‘Fear of what?’
‘Fear of losing you. Losing the thing I loved so much.’
I ought to resist the smile. ‘Go on.’
‘I could see what was happening to me. All the mind games were useless. It had got bigger than me. This was one fear I couldn’t control.’
‘But you still believed in it, that night? You still thought your method could work?’
I hate it, but somehow I’m anxious about the answer. That night from my memory: it was the beginning of the end.
‘No. I don’t think I did believe it. Even as I was telling you, I was doubting it. I think that could have been the moment it all changed.’
‘So was that when you stopped loving me? Or did you never actually love me? Was that all just another great effort of will?’
‘No. I never stopped loving you, Yvonne. I just became too afraid.’
‘Don’t tell me. You were so in love with me you had to disappear to California without telling me.’
He shakes his head. ‘Not California. I went around the world. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t get in touch. I couldn’t tell you.’
He looks like he wants to sit down. So would I, after spouting bullshit like that. I hope he picks the sofa. Mateus on my bed is not an arrangement I could cope with.
‘Is that why you tracked me down? All that Come to Florida stuff. The video about the condo on Anna Maria Island. That was a good joke, wasn’t it?’
‘I needed to find you. I knew that what I had done was wrong. Anyway, it’s too late now. You’ve probably found someone else.’
I say nothing. If he’s fishing for information about me, he’ll have to get used to ignorance. I’m not telling him anything. I’m not telling him how I was afraid of my dreams, just because Mateus might be there and I’d have to wake up from that dream and lose him all over again. I’m not telling him about the letters I wrote, scratching around in clumsy, unpractised handwriting for an answer to the question he left me with. Saying this stuff would be like selling my own blood. It’s mine, not his. That matters.
‘You gave me uncertainty. I don’t know how you could do that to a scientist.’
‘I was always planning to get in touch, Yvonne. When things had had a chance to calm down. But the moment never came.’
I wish I’d brought those letters I wrote him. He could have had something to laugh about on the plane.
‘Maybe that’s because they never calmed down. You didn’t even know if I was still alive.’
‘I did. I had your research articles. Your institute’s website. And you know that my old employers are interested in everything that the Lycee do.’
I look at him, shading to anger. He raises his hand and nuzzles it absent-mindedly, where the wedding ring would be.
‘You and your Sansom friends know about us losing our mapping data, don’t you?’
‘In our little world it’s headline news. By the way, Sansom were not behind this security breach. They’re as astonished as anyone.’
Astonished perhaps, but they will almost certainly know by now that Gareth has got the data.
‘Do you know what they’re doing in the mines?’
He’s probably never spoken about the mines. He knows, of course: you couldn’t work there and not know. There’s an instant of surprise, and then Mateus refixes his stare. He looks flushed, a little irritable, and very sure of the beauty of what he has in mind. I recognise this look. The look that comes before the touch that comes before the sigh that leads to the fumbled shedding which is the precursor to the same old gorgeous thing. He’s going to try it on. But first, there are things I need to know.
‘Have they got chimps down there? Enculturated chimps?’
He nods, eager to please me on this and then get on with pleasing himself. ‘They’ve got enculturated chimps, bonobos, any language-trained primates they could get their hands on. They’re working on a new kind of electrode which can be implanted deep into the brain to stimulate the relevant neural areas. The basic technology’s been around since the late 1990s. The difficulty is in finding a biocompatible material for making the implants from. Something the body doesn’t reject as soon as it’s gone in. These new electrodes have got a special kind of titanium casing which means the body won’t reject them. They’re smaller, safer, easier to place and more accurate. Absolutely perfect for self-stimulation. And you don’t have to carry a battery the size of a cow to power them.’
‘Self-stimulation?’
‘Of course. That’s what this research is all about. They’ve been using deep brain stimulation for years. They had a lot of success in treating Parkinson’s. But these other diseases are a different matter. The pathways of the Lorenzo Circuit run too close to vital areas. You need to know exactly where to put the electrodes, and you need to be able to control the way the current is distributed across them. The problem with deep brain stimulation techniques is that they have been scattergun. They have only been able to produce a steady current which you can’t even switch on and off. With this system, users can both vary the strength of the stimulus and control which electrodes are active.’
‘That’s why Sansom want the map of the Lorenzo Circuit. So that people with dementia can control their own memories?’
‘Exactly. A safe, painless operation, over and done with in half an hour, and the patient has her own electronic box of memories. When she wants to remember who she is, she presses any one of a number of buttons corresponding to the different electrodes she’s had installed. And the good times come flooding back.’
This is what Gareth was talking to me about. It’s all about the control of memory. But there’s something else I’m not remembering. Some detail he entrusted to me, which could explain everything.
‘What would someone do if they wanted to get hold of these implants?’
‘They’d have to find their way into the mines. And be very persuasive when they got down there.’
He pauses, watching the effect of his words. I have an image of Gareth, alone, far away, walking a long distance in the dark. While these thoughts hold me off guard, Mateus takes a step towards me, holding out both hands.
‘Now let me tell you a story.’
