An Unusual Angle
Page 9
I do rave on.
By this time she has concluded that I’m either a neurotic liar or a psychotic suffering from delusions. She’ll probably be all patronising, muttering ‘yes’ at appropriate points in my explanation, as she wonders if she should do anything about me. In the end she will decide that I’m probably Harmless, allowed outside an institution because of the narrowly defined subject range of my fantasies. And perhaps she’ll pray for me for the next two or three nights.
Which brings me to the real issue. Do I restrain myself from telling the truth because I do not want to disturb her, or because I do not want to disturb me?
I don’t have much success with public relations—that’s really the distributor’s job, anyway. My policy is that it’s best to avoid people whenever possible.
Not all people, of course. The criterion is the degree of truth that can appear in the conversation without causing a disturbance, merely because something has been said that ‘people just don’t say’.
The tolerance range among students is, generally, far better than among adults, but too much generalisation is dangerous. Some teachers are quite able to face some truths without cringing, while some students would sooner knife you than know certain facts. (By facts I mean, of course, things I believe to be true.) Both groups have their conventions, and it is hard to say which set is the least logical.
What is sickening and degrading is being forced to have two personalities, two ways of thinking and speaking. What is frightening is the possibility of the switching back and forth becoming instinctive and absolute. I have been terrified after saying something in class which could only be appreciated out of class, and finding the glassy stares of the other students as reproachful as that of the teacher.
I cannot decide whether total honesty would strengthen society or make it crumble. No chance of a practical experiment.
At school next Monday it is lunchtime and we sit in a circle in the shade of a tree on the Southern Lawn, and talk. About whatever comes up. About things that happened in classrooms and things that happened in Cambodia and things that happened in Cretaceous Europe. About war and history and the CIA. About music and books and films and television. Many of us have seen if… which we go over in detail again and again and again and again, as we do with Catch-22 and Zardoz and The Ruling Class and Star Wars and Altered States and Poltergeist. Once I brought a copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and we read the first act, by the end of which I was screaming out Martha’s part so loudly that half the school could hear me.
And that sort of thing.
I used to film from about five metres up, taking in everyone at once, but now my technique with viewpoints has improved enough to allow me to move from close-up to close-up of each person as they speak, with very smooth tracking. It looks much better.
And then the siren shatters the serenity.
—I’m not going. I’m going to sit here all afternoon. Stuff Science.
But he comes. And we all change into dull, conservative, boring fools. To avoid disharmony. Ho hum.
We are studying insects. All ten million or so species. In six weeks. Imagine that.
—I want you all to start an insect collection from today. I’ll collect it and mark it at the end of the term. Get as many different types of insects as possible, and pin them through the centre, trying not to damage the bodies. You can kill them with normal fly spray, then put them in a shirt box.
He smiles dangerously.
—Is there anyone who doesn’t believe in killing insects?
Not in the halves of our beings we present to you.
—Good.
That afternoon I see a beetle scurrying along the ground. I spray it heavily with the fly spray until it is covered in white foam. It keeps crawling. I pick it up and take it to the bathroom sink, and put it under water for thirty seconds. When I take it out, it is still kicking its legs. I immerse it again, this time for five minutes. Its legs still shake weakly. Then I use boiling water, and it is finally dead.
Why does it matter to me how quickly it dies? Is it in agony? Can a beetle feel pain? Why are my hands shaking as I pin it to the cardboard back of the shirt box?
As I fumble with the pin, trying not to crack the brittle body of the beetle, the soundtrack fills slowly with the music from The Collector which makes me cry, and the tears slide down my face onto the grey cardboard, making patches of dark sogginess.
Let’s replay that scene in the Science class, but with a slight change of setting. I know it’s trite hyperbole, but isn’t every thought of mine?
—I want you to go out and organise the rounding-up and extermination of every Jew in this city. I will be watching your methods, and judging their efficiency. You must be thorough: even those in positions of respect in their communities, even those with friends in government, must be destroyed along with the rest. But use discretion as you do it; we must keep up the appearance of arresting only criminals and spies. The extermination camps are fully equipped with the most efficient devices; we will even be using the chemicals obtained from the corpses as industrial supplies for pharmaceutical manufacturing for the next sixty years.
He smiles dangerously, strokes his moustache with the tip of his index finger, then says:
—Is there anyone who feels that their conscience will present problems in this matter?
Not in the halves of our beings we present to you.
—Good.
As they stand and leave the room, neat young boys and girls in brown shirts sing in pure, clear voices:
Stand up! Stand up! For Fenkirk!
Who teaches us right from wrong!
And gives us moral fortitude!
That we may be truly strong!
Though we may face temptation!
We know that we’ll not fall!
Our strength does come from Fenkirk
To whom we owe our all!
During the song, we follow the men from the briefing into their cars. Cut to library film of arrests, scenes in concentration camps. Intercut shots of students insect-collecting.
