Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  I thought there was something awful and awe-inspiring in this sudden, rapid dissemination of elements, the mass turnover of affected plant and animal bodies. Insects, in their hundreds of million, breaking down into soil mulch then growing out as the basis of trees and fungi, producing fruit and seeds consumed by unfolding animal sequences, finally collapsing to recompose the forest, everything turning over again in a sweeping regeneration. The forest itself left no record; humidity prohibited fossilisation. In this sense, and counterintuitive as it might seem, given the palpable digestion all around us, the forest was deathless. I managed, in spite of all this, to routinely walk on the ground without ever considering it, without ever thinking of what it was made of.

  Jane attempted to shock us with night stories of fungal rapaciousness and the possibility of reconstructing prior events from resultant growth. A community struck down by famine then, in a morbid but, she said, perfectly natural sense, resurrected in the effusive growth of carnivorous fungus, these saprotrophs draining the collagen and keratin from the bodies, bulbous white fruit emerging overground in excessive quantities; an apparition of the village, ghostly bodies illuminated through trees in the moonlight.

  I pictured a time-lapse display of the soft drift of human civilisations and considered the vast power of the trace uranium presently inside us. From this, everything accelerated, beyond perception, beyond control, the smallest, most innocuous act blooming out into something incomprehensible, unfathomable. I saw dense spiral patterns, exponential increases through simple logarithmic progression – 1, 2, 4, 8 – quickly gathering a number greater than all the atoms in the universe. I saw the uranium mines – the opened earth – as the source of a dreadful unfurling, an autocatalytic reaction consuming all life, all information, in an unseen nuclear detonation, a brief, vivid white light flaring soundlessly in a small pocket of our solar system.

  VII

  It was afternoon, he had eaten, and though he felt drowsy following the morning’s work he was determined not to sleep. All he had to do to drift away was close his eyes but he knew he shouldn’t, he should stay awake as long as he could. He made himself get up from the chair in his room, approaching the stairs. He hadn’t been able to answer the doctor’s questions. He couldn’t describe the pain. Not just cloudy, but as if… my head is occupied, strange, far away, physically remote from me. He walked uncertainly, sceptically into the kitchen. He smelled something. Another symptom, he thought dismally. What had done this to him? But he stopped by the fridge and reached an arm out and opened the door.

  The food was beginning to spoil. That was it. There was an electronic display inside but he couldn’t make sense of the readings. He made a mental note to ask the doctor the next day. Wary of his tendency to forget, he resolved to write it down. He wandered through the house for several minutes, searching both levels, every room, every cupboard and every drawer, finally realising he was looking for his laptop. An external repository holding his information. Everything would be stored there, a record of his life. If he could find it it would all make sense, everything would come back. But his search failed; he assumed it was being kept somewhere safe, maybe even temporarily removed to save his eyes from strain. The doctor had mentioned something about avoiding high-stimulus objects; he needed to ask him about this as well.

  Rifling through the drawers, the cupboards, he skimmed over the contents, irritated by the unfamiliar and unreadable objects. Where were his things? Who did these belong to? Not for the first time, he suspected a level of organisation above and outside of him, a malign influence controlling things, watching him and moving him around. Paranoia: another ‘post-concussive symptom’. It was easier, and demanded less of him, to think like this. Still, he clearly wasn’t being told everything, though he could see no reason for the doctor to withhold information from him.

  The house was sparse, thinly populated, and nothing he found gave him any information he could use. Given the size of the house, he surely didn’t live there alone, and yet nobody else had come. Sometimes he listened by the covered windows, by the doors, waiting for the sound of feet approaching, a key turning in the lock. He was restless, tempted always to turn, to look back over his shoulder, imagining the approach of an unknown figure. He continued searching. Eventually he saw a small paper notepad and a pen, but when he sat at the table he felt a fatigue, a torpor, an overwhelming reluctance to begin writing. Something about the refrigerator? But he didn’t know how to begin. Putting the pen down – odd, alien in his grip – the pressure lifted. He packed the notepad and the pen back into the drawer and tried to recall what it was he had been doing.

  The smell. It wasn’t limited to the fridge, nor to food items. There was a quality, a low ferric musk, he’d encountered before. It was strongest by the kitchen and the bathroom downstairs. He stood at the sink, reminded of the feel of the warm water dissolving through his scalp. He shivered as he pictured the wetness seeping into the wound, the doctor’s hands inside.

  Before he stepped into the shower cubicle he glimpsed his body in the mirror and saw the scratches on his chest, his arms, his neck. He leaned in at the sink, prodding the wounds. Though it was impossible, they seemed to be deeper than before. He didn’t know why the doctor had said nothing about these. Surely they were written up in the notes from the hospital. It didn’t make sense. He stepped back from the reflection, watching it fade. It couldn’t be real. None of this could be happening to him.

  He pulled open the fridge door and saw a faint grey puff grown over the fruit and vegetables and meat. Milk had turned in the carton, grouping into thick, tumorous lumps. He put his hand to his face, covering his nose and mouth from the smell that issued.

  ‘John, what is it?’

