by Paul Haines
She starts awake—was she asleep?—and I was wrong, she’s not a girl, she’s a woman. She can’t be much older than me. No, that’s not true. Maybe her body has only lived for so many years, but her mind is like nothing else on Earth.
A surprised frown dips beneath her matted bed hair, quickly melting away as she rolls her eyes and sighs, this amused exasperation her only greeting. Her head drops back on the pillow, eyes closed. She’s seen all she needs to see.
“One at a time.” I push Colin back out the door. He resists for a moment, staring at her. She’s not unattractive and a feather of envy brushes up my throat. “Get the helmet.” I shut the door behind him.
“I know you probably need some time to figure me out,” I say, approaching the bed. My voice rasps too loud in the silent room, tongue and lips dry and coarse from yelling. “I can’t give you that time, sorry. We need to be out that door and up that corridor and out of this place, and we needed to have done it ten minutes ago. We’ve got your helmet, you won’t leave this room without it on.”
I tug angrily at her straps. She lies here for all hours of all days, and can’t take herself to the toilet. She reeks. Rage at this small indignity is easier to hold than rage at the greater crime against her.
“You knew.” The words form in her mouth slowly, as if spooling from a single thread drawn across a great distance. “Right away. Why the straps.”
I glance at her face. Proud Greek nose, smooth olive skin gone sallow without the sun, fierce eyebrows. She looks at me looking at her, some tired recognition in the faint tilt to her chin. Already, she sees me. Maybe she doesn’t need that much time. Maybe I’m not that hard to figure out. I try not to feel insulted by this.
The first strap comes loose. “It’s what I’d do, in your situation.” My knuckles brush against the inside of her wrist, and the pearled scars there.
Her hand twists, and her grip is not weak. “How do you know I won’t do it again once you’ve freed me?”
“I don’t.”
“Will you stop me?”
I don’t answer. She can read my mind and see the truth for herself.
* * *
She was the first psychic ever created. The lab rat DREOC used to trial and error their research and streamline the process for the mindreaders to come. She woke with all her walls demolished, able to read everyone, unable to hold herself apart from the collective conscious. After weeks alternating between screaming and sedation, they built a shielded room, providing the walls they’d taken from her, and she never left.
Later, she’ll try to tell me what it was like. “Like drowning, never dying,” she says, or, “Noise torture, like the CIA use,” or, “Chemical burn in your brain.” Her mind was levered open and the world swept through and swept her out. She can’t explain, and I can’t understand.
The records refer to her as Yvonne, but she hasn’t been Yvonne for some time. She is everyone, and no one.
From her, they were able to design the first Psychic Waypoint Towers and extract some meaning from the data they collected. From her, DREOC built everything.
She is the end of the world, sitting here in green pyjamas.
* * *
Kim holds the door open for Colin, huffing beneath the helmet’s weight. There’s no time, but he launches into his speech before he’s crossed the threshold.
“We’ve been fighting DREOC from the beginning. Anyone could see that tapping into the collective unconscious was the highest breach of privacy, an abuse of power justified as being for ‘the good of all mankind’. Exploring the human condition, establishing Australia’s psychic signature, enhancing anti-discrimination laws; it never ends, and people were surprised when segregation became legislation.”
Kim ignores my gesture to leave and darts after Colin, catching the other side of the helmet. He nods briefly, not breaking his monologue. “That’s not what Australia is. See Tessa?” He can never quite meet my eye when using me as an example. “Unclassifiable, indefinable, she is her own person. As we all should be. DREOC has forgone the individual. We won’t let it happen, not without a fight. Aussie battlers, that’s what we are. The underdog. Fighting for a fair go.” They heave the helmet onto the bed with a grunt.
I’ve heard him practicing this in the bathroom. I wonder if he believes it.
“Six minutes,” Kim mouths. This is taking too long.
