Dark Matter (15 page)

“Why do you break their necks,” Rasputin
said.

The beanied head of the man didn’t turn. He
said, “Better for the fish. Better eating. Doesn’t stress them so much.”

Yeah, thought Rasputin, they look pretty
happy.

The sun’s heat was beginning to reach
through Rasputin’s t-shirt to his back when he and Dee walked away from the
river. He was perspiring by the time they had travelled the couple of hundred
meters to his door. Sweat cooled his arm as he swapped his cane to his left
hand, retrieved his keys, and opened the door.

Dee said goodbye from the front step. He
closed the door until only a strip of her face showed through the crack, her
expression unreadable.

He paused, gathered breath, and said, “She
is...she
was
my sister.” He closed the door before she could respond.

Sitting in curtain-wrought darkness, he
brooded on Dee’s message from Thorpe, while visions of fish floated about the
ceiling, their heads flopping on slivers of flesh.

At noon the clock on the lounge room wall chimed.
The sound was fake, from a speaker. It buzzed as the volume stepped down in
stages rather than fading like the real thing. It pried him from the couch.

He called Thorpe’s room and found the
receptionist to be almost obscenely eager to reschedule his appointment to that
afternoon. She informed him a taxi would pick him up at 1:10. It was all taken
care of.

At 1:37 he sat alone in a waiting room,
acutely aware that he was hunched over, arms crossed, fingers tucked into fists—the
postural equivalent of Defcon 5. No one came in or went out. A speaker embedded
in the ceiling was piping in an easy listening station. Dire Straits were
playing Sultans of Swing, and Rasputin willed the sweet, rolling licks to enter
his body and relax his muscles. Nothing doing. Fleetwood Mac was no better, and
when the song finished, the announcer called the time at 1:45.

“Professor Thorpe will see you now,” said
the receptionist, prompted by no signal Rasputin had seen. Perhaps it was a telepathic
practice.

Rasputin found Thorpe seated behind a desk
that ran the width of the room. It was a large room, yet Thorpe looked in
proportion behind that desk. His chair was at a tilt, and his hands were locked
behind his head. He sat as if in a dream, gazing at the ceiling.

He straightened abruptly, and rose from the
chair in one motion, and skirted the desk to where Rasputin stood. Thorpe
raised both hands, leaving Rasputin’s right hand hovering in the space between
them. The surgeon’s hands locked over Rasputin’s head like a cage, and drew it
under his gaze. A faint odour clung to the man’s skin, thin like the atmosphere
of a dying planet. Rasputin wondered if it was cologne or surgical swab.

The hand-cage tilted his head one way then
the other, focussing, Rasputin realised, on the surgery site. Only when he had
satisfied himself, apparently, did he take Rasputin’s hand, which had hung in
the air forgotten.

“Your scar is healing beautifully,” he
said, and sat in one of two chairs arranged for patients. Rasputin took the
other. Thorpe leaned forward, hands on knees, and smiled.

“I am glad you have decided to observe your
follow-up regimen. It is wise. It would be silly for a little money to get in
the way of something so important as your health.”

Rasputin sifted his thoughts. Half his
nerves stemmed from a fear he would have to pretend to be whatever it was
Thorpe was looking for.
Cut to the chase, then. Let’s see how many hubcaps
fly off this sucker.

“What’s the deal?”

Thorpe’s eyebrows shot up, but he responded
smoothly. “I will handle your bill, and provide pro-bono everything needful for
your rehabilitation—physiotherapy, neurologic assessment, and access to this
country’s finest neurosurgeon.”

No prize for guessing who that was, but
Rasputin was tempted to ask. Instead he said, “What am I chipping in to this
deal?”

“Nothing significant. Simply your brain.”

“I was hoping a few urine samples would do
it.”

“I can see the humour,” Thorpe said,
leaning further forward over his knees, great joints that even through his suit
pants were chiseled like a statue of Zeus. “But the reason you are here, the
reason for this unorthodox arrangement, is my grave concern for your health.
Yet you do not seem to grasp the gravity of your predicament.

“I spoke to your girlfriend—” Thorpe said.

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Excuse me. When I spoke to your lady
friend, my concerns grew.”

So he had pumped Dee for ammunition. No,
not pumped. Tapped, like an oil reservoir.

“You have missed physiotherapy, which I now
understand. You are sleeping late—”

“Late’s normal for me.”

“And getting into fights. Is that normal
for you too?”

He let that pass.

Thorpe leaned back and let the silence
stretch. Rasputin’s gaze hunted the room for something to remark on, to break
the mood, but nothing in the cookie-cutter clinic room appeared to belong to
Thorpe except the monolithic desk. His search completed a lap of the room and
came to rest on the cane angled across his lap.

Thorpe’s face twitched as he narrowed his
gaze, a movement incongruous with his great frame, like a Lion at cat-play.
“Have you heard of ALS? ‘Lou Gehrig’s’ Disease in the vernacular.”

Rasputin couldn’t help but meet his gaze.

Thorpe steepled his fingers. “It can be
triggered by motor neuron death.” Rasputin was pinned by the surgeon’s gaze. It
was watching for any telltale sign of what he was thinking.

“But the hammer can fall months after the
trigger has been squeezed. And the bullet comes on slow.”

(
Impact washes through cerebral matter
in shockwaves that temporarily displaces them, as with any fluid or elastic
material
)

“First sign
could be weakness, just plain garden variety lethargy.”

(
Some of them don’t appreciate the ride.
They are stretched to breaking point—
)

Rasputin inwardly cursed the prescient
machine his memory had become. It was spewing facts and he yearned for
ignorance.

“Then your
tongue might begin having difficulty wrapping itself round words.”

(
and pop—
)

“And before long, you can’t swallow.”

Rasputin swallowed on reflex, forcing his
Adams’ Apple down like a tyre-tube in water.

“All comes of secondary biological
cascades, you see,” Thorpe said, and spread his hands as if the Christmas party
committee had been informed the budget would only stretch to finger food. He
jabbed a finger toward Rasputin’s temple. “Your injury was a smash and grab.
But the rest will be the work of a genuine psychopath, and he has you locked
up, stretched out and naked, and is in no hurry to decide which morsel of your
humanity he will take now and which next: mobility,” his hand cut the air, a
scalpel strike, “speech, and finally breath.”

Thorpe emptied lungs like bellows into the
silence and became still.

(
Time is all you have now. We’ll see if
it’s your friend or not.
)

“This is no hypothetical, Rasputin. I
witnessed this case. His name was Reginald Palmer. And the worst of it? To the
very end, he was
aware
. He lay there, warm and living by physical
indications, but buried alive in his own flesh. We have a clinical name for it:
Locked-in-syndrome. The French have a name that captures its essence better:
Maladie
de l’emmure vivant.
Walled In, Buried Alive, in his own flesh.

“A French journalist entombed in his own
body wrote his memoir by winking each letter. It was called: The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly. I’m sure you can discern the metaphor.”

Fear ballooned in Rasputin. He had never
wanted anything more than to wind back the last few minutes of life, to before
this behemoth of a man had spoken, and start over in a world that split from
this and knew nothing of any Reginald Palmer.

Then he wanted to laugh. He was the one who
had wanted to cut to the chase, little knowing he would end up the burning
hulk.

Thorpe had fallen silent and stared with
unfocused eyes. He seemed tired. At last he gave the faintest nod as though he
knew Rasputin’s thoughts exactly.

Rasputin fingered the groove he