Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  ‘What the fuck is going on with you?’

  She fish-eyed me. The dead stare. ‘I’m thirsty for beer,’ she said.

  ‘Shut up. Shut up with the bullshit and tell me what’s going on.’

  She closed her eyes. The thin skin of her eyelids was a dull mauve. I waited but she didn’t open her eyes. Didn’t speak. Her silence eddied around me. I felt the pull on my skin. I wanted to speak to fill the space of what she couldn’t tell me. I wanted to ask about the boyfriend whose pictures had appeared then disappeared from Facebook. I wanted to say that her father called me every day for a month after she left and her mother had followed each call with a text of apology for bothering me.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it on my own.’

  Instead of taking a touristy tour, I asked at the hostel if anyone was going to the Cassowary Lodge, which is how I ended up the next day in a beige Camry Rent-a-Wreck with a Christian couple from Canada and a Taiwanese girl. They’d met at a postgraduate conference on world literature. This was their last day in Cairns. I was paying a quarter of the rental and petrol.

  ‘So are you, like, a student?’ The driver spoke without turning his head but I could hear him perfectly, his voice ringing through the car like the speech of a reverend or a salesman.

  ‘No.’ I didn’t want to go on, but that would have been rude. ‘I do contract work in the public service. The government.’

  ‘Hey, that’s great!’ The girl twisted in her seat and pushed her left hand toward me as if we were about to do a high five. My hand was still sweaty, as was the rest of my body, moist and sticky from waiting in the heat to be picked up. I waved my hand vaguely in the direction of hers and mumbled, ‘High five.’

  ‘So, like, policy?’

  ‘No, like, photocopying.’ Those Canadians were probably only two or three years younger than me, but they’d obviously never worked a day. Straight from school to university, conference trips across the globe, exciting adventures in cars with the locals who earned a living doing photocopying and filing. I turned to the Taiwanese girl in the seat beside me.

  ‘What do you study?’ I asked.

  ‘I am professor,’ she said, and turned to look out through the window.

  I wished I’d taken the touristy tour.

  Josie was lying on her bunk when I got back. I pulled off my clothes and lay down on the lower bunk in my underwear.

  ‘We need better jobs,’ I said to the slats and bulging mattress wads above me. ‘And the cassowaries were in an enclosure and bored and they were as tall as men and looked angry. They’re dinosaurs, living in the wrong time and the wrong place. We dinosaurs from the lost world all need better jobs.’

  ‘Better jobs? I guess I got chosen by the wrong parents and went home to the wrong house. Then I went to the wrong school and I met you there and we both got the wrong jobs.’

  ‘Wrong school all right. Wrong suburb, wrong country, wrong time. I never thought I’d say this, Jose, but I want to have a good job and a nice car and a house and … are we talking about the same thing?’

  Above me Josie shifted position and the shape of the mattress through the slats rolled like the underside of a raft. A hand reached over the edge of the bunk. I took the notebook and read.

  J & M’s Travel Diary, Day Three. I am having trouble telling Merryn that I found out I was adopted. And freaked. And left Melbourne. And everything is shit.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’

  So here we are, standing up to our hips in the dawn sea, dressed in bikinis and pantyhose. We’re holding our arms high and she’s gripping my right hand like she’s the referee and I’m the winner of the bout. She’s gripping my hand so hard it hurts, and I think of those years at school when all I wanted was to be her, the glorious, take-no-prisoners, bulletproof Josie. I can see the transparent blue of a box jellyfish drifting toward us on the lip of the swell, its tentacles performing a slow shimmy in the seawater. There are probably millions of broken-off tentacles here too, random strands riding the currents, wrapping themselves around the driftwood and the seaweed, the tiny silver fish and the human beings.

  ‘I feel better now,’ Josie says. ‘The water is refreshing.’

  My arms are getting tired. It’s tempting to let them drop into the cool sea.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she says.

  ‘Of course I came. I’d always come.’

  Our raised arms start to tremble with the strain.

  ‘I think I’ll go back to shore now,’ she says.

  She lets go of my hand and leans over to kiss me on the cheek. The movement causes water to lap over the waistband of my pantyhose. I wait for the excruciating sting, but nothing happens. The jellyfish washes past me on the swell, its gelatinous body bumping harmlessly against my nylon-wrapped thigh.

  ‘I’ll stay in a minute longer.’ I wrap my arms around my chest and stare out to the horizon, white-blue against the dark line of the sea.

  Restraints

  The labs should have been locked, but because of a massive power surge – followed by an outage – every room was gaping as if some angry foot had kicked open all the doors. Normally, the inside of the buildings was lit to banish any idea of a shadow. White walls and white linoleum. Windowless hallways and labs. Security points at every entry. Now the only light visible was the glowing green of the exit signs.

  The other weekend skeleton staff were racing around the dark building like disturbed ants, panicking about damage to the instruments. I was hurrying too, not because anything urgent was going to happen in my lab, but it seemed wrong to stroll when everyone else was hysterical. At one point I turned a corner in the corridor, tripped and lurched several steps toward the bleeding green aura of an exit sign beyond the next bend, and had to press my hand against the wall for balance. When I tried to use my phone as a torch, the light was no brighter than the white of a playing card, so I put it back in my pocket.

  My lab would be fine, but I was a little concerned about the test subjects in the animal house. Their restraints operated on an electric switch. If the restraints had failed and the monkeys pulled away from the caps now, the electrodes would be torn out of their brains and a full year of the team’s work would be ruined. Still, I knew there were backup generators for the important machinery and electronics, and Jay was monitoring the animal house so he could lock the restraints manually if necessary.

  Because of the lack of light, I overshot the door to my lab. The instant I stepped through the doorway I realised I was in the wrong room, but what I saw was so fascinating that I stepped further inside. This lab had light paths in the floor, like the lights that lead you out of an aeroplane in an emergency, and they gave off enough illumination for me to see more clearly. Unlike the lab where my work was taking place – a cross between an engineering workshop and an electronics factory, with half-finished parts lying around on benches and discarded finger prototypes cannibalised for the next version – this lab had a wall of full robot prototypes mounted on racks. While we worked on the single element of the hand grip, and the lab on the other side of us worked on limb mobility and the next lab calibrated vision, here you could see the progression of the full machine design. Usually we weren’t allowed to see the assembled prototypes. Too much money was involved in this intellectual property. So we worked in our separate rooms, and the head engineers with full clearance put the robots together in the high-security lab. Our phones even had software that disabled the cameras when we walked through the security barriers.

  The green light from above the door shone directly onto the prototype wall, giving the machines a golden-green glow like tarnished brass. The first version of the prototype was clumsy and large, essentially a rolling bot. Version two beside it was sleeker, leaner, multi-limbed. The next iteration began to look like some kind of creature rather than a simple robot. Four more versions along and you could start to see what this
was becoming.

  My head turned, almost involuntarily. It is movement that draws the eye first: something any prey knows. A cat knows, hunched and still under the azalea in the yard as the local terrier trots by. The deer frozen in the sights of the rifle knows. In the far corner of the spacious lab was a diamond wire cage the size of a squash court. Four machines were inside the cage. I thought I had glimpsed movement in the dimness, but now the machines were immobile, seemingly stuck to the wire in different positions. One hung from the ceiling.

  I returned to examining the prototypes on the wall. The ones in the second row down had two legs shaped like chicken drumsticks with claws for feet, and a stumpy body covered in mesh. No head. Further along the rack the machines had gained another two legs. As I was examining them, my hand reached up to scratch my cheek and I caught again a flicker in my peripheral vision, as if my movement had somehow registered with the machines in the cage.

  When I approached the cage, the robots did move, adjusting their positions. They were four-legged, with the same mesh-covered headless body as the prototypes, clinging to the wire with articulated metal feet, their grip possible because of the digits I had helped design. Inside the mesh of their torsos I could see glints of glass, perhaps eyes or cameras. Some kind of sensor. They were the size of large bulky cats. I had been designing robotic parts all my working life, but these machines were different, more like animals.

  I stepped closer again, compelled to look. The machines travelled slowly around the cage. They each moved to a new position which would keep me in their view, like a team of hunting predators. I backed away, inadvertently knocking over a stool. At the clatter of the stool bouncing across the floor, the creatures – and I still think of them as creatures even though I know they were not alive, just robots – unclenched their feet from the wire and scuttled around the cage. The noise of them moving, the oily metallic clicking of their limbs and rippling of their mesh coat, the lack of voice or sound or smell other than metal and static, the swaying of the cyclone wire under their weight: all this was mesmerising. But it was my sensation of being stalked that let me know the monkeys in the animal house were still locked into their restraints, the electrodes were in place, and the brain–machine link was functioning. I could see the robots, and the monkeys could see me.

  A moment later the lights came on. Once I had stopped shielding my eyes from the sudden glare, the eerie sensation was gone. I left the lab quickly, afraid someone would find me in there. I should have turned back to go to my lab, but I found myself walking to the animal house. The electronic pass at my waist beeped as I exited my building, and I crossed the white concrete path that led through the lawn to the house. I had never understood why we called it a house. From the outside it looked like a grey government building, squat and regular and unexceptional. Inside the foyer were, once again, white walls with white linoleum, but once you passed through the double set of doors, the colour of the corridor changed to the polished grey of steel, with basins and supply cupboards and doors with reinforced window glass along the walls.

  As I reached the room where the test subjects resided, Jay pushed through the door, and it closed firmly behind him. I heard the automatic lock slide into place.

  ‘Vin, mate, everything all right?’ he asked. He was breathless.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, aware of being out of place. ‘You?’

  ‘Bit busy. The blackout, you know. You’re the fifth guy to come and check on the subjects. They’re fine, except jumpy from sudden darkness and all the activity. Is that all?’

  ‘I thought I’d drop in to see the setup again, you know? Nothing special.’

  Jay sighed. ‘I’d rather you didn’t, Vin. It’s all been a bit much. I’d like to let them settle.’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  I was insisting without knowing why. In the last year I’d only visited this room twice. Once, we had to ensure the electrodes were properly placed, so we brought down a prototype hand to test the stimulation-response while we observed. The second time was after staff drinks in the canteen, when the new assistant wanted to see the animals we were using. We shouldn’t have come that time.

