Acid Song (11 page)

This was unusual. They didn’t talk about sex. Neither of them had a taste for that sort of analysis. She was right about the dreaming. Precious was exactly the right word. Lucid dreaming was the official description. He’d seen an ad for the clinical trials being conducted at the university. He was a perfect candidate, apparently. Remarkably relaxed, unusually open to suggestion. The compliments had pulled him in.

After the first partial success, he’d needed no other reason. Dreaming and knowing you’re dreaming. Directing the dream. It was an
unimaginable thrill. He wasn’t there yet. Not entirely. The experience was still variable, too dependent upon falling asleep in exactly the right conditions. And he could feel there was more, even though the research team had stressed there was no way of knowing how far it could be taken.

‘Could you ever imagine it getting to the point where you never wanted to wake up?’ Max had asked him, at the last interview.

‘No, shit no. I mean it’s fun and all that, but you know, you still have to live, right?’ Simon replied. And Max, being a man, didn’t realise he was lying.

Simon slid across the couch, pulled Amanda close. Kissed her. She kissed him back, then changed her mind.

‘No, don’t,’ she told him.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want you do it just because you feel you should. That’s the point.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. You’d rather be dreaming.’

‘It’s too late now anyway,’ he told her. ‘I won’t be able to. I’m too agitated.’

‘And that’s my fault?’ she asked.

‘No, it isn’t. It’s, it was the whole political thing, and you know, tomorrow. Anyway, it isn’t a fault. You’re right. It can’t become an obsession. I’m sorry.’

He moved towards her, but again she pushed him away.

‘Let’s just watch.’

They sat together, side by side, eyes on the screen, while the problem between them decanted.

‘Love you,’ Simon told her.

‘I know you do,’ she replied. She took his hand and squeezed it. He closed his eyes, imagined he was flying. Asleep, and flying.

ALICIA WAS ASLEEP. When Luke tried to sleep in a car, it made him vomit. Luke left Robyn to unpack their child, while he walked on to unlock the front door. It was an act he’d carried out a thousand times before. His system was on automatic, cut down to the lowest level of alert. Today he had tried to explain to his Year Thirteen biology class that this was anything but normal. That for the majority of its short life span, the
Homo sapiens
had lived out its existence in a state of high alert. This state of comfort we mistook for emptiness was in the end a fleeting anomaly, a miracle of the history of curiosity and timing. He hadn’t convinced them. He hadn’t convinced himself.

Then he heard the noise, just as he reached the front step. Instantly his pulse quickened and his eyes dilated. Adrenaline, the wonder drug. Luke turned back, father and protector. Robyn, child in her arms, looked up, sensing his alarm.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘There’s someone in there,’ he whispered back.

‘Are you sure?’

Luke edged back towards the car.

‘Give me your cellphone.’

‘I don’t have it.’

‘You always have it.’

‘I left it recharging. What should we do?’

Luke stopped. Again he was blank. There should be an answer. He knew that. But this was the sort of man he was, even in times of crisis. A blank man. How such a quality had survived the ages was a mystery to him.

‘Get back in the car.’

‘What?’

‘Get Alicia in the car.’

‘Where are we going to go?’

‘Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. We’re insured. We’ll go away, come back. Find we’ve been burgled, ring the police.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Robyn told him. He agreed with her. It was. It was also his very best idea.

‘So what do we do?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps we should …’

She left it there. Something had happened behind him, something more important than finishing a sentence. Luke turned.

A young man. Tall and solidly built, but no more than a teenager, a face not so different from those Luke confronted every day. He wore a simple uniform: jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, basketball boots. He stared Luke straight in the eyes, only the glass of a sliding door between them. Luke raised both hands, to show he meant no harm. A fog of fear descended. There was him, and there was this boy, and there was time, caught on the point where their eyes met: stretching, stuck. The boy did nothing. Not Mäori, Luke thought, lamely rehearsing his description for the police. A Pacific Islander. Luke took a step backwards.

‘What are you doing?’ Robyn hissed at him.

‘Get in the car. Get Alicia in the car,’ Luke hissed back.

‘You’re not just going to let him get away are you?’ Robyn challenged. ‘Look, his bag’s full. That’s our stuff.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about our stuff,’ Luke told her. ‘Just get back in the car.’

‘No,’ Robyn told him. ‘Here, hold her.’

