The Second Cure

by Margaret Morgan

  ‘I’d had my suspicions, you see. I had my fears. Her clumsiness, the accident at church. And a feeling that her faith wasn’t … Plus there was an … incident in my garden. Something frankly un-Christian, which I don’t think I should go into. These are the symptoms, you see. Of course it’s a sin to take one’s – you know – but you mustn’t blame her. Not everyone is strong enough to fight the Plague.’

  Brigid heard Charlie gasp next to her. The insensitivity was astonishing.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. You did know? I just assumed. And aren’t you some sort of researcher in it, Charlie? You must know even better than me how it feeds on faith, killing it.’

  She dabbed the corner of an eye with a hanky. ‘If only I’d insisted she get a purity mask.’

  ‘Would that have protected her from the lightning?’ Brigid asked. She’d had enough. She felt Charlie’s hand on her arm. Screw that.

  Tricia looked pained. ‘Of course, I know: God’s ways. Some people think that He left that sort of thing behind in the Old Testament. But even if we think His punishments cruel, they are always just.’

  Brigid wanted to punch her. ‘That is just such horseshit,’ she said. ‘How the fuck can you believe such garbage?’

  Tricia looked at her with pity. ‘You’re the lesbian, aren’t you? I’m not one to judge, of course, but it must have been such a burden for –’

  Phillip Guthrie had swept in, taking Tricia by the arm and drawing her off into conversation and a crowd of church people.

  Into their stunned silence, Richard spoke. ‘Did she actually just say that God smote Mum?’

  ‘Is it “smote” or “smited”?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Smote, I think,’ Brigid said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Richard had said.

  ‘You’re going to be late for your nine-thirty meeting if you don’t leave now, Brigid. Traffic’s delayed fifteen minutes going south.’ Her vocomm drew her back to the present.

  As she collected her keys and put them in her tote, Brigid idly wondered why it was that when she remembered her mother’s death she never cried.

  Charlie watched as a besuited, silver-coiffed man at the other end of the bar ordered another single malt. Top of the range, so he wasn’t short of a quid. Or maybe he was celebrating, although he didn’t look too happy. She wondered why he was out there, not in the concert hall. Perhaps he, like her, wasn’t a thete, and was waiting for someone who was there for the music.

  She sat alone at the bar, her mood sombre. It was the anniversary of Winnie’s death. This morning, as with every year, she’d sat on the throne, looked out at the valley and remembered. No place was heavier with echoes of her friend’s life and death. She always brought a little picnic of tea and pikelets, just as she and Winnie had shared that day the rain returned. She recalled how impotent she’d felt, so angry that she hadn’t found a cure yet. If Charlie could have saved her faith, she could have saved Winnie.

  Winnie had rung her not long before her death. No message, just a call rejected, and when she called back Winnie hadn’t picked up. Richard was in the middle of an exhibition fit-out, and when she suggested he try her, he’d been uninterested. ‘Mother hen,’ he’d said. ‘Always the mother hen.’ He had come to regret those words.

  Still reeling from Reed’s death, she’d hurried home. The weather was horrific, an endless downpour worthy of the tropics. Relieved to see Winnie’s car outside, she’d opened the front door and called out, but there was no reply. Goblin was in the kitchen, wet and whimpering, and then Charlie had seen the opened back door and Winnie’s crutches on the floor. That’s when she knew.

  Winnie was lying on a rock platform, five metres below the cleared throne. She wasn’t moving. Charlie looked around frantically for a way to get down, but the cliff was sheer. She scrambled back up to the top of the stone steps and ran back into the house, to her mobile. Her hands were shaking and she dropped it on her first attempt to push the numbers.

  ‘Emergency. Police, ambulance or fire service?’

  Charlie could hardly speak. Her throat was tight with panic.

  After the operator had put her through and a dispatch officer had calmly taken the details, Charlie had rung Richard, but he didn’t answer. She left a garbled message for him, telling him about Winnie and to ring back straight away.