A bemused smile touches Yvonne’s face, distant, as everything she says and does comes through so many layers of everyone else she appears to forget her body, and he trails off like a stunned school boy.
“But, you know that, of course.”
I suck in my cheek and give him a look before turning to the helmet. “Is there a trick to this, or do you just put it on?” It isn’t glass, but looks it. It’s reminiscent of an old diving helmet, and the shoulders are heavily padded to soften its ridiculous weight. Our greasy handprints are all over it. “Kim, get out there and get the others ready to move.”
“Wait.” Kim hesitates, but Colin isn’t talking to her. He nods at Yvonne. “Prove it.”
“We don’t have time for this.” The militia is coming, if not here already. We have to go.
“We do,” Kim backs him up.
“We can’t do this again,” Colin says. “If she’s the wrong person—”
Yvonne slips from the bed and crosses the floor with small steps, and beckons him down to whisper in his ear.
All the blood rushes from his face, etching out his acne scars, the graze on his forehead and the grime on his chin. His looks down at Kim, and I see something there I don’t want to see, before he looks at me, then away, resolutely away. The question on Kim’s lips stalls with a quiet shake of his head, and some invisible and undeniable chasm opens between us.
What did she tell him? I think I know. I wish I didn’t know. I add another year to my hypothetical therapy.
“Satisfied?” I can’t keep the edge out of my voice.
He nods, once.
“Kim,” I snap, ignoring the half-formed guilt on her face. The lights flicker and die momentarily. There is no time. “I said go tell the others, we’re leaving.” She can’t leave the room fast enough. “Help me with this.”
Colin casts quick furtive looks at my face as we lift the helmet. He never did master forced casualness. The helmet settles and Yvonne straightens awkwardly beneath it.
“I haven’t had any contact with anyone outside for . . . I don’t know. Time is a different language with too many parallel memories. Not since they made the other mindreaders, at any rate.” The helmet fogs with her breath. With halting steps she heads to the door. Too slow, too slow.
She looks at me. “I’ve read you. I know everything about you.” I pause. “Everything.”
Old disquiet stirs in the back of my mind. There are no walls left in the world.
“Even the zombies.” There’s no amusement in that statement.
“I haven’t dreamed for a long time.”
“Liar.” Her smile fades fast. “I know the way they work. I can see why they put you in the reject bin, with all the other pieces that didn’t fit in their jigsaw. I know what you’ve done.” I expect judgement, but there is none. “I know why you’ve done it. For Australia.”
“No, not for Australia.”
I can hear Colin not saying anything. I can read his silences as easily as Yvonne read me.
“You would say this country does not know what it is.”
Kids threw rocks at me after school, calling me a dirty chink and telling me to go home. Which is exactly where I was going. At least the irony amused my parents.
“It will know, in the end.” And it will not like what it sees.
She shakes her head, shuffling ever onward. “You can’t lie to me,” she says. There is almost a question in her voice, a question she knows there is no point in asking.
I reach out to steady her, swaying beneath the helmet’s weight, but don’t touch her. “No. I can’t. Everything you saw in
my head is true.”
The corners of her mouth sag.
“I’m sorry,” I add, as the pitch in the room alters. The air-conditioning has stopped.
“I can never go home.”
I unholster my gun, signalling for Colin to get the door. “None of us can.”
He cracks it, peers through, and confirming the corridor clear, ducks out.
“I’m sorry too,” she murmurs. I can barely hear her. It’s not a diving helmet, it’s a fish tank.
I stare down the corridor at Colin’s back, at the fingertips Kim lays on his wrist. He recoils from her. He knows I’m watching. I keep my finger off the trigger.
“I know you know.”
“And you know I chose to say nothing.”
Colin flips off signals in a flurry. Fuck. We’re not alone.
Yvonne slips a hand into mine. The creases of my palm are black with cordite and sweat, my knuckles bruised, and her skin is paper dry and cold. Back pressed to the wall, I step out, but she doesn’t follow and stops me short.