This is absurd, ridiculous, laughable. There is no way I can make this comparison, the scales are too different, the issues unconnected. I take everything too far and end up with a muddy non-comment.
But that’s all right, I’m used to it.
I don’t expect anything else.
Should I have ‘Who teaches’? ‘Which teaches’ does not seem to fit. Well, we are always being reminded that Our School is not made of buildings, but of teachers and students and administrators. And legislation.
Should I have said ‘Who teach’ then? Why did I use the singular? The plural does not seem to fit. To this I have no answer.
It is the last day of my second year at Fenkirk Vale Senior High School, and somebody has decided that we should not sit around in our Tutorial Groups all morning, but instead we should go out onto the oval and take part in peculiar activities like egg-and-spoon races and balloon-bursting competitions. I cannot find out who has decided this. The House Directors (four teachers who run a House each for $1000 extra pay a year) deny that they made the decision. So who did?
And we go through with it all, every absurd event listed on the mimeographed sheets which appeared from nowhere. I sit and watch. A teacher approaches me.
—Why don’t you go in the thirteen-legged race?
—Because I do not wish to.
He gets a little angry.
—Look, we’re only doing this for you kids. We’d much rather have you all in classes playing cards or reading, instead of out here having fun and being so difficult to supervise. We certainly aren’t getting anything out of it.
—My sentiments exactly. We’d all much rather be in classes playing cards or reading. It may be a little dull, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Look at that!
I point to a peculiar kind of relay involving quoits and figs. All the competitors, obviously pressured into it, have looks of disgusted boredom on their faces.
I say:
—What I want to know is who organised this thing in the first place. The students don’t want it. The staff don’t want it. The staff are running things under the illusion that it’s ‘fun’ for us, or something like that, while the students are making it fairly obvious that they’re nauseated by the whole idea. Who started the whole thing? Why are we doing it when nobody wants to do it?
The teacher looks frightened. Most of them are extremely superstitious.
The answer should have been obvious all along.
Minutes before the morning ends, I see Seward standing up on the hill at the end of the oval, far from the activity, looking down over everything with a grin of satisfaction. He is enjoying it. That is the purpose.
There’s a simple explanation for everything.
Fade-out the noise of the crowd, and bring in the wind blowing across the hill, as we track in towards his face.
Then, shocking even me, he raises his arms and begins to conduct us with an imaginary baton.
Chapter 9
COMPANY
I am obsessed with light.
Not surprising, considering that movies are difficult to make in darkness.
But I am obsessed with extremes of light: explosive flashes, the sun, fireworks, magnesium flares, searchlights, laser beams, welding torches. And that sort of thing.
I can never get over the scene in Catch-22 when Yossarian and Dobbs are stumbling about on the runway in almost total darkness, and then the enormous floodlights are switched on and their bodies turn white.
To me it is still more memorable than all of the light and magic of Poltergeist.
And that sort of thing.
I film all my car chases at dawn or sunset. I find a very straight road with just the right type of hill on it, pointing straight at the rising or setting sun. Then I get a long way back, and use a Cassegrain telescope focussed at infinity. And then the first car comes over the hill, with the enormous image of the sun behind it. And then the second car. From that distance, the cars are virtually silent, and I never dub in anything later. My car chases are very quiet.
And when the cars run out of petrol (yes petrol petrol petrol petrol petrol there’s no such thing as gasoline in this country no matter what impression Mad Max II might give) or explode or end up in four feet of mud, and the chase goes on, on foot, it takes place around a blast furnace. Which is very bright in some places.
And that sort of thing.
When I wait for buses at night, I stand beside the road staring at the sea of car headlights, the river of white. The bodies of the cars seem almost entirely transparent, there seems to be nothing there but light. If I lengthen my persistence of vision each headlight becomes a flowline, a brushstroke of light. I nearly dive in, it looks so warm and soft to swim in the light.
And that sort of thing.
What I like most about science fiction films is the number of opportunities to use bright lights. The sun is hundreds of times brighter in space, weapons can be much more spectacular, there are space-ship crashes, strange tools, incredible communications devices.
And that sort of thing.
I am lying in bed. It is a warm summer night. There is no moon. The room is very dark. There are occasional faint traffic noises, and a continuous, barely audible hum of insects, probably done with a synthesiser. There is no wind.
I create a viewpoint, run it around the room. Nothing of interest. Why should there be?
It slices through the flywire screen into the still night. The sky is cloudless, and I scan the heavens, bringing in the stars, and Jupiter which is very bright.
Then I start to move it upwards. And upwards. Below, the suburb is dotted with street lights and a few house lights. And upwards. The lights contract to pinpricks against a black, featureless background. And upwards, faster and faster until I can see the dawn approaching.