  ‘Two minutes,’ Jay said. ‘And stay up this end of the observation window.’

  The monkeys were in their specially designed chairs, heads clamped to keep them still, sensor caps replacing the detached brain pans. They looked well nourished. Their excrement was collected under the chairs and washed away by a steady stream of water, so the lab didn’t smell as bad as you would expect. All this registered as I watched their hands clenching and releasing in a fashion that reminded me of my own aching hands flexing when I’d been locked in the lab, working at the computer too long.

  ‘So the power failure didn’t cause any disruption to the link?’

  ‘No. Backup kicked in straight away.’ Jay made a show of looking at his watch.

  ‘And …’ I said. ‘Uh, I ah …’

  I couldn’t think of another question to ask. I moved a couple of steps down the room so I could see the monkeys’ faces. They were stretching and squeezing their lips together, opening their jaws, squinting so their eyes were almost hidden. I moved a little further forward. I was almost in their sightline.

  ‘Don’t do that, mate, please,’ Jay said. ‘It’s better if they get no stimulation here. You do enough stimulation from your end, okay? I’m just trying to keep the fucking things sane for another three months until you’re done with them.’

  My gut turned over, and for some reason I had a vision of my ex-wife with our Pomeranian in her lap. She liked to dress it up in dinky little coats with ribbons and bows. She would never clean up the dogshit in the yard because she said it was too disgusting. After she left I gave the Pomeranian to my mother, who said to me, Don’t bother giving me those stupid coats. Maybe it will remember it’s a dog.

  I took one more step. The eyeballs of the monkeys rolled toward me, their heads constrained from movement. In the paper we had published about our research, we had named them Subjects A through D.

  I wondered what the machines in the secure lab were doing at that moment.

  A Short History of Peace

  This house where we live was built for labourers four centuries ago. The storey above us is empty already, the tenants gone last week. The cramped rooms; the worn stone where we step down into the kitchen; the bathroom that juts out from the back wall of the original house where once the workers sluiced water over their sweating scalps from a hand pump in the yard; the patch of dark soil near the back fence where the remains of old fires were tipped by women when they rose at dawn – this house reminds us of who came before.

  Yesterday there was a knock on the front door. I told him not to answer. He said there was no point. They would come again.

  My body too wears my history in its skin and its bones. When I step down from the flagstone into the kitchen, the past reverberates through my joints. I am corroded by time and work and love, shaped into worn-down angles and faint white scars that make me seem like a part of the house, a stone woman who emerged from this wall centuries ago. We are built of this country. The shape of our long narrow land repeats in our anatomy, split by the spine. The body has a left side and a right side but they are not in symmetry. They struggle for dominance. One generation we are left-handed, the next we are only adept with the right.

  The human spine begins with the letter A, the atlas vertebra, which bears the weight of the head. The spine has twenty-six bones, some fused, some singular. In the bed where we lie together I trace his bony back, climbing the ladder in a two-fingered walk. Outside the room, delivery trucks for the factory down the road reverse with the insistent beeping that makes it seem as though they are travelling the length of the street backward. I wish I could hear that sound in my life, the alarm that says we are travelling backward. When travelling the spine of a country, or of a man, with one’s eyes squeez
ed shut, it is difficult to know whether one is going up or down, forward or backward, into the past or into the future.

  He stretches long like a cat on the white sheets and yawns with a faint yowl of tiredness. I can hear the click of tendons shifting into place over his bones. Two people walk past the front of the house, talking in bright loud musical notes. Their shadows traverse the blinds quickly, like hurrying ghosts.

  It is dusk. The last of the sun is trying to slip into the house through the bands of the blinds. The air inside is heavy and still. We are too exhausted to talk anymore. All we can do is count the body. Listen to the body. Feel the slow measured wash of life through the circulatory system.

  In the morning we sit at the table. The kitchen is in the dark part of the house, the north, with a window opening onto the side passage that traverses the west wall of the building and enters the small backyard beyond a rickety lattice gate. At different points along the route you can look inside and see what is happening to the residents.

  If someone were to look in through the kitchen window this morning they would see him and me facing each other across the table with a pot of tea between us. There are books on the table, stacked at the end abutting the wall.

  It is summer. We have an extra hour of daylight in the evening, and an extra hour of darkness in the morning. Right now the sun has risen and the heat is already radiating from the stone buildings. This is the fifth day of the heat wave. In a city accustomed to snow, we cannot cope. The tetchiness that started with our discomfort has escalated into panic and erratic behaviour.

  The house has absorbed not only the heat but the smell of the heat. A whiff of rotting garbage and curdled milk, of the city unable to cleanse itself. The sour smell of overheated skin, of dried sweat, the dank water sitting in the bends of pipes. The deserted buildings, the drains, the abandoned dogs, the scorched leaves of trees, the nearly empty cafes on the boulevard serving jugs of iced water, the thwomp thwomp of distressed ceiling fans and the rumble of a few shop air-conditioning units straining and soughing and dripping their wastewater into grubby white buckets.