“Choices.” The word sounds hollow, drooping from her tongue. “You have given me no choice here. You’re no different from DREOC.”
There is no time. Kim catches my eye and beckons urgently. Their impatience claws beneath my shoulder blades. Echoing down the stairwell, the sound of boots, the rasp of flak jackets. Deep in the building something rumbles, and the lights go out for good.
There are too many things I can’t grant her, but I ask. I have to know. “What do you want?”
She sighs, soft and airless as a failing moth.
“I want to die.”
And the shooting starts again.
* * *
We speed down the Western Ring Road in an old jeep. My ribs shriek with every bounce, and on the cracked road there is a lot of bouncing. The freeway is clotted with the husks of burnt out trucks jack-knifed across the lanes, the remaining wreckage of conquered barricades and cars half-crushed by the passage of tanks. Flitting between the warehouses is the occasional glimpse of what was the city, baleful and weary beyond orange-bellied smoke.
We left at least six behind at the research facility, and beside me Kim writhes and kicks at the seat in front. She can’t breathe, she’s choking on her own blood.
Four nooses hang from the sign for Pascoe Vale Road. One of them has snapped. I can’t tell if the dead are theirs or ours. Yvonne looks at me, and her look is terrible.
“What have you done?”
She doesn’t need to ask. She knew. Now, she understands.
* * *
Colin is speaking, but no one hears him. They’re looking at Yvonne, tired and wilting and ridiculous in her begrimed pyjamas and helmet. They’re looking at the unhappy turn of her lips and downcast eyes. They’re looking at her hand, clinging fast to mine. They’re looking at the bullet-proof vest I’m still wearing, and the small but significant hole in the outer lining. They’re looking at my straight back, set shoulders and lifted chin. They can’t see my pain. Here in the main bunker in our underground base, all they see is the revolution, and our victory.
Colin finishes listing the lost and dead, his voice breaking on Kim’s name. Her last packet of cigarettes in his hand, already tapping one out. I never did pick up the habit. “The price was high,” he says, meeting my eyes briefly. This time he does not tell me it was worth it.
“There is still a lot of work to be done,” I say.
Unlike him, I am very good at pretending nothing is wrong.
* * *
Yvonne finally releases my hand, after taking it in the corridor all those hours ago. Her flesh is crimped with the impression of my fingers where I’d gripped too hard in pain, the bruising already showing. She shucks off the helmet with a groan of relief.
“It’s noisy,” she says of the room we prepared, “but keeps enough out.”
I sit gingerly on the edge of the bed, too aware of her. As the Psychic Waypoint Tower invaded my sleep, so she is once again invading my thoughts, and I don’t like it and don’t hide it. Although there’s little of interest to see right now. Intense hurt. Colin. Betrayal. Fatigue. Grief. Kim. A sudden savage craving for chicken parmigiana.
She holds up her bruised hand. “If I can touch you, I can read you.”
Oh.
There’s no small amount of malicious enjoyment in her pronouncement.
I don’t deserve to feel betrayed. I assumed her to be passive, just a tool. She’s right. I am no different from DREOC.
She shakes her head in agreement. “No, the Face of the Revolution is not.”
I could convince her. I could put forth all the reasons she has to work with us. I could.
“But you want to let me choose,” she says, simply. “You see me as a person first. You would let me choose even though none of your comrades has considered doing so, and will oppose you if they find out.”
I haven’t said a word. There’s no need.
Yvonne crouches before me. Her face, protected by the helmet, is starkly clean compared to the rest of her. There’s a faint memory of air-conditioning in her hair.
“Who am I talking to; the revolutionary leader, the heart-broken daughter, the jilted lover, who?” She touches my face, a touch that is only a touch.
Chicken parmigiana, followed by a lamb souvlaki.
And then, hot apple pie and cream.
“Me,” I croak. “You’re talking to me.”
III.