I am dreaming. I can never keep a viewpoint more than five hundred metres away. After that, they just wander off. I never get to cancel them, and I never see from them again. Perhaps somebody else grabs them.
Somebody else?
Of all the telepaths I have ever met, none has been even one tenth as strong as me. Could there be somebody else who can manipulate viewpoints? Somebody else who can screen minds, blocking out or deceiving weaker telepaths? Somebody else who can change the boiling point of water by two degrees?
Somebody else with a microminiature camera in a cavity in their brain?
The odds are against it. But I gave up believing in odds when I made a pair of dice give nineteen twelves out of twenty. When somebody else was throwing them. That made me sweat myself sopping wet (more out of fear and nervousness than effort) and I never could repeat the feat. It could have been pure chance, whatever that means … but the odds are against that.
I think outwards:
—Can anybody hear me?
I hear the answer in my head:
—No.
It is me thinking to myself. The first sign of madness.
But there’s nobody else to think to.
Think with? Think at?
Irrelevantly, I get out of bed and stand up. Why should that make any difference? This time in reality, I create a viewpoint. I send it south. At about five hundred metres, the image suddenly vanishes. It is not a gradual loss of signal strength … it is a snatch …
The same again, northwards: it vanishes suddenly.
The same again, westwards: it vanishes suddenly.
The same again, eastwards: it vanishes suddenly.
And south-west, south-east, north-west, north-east.
And straight up, forty-five degrees up to the north, the south, the west, the east, south-west, south-east, north-west, north-east.
Always at around five hundred metres. But I cannot judge distances very accurately. I appear to be surrounded by a hemispherical surface beyond which my viewpoints vanish.
I cannot send them underground.
Then I remember a night nearly a year ago, when I felt that I was being followed by an enormous, oppressive shell, always centred on me wherever I went.
So subconsciously I understood that long ago?
Perhaps.
Is it a peculiar limitation of my powers, or something foreign imposed on me by somebody else? Something else? Has it been true for all the time I have been able to make viewpoints? It is difficult to say. Only recently have I become sufficiently skilled at manipulating the viewpoints to be able to tell. Does it mean anything to ask if it was there before I could detect it?
I can never walk out of it, because I am always at the centre. I can never see beyond it, because my viewpoints vanish when they reach it.
I yawn, shake my head, and feel it follow even such a slight movement. I am suddenly overwhelmed by claustrophobia. I dive into bed and wrap myself tightly in the sheets, my eyes closed. An odd remedy for claustrophobia, but it works. It would be logical to go outside, into the wide open space of the back yard. But then I would feel its presence even more strongly, as I did on that night a year ago.
I send a shock wave through my brain which puts me to sleep.
Dreamless sleep so I wake as tired as ever. I once tried to film my dreams, but it never came out. A Great Pity. Just blotchy lights.
I can no longer feel the oppression of the hemisphere. Perhaps it was all a dream and I am tired anyway. I create a viewpoint and send it off in a randomly chosen direction. At about five hundred metres, it ceases transmission abruptly.
And the hemisphere crystallises in my mind. Now why’d I go and do a thing like that? I try to shake it, but it stays in focus. Like an itch. Like trying to forget an itch. It won’t go away.
All day it is there at the back of my mind, sometimes at the front. It is not pain or sight or hearing. It’s like knowing I’m being watched, even though I have no evidence from my senses. It could all be in my mind.
It could all be in my mind. Everything.
Perhaps.
Late
in the afternoon, I try something. I think outwards:
—I need room to breathe!
It was the first thing that came into my head. I feel a change in the hemisphere, a lightening of the sensation. But not completely. I send out a viewpoint.
It vanishes after one kilometre.
It could still be all psychosomatic (a strange term to use when it’s debatable as to whether my body is involved at all). It’s very hard to tell. If the expansion of the hemisphere is a response to my plea, then why is it there at all, and why doesn’t whoever has imposed it communicate with me?
If my brain is playing dirty tricks, and simulating it all, then I might as well give up approaching this logically.
I let no thoughts of the Cruel Joke surface.
Much.
I think outwards:
—More room than that!
No change.
—That’s room enough, quite enough
says a whisper in my head, but it is probably me thinking to myself again. It lacks the certainty, the solidity, the externality of communication. It is just musing.
What would telepathic contact on a conversational level be like? Hearing speech? Would it boom through my brain … or would it bubble up from the underground springs of my subconscious? Could I manage to distinguish between it and my eternal dialogue with myself, my endless stream of discussion and debate and threats and reminders?
I hope so.
All evening I try to communicate over and over again, yelling, threatening, pleading. Requesting sensibly. By midnight, I am totally irrational. I have decided that I am being heard, but not answered. I am sullen and childish as I think outwards:
—Why the hell don’t you answer, you stuck-up bastard! I bet you don’t have the power! I bet you couldn’t make yourself heard if you wanted to!
Then: