“Too much to lose,” he said, this small moustached man with sad brown eyes. “We’ve taken an orphan or two once in a while, and returned them, as a possible help. But there have been too many unpredictable consequences, as you well know.”
That’s why he was here, one of the orphans, reluctant to say goodbye, an outcast sufficiently different from his kind to be alone among them.
We sat in silence, outside each other’s wall.
“You know, of course,” he said finally, “that everything you’ve heard from me is imagined in that storybook library where you worked.”
“Not taken seriously,” I said, thinking of the day I was let go in a budget cut.
“It could help,” he said.
“Sure, if the world was run by a selfless dictator who would bend to reason and knowledge, and live forever. Why not send someone to take over?”
“You’ve got to come out on your own or not at all.”
Come out, I said to myself. There was an awakening from a nightmare in the words, but the black corridor to the exit was too long.
“If we can only save ourselves,” I said, “then why are you still talking to me?”
“It’s as much as I can do.”
“You’ve seen and watched,” I said, groping for words to provoke him, even hurt him, “– but without much good.”
“I agonize,” he said.
“Do you now?”
“A few of us care. Some want to come home, to more than this world.”
He was out of his mind, I told myself, dangerous because so much of what he said was true, and I was now talking to him as if it was all true. He was from here, and as unable to shape our world for the better even if he was from elsewhere, because they would not back him. His own unwilling ambivalence was nothing more than a diseased good will. He might just as well be from here. If he could not help, how could we expect to help ourselves?
They would never come to help us, unless enough of them disagreed amongst themselves.
Never.
We would have to save ourselves, loosen if not untie our own Gordian Knots.
I stood at the edge of my humanity, willing to leap into his delusion, struggling as I took a deep breath and silently asked him to take me with him.
A refusal would prove nothing, but a yes would expose his tortured, wish-fulfilling fraud.
My breath quickened. “Are they people… out there, like you?” I asked.
“Not as you know them.”
“Better?” I asked, struggling with the fool in myself.
“In every physical way,” he said. “It takes care of much.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“The removal of physical decay improves human psychology. The removal of fear in the short-lived, for one thing, makes many problems irrelevant.”
I laughed, having rehearsed too many possibilities in a life without a future. Peering ahead, seeing the need of a human redesign, physically and educationally, only brought despair and contempt for the present.
“Help us!” I shouted, grabbing the table with both hands and rattling the bottles on it, suddenly ready to abase myself before him, implore him to raise up my wretched humanity, pull me out of myself, away from the hells we knew so well. If he was who he claimed, then a multitude of heavens awaited in place of superstitious mirages. “Help us!” I cried again.
The skygod reached out, steadied the shaking bottles on my table, and said, “You must first imagine what it would mean, then do it yourself, accepting the loss of those you leave behind. The dead long ago outnumbered the living.”
“What do you mean... imagine?” I asked, calming down, feeling that it might be best to leave us alone.
“See what you can’t yet have – know what it might mean. Glimpse it. What can be done must first be imagined.”
“What are your people like?” I asked, thinking that something had imagined our universe and set it adrift like a soap bubble.
“You’d be surprised by the inertia still in them. There’s a group determined to live for a time in every era of the human past – in caves, trees, on plains and steppes. They go equipped, of course, and they move on, because there will always be time.”
“Where did they come from?”
“From the past, here and elsewhere, from preserved libraries of bio-diversity. They are not a majority.”
“Who are the largest?” I asked with a painful curiosity, afraid that he would stop lying to me.
“The metaphysicians... Like you, greedy to know, who think they might one day learn what it’s all about. Strangely, the simple ways attract most often from this tiresome group.”
“How many mobiles are there?” I asked.
“Oh, we can’t know. The human derived ones are not all of them. Many don’t travel, but cluster around red dwarfs, suns that will last the longest.”
“Then why are you here You didn’t come back to die, did you?”
He smiled, and I sat trapped somewhere between reality and delusion.
“I imagine that your kind would not die,” I said. “At least not as quickly as we do. They give you that much, don’t they?”
“We do not think of a life that will end. You think that way when you’re young, until aging forces you into narrow choices.”
If they would only empower him to rule, I told myself, feeling a great open conspiracy taking hold of me again, afraid that I was sitting in the room alone, insane but full of hope, marking all this down in an indelible memory.
Full of truth but insane.
I grasped at wishes. His presence here was a wild intervention to be doubted, to have it both ways, to let us think for ourselves. Yes, that had to be it. A straightforward intervention would be an invasion, a conquest, as final as a revelation from a god, but his way still left us free to take it as a wish or a delusion.
A fit of despairing sanity struck me.
There was no one out there in the dark.
We’re all alone and must save ourselves.
Fermi’s doubt might have been a wish for human solitude, or a fear of an empty sky.
“Take me with you,” I said.
And he did.
Audiovisionary
Stephanie Saulter
The voices have gone quiet.
I am not supposed to listen. I’m not supposed to listen. If I didn’t listen then it wouldn’t matter if they were quiet or loud, I know this I know this, Dr Panko says so and I know I know, but I can’t not listen. I can’t I can’t I can’t.