He’d never seen Robyn back down, not once. Now she thrust Alicia at him, and Luke had no choice but to take her.

‘Robyn, don’t.’

She strode forward. A brave act, all their friends would later pronounce, and Luke would take on the chin the implied accusation. Coward.

Inside the intruder froze.
Just run,
Luke wanted to shout.
Make for a window. She’s not that fast. You’ll be fine.

The border between tragedy and comedy is broad and liquid, a river of possibilities.

‘Get back, lady,’ the boy warned. The sound of his voice was a jolt, confirming as it did the difference between a window and a television screen.

‘Drop your bag,’ Robyn returned. In Luke’s arms Alicia came awake, and furiously blinked her sleepy eyes, trying to make sense of this strange dark scene.

‘What’s happening, Daddy?’ she asked.

‘Nothing, it’s okay,’ Luke told her.

It wasn’t. The boy stepped towards the door. Robyn did the same. The door was locked. She wrenched at it but it did not budge.

‘Unlock the door!’ Robyn screeched, experimenting now with full-blown hysteria.

Alicia began to cry.

‘Unlock my fucken door!’

Luke did nothing. He simply watched the scene unfold and thought to himself, ‘I am doing nothing.’

The boy could have still escaped. The light was poor. He would never have been identified. He didn’t have to do what he did. There was a clear and simple choice available to him.

He smashed his fist through the deadlocked door. Glass showered over Robyn. She cowered. Luke put down the screaming child. The
boy kicked at the door. Luke ran towards his wife. The door flung open. The boy barged out, swinging his heavy bag, knocking Luke to the ground. Luke scrambled to his feet, his eyes on his daughter. The boy cut left.

The way ahead was clear. A child, a driveway, the street, freedom: but the boy cut left. He hurdled the low fence bordering the vegetable garden. There was a loud crash as he ploughed into the glasshouse which night and grape vines had conspired to make invisible. There was nothing more. No movement, no sound. Alicia did not cry. Robyn did not shout. Just a bewildering silence.

Then a groan, long and low. Followed by a frightened:

‘Fuck!’

Robyn looked at Luke, still expecting more of him than he could deliver. She walked past him and picked up their daughter, offering her soothing noises. Luke understood that further inaction was now inexcusable. He looked about for a weapon but nothing suggested itself. Slowly he moved towards the scene of the glasshouse collapse.

The boy lay on his back, clasping his ankle. Even in the half light the bleeding was obvious, a thick dark stain seeping through his fingers.

‘Robyn,’ Luke called. ‘Get the outside light on.’

He took another tentative step forward. The boy did not move.

‘Okay, don’t move. I’ll come round through the gate.’

Light flooded the scene. The boy was on his back. He looked up, terrified.

‘I’m bleeding man. I’m fucken bleeding.’

‘Robyn, call an ambulance!’

‘What about the police?’ the voice came back.

‘Ambulance!’ Luke insisted.

‘Is it bad?’ The mention of an ambulance had clearly frightened the boy. Luke looked more closely at his face. Fifteen, he’d say. Not one he recognised.

‘Move your hand, let’s take a look.’

The cut was deep, but not, as Luke had first feared, an artery. Already the blood was beginning to congeal.

‘Okay, you’re going to be okay. It’s not too bad. Here, just put some pressure on this. Just keep pushing down. You hurting anywhere else?’

The boy shook his head. Robyn’s face poked over the fence, her expression shadowed like a puppet world ghoul.

‘They’re on their way. What’s happened?’

‘Cut an artery,’ Luke lied, wanting only to be rid of her.

‘Right. Good.’

Good?

‘I’ve called the police,’ she added, as if to make certain her position.

‘Get inside,’ Luke told her. ‘Take Alicia inside and stay there until they arrive.’

Get out of my sight.
Robyn looked doubtfully down at the two of them.

‘Don’t let him get away,’ she told him.

Luke looked back at the boy, whose face was drained of all expression. Frightened and waiting.

‘Sorry mister.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I didn’t know it was your house,’ he tried to explain.

‘And that would have made a difference would it?’

‘You teach my cousin.’

‘Oh. Who’s that?’

The boy thought for a moment.

‘I probably shouldn’t say. I saw you at the rugby once. You were running the sidelines.’

‘Good memory.’