‘You’re on a balcony on a summer night. You’re wearing a red dress which reaches to just above your knees. You’re talking, telling the story of the first time you made love. He sits on a chair behind you, listening. You don’t turn around. All you need to know is scattered between those black trees. You smell the endless millions of pine trees standing dead still under the stars. Underneath that you smell your own smell, perfume and sweat and longing. It’s been a hot, amazing day.’
He’s moved behind me, to the chair I was sitting on. I haven’t flinched, haven’t moved away. He knows what he’s saying. It fills me with a deep, fiery satisfaction, the thought that he remembers my fantasy, assumes it has kept its power. I’m standing by the sealed glass, the net curtain pulled wide. Planes rise from one end of the horizon and stroke upwards across the night, blinking. I’m on them, every one of them. They carry me off in pieces. Far below, a police light strobes along a freeway. All over the city, traffic lights are turning green then red, holding up the traffic on empty roads.
‘The first thing you feel is a finger at your ankle, brushing at the skin. Your voice is still speaking but you have no consciousness of the words. It doesn’t matter. There is no you. You’re nothing but connections, accidents, illusions of control. The finger brushes upwards over your calf and turns into a hand. Now there are two hands, one on each knee. You feel your stomach tighten. His wrists nudge upwards on your hem, raising the fabric over your skin, exposing you to the air. The hands reach up over your hips and hook the elastic of your panties. You feel them being pulled down gently over your hips, their astonishing new wetness turning cold against your thighs. The breeze on your skin makes you gasp, and you lean forward further over the balcony rail, opening yourself up to the night. You feel someth
ing warm and wet, a tongue, licking at the crack of your buttocks. His hair tickling your skin. He parts your buttocks with his thumbs and sinks his tongue into you. What does that feel like to the man? What does it taste like? You’ll never know. His consciousness is unknowable, a star you can never reach...’
‘Wait...’ I push his hand away and jerk my body upright, bumping my cheek against the window. ‘That’s you. It’s not me.’
He is there behind me, hard, ready. I feel him brush uselessly at the folds of my dressing gown, not knowing what to do with his hands. This is the closest I come to completeness, this twitch of lust and grief that catches sight of itself just as it dissolves. I stare up at a passenger jet slicing through the still-blue horizon, amazed that there are people up there inhabiting lives they never question, never doubting the illusion of themselves.
‘Yvonne, you’ve got to trust me. I can make you whole.’
I don’t answer. I don’t turn around. He can do anything he wants to me but he can’t make me look at him—he can’t make me attend. My consciousness is unknowable; it’s the floor the lift doesn’t stop at, the uninhabited planet. I can hear him breathing, waiting for an answer. The answer doesn’t come. I sense him wondering what to do, how to get me to look at him. The silence stretches into embarrassment, into shame. Then zipping, rustling, a human body moving.
The quiet closing of a door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Be My Cinema
◉
The night Mateus came to my room, Effi collapsed at Millennium Heights. The nurse found her when he turned up for his morning visit. I’d become fond of Daren, but it still felt odd to be discussing Effi’s life and death with him down the hotel phone.
‘She’s had a stroke,’ he told me. ‘Not the first one, neither.’
‘What happened to her son?’
‘He went home. Saw she was getting her dinner down and thought she was OK.’
I packed in a hurry and took the hotel shuttle to the airport. I was at the front of the queue for security when I realised I didn’t have my phone with me. It was too late to go back to the hotel. I remembered Mateus’ curiosity about seeing it on the windowsill in my room, the reason it evaded my last-minute look-around. It would have been out of charge, which was probably why Daren had called the hotel. I sat on the plane, watching its cartoon image crawl pixel by pixel across my in-seat movie screen, and thought about upgrades. At Pelton Airport I picked up my flightcase and poster tube from the baggage carousel and got a cab straight to the hospital. I found Effi sitting up in a corner of a mixed ward, trying to peel a banana.
‘Yvonne,’ she said. ‘Thank God for you.’
The neurologist took me into a side-room.
‘We gave her a thorough scan after this stroke. We found evidence of numerous small lesions in her temporal cortex. About here,’ he put a hand to his own head, ‘on the left hand side. It explains why she’s been forgetful, not recognising people.’
‘I thought it was Alzheimer’s. You’re saying it’s the strokes that have been doing this to her?’
‘It could be either. It could be both. Hers is an old brain, a tired one. It’s under attack from all sides.’
Effi watched me come back into the ward.
‘You look shattered,’ she said. ‘You should go home, get some sleep.’
Her hair was unpinned from its bun and hung loosely on her shoulders. She hadn’t dyed it in weeks and now it was clouding to white. Even in the hell of this hospital ward she’d managed to put her lipstick on.
‘I’m sorry, Effi. I shouldn’t have left you.’
‘Of course you should have left me. You don’t have to worry. I’m a creaky gate. I go on for years.’
I leave her and hurry back along the peach-hued, endlessly replicating corridor, with a vanishing hope that I somehow remembered to pack my phone in my hold baggage. I spend ten minutes rummaging through my flightcase on the hospital forecourt, then go back inside and find a card-phone on the corridor.