Especially when they’re quiet. When I have to strain to hear them. I have to concentrate. Dr Panko thinks it’s good when they’re quiet. She says first they’ll go quiet and then they’ll go away and if I don’t try to listen to the quiet maybe they won’t come back. She’s wrong she’s wrong and she doesn’t know she’s wrong and every time I tell her all she understands is that I’m wrong.
I’m not wrong.
If Dr Panko and Beth and Stevie and everyone else would just listen, listen to me, listen to them, listen and, and, and understand, then I think maybe I wouldn’t have to listen so much. I wouldn’t have to hear.
Maybe then they’d leave me alone.
I can hear the muttering as Panko and I come up to the door. She frowns as I pause at the square lens of the double-glazed, metal-framed, aggressively institutional observation window before I swipe us in. We both know what I’ll see, and Panko hates to waste time. She makes a show of looking at the chart – no surprises there either – while I look in on Joe. Before we walk in on him.
He’s standing against the back wall of his room, sort of turned and hunched into the corner, the pose of someone having a very private conversation that they don’t want even the most casual of passers-by to overhear. Needless to say no one’s there but Joe, and now me and Panko, although the urgency with which he’s mumbling, “Listen, listen, just listen, I’m listening, it’s not me not me, listen to me…” would make you think he was trying to talk down a m
ob. He stops abruptly as we enter, the angle of his body shifting to acknowledge us even though his head remains inclined towards the corner. It’s a twisted, unnatural posture, tortured even, and it makes him look like something not quite human.
“How’re you doing today, Joe?” Panko’s voice is brisk and businesslike, as though she were running through day reports at the morning staff meeting, or reeling off outcome statistics for a review.
We’re supposed to talk to patients as we would to anyone else. Be the example, the model; the route map they can follow back to sanity. This sounds like a good principle, and mostly it is, but with some of our cases I’m not sure it’s helpful. Or kind.
I’m never sure with Joe.
“Quiet today,” he whispers. “Quiet, quieter.” He blinks red-rimmed eyes at Panko and me, licks his lips with a tongue that looks as dry as sandpaper. His voice falls on the words and I have to strain to hear him. I wonder why I still bother. He sounds hollow, as if there’s so little left of him he’s too small to fill up his own skin. He sounds like despair.
“That’s good.” Panko’s professional, expansive cheeriness is downright cruel in comparison, and I feel myself wince. Joe just hunches his shoulders, and shudders a little.
Hear us hear us we are here we are us we are you. We hear you, hear us, know us. You are there we are here we are one we are all. There is no distance there is no space there is no time we are with you always. We reach for you reach for us join us speak to us speak for us. Hear us you who are you, you who are all. Speak to us we wait we hear we are here. See the sparks the threads the lines, point to point, indivisible, us to you across all space all time, no space no time. We are far we are there we are here. The strings connect us we are us we are you we are all. We are here, the greater you, the greater us, we call and we call and we call for you to join us. Hear us and answer.
I check the chart again while Stevie tries to talk Joe out of his corner and over to a chair. He’s quiet today but tense – there’s a stiffness to his movement that suggests an increase in muscle rigidity. This might be a side effect of the meds he’s on now, and I note it on the chart. That would be pretty rare, and not particularly worrying; a hell of a lot less worrying than the damage he’d be trying to do to himself without them. The main thing is, he seems a lot calmer.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better, Joe,” I say, to say something and to give Stevie some support, while I flip through the history. This could be yet another blip, one that only looks like an improvement. Scanning the entries that go back over months and years, I’m forcefully reminded that I wouldn’t be the first clinician to have unrealistic hopes for Joseph Herald’s progress. “Let’s have a little sit-down and a chat, shall we?”
Stevie’s persuaded him to perch on the edge of his bed. I take the chair, and notice him licking his lips again. Probably a new tic, although the meds could be making him dehydrated. That wouldn’t be good at all. “Are you thirsty, Joe? Would you like a drink?”
He nods, and to my surprise whispers, “Yes, please.” Stevie’s eyebrows shoot up in astonishment. The water station and cups are down the hall, so I’m alone with Joe for a few seconds while Stevie steps out.
He looks at his hands, at his feet, at the floor, anywhere but me.
“So your voices are quiet today?” I ask finally. He nods. “But you were still talking to them, Joe. When we came in.”
He stares at me, caught. Stevie comes back and hands him a plastic cup of water. Joe sips cautiously, still staring.
“Why are you talking to them, Joe, if they aren’t talking to you?”
He holds the cup in both hands, gazes into it, squints up at me, glances over at Stevie, back at the cup, back at me. “They’re still there,” he says finally. “Just quieter.”
“You were asking them to listen to you,” I point out. “Is there something you want to tell the voices, Joe?” He nods seriously, and I let him see me heave a sigh. “But what’s the point of that, Joe? You know there’s no one there. It’s only you, Joe. It’s all you. Remember?”