‘He says you’re okay.’

It wasn’t, Luke imagined, calculated, but still it hit its mark.

‘Okay, cousin of my mystery student,’ Luke whispered, ‘I want you to listen very carefully. In a moment I am going to scream out and you are going to run away. Your ankle is okay. The bleeding has almost stopped. Just make sure that when you get home you clean it well. Do you understand?’

It took a few seconds, before the boy understood.

‘Thanks mister.’

‘Don’t do this again, all right? It was a stupid thing to do.’

‘I won’t.’

It was a lie. They both knew it was a lie. But they could pretend.

ABOVE THE CLOUDS, the world was blue and faultless. Simon saw whiteness wrap around the horizon beneath him, betraying the curve of the globe.

He rolled lazily, as gentle as a thought. The world spun about him. Cloud, sky, sun. He felt its perfect warmth on his cheek. The air was thin and paid him no mind. He tipped his head slightly and his body followed, smooth as a dolphin. The clouds parted ahead of him.

The forest was filled with light. He wove between tree trunks, became dizzy with the close blur of earth. His mouth opened, and his lips vibrated with the passing air. He smiled at the music they made. He called her name.

She stood before him, then turned and ran. He followed on foot. The grass was cool and wet. There were rabbits. He thought about removing the rabbits. The thought took his mind from the place, and when he returned he and she were already inside. She locked the door behind him. Looked nervously out into the street. Pulled the curtains. Secrecy, his other love. Secrecy and flying.

Her smile was from a place he could not name. Outside of dreams he hadn’t seen her since the two of them were fourteen, when he first learned of desire. She’d barely known he existed; her family moved away before he had a chance to speak of love. How old was she now, here in the forest? He chose not to think about it. Age was
clutter. When he woke, and remembered, he would think of her as older. For now there was only her hair, redder than it had ever been, and her skin, paler. Her eyes were round, her gaze deeper than sleep, and Simon felt the familiar euphoria. Such was the debt he would forever owe the lucid dreaming project.

Acetylcholine nerve cells triggered spastically, sending PGO waves crashing against the shore of a suffocating consciousness: false alarms signalling movement where none existed. The cortex improvised, hallucinating to make sense of the signals. All the while he, that shadowy awareness of self, camera-shy to the end, built bollards about the narrative, nudged it down the desired paths. What you are doing is what we all do, Max had told him. We all have recurring motifs in our dreams; the difference is only in your presence, your awareness. ‘

‘And what am I, if not my dreaming brain?’ Simon had asked, during their second interview.

‘That,’ Max told him, ‘is a question for the philosophers. And I am only a scientist.’

But his shrug was unconvincing. Scientists, Simon suspected, thought of philosophers in the same way writers thought of actors. Expendable.

Simon saw no need to struggle with either philosophy or science. Awake, he could no longer say how it felt to be fourteen, to fall in love for the first time. All he could find in his memory were snippets: the warmth of sunshine and the smell of cut lawn. The heat of a blush, the beating of an unreliable heart. Yet asleep, there he was again, swimming in a stream of chemicals, alive in the way only those who have just learnt the trick can be; charged with long forgotten innocence, trimmed clean of life’s clumsy compromise. He loved her until it hurt. Often, he would wake to tears on his pillow. Tears of forgotten joy. But forgotten only slowly. He made excuses now, on the mornings when the sadness of leaving was too much for him.

She began to undress for him. He stood and watched, a man who could fly. She was his wish, and he wished only that he wasn’t dreaming.

‘Simon.’

He was being pushed. His shoulder rolled. His head dug deeper into the pillow. The smells of day bullied their way on board. There are no smells in dreams. He looked at her longingly. Cursed life.

‘Tomorrow,’ he told her. He looked into her face, her wide nervous eyes. He lingered on her breasts. He would remember her as older.

‘Simon, I thought you said you’d set the alarm.’

‘What?’

Simon blinked in the day. It was close and colourless. Walls pressed in. A tangle of sheets held his legs in place. A bright ray of light pierced his eyes. Amanda sat beside him, pulling at the curtain, squinting at the world.

‘It’s still raining.’

‘Wasn’t in my dream,’ Simon told her.

‘You were meant to set the alarm.’

Simon waited for this information to settle. Memories took shape, like a playground of children rushing to stand in line. Saturday. It was Saturday.