‘I seem to have lost my phone,’ I tell James. ‘In America.’
He wants to come and pick me up. You don’t drive, I say. Grandstand can drive, he says. I’ll borrow Grandstand’s car.
I don’t know what happens now. He swings onto the hospital forecourt with the visor down and a Brisbane Lions baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. It’s black night, gone nine, and Westwood Road is a long fluorescent-lit hangover, kebab joints and shuttered shops and plasma screens advertising a life that is going on elsewhere. He was having me on, telling me that he couldn’t drive: he cuts through these dead streets like he’s been doing it all his life, carves pieces off this city till there’s just me, him and the big old house he calls home.
The place is deserted. They’re on an action somewhere, projecting cinema-sized images of experimental marmosets onto the walls of Bankstown Underpass, and then lying down in the traffic and drawing chalk outlines around each other, conjuring the images of the slain. Bridge and Level Ten are going to be playing sounds on a portable PA to the cars at the traffic lights, distortion-level recordings of a dawn rainforest, a hospital respirator. This is the Atrocity Exhibition, James explains: any means necessary to show the world the reality about what is done in its name. Last week Grandstand smashed up two brand-new plasma screens and thus saved a small sector of downtown Pelton from three days of pharmaceuticals advertising. Where does it end? I ask James. He glances up at the sky, which tonight is sponsored by TransGen Technologies. There, he tells me.
‘My friend’s had a stroke. I don’t need to be reminded of reality.’
‘You’ve spoken to a doctor, Yvonne. He’s shown you the world through a stained-glass window. Come back when the glass is broken. Then you’ll see what’s really going on with Effi.’
‘I saw Mateus,’ I tell him, as he tries to get the fire going in his room. ‘Was he just a story as well?’
‘Did he try it on? That’s the best way of telling.’
‘He tried it on. But I wasn’t interested.’
Maybe there’s a longer silence than usual.
‘Are you going to see him again?’
‘No.’ I’ll tell him this, and no more. ‘He wants to.’
He turns away from the grate and looks darkly at me. ‘That guy’s a fool. For letting you go.’
He’s lit a good fire. He knows how to give it structure, how to let the thing breathe. He drapes a piece of newspaper over the grate and there’s a roar, a blazing suction, like a door to hell blowing open.
Then the gorgeous sight of James’ stash-box.
‘Anyway,’ he says, unfurling papers. ‘You say there is no you. No centre of rational choice. Just inputs and outputs, stimuli and responses.’
I wonder if Mateus could feel that, as he tried to make me look at him. My absence. That was all he loved, after all, all that was available for him to love. The ghostlessness of my flesh. His zombie girl.
‘Maybe that’s why I feel I’ve been sleepwalking through my whole life. I’ve managed OK. I just haven’t been there.’
‘But you do make decisions. You decided to phone me.’
‘I said I’d phone you.’
‘You decided to say it.’
‘I just speak,’ I tell him. ‘I never think first.’
‘Is there anything else you do without thinking?’
‘I don’t know. My mind’s a blank on that one.’
He smiles and starts breaking tobacco into the papers he has stuck together. I like watching him work. His dark, thickly waved hair needs a cut, or at least a good comb. I can’t guess when he last shaved. The sight of his stubble sparks ghost-burns on my skin, the bleeding of a signal between areas of cortex, the memory of a touch that hasn’t yet come. Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll pull out from a junction with the certainty that I’ve misjudged the manoeuvre, and that truck I saw in the distance has, without my brain having yet caught up with the fact, slammed into my side; there’s a half-second of heart-in-mou
th waiting that makes fools of my senses, until my brain catches up and I see that I’m OK. This is like that feeling. It’s the impossible foreknowledge of having had this face next to mine, of having stared into it in my absence, woken up next to it when I couldn’t conceivably have been there. Whatever’s going to happen has already happened. I’ve crashed in flames; I just haven’t yet heard the news.
‘Anyway, we talked about Sansom. We were right about the mines. They’re using these implants to try to manipulate the Lorenzo Circuit. That’s their big idea. Their cure for Alzheimer’s. Allow people to control their own memories, and so reverse the effects of the disease.’
He twists up the spliff and comes over to the sofa. Our bodies sink down together on the old springs.
‘So that’s what Gareth’s interested in. That’s why he took the data, and why he’ll now be trying to get into the mines.’
‘You think that’s what he’s doing?’
‘I don’t know. Until you can remember what he told you, we’re just guessing. I’ve been asking around. No one’s heard from him. He doesn’t have any friends. That’s why you’re so critical in this, Yvonne.’
Movement starts up on his terminal, some sort of still-image slideshow. The data projector, its guts lit with the restlessness of stand-by mode, points darkly at the wall above his bed.
‘You’re going to have to talk to Gillian,’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘And tell her that I’m the cause of her losing all her data? No way, James. I’m not going back there. I’m quitting.’
‘You can’t quit. We need you. You’ve got to help us to nail Sansom.’
‘You’ve got your videos. They’re all the proof you need that they’ve got chimps down there.’
A Box of Birds Page 15