  An hour later, Charlie was still shaking, but it was now a racking of her being that came from deep within her bones. Lenny had come across the road when he heard the emergency vehicles, and he gave her a cup of milky, sugary tea, ‘for the shock’, but she hadn’t even been able to hold it and doubted she could stomach it. She stood, wrapped in a blanket someone had found her, while Lenny held an umbrella over her. They watched as the rescue helicopter lowered two paramedics down beyond the throne, its spotlight catching a thousand droplets of water in its beam. The wind from the chopper lashed rain into her face, mixing it with her tears.

  The rescue workers shouted at each other so as to be heard over the torrent and the noise of the blades, and Charlie remembered trying to read their faces. Was there any hope? An idiotic accusation kept stabbing at her: if she hadn’t cleared away the overgrown throne, this wouldn’t have happened.

  She had to know. The tension was overwhelming. She ran from Lenny and his umbrella, flung off the blanket and pushed away restraining arms so she could see. A police officer had moved in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. His face was sombre. ‘Charlie, I’m sorry. There are no signs of life. She’s been dead for a while.’

  She subsided onto her knees, hands sliding in the sodden turf. Dead. Winnie was dead. Call me ‘Mum’, if you like. She dug her nails into the ground and mud oozed between her fingers.

  Charlie felt hands pulling her back up, back onto her feet. It was Richard. He had arrived. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight. His leather bike jacket, slick with rain, felt cool against her cheek.

  They had stood there together, watching the helicopter hover, as her body, wreathed in plastic and bathed in the glare of the spotlight, rose into the night.

  She drained her glass. It had been a long time since Charlie had gone to one of Richard’s concerts, as opposed to consuming too much red wine in the bar outside. When he opened his first SynDome, she’d attended each performance assiduously, but her curiosity waned and it was gradually replaced by envy. Thetes revelled in the secret language Richard’s music spoke to them, some perceiving it through vision, others through smell or taste or tactility. Despite his attempts to involve her, her feeling of exclusion was profound. It would have been more tolerable had Richard’s friends and fans been more restrained in their adoration of him and in their commensurate pity for her and her inability to ‘get’ his music and his art. The implication was that unless you perceived music beyond mere sound, you were some sort of aesthetic oaf and hardly a suitable partner for a genius like Richard Bayliss.

  The irony of Charlie having been one of the first to take the Toxo vaccine she and her team had invented didn’t elude her. She had ensured that synaesthesia would never be hers, just as Richard’s fame as one of the foremost practitioners of the new Neuro-Aesthetic Movement began to soar. Her professional success had permanently cut her off from a true appreciation of his. Many of his fans proudly proclaimed that it was his music that had led them to refuse the vaccine. Almost a competition to show their devotion.

  ‘Another?’ The bartender gestured at Charlie’s empty wine glass.

  ‘Yeah, sure, why not. Thanks, Johnny.’

  He poured her Shiraz, which she didn’t pay for. It was Richard’s bar, after all.

  If her relationship with her lover’s art was complex in the early days of the music and art he created specifically for thetes, once he began to successfully master orgasmic music it became chaotic. His musings on the night of Tristan and Isolde at the Opera House had now become reality – a very lucrative if controversial reality. Musical porn was now his metier. Richard had devoted himself to calculating precisely which progres
sions, chords, key changes and rhythms would most reliably bring the listener to orgasm, and set about composing a series of works that made him famous – and infamous – worldwide. The purpose-built concert halls he had begun constructing – white hemispheres with interiors reminiscent of planetariums, visuals projected onto the curved ceilings and reclining seats angled towards them – were labelled by scandalised commentators as ‘domes of sin’, a name Richard quickly adopted and adapted, to the delight of his growing fan-base. Although only around twenty per cent of synaesthetes responded sexually to his music and painting, their enthusiasm for the art form ensured that each SynDome performance was sold out. There were now SynDomes in every capital city in Australia. (Not in Capricornia, of course, where Richard’s works were banned, along with Indonesia, Iran and bits of the former USA.) Franchises were opening across Europe, Canada, South America and the Union of New America. They used his template, his music and his digital 3D art. Richard’s growing wealth had started to shock even him.

  Black-suited attendants opened the auditorium doors and the sound of applause burst through. The concert was over.

