by Shane Carrow
And then something flicked, and I found myself standing on a street in the warm sunshine among a crowd of thousands at the Royal Show.
It lasted only a few seconds. For a few brief, wonderful seconds, I saw a broad road in the Claremont Showgrounds, fringed with tents and pavilions and filled with people: couples holding hands, toddlers riding on their father’s shoulders, children chasing each other or eating cotton candy. A hot dog stand sent a waft of steam and the smell of frying onions washing over me. Somewhere in the distance came screams of laughter from the rides in Sideshow Alley. Above was a hot blue West Australian sky, clear as a bell.
For a moment the scene darkened. The road became empty and desolate, a few scraps of paper drifting in the breeze, a few skeletal corpses lying in the shadows. Claremont as it must really be.
And then I was in the chamber again, eyes thrown open as Draeger gave me a sustained volt from the cattle prod.
Too complex. His mind will not take to it. Try something simpler.
“...doesn’t have any long-lasting psychological effects,” Draeger was saying. “At least not compared to other methods. I really don’t see why. It looks as painful as everything else.” He laid the twin metal prongs against my chest and gave me another burst. I snapped back into the chair, screaming through clenched teeth, spine curving back in sheer excruciating pain.
Flick.
My house. My living room. My television, with Kochie braying about on Sunrise. Early morning light through the sliding glass door. Half a piece of Vegemite toast on a plate in front of me, the coffee table strewn with TV guides, PlayStation controllers, a copy of the West Australian.
I was breathing very heavily.
My father – strong, tall, stubbled, wearing black pants and buttoning a white business shirt – strode past me, kicking aside an empty washing basket as he did. “If you want a lift to school you’d better hurry up,” he said irritably. “And it wouldn’t kill you to tidy up around here.” My eyes followed him in shock as he walked into the kitchen, grabbing dishes and plates as he went and depositing them in the sink. He seemed oblivious to the trickle of blood slowly oozing down his face, from the gaping exit wound in his forehead. The exit wound that Aaron had put there on the wharf at Albany.
That one was your fault, Aaron, said a distant echo of a voice as I found myself back in the torture chamber again, gasping for breath, my mind staggering under the load of what I’d just seen. Had I snapped? Was I going insane?
Would it be such a bad thing, if I was?
I’m doing my fucking best here!
More electric shocks. More agony. I screamed out desperate questions now, demanding to nobody that I be told what was going on, that the bizarre experiences my tortured, twisted mind was hurling at me be explained. Those demands must have been mixed in with all the general screaming and pleading, because Draeger took no notice of them.
Flick.
A suburban backyard. My friend Nick’s house. A hot summer afternoon, the patio casting gentle shade over us. Nick was sitting at the plastic table in a folding director’s chair, wearing nothing but a pair of board shorts, peering over the top of his aviators and carefully rolling a joint. I was standing up, holding a slimy tennis ball in my hand. Nick’s border collie was excitedly prancing about in front of me, ready to dart across the lawn after the ball.
Heat on my arms. The panting of the dog. The smell of marijuana. It felt real. I looked down at myself. Jeans, sneakers, a Tame Impala t-shirt. I dropped the ball, ignoring the dog as he scampered over to it and crashed into my legs. I ran my hands over my face. Clean. Fresh. No scars.
I looked over at Nick, lighting up his weed. “Jesus, man,” he said, snapping his Zippo shut. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Weakly, I sat down in another chair, white plastic, cracked and faded. Even as I opened my mouth to speak, the chair became steel, the summer light became gloomy darkness, and the entire scene before me melted away into the dark and terrifying torture cell that was all that had ever existed. The only room in the world.
Okay. That was a little better. We can do this!
Draeger was standing in front of me, holding the cattle prod in one hand, staring at me suspiciously. “I think you passed out for a moment there,” he said. “I hope you can last longer than that, Matthew.”
I started laughing. A huge, deep, joyous belly laugh, because whatever was happening to me, whether I was slowly going insane, whether I’d been insane this entire time, dreaming up the Endeavour and the HMAS Canberra and New England, whether I was locked up in a padded cell back home in Perth, it didn’t matter, because I was free, I was escaping, I was getting out of this…
Flick.
A ball. Unmistakeably. My Year 12 graduation ball, in fact, in November of last year. Two hundred teenage students in evening dresses and rented tuxedos, laughing and talking and eating. A constellation of white tablecloths and expensive cutlery. A wall-to-wall glass window, showing the lights of Perth shimmering on the black water of the Swan River, King’s Park a blotch of darkness against the glow of the southern suburbs.
I was sitting at a table, wearing a suit and tie, my hair long and scruffy. The centre of the table had a complicated arrangement of candles, with a placard at the centre: “Rossmoyne Senior High School and the Sheraton Hotel would like to thank you for a night to remember!” Half the seats at my table were empty; people were already getting up to dance, the DJ playing some Top 40 shit. Glancing over at the dance floor I could see my date pushing into the crowd with some of her friends. Emily Kinsky. Blonde, tall, good-looking. Very smart, but also very snarky, and not well-disposed towards any of my friends. In fact I think our relationship had been well and truly on the rocks at that point.
