism. The best type of anticipation would be conscious prophecy, genuine prediction of coming events, but since this desirable gift is not to be had on this earth, the organism has to be content with the next best endowment, the gift of guessing or gambling. Granted that a false guess may be lethal, in the absence of any guessing, there could be no lucky hits either. The situation has been rightly compared with that of the scientist who must test and probe nature and can only do so in the light of a hypothesis.’

  — E. H. Gombrich, Illusion in Nature and Art

  She has stared at his unmoving face for so long over the past three days that when it finally moves now, she can’t make sense of what she is seeing.

  It twists. Spasms.

  Still holding the syringe, she stands up, runs across to the small fridge in the corner. Takes out a bottle of water.

  The plastic is cold in her hand.

  As she awkwardly twists open the bottle cap, with her right hand still holding the syringe, the turning needle grazes the heel of her other hand.

  She stares at the syringe, astonished.

  She finds the red protective cap for the needle, screws it back on; pulls open a desk drawer, throws in the syringe; slams the drawer shut, and shudders, as though the syringe were alive, and malevolent; had tried to sting her, a scorpion.

  She brings over the open bottle of water. Sits by his side.

  She takes his hand, but it doesn’t respond. Like sandstone, dry, heavy.

  He makes inhuman noises at first.

  Well, perhaps he isn’t human any more.

  A minute, two minutes of these animal noises. No words. Then he settles into silence.

  Another minute. Silence. Then he clears his dry throat. She gives him a sip of water with her free hand.

  The dry stone moves in her hand. Comes to life. Pulls free of her grip.

  And he reaches up; he takes the bottle from her hand: he drinks and drinks and drinks.

  ‘How . . . long . . .’

  He can speak. He can speak . . . ‘Three days,’ she says.

  ‘The time . . . flew.’

  ‘Time flies like an arrow,’ she says. Her mouth moves into the shape of a smile, and it feels strange, like something’s gone wrong, her rigid cheeks crumpling upwards. Against gravity.

  He gazes around him distractedly, blinking in the light; seeing the world transformed.

  ‘Fruit flies like a banana,’ he says.

  It’s him. He’s back.

  She starts to laugh and can’t stop.

  5

  Torrents

  ‘I create, I maintain, I destroy.’

  — Shiva, saying he is Brahmah, Vishnu and Shiva.

  ‘That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.’

  — Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

  ‘What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.’

  — Samuel Beckett, ‘Enough’, from First Love and Other Shorts

  64

  They are back at the house. She has dragged his old bed into the living room, into the brightest room. Changed his sheets.

  She sits down in the old leather armchair. Her father’s armchair.

  ‘My legs are tingling,’ says Colt.

  ‘That’s good,’ she says.

  ‘Everything’s tingling,’ he says. ‘Where the tube was, the drip . . . it’s tingling.’ He holds out his arm. ‘Look.’

  Naomi looks. It’s already closed up. Healing. Healed. Incredible.

  Meanwhile, in Colt’s head . . .

  His tongue is tingling. His ears are tingling.

  The words are tingling.

  The world is tingling.

  It was as though the ocean had been held back, all his life, by a steel wall, a mile high and a thousand miles wide.

  And in that steel wall was a single hole, through which shot a jet of water.

  And that thin stream, he had thought, was the ocean.

  But now the wall has come down, and the entire ocean comes at him, unblocked, unfiltered; the ocean of information, the ocean of sight and sound and vision and taste and touch and it should be overwhelming but it is not, because something has happened to his brain; something amazing, something beautiful has happened to his brain; and now he can think as fast as he has always wished he could think. And he can feel as fast as he has always wanted to feel. And the sensations do not back up, tower over him; they do not come at him too fast to be processed, too fast to be felt, till he feels only that he is drowning.

  He is not overwhelmed, he is not washed away, he is instead washed clean in the torrents of information, lifted up, supported; he feels more alive, not less, more himself, not less.

  Once, I saw through a glass, darkly, but now I see things clear.

  65

  Later that day, Naomi stands on the ridge behind their house, and watches her son walk shakily out onto the playa, across the flattest landscape on earth. The closest to a mathematical abstraction.

  As flat and white as a sheet of paper the size of New York.

  As he walks, his senses tingle, his brain fires and rewires, trying to make sense of the sensations.

  Each step scuffs the surface of the dry lakebed, raising fist-sized puffs of white alkali dust which, after a second or so, relax and fall back.