  ‘’Bout bloody time,’ said the single malt drinker to no one in particular, tapping his smart-specs in front of his ear to check the hour. He was waiting for someone. He downed his drink and stood expectantly, not knowing what Charlie did: the audience at these concerts never departed quickly. In a post-orgasmic languor, they would be queuing for the abundant toilets to make themselves decorous once more. (Many men now availed themselves of what were the equivalent of incontinence pads, manufactured for this express purpose. Richard wasn’t the only one making money out of his music porn.) The equivalent of A Reserve tickets entitled the holder to a suite with ambient lighting, an emperor-sized bed and private bathroom, and ample Champagne, fresh fruit, chocolate and massage oils for the entertainment of couples or groups. No need for noise cancelling headphones for those patrons. The shared experience was part of the pleasure and they tended to linger.

  Charlie had long ago decided she must be a prude. She’d never feel comfortable orgasming in public. Even if the music had the capacity of making the earth move for her, she’d be one of those who’d stream it and let it work its geophysics in the privacy of her home. But more than that, she felt a slight disdain for Richard’s clientele, a cynicism about their need to flaunt their synaesthesia, an annoyance at their smugness. That they saw their symptoms as rendering them superior was unquestionable. How very different they were from Winnie, driven to annihilation by the burden of her infection. Their self-satisfied celebration of their infection never failed to remind Charlie of the night of her death, their hedonism bringing into sharp relief the pain Winnie couldn’t bear. It wasn’t rational, but she felt resentment towards them for the loss of her friend. Absurdly, she even blamed Richard for her death, because what had brought his mother anguish was bringing him wealth and success. Knowing that it was nonsensical made the thought lurk and poison no less.

  A couple of years ago, a celebrity website had profiled Richard and her, painting them in starkly antithetical terms. The passionate creator and the aloof and cerebral scientist. The man who had embraced T. pestis and redefined creativity, and the woman who had devised the vaccine and the cure. The one who opened up the world of the spirit, and the one who shut it down. Charlie had been furious. There’d been no mention of those who miscarried or gave birth to profoundly disabled babies. No reference to the wretched existence of the Cotards, living lives of unending death. No concern for the loss of religious faith that had sustained millions. And not a single fuck was given for the cat species that had been wiped out and the knock-on effects in countless ecosystems. Nothing but the complacent arrogance of the thetes and their insulting conviction that to be vaccinated was to embrace mediocrity.

  It had been a dangerous time for Charlie and Richard’s relationship. Had he responded dismissively, Charlie would have left him, and so she’d stood back to see what he would do. Fortunately, his anger equalled hers. He wrote a lacerating riposte that he insisted the site publish, in which he defended Charlie and her work, mocked the simplistic dichotomy of the article’s thesis (‘You think science isn’t creative?!’) and challenged its implicit divisiveness. Hasn’t the world had enough of ‘us and them’? he asked. Some of it was, to Charlie’s mind, rather naïve, and Richard was not a great writer, but his sincerity was obvious, as was his loyalty to her. They survived the episode, and in the time since had consolidated their relationship as they cautiously navigated the changes his work was bringing to their lives.

  Well after the single-malt man had given up and sat back down, the first of Richard’s music lovers emerged. Some looked flushed and embarrassed. Others were laughing with happiness, sharing jokes and smiles with their friends. A few looked grumpy. Maybe the magic hadn’t worked on them? Surrounded by a tight coterie of fans, mainly young, female and attractive, Richard appeared. Over the heads of his devotees, he looked to the bar and caught Charlie’s eye. He smiled.

  If Charlie were honest, this was the real reason that she came to his performances. Envy might have ruined her experience of his music, but it was jealousy that made her sit in the bar for every concert. Musicians and painters had always had their groupies. But a musician and painter who could bring you to sexual ecstasy solely through his art? That was the ultimate groupie-bait, and while she wanted to trust Richard … Well, she’d wanted to trust Shadrack, too.