He huddles forward like a repentant child, elbows on knees, dipping his head towards the empty cup in his hands. He’s coherent today, almost rational, so I decide to take that as a yes.
“You were really trying to tell yourself something, weren’t you?” He looks up, the cup twisting in his fingers. “What was it, Joe?”
Dr Panko talks so much.
She talks and she talks and she talks and I try to listen, I try and try, because she sounds so different from the voices. There’s only ever one of her and it sounds like she knows what she means, and she says things so clear it seems I should know what she means too. It’s so easy for her, to talk and talk.
It’s so hard for me to listen.
I know she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t think the voices can be real. I don’t know if they’re real, I only know they’re there. They’re somewhere.
She says it’s me trying to tell myself things and I say I don’t know the things they’re telling me, that they’re trying to tell me. I don’t want them to tell me anything, I’m not the one they should be telling. I hear the words and I see the pictures they make in my head and I almost know what they mean, but I can’t because it’s too much and too fast and the things they almost mean aren’t anything I have words for. I don’t know those things to tell them to myself. If I knew, they would make sense, I would make sense, but they don’t make any sense.
It’s worst of all when I try to explain, when I try to say what the voices tell me. To explain to her, or Stevie, or Beth, or anyone. That’s when the voices go quietest of all, for a while, like they don’t want to interrupt. They want me to tell, they don’t want it to just be me. But it’s so hard to tell what they say, because they don’t make sense and I can’t remember, and if I stop to remember or Dr Panko makes me stop to ask me things then they come back, they come back quick and loud, so loud, like a million voices shouting, because they don’t want me to stop.
I can’t do a million voices. I can’t I can’t. I’m just me and my head hurts and they’re always too quiet or too loud and I don’t have words for the pictures they make.
I’m so tired.
Joe lies on his side now, curled into a ball on the bed, eyes screwed tight shut. I kneel beside him on the floor, my hand patting his arm in a manner that I hope he’ll find comforting, murmuring, “Take it easy, Joe, it’s okay, you’re okay, it’s fine,” over and over again, in as soothing a voice as I can manage. The terrible dimpled scar on his temple, exactly the size of a no. 7 drill bit, is right in my eyeline. I force myself to keep it there, so as not to stare daggers at Panko. Joe’s been through this often enough. What did she think would happen?
She’s busy tapping at the chart, making notes, eyes darting between it and us. I can see that she’s nibbling at the inside of her lower lip, a thing she only does when she gets really worried, and it makes me a little less annoyed. Joe’s ragged breathing has calmed almost back to regular before she finally speaks.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you might be able to talk about it today. I’m sorry I was wrong.”
His face scrunches into an even tighter grimace for a moment, and he whispers something I have to lean forward to catch. I repeat it for Panko.
“Tried.”
She sighs, and it sounds genuine this time. “Yes, I can see that. Don’t beat yourself up, Joe. You’re doing as well as you can.” Her tone is uncharacteristically gentle, and Joe’s eyes twitch and blink open. But he only stares, vacant.
“I’m going to go, Joe. I don’t think my being here can help you today after all. But Stevie could stay with you, if you like? Maybe help you do some pictures, if you feel up to it?”
I watch him closely. It takes a few seconds before I detect the tiniest shift of his head on the pillow, and an eye blink that looks deliberate enough to have meaning. I look back at Panko and translate it into a nod that she
can recognise, and she nods back.
“Okay, Joe. That would be good. I’m going to try to work out what else we can do that might help you.” She hesitates, hand on the door. “Would you like me to let Beth know how you’ve been today? Talk to her about any new ideas for treatment?”
Joe’s jaw works, and his hands clench spasmodically. Then the fingers open, and he begins to rub at the other scars, the long, thin ones that mark his wrists. The nod is definite this time. “Yes,” he whispers. His voice is washed out, weary. “I’m sorry. Tell her.”
“I will, Joe, but remember none of this is your fault. Beth knows that too.” She watches him for a few seconds, giving him time to respond. When he doesn’t she gestures that I should come see her when I’m done, and leaves.
I sit beside Joe’s bed for a while, until his hands and the muscles of his face have relaxed enough to make me think he might be able to move and talk a little; maybe even hold a crayon. I get him some more water, and help him ease himself upright. He drinks thirstily and then just sits, absently twisting and bending and tearing the cup in the way that he does, gazing at something in the middle distance that I can’t see.
After a bit I pull the mangled lump of plastic gently from his fingers, and put it on the table next to the other one.
“Those are some pretty cool cup sculptures, Joe. Want to try some drawing now?”
He looks confused for a moment, as if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but then his face clears a little and I can see understanding there. I get him settled in a chair, lay out sheets of recycled newsprint, put the tubs of stubby crayons and coloured pencils to one side. I know which colours he tends to like – greys and reds and a strange silver-blue – and I leave them lying near his hand. Then I take the other chair and quietly, without any talk or fuss, pick up a pencil I know he won’t want and start to doodle on my own paper. He doesn’t move at all for a while, and I don’t look up. I sense rather than see when he finally chooses something and starts to work.
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 17