  The clouds move over his head.

  The sun sh
ines on his skin.

  His clothes move, too, against his skin.

  The sound of a jet, from five miles above.

  Light, ricocheting off everything, from the toe of his shoe to the pale daytime moon; carrying information.

  And all of it making patterns, patterns.

  And in his mind, patterns, patterns.

  He runs his pattern-recognition, and connects each to each.

  He closes his eyes. The filters are off: he sees the world as it is.

  An odd image of himself appears in his mind, all tangled up with Bible stories his mother used to read him.

  Moses in the desert.

  Crossing the Red Sea.

  He walks out into the ocean of information, and it bears him up; he stretches his arms wide, and embraces the blazing pillar of ever-changing data that rears up before him, that touches the sky, and he is not consumed;

  Here comes everything.

  He can hear the mingled sounds of the cars and trucks on the distant freeway.

  He can taste the mathematics of their masses, like metal on his tongue.

  He can hear their speed.

  How can he do that?

  He concentrates on the constant roar, and now he can pick out each individual truck, car, motorbike; and he feels wave after wave of pleasure at each little surge of mechanical sound, as the mounting excitement of their approach compresses the waves of information; and then in a deep groan of release they pass him, the sinuous sound waves stretch out, relax, further apart; and his mind solves the equation automatically, no equation at all, just revealed truth, pattern-recognition; a drop of such a frequency means such a speed.

  Doppler shift . . .

  He can unpick the interference patterns when two cars get into phase, and their separate noises join; begin to cancel and to reinforce.

  The world, which had alternately mumbled and shouted at him all his life, now speaks to him clearly in pure math.

  Truck coming. Twenty-two wheeler.

  The rumble of its tyres, flat to the road surface.

  Fully loaded.

  Without even looking, he can see its speed, the rate of its movement, the weight of its load, the charge it must be pulling from the solar road. Everything as clear, as vivid, as bright in his mind as Road Runner in a cartoon.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

  Its approaching, high-pitched greeting-cry falls off, into a deep goodbye.

  66

  ‘Brains are the ultimate compression and communication systems.’

  — David J. C. MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms

  That evening, he helps her drag his bed back to his room, but he’s still weak. He climbs under the covers as soon as they’ve finished, and drifts into sleep.

  As Naomi stares down on his unconscious face, she thinks, I’ve flicked a switch at the back of the universe . . .

  Her thoughts are soft and slow from exhaustion, but nonetheless clear.

  I am the mother of Jesus. He has died, and risen from the dead. I have brought him back from the dead . . .

  Naomi goes back to her bedroom, closes the blackout shutters on her bedroom window. She lies down on the bed, and it feels like she just keeps falling.

  When she wakes up, in the dark, her body assumes she is still in the lab, and she lurches up and off the bed, thinking she is in her chair, that there has been a power cut.

  She sees, very solid and clear, what she wants to see, what she expects to see, what her eyes and mind are hungry to see; Colt standing, smiling. But it’s just her waking mind’s best guess, trying to make sense of a chair, some clothes on the floor. The image of Colt flicks out of existence, replaced by the real room. Her bedroom. Empty.

  She opens the blackout shutters, winces at the blast of light.

  It’s morning.

  *

  She finds him in the kitchen, wearing his helmet.

  It’s surreal, how normal this feels. Like nothing’s happened.

  ‘Food,’ she says. ‘You must be starving. And water . . . what can I . . .’

  ‘Pizza,’ he says.

  And he’s about to order online, when he realizes she might not be on duty.

  She might not be tracking him any more.

  He’ll have no way of knowing if she’s received the order.

  ‘Pizza?’ says Naomi. He hasn’t eaten pizza since he was six? Seven? No, there was that pizza in the fridge, when she came back and he . . .

  ‘I’ll call,’ he says, and walks out of the kitchen.

  *

  Colt goes to his room.

  Switches off the game.

  Does his breathing exercises.

  OK. Now.

  No.

  He lies down on the bed.

  Relax. Yes.

  But his eyes are distracted by the vintage poster, high on the wall. Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who. It starts to set off associations, thought loops.

  He blacks out the visor. Clears his mind again.

  Calls.

  In the warm dark of the helmet, he hears his breathing; the circuit’s electronic breath; then the familiar clean tones.

  Devices singing, each to each.

  ‘Da Vinci’s.’ A man’s voice. Colt is prepared for that.