‘Flying and forests, and then a house.’ He said it out loud, omitting the one detail he could be sure he would not forget.

‘What?’

‘Just so I don’t forget, the dream.’

‘You were meant to set the alarm.’

‘I thought I did. What time is it?’

‘Ten.’

‘That’s okay. Ten’s okay.’

‘I’ve got a lot to get through today. Remember the meeting I told you about? And I’ve got to get ready for tonight’s speech.’

‘I know,’ Simon lied.

‘Who’s it with?’

‘Who’s what with?’

‘My meeting.’

‘Why do you never believe me?’

‘I don’t know, Simon. Why didn’t you set the alarm?’

‘I forgot.’

He wrapped his arms around her. She was hot with bother, but moved in time with his hands. He pulled her back beneath the sheets and kissed her.

‘Sorry. You shouldn’t have trusted me.’

They kissed again. She tasted bad.

‘You taste bad,’ she told him.

The meeting. It was something to do with the documentary she was making. Some old TV footage … that’s right, Paddy.

‘You’re meeting Paddy at the archive.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You thought I’d forgotten.’

‘I still do.’

‘You take a lot of pleasing.’

‘You enjoy the challenge.’

‘It’s the failing I enjoy. The older I get, the more nostalgic it makes me.’

‘You’ll make a good old man.’

‘You taking the car?’

‘The car’s at the garage.’

‘We need a new car.’

‘Sell your screenplay.’

‘Get a real job.’

They kissed again.

‘Mind if I stay in bed?’ Simon asked her. Amanda sat up.

‘Yes,’ she told him.

‘Did you get broad shoulders from swimming, or did you get into
swimming because you had broad shoulders?’ Simon asked.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘It hasn’t. I like your shoulders. Why can’t I stay in bed?’

‘Today is a very busy day, Simon.’

She was right, although he couldn’t remember why. But he did remember that last night, as he’d fallen asleep, he had been trying not to worry about something. Which, he now realised, was excellent news. A smile crinkled his sleepy face. ‘You know what, I think I’m there.’

‘Where?’

‘Last night, well, it wasn’t the perfect lead in was it? But then, when that kicked in …’ he motioned to the small device on the floor beside the bed, from which wires extended to the cap he slept with nowadays. An alarm clock of sorts, designed to measure brain waves and wake him between sleep cycles, when he would emerge at his most refreshed; or so went the theory. This one had been modified for the purpose of the experiment. It gently prompted Simon as he entered the night’s last dream cycle, giving him the best chance of coming half awake, of entering his dream.

‘I still dreamed, didn’t I!’

Simon looked at Amanda, who if impressed was hiding it.

‘This is the breakthrough.’

Amanda looked at him, and unable to resist his enthusiasm, smiled back.

‘Cool.’

‘It is.’

‘What did you dream about?’

‘Just flying.’

Simon thought of her again – Alice was her name – and wanted her. His hand ran down over Amanda’s stomach. Amanda took his hand and moved it off her. She had passed through to the waking side and was already preparing for action. It took him so much longer.

‘Sorry, no time. Today’s going to be crazy. Shall I write you a list?’

‘Let me wake up a bit. Then I’ll remember.’

Amanda pulled the covers back.

‘Go and have a shower,’ she told him.

‘You go first.’

‘If I leave you here, you’ll go back to sleep. Go on, I’ll get some coffee on. You’re sure you don’t need a list?’

Simon tried to remember.

‘Pick up the car. Do the shopping, and …’ there was one more. ‘Check out that guy selling film stock.’

‘You forgot Sky. You have to take the decoder back. I’ll write you a list. And …’

‘And what?’

She gave him the look he had grown oddly addicted to. Her ‘How can you be so stupid?’ look.

‘Your meeting, with the film people.’

‘Right, oh, Jesus. What time did I say that was?’

‘Not till three.’

‘That’s all right then.’ He tried to burrow back beneath the sheets but Amanda gave a sharp shove with her feet and he rolled out of bed. The floor was cold. His erection was subsiding.

IT WAS THE place Richard felt most comfortable. He wasn’t the sort who could unwind walking along a beach. Television reminded him he was out of step; small talk made him feel small. A bottle of
wine and a good book could take him out of the world, but here he could settle into it.