  She returned his smile as he attempted to disengage from audience members who didn’t want to say goodbye, and he gestured to the door beside the bar, the exit to his office. As she picked up her bag and her book, she noticed the single-malt guy assisting an elderly couple towards the lifts. One was doddering with a walking frame; the other was in a wheelchair. Gone was his earlier impatience. Now he was all solicitude. These must be his parents. They were both coyly smiling, glancing at each other in what was obviously post-climactic delight. As they waited for the lift to arrive, the woman’s hand settled on her husband’s, which lay on the arm of his wheelchair. Their fingers clasped. And Charlie had to confess: Richard’s work wasn’t all bad.

  Cairns, Republic of Capricornia

  Having to set aside three hours for security checks for a two-hour flight irritated Brigid. It wasn’t as though she could use the time to get work done either because most of those hours entailed queuing at the various checkpoints throughout the large, open space hall: DNA barcoding, iris, palm and fingerprint scans, GSR (galvanic skin response), facial recognition. Pregnancy test, of course, to ensure no women in the first half of her pregnancy left the country for a termination. ‘Abortion tourism’, they called it, and the penalties were fierce. Throughout, officers of the Capricornia Special Security Agency (the former QSSA) strode alongside the queues, presumably to terrify the passengers sufficiently to make them fail the GSR test and justify an interrogation. These thugs looked as though they’d enjoy nothing quite as much as a good solid grilling before afternoon tea. Brigid thought nostalgically of the days when metal detectors and baggage X-rays were the most intrusive part of travelling. This, on the other hand, was part of the labyrinthine process of obtaining a Capricornian exit visa. Getting into the country was even harder, so determined was the Effenberg regime that Toxoplasmosis pestis not find its way into the brains of its citizenry.

  Throughout the airport, as with most public spaces in the city, the state broadcaster poured its propaganda from vast screens. Brigid had learnt to block it out, but had also learnt the local trick of feigning interest whenever the CSSA goons were looking. Now, though, her interest wasn’t feigned. On the nearby screen she recognised a face, unmistakeable under her now even more ornate purity mask, with white-on-white embroidery in the modern style. It was Tricia Townsend, standing next to Marion Effenberg, who was giving a speech. Brigid subvocced to get audio and heard the First Mother announcing into her ear that she was delighted to appoint Tricia as her personal assistant in the Daughters of the Song of Lig
ht.

  Well, well, mused Brigid, haven’t you risen in the ranks of the pious. Personal assistant to Marion Effenberg was a position of serious power and cachet – as long as you held onto it, anyway. Tricia’s predecessor had been sacked and no amount of discreet investigation had revealed what had happened to her. Now Tricia was talking about the great honour of serving the First Mother. The smugness on her face as she described climbing the spiritual greasy pole all the way to the summit made Brigid wish she had punched her all those years back. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but it would have felt so good.

  Brigid had reached the final section and stood at the counter sign-posted ‘DNA Probing’ as an unsmiling official with a buzz cut scanned her ID. She put out her hand and he squeezed a disk the size of an old five-cent piece against the pad of her left thumb. From within the disk a minute dart shot into her flesh. Within seconds, the display on the button flashed green, indicating that a sufficient blood sample had been successfully retrieved. He pushed the disk into a slot on the machine on the counter and directed Brigid to the next desk, where, after another ID scan, she would receive her results.

  While the technology was modern and relatively rapid in its DNA analysis, this part of the exit processing was always the most time-consuming, with travellers waiting an hour or more, while they enviously eyed the few seats provided – always full, of course. They leant against walls or meandered about, trying to look patient. They weren’t bored. The atmosphere was too intimidating for boredom, and there seemed to Brigid a sense of just-suppressed panic beneath the surface of their passivity. She suspected the delay was deliberate, a final insult to those who had the audacity to want to be anywhere on the planet other than Capricornia.

  She settled in for the wait, finding a spot against the wall close to the results counter. A small boy sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with a game console, sporadically looked up at her and smiled shyly. She’d smile back and he’d look away, returning to his game. Standing next to the boy was his mother, wearing the white lace purity mask of the devout. She was holding a baby, bouncing and cajoling it to ease its fretful wailing. Most babies in this section of the exit hall cried, in Brigid’s experience. They weren’t exempt from the DNA probe, and those administering it were not adept at bedside manner.