As I watched her dancing, she cast a glance over to me – and for a brief, horrible second, her face was a pallid grey, with milky dead eyes like monstrous spider’s eggs.
My eyes shot down to my plate, my heart racing. I stared at the half-eaten mixture of steak and salad very carefully. I kept my eyes fixed on it and tried not to look at anything, not to even think about anything. I concentrated on breathing. In and out. Nothing else.
A motion beside me; somebody had slipped into Emily’s vacant seat. It was Aaron, looking awkward in a suit and blue tie, the lack of a corsage on his breast pocket a tell-tale sign that he was flying solo. His face was shockingly different. Pale, clean, short haircut. Not the face I was used to, which had unwashed tangles of long hair, a deep scar running up his left cheek, a faint tinge of stubble around his mouth. He looked so young.
And yet the eyes were... different. They didn’t belong in that body. They were cold and hard and wise. They were his real eyes.
“Get up and come with me,” he said.
I didn’t argue. Aaron led me through the tables, past the rings of girls with fake tans and makeup, past guys who were taking off their jackets and loosening their ties to dance. Every glance gave me a familiar face. Old friends. Acquaintances. Classmates. People I hadn’t thought about all year. People I thought I’d forgotten about.
We approached the wall-to-wall glass, which had a small door leading out onto a balcony. It was cold outside, and windy. The only other person on the balcony was Mr Francis, my Geography teacher, smoking a cigarette. When he saw us he dropped it over the edge, trailing glowing embers, and went back inside with a guilty look on his face.
I placed both hands on the balcony railing – cold, smooth, dependable – and stared out across the city. It was a world of light, from the coloured gum trees by the war memorial in King’s Park, across to the glitzy apartment buildings of South Perth, down to Elizabeth Quay where the beacon lights of buoys and the bright restaurants aboard the ferries and the spotlight of a police boat all mixed and mingled across the water. The warning light on a radio tower somewhere in the suburbs. Car headlights along the Esplanade. The red dots of planes and helicopters slowly moving across the stars.
It was so real. And yet,
at the same time, it wasn’t. When I tried to pay attention to fine detail, my eyes would... slide over it. If I moved my head too quickly, I found disorienting blank spots in my vision for a split second before they were filled. And in certain patches of the distance things became somewhat... grainy, like a point in a video game I was never supposed to reach.
“Don’t think about it,” Aaron said. He was leaning against the railing beside me, arms folded, facing back into the ballroom. I could still hear the bass thud of the DJ’s speakers. “Don’t push it, don’t play with it, don’t break it.”
“What the fuck is going on?” I said, turning to him. “Are you even real? Is that you? Or am I talking to myself?”
“I’m real,” he said. “So is this.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “This is the past, Perth is dead and gone…”
“Don’t!” he hissed, turning to face me.
For a brief split second, Aaron’s body flickered. Instead of a dorky high school student looking uncomfortable in a suit, he became the real Aaron, wearing snow pants and gloves and a bulky parka, a Glock holstered at his hip, sunglasses over his eyes. Even a dusting of fresh white flakes on his shoulder. The Aaron I’d seen on the last day of July, waving goodbye to me, slowly dwindling as the helicopter carried me away.
He grabbed the back of my head and forced my neck down. “Stare at the ground. Stare at your shoes. I don’t care. Don’t look at me and don’t look at the city and for Christ’s sake don’t say things like that. This is only as real as you think it is, do you understand that? It doesn’t matter if it’s all in your head. If you believe it, it will maintain. If you don’t...”
There was a long silence. “Then I’m back where I was before,” I said, staring down at my expensive black shoes and the tiled floor of the balcony.
“This is where you are,” Aaron said. “This is where you belong. This is the real world.”
Slowly, I raised my head. I looked through the glass windows at the ball. I looked over the river at the city. I looked at Aaron, who was once again young and fresh-faced. God. Had we really changed that much in just, what? Less than a year?
“What happens if I go out there?” I asked, gesturing at the city. “What if I just go out and keep on walking? Or what if I go back inside, take a knife and stab someone in the heart?”
“Then things will fall apart,” he said, “because we can only re-create what you remember.”
“We?”
“Me and the Endeavour. And you. All three of us. I don’t know. It’s complicated.” He sighed. “It’s also very fucking hard to do and it’s your only chance to get through this. So don’t screw things up. Don’t push your luck. Keep your head down, do what you’d normally do, do what you remember doing. We can create some things, simple things. We can improvise a little. But do your best to keep things normal. Follow the script.”
I stared at him. “But how the hell are you doing this?”
Aaron pinched the bridge of his nose. “We can discuss that later. For now, just go... live your life.”
I looked at him for a long time, still unsure if I was going crazy, still unsure what was real and what wasn’t. But I trusted him. No matter what form he takes – a voice in my head, a vision in my mind, a fighter by my side – he’s my brother, and trust him with my life.
So I turned and walked back into the ballroom.