In the lab Richard lost track of time and space. He only had to open the door to experience an untangling in his head. He could happily spend all day here, twenty-four hours solid, and there had been a time when such stints were not uncommon. But life moves on. The first roadblocks feel temporary, the detours a transitory evil, until the moment you forget where you were headed. Nowadays the lab was luxury, a child’s tree fort, a place to hide away.

Richard stood in the doorway and let the room come to him. Three long benches defined the space. On each sat a jumble of the equipment he loved: the rounded, flower-like computers, chosen by the lab manager, he knew, for their looks; stacks of pipette-tip boxes colonising the empty spaces; the ever-changing chemical kits, emblazoned with corporate logos, looking as if they had escaped from a toy store; bright red lab books, last bastion of the hand-written word; the hi-tech contribution of the small squat incubators, centrifuges and PCR machines. Heat, spin, cycle. Here at last was a place that had defied abstraction, where one could still be dirtied by reality. Stainless steel sinks stood sentry at the end of each bench, as if to underline the point. And Richard’s favourite thing of all: the glass. Everywhere there were bottles: different sizes and labels, half empty, half full, a defiant finger raised against a plastic world. To an outsider it might have looked haphazard, but only because the order was functional rather than cosmetic. From the boxes of rubber gloves at every station washed the smell of latex, a strange scent to find comfort in, but it was the strangeness Richard clung to. Instinctively he reached behind the door and took his lab coat from the hook, his costume. Around the room’s perimeter the industrial fridges hummed their greeting. Richard had a separate office, off to the side, but rarely used it. When he came here, it was for the benches.

He had an hour at least, before any of the others would arrive.
Margaret, the lab manager, was on leave for the week, and Klaus and Melissa were at a conference. The rest of them were start-late stay-late types. There were windows like this occasionally, when the space was still his. Technology moved rapidly, and every week it seemed there was a new chemical on offer, a new technique to learn and machine to master. When the lab was bustling he felt like a dinosaur; his impressive form turned clumsy in the presence of mammals. They treated him with great respect, of course. His reputation was still the foundation upon which The Institute relied. But if they looked closely, they would see his time was passing. What would I give, he wondered, to be young again? And the honest answer was anything. He would give anything.

On the wall was a framed photograph, and beneath it the carefully printed title,
Richard Bradley: Self Portrait.
The photo was purple on tan, a combination demanded by the stains, and showed his forty-six chromosomes, a splatter of Xs: headless dolls pinched at the waists, frozen mid-dance, caught out. He knew them well enough to recognise the mischievously named Y, small and malnourished, watching from the perimeter as if awaiting permission to join the swirl. This was not the chromosomes’ natural state. They had to be coaxed into this position, like children squeezed into their Sunday best for a family portrait, coming together only that they might be torn apart; split and divide, one cell made two, life continuing with its business, the most everyday of miracles. For the photo they had been trapped in pro-phase, holding back the formation of spindles to which each pair would attach itself, that it may rip itself asunder. A violent sort of poetry.

Richard saw in this picture those towering intellects who had designed the microscopes, refined the cameras, imagined the computers, engineered the centrifuges… Life writ large by the miracle of human curiosity. Richard started each course he taught by parading before the students the genuises who had brought them to
this point: Darwin, Mendel, Fischer, Dobzhansky, Huxley, Mayr, Watson, Monod, Hamilton … the list changed with his mood. Because they have thought and wondered, he told his students, because they have asked and argued, measured and examined, we can view the world from our privileged vantage point. Knowledge as reason for being, for knowledge’s sake. If we are not the ideas we carry, share, reshape and contest, then what are we? Such was the florid rhetoric he was capable of, when none but the young and impressionable were there to call him on his excesses.

Not that every student was so easily impressed. Richard remembered a debater fresh from five years boarding at a local Catholic college, majoring in law but hedging his bets by spending a little time in the biology pool. He was a tall boy, dressed in the preppy way of the rural wealthy, a collared shirt only half subdued by his merino top, striped and untucked, flaring over the top of his jeans like the beginning of a skirt. His skin was clear and he walked with an athlete’s confidence: long-jumper, flanker, second fifteen. These and other facts Richard picked up a year later, when he attended the boy’s funeral. His name was Thomas Walden.

That was six and a half years ago. He approached Richard at the end of the introductory lecture and without a word of introduction presented his argument.