I pull the trigger. Again.
The crack of gunfire joins the echoes already bouncing around Federation Square. None of them truly fade away. I wanted to use a silencer, but Colin said it would ruin the effect.
It’s amazing how much blood comes out of a head wound. The body, greasy blonde hair and heavy jowls, is dragged from the stage before it has finished collapsing, but there is still so much blood, spilling on top of all the blood spilt before, thick and black.
Colin actually used the phrase ‘thoughtcrime’ that time, and I don’t believe he was being ironic. I don’t believe he’s read 1984 either.
“Bring the next,” he says. Next. Next. Like the echoing gunshot, the word never fades away.
Pieces of the outside world reach us; a pirate broadcast on shortwave, a briefly stolen satellite hookup, an unreliable spliced phone line. The picture pieced together is contradictory, both hopeful and hopeless. DREOC is proceeding as planned and has started a program for reading the minds of high school students to determine their future occupations. DREOC is tangled in international red tape and is being charged with human rights abuse. Martial law has been declared in all states. More underground rebellions have formed. The cultural zones have become entirely sealed off and no one can leave them. The rebellions are quite literally underground and go where they please.
Australia is frightened. Australia is joyous. Australia doesn’t know what it is or what it is becoming.
The original plan—and it was a fine plan—was to have Yvonne act as our own Psychic Waypoint Tower and gather information regarding DREOC’s capabilities and movements, the location of their stations, and their future plans. We had no moles, no inside intelligence to speak of. She was to be the turning point in our campaign.
And she was.
Oh, she was.
Colin pronounces the sentence, and I pull the trigger. Again.
“Bring the next,” he says.
We’re on the stage backing the Transport Bar. When Prime Minister Rudd made a formal apology to the indigenous people of Australia, I was here, watching this stage. Colin liked this resonance with the past, thought it fitting. The square is packed, the incline towards the twisted remains of the Atrium rises in the receding distance, until all I can see is a wall of faces.
There was cheering when we began, when the first DREOC militia member was executed, and what I saw in those faces sickened me. All these executions later, and there is no cheering, and what I see in those faces now is worse.
We don’t have enough ammunition to was
te on a firing squad. There are no bullet holes in the wall. We have left no mark to tell those who will come later what has happened here.
There is just me, hand and gun so splattered with blood it drips like an open wound, waiting for the word.
I pull the trigger. Again.
“Bring the next.”
This used to be such a cultured space; cultural exhibitions, curious art installations, activists and petition-signers, street-performers and sponsored jazz bands, free tai chi and salsa classes, book fairs and green energy expos; all these things aimed at making the world a better place.
Not all blood smells the same. Not all blood flows the same. It creeps across the stage and oozes around my boot.
I have to be the one to pull the trigger, Colin said. It is symbolic. It is what history wants. I fired the first shot, the shot that started this, and so I must fire the shot that will end it for these criminals.
He said these things, and I knew, blinded by the blaze of his conviction, he couldn’t see me anymore.
Colin is reading, again, the charges against one of the seventy-nine DREOC militia members remaining in our captivity. Try-hard tribal tattoos, a weak chin and mutton chops. He’s just some guy. Some guy who needed a job to get his parents off his back. Some guy who got caught up in the hysteria. Some guy paying rent. Some guy trying to make himself big. Some guy with nothing better to do. Some guy, pulling Samoans and Somalis and Indonesians and Vietnamese and Greeks and Turks and Lebanese and Koreans out of their homes and telling them where to go. I have to keep reminding myself of this. It gets harder each time I pull the trigger.
There is no end to these ordinary people. There never will be.
This guy, this enemy, this guy, he cringes away from Yvonne’s hand. Yvonne can’t take the helmet off outside, or lose her mind in the roar of the world’s collective conscious. Her hand has become the hand of judgement, resting on the back of his neck. With a touch she can see, and with a touch she sees him. There are no walls left in the world.