  As the doctor walked towards the fridge John stepped away, leaving the door open.

  ‘This should have been seen to earlier,’ the doctor said in a low voice, adjusting the settings inside. ‘It’s the weather, the network failures. It’s knocked the fridge controls. It’s too warm and the food’s expired. Whatever’s rotted first has spread.’

  The mould wasn’t confined to the refrigerator. Two parallel dark lines, beginning from the door and reaching out onto the vestibule wall, had appeared overnight. It was almost a relief that he had not imagined the smell. It was not another symptom; it was a simple, natural, routine process. He found further lines by the windows downstairs and in the bedroom above. As he preferred to keep the curtains closed, it was possible the fungus had entered earlier, hidden by the material. The view outside remained unclear; whenever he pulled back the curtain he saw the heavy fog. The insulation was flawed and the vapour found a way in, drifting through the house, dry rot beginning on the exterior door and by the windows. It wasn’t significant, but he told himself to monitor it, to keep checking, to watch how it developed.

  The doctor made some notes on his tablet and then gestured for him to sit back at the table. ‘Okay, let’s leave this for now. I’ll dispose of the items when I leave. If you give me a list I’ll bring fresh supplies. Anything you need, it’s not a problem. For the moment, I think it’s clear we can’t rely on automatic delivery, that this is our best option. Now, tell me what you remember of the tests, John. The hospital.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t remember the tests,’ he said, facing the covered window, the dim light, ‘or the hospital. Just this white mask, a plastic shield over my face, gaps for my mouth and eyes.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. It’s a less intrusive form of analysis. We’re developing new forms of measurement all the time. Craniocerebral trauma can be quite resistant to interpretation. Later, if necessary, we can use the full-body scanner.’

  ‘The magnet? To draw out what’s wrong?’

  ‘Yes, the magnet. But I don’t think it will come to that.’

  ‘You’re sure the damage isn’t more serious? That I’m going to recover fully? I’m going to get my memory back?’

  ‘I’ve no doubts. You wouldn’t have been r
eleased otherwise. As I’ve said before, the worst thing you can do is spend time worrying. Now, John. What is this?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Would you open your collar, please.’

  He tugged at his shirt, struggling with the buttons – he was still having trouble performing certain manual tasks, holding a pen, opening packaging. Eventually he exposed his neck, showing two long scratches and the large yellowing bruise underneath. He pulled back his sleeves and unbuttoned the top of his shirt, displaying the two further marks, one on his left arm and the other on his chest.

  ‘This is everything? Nothing on your back? Open your mouth, please. Your mouth, open it wide, and hold until I say.’ He lit a bulb on the end of a silver pen and aimed it inside. ‘Right, right,’ he said, ‘okay. One last thing. May I see your fingernails? If you just lay your hands flat on the table – like that, yes, thank you.’ He recorded several images on his tablet, talking quietly to himself, making no further direct contact with his eyes.

  ‘Now take your hands back, relax.’ He turned from his case, clipping it closed and, facing John, seemed to reset his expression. ‘These are fresh. Do you know what that means? You are breaking your wounds, John. You are responsible for these. Don’t worry, we can treat it. It’s not so uncommon following physical trauma. During your sleep, you have been replaying the attack, making an active, ongoing attempt to counter it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your arms are thrashing during the night. You’re responding to something, responding to what happened. You’re trying to claw at something, something which you deem to be a threat, but because there is nothing there you are applying this violence to yourself. The skin and hard blood beneath your nails, you’re digging it out.’

  ‘And my mouth,’ he said, his voice trailing away, ‘why …?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve found evidence of tension and applied force upon upper and lower molars. You wake, sometimes, with a sharp pain in your jaw, extending to your neck. A really quite severe pain. You have a dry, powdery taste in your mouth, persistent, difficult to shift, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those are nightmares. You are grinding your teeth during nightmares. Mr Harper, may I ask you something? It’s important. Now, do you recall anything about these nightmares? Anything at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing that could give us an insight into the attack? The nightmare may feel real, it may seem as if it is happening now.’

  ‘Nothing’s come back. I remember only a field, a large emptiness, this sound.’

  ‘You’re certain? When you do remember, I’m confident this auto-violence – these renewed lacerations on your body – will cease. But for the moment, we do need to do something about them. So I’m going to issue you with a mild sedative to be taken once every twenty-four hours, in the evening, directly preceding sleep. This will help us with the immediate problem of the physical symptoms, ensuring minimal activity during the night, so you’ll no longer be subject to the cuts.

  ‘However,’ he continued, taking a pair of scissors and a small ornate wooden box from his case, ‘as an extra precaution, I recommend we see to your nails. What I’m going to do is cut the nails just a little further, thereby precluding any additional self-inflicted tears. I’ll gather the clippings in here.’

  The morning visits from the doctor anchored his days. Otherwise, his experience remained shallow, automatic and provisional; he walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, he cleaned up after a meal, he showered and dried himself. The moments didn’t connect, instead repeating, stuttering. Frustrated, he waited for everything to link up, for one action to lead into another, for a through line to emerge, taking him forward. He was uncomfortable and restless because there was no guarantee the phenomenon would change. He had to trust that it hadn’t always been this way, it couldn’t have been. He flitted between rooms, observing the stiff, rigid motion of his arms and legs, sometimes forgetting what had brought him there and where he was going. He observed himself sitting and waiting and he had an urge to express a violence that would shatter this dull equanimity and take him out of it, take him forward.