And I danced. And I rode home in a limo with my friends and their dates. And we went to the afterball, and I got drunk, and got in a fight with Emily because she accused me of flirting with one of her friends, which I kind of had been, and we broke up. Just as everything had happened in real life, on that beautiful distant night in the past. And then, rather than living through the next day, I found myself in some other memory, as suddenly and unexpectedly as if I’d been dreaming.
Which I suppose I was.
They changed constantly. I would be sitting in the food court at Garden City with friends from high school, eating Chinese food on a Thursday night. I would be rocking back in my chair looking at my watch in History class, listening to Mr Fogerty drone on about the conscription referendum during World War I. I would be sitting in the car of a friend’s older brother as it roared down the Kwinana Freeway, driving us to a party on a Saturday night, pumping out music and cutting off other drivers.
It wasn’t real. That was a thought I had to avoid at the time, but I can freely say it now, analysing it in fascination, remembering the memories. It was often blurry, usually insubstantial, almost real but not quite there. Gaps in the framework. Far more coherent than a dream. But only about as realistic as, well... a memory. And things never slot together quite right in memories. You remember certain details, but never the big picture. So there were problems and mistakes. People might leave my vision for a moment and then come back as someone else. I might put an object down only to have it disappear entirely. A section of skyline or group of trees might not fit together properly, and leave me feeling disoriented.
But still: it was quite a party trick.
Occasionally it would slip up very badly. That was my fault, not Aaron’s or the Endeavour’s. I’d be walking among the crowds at a train station and suddenly see them as hordes of shuffling, decaying zombies. I’d be looking at a highway and suddenly see burnt-out cars, bleached skeletons, abandoned Army barricades. The imagination can be about as powerful as memory, I guess. When this happened Aaron and the Endeavour would immediately place me in a new memory, a new environment. Only once did I screw up so badly that the entire illusion shattered, and I was once again screaming in agony in the torture chamber. But they hauled me back into the fantasy world before long, and there I stayed, shivering with the memory of pain and terror, trying to lose it among other memories. Better memories.
I didn’t see them – Aaron and the Endeavour, I mean. They were there, I guess, observing me, whether as invisible deities in the sky or through the eyes of passers-by, I don’t know. But they deliberately kept me out of memories involving Aaron. After the ball, I didn’t see him again. Not once. Whether that’s because so many of those memories also included Dad (we moved in different circles at school), or whether he just wanted to avoid me asking him questions about what was going on, I don’t know. Didn’t ask.
Because we did have time to talk about it, later on, when I shifted straight from standing in line at Red Rooster to lying on the mattress in my cell. The torture was over. And I’d survived. I was still here.
Immediately I groped around for Aaron’s mind, and connected with it. Already in the zone. Wow, I said. Just... Jesus. How in the hell, man?
Don’t ask me, because I’m not exactly sure myself, Aaron said. He sounded exhausted. It was the Endeavour’s idea, and it’s the one pulling most of the strings. I’m just the... pipeline. The link.
It’s done this before? I asked.
It’s heard of it being done. It’s not meant to be possible over long distances... but then, neither is telepathy. I don’t know. I guess it’s another of those things only you and me can do.
I felt around for the Endeavour’s mind, but there was nothing. Only Aaron. I heard the two of you talking, when you were doing the first few, I said. How come the Endeavour can do that, but not... I mean, how come I can’t talk to it now?
I don’t know, Aaron said wearily.
Well, it’s incredible, I said. It felt so damn real! How the hell are you doing this? Half that stuff I could barely remember myself.
There’s a lot of stuff in your subconscious that you barely touch, Aaron explained. Stuff that happens to you, and you just file it away and forget about it, except that it’s still there. It can still be pulled up if necessary. Or something like that. This is kind of experimental. Even the Endeavour doesn’t fully understand how the human memory works.
Well, jeez, I said. By all means, go rummaging around in my brain when you don’t “fully understand” how it works.
The Endeavour already did it to both of us before,
Aaron pointed out. And you know what the alternative is.
I was joking. Aaron, this is amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. You can keep doing this, right? This is the way out?
Looks like it, Aaron said hesitantly, and I could tell, even then, that he was thinking about the future. About how long this could go on for – weeks, maybe months. About what would happen to me when Draeger realised that torture wasn’t working.
I don’t care. I’m ecstatic. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be happy. But I remember now.
September 24
I’m sitting on a train. It’s early afternoon, and there are only a handful of other people. I’m staring out the graffiti-scratched windows at Victoria Park sliding past, at the dismal blocks of flats and grassy embankments topped by chain-link fences. Suddenly the rattling of the rails is replaced by a clean whooshing as the train glides over the Causeway across the river.
Clear, open water. Black swans waddling up onto the banks by the golf course. A police boat cruising underneath the bridge. The ugly brown hulk of the East Perth gas works looming up from the marshlands.
I turn away from the window and look at the seat opposite from me, where Nick and Ben are sitting. We’re still dressed in our school uniforms, but with the ties removed, the shirts untucked, the sleeves rolled up. Ben, always the nervous one, is in the middle of some spiel about how his academic record is bad enough without skipping final period. “We have exams in six weeks,” he says. “I don’t want to end going to TAFE.”