  ‘Is Sasha on duty?’ says Colt. ‘Doing deliveries?’

  ‘Uh, let me check . . .’ Background noise gets muffled for a few seconds. ‘Uh huh,’ says the guy. ‘Just came on shift.’

  ‘I would like for her to deliver,’ says Colt. He feels he should explain. ‘She likes to ride her bike out here.’ Is that enough? Is that a proper explanation? ‘No speed cams.’ That should do it.

  Some of his sensations are new, disconcerting. He’s imagining how Sasha feels, and it’s like he is split in two; he’s here, thinking about her; but he’s also her, thinking about him, about the road out to his house. The image is distracting and strange. It’s affecting his voice, he can feel it affecting his voice, and he knows people don’t like this version of his voice, and he panics.

  The guy on the phone is laughing. ‘Oh yeah, you. The guy in the home-made helmet.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK . . . same address?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK . . . Last time was pepperoni and olives, extra olives. What can we do you for today, sir?’

  ‘Same,’ says Colt, as fast and deep as he can. ‘Same.’

  He cuts the connection.

  Lies on his bed with his eyes closed, listening to his breathing slow down in the dark.

  *

  ‘I’ll get it,’ shouts Colt when the doorbell rings.

  He answers the door.

  Yes.

  Colt sees himself in the reflective visor of her helmet, wearing his old Road Runner T-shirt.

  Meep, meep.

  He studies his T-shirt’s reflection. He’s worn it every laundry cycle since Mama bought it for him, but he hasn’t actually looked at it in years.

  It’s too small. It’s too old.

  It’s faded.

  The cotton has rotted away at the hemline.

  It’s fraying where he once cut the seam at the neck, to pull it on over his helmet.

  He should have changed.

  Something else is wrong. Her helmet. It’s black, like his. Not red. And, wait . . . he glances past her, and says, ‘You’ve got a new bike.’ It’s a Suzuki, vivid green.

  She flips up the visor and it’s a guy with stubble; a fresh pink scar on the light brown skin of his cheek; bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Sasha,’ says Colt.

  ‘Huh?’ The guy holds out the pizza, but Colt doesn’t reach for it.

  ‘Sasha was meant to come.’

  The guy shrugs. ‘Oh yeah, she said to say . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Man, it’s gone . . . something like . . . some Bible quote, she made me learn it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jeremy or Jerome or something. Verse 33, line 3, I re
member all the threes . . . “Call me and . . .” No, it’s gone.’ He shakes his head, and winces. ‘Late night, man. Late night.’

  Jeremiah 33-3. Not ‘call me’.

  ‘Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’

  Call to me.

  *

  In the kitchen, Colt isn’t sure he wants to be alive.

  He moans.

  It helps relieve the pressure.

  He moans again.

  ‘What happened?’ says Naomi. She had tried to listen in from the kitchen, but couldn’t catch it. ‘Take off the helmet. Table rules. Take off the helmet and talk.’

  He sits at the table, takes off the helmet, and closes his eyes.

  Naomi teases out the story. Most of the story. Some of the story.

  It takes a while.

  When he’s done, Naomi studies him across the table. He’s subvocalizing. ‘So . . . what are you thinking?’ she says.

  Colt doesn’t want to say it, but he can’t lie. ‘I’m thinking . . . it came into my head, Mama . . . I didn’t want to think it, it came into my head and now it’s going round and round . . .’

  ‘What is it? Just say it.’

  ‘She’s a fucking bitch.’

  ‘No, she’s not a fucking bitch. Never say that again.’ Naomi digs the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, and massages her eyeballs till the pressure causes the cells in her retinas to fire, sending nets of white and purple light flaring across her vision. Opens her eyes again. Blinks. Studies Colt’s face, his jaw.

  His eyes.

  She can’t help it, she says, ‘You’re just like your father.’

  Colt looks puzzled. She’s never said anything negative about Ryan. He says, ‘That’s good, right?’

  Long pause. ‘In some ways . . . How does she make you feel?’

  ‘What does that mean? I don’t know how I feel.’

  ‘But you feel something, right? When you see her? When you think about her?’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘No,’ says Naomi, ‘it does mean something.’

  ‘You’re going to talk about love. Don’t talk about love.’

  Right, the brick wall. She stops, and thinks. It’s a language problem. It’s a metaphor problem.

  ‘Romantic, ah . . .’ No, she’s losing him. ‘Forget that. Reset. We’ll start again . . .’