  As he found little instructive evidence in the house, he determined to watch himself more closely. Everything had come from somewhere; every action referred to something prior. The automation in his behaviour had been learned, trained. His habits, obviously, told something. Everything was encoded with the past.

  Waiting for the water to heat he stood at the side of the cubicle, the showerhead pointing the other way. Too close to the jet and the stitching over his head might break. He was protecting his head, reacting to the attack. Much of his behaviour followed a similar pattern. Support and carry the head. No sudden movements. Rise slowly and carefully from a sitting position, watch for the first signs of blood rush. He walked tentatively, raising his chin, conscious of having to put the head somewhere, to give it a position, conscious of the fact he was still prone to dizziness and imbalance and that the position of his head contributed to this. It was no longer inevitable he’d remain upright. Only a fine balance permitted this – it wouldn’t necessarily hold. To walk you had to move your feet a certain way, exert a certain pressure and produce uplift off the ground, assume consecutive motion in the knees, form a largely straight line through the rest of the body, the spine branching out into packed nerves. Noting the effort involved, the deliberation in setting his head this way, he gathered that his habit was otherwise, that he would ordinarily have walked with his head low, his neck arched.

  He understood this while he washed his limbs, dabbing at his neck wound, and while he carefully washed the hair around the shaved part of his head. He thought about it more. He could discriminate behaviour that reacted to the attack from behaviour that preceded it. It occurred to him that if he could chart in sufficient detail every single action he took in response to the attack, every one of the numerous ways he tried to make himself comfortable, safe and protected, then a picture would emerge showing exactly what had happened, a picture of himself and whatever it was – most likely a bird of prey, they had reasoned – that had struck him. Taken to its logical extreme, this kind of bodily charting could develop even further, predating the attack, could ultimately reveal the whole of his life. Perhaps then he would feel himself again, and everything would be okay.

  Getting up the next morning, going for a glass of water and returning to his room, the light dim, the sheets spread, he was struck by the fetid smell, musky and thick, a product of the consistency of his breathing in this one confined space, the slightly weaker pulse during sleep, the lowered body temperature, the activity and industry of his digestive system, all producing a distinct odour, a closeness he returned to and which he didn’t recognise at all. But this was him, he thought, lying there, eight, nine hours, the sheets tighter to keep him fixed, as much as he could be, in a single position, precluding him from turning and from irritating his head. He was embarrassed and ashamed, wanting to distance himself from this evidence, the openness of his exposure in the air of the room. Even worse, he couldn’t open the window, sure if he did so the mould beginning to appear on the wall beneath the sill would spread.

  He was noticing a keener sense of smell and touch. Gripping the handle of a drawer in the kitchen, opening a door, holding a plate in his hand, the feeling would become immersive and enduring, and more than knowing he had performed these actions before, countless times – of course he had, he was grown, he had aged – he felt that he had, he remembered, haptically, the more extensive nature of his life, felt a warming familiarity in moving and gripping and holding things, felt an appreciation for the weight, shape and size of the objects around him.

  Don’t press it, the doctor said – at first he thought he meant his head, the wound, the cut – don’t push it, the memory will return itself, of its own accord. Let it happen, the doctor told him, let it continue to happen.

  He continued to divide himself up, feeling pity and sympathy for t
he person on the cusp of the attack. He wanted to warn him and if that was impossible then collect him and gather him and tend to him, settle him, make him feel better. He had been struck in such a personal way that he had forgotten much of his ordinary memory. Whatever had done this to him had reached inside and known exactly where to look. It was only natural, he supposed, that as he moved around the cottage, pulling open drawers hunting things, turning on the faucet, opening the fridge and unwrapping food, walking through doorways, over pale wood and linoleum, that he was watchful, as if he had to be especially careful, as if ordinary life could no longer be counted on to continue quietly and by itself, as it might have done before.

  Five days after the doctor arrived he found his laptop packed away, hidden beneath towels in the storage closet. He must have done this when he had last gone out. He couldn’t remember. He stared at the screen as if at an alien artefact. His fingers, assuming a claw-like grip, made no impression, the screen remained resolutely black. Even if he could restore power and find a network connection, he would still have to enter his pass codes. It seemed like so much. He put the laptop away.

  He felt a lack of trust in the neutrality of objects. Something real, something with mass and structure, texture and weight, had collided with him. Something had done this to him. There was no reason it couldn’t happen again. He had to be careful and watch the ordinary objects of the cottage, monitor them – the fluid way the kitchen drawers ran out along their tracks, how the weight inside was partly suspended and partly evident, the contents of the drawer and its floating emptiness presenting at the same time. He had to watch everything, monitor everything, feel every moment and gesture, appreciate it and inspect it for change, difference, for the earliest warning, perhaps, that something terrible was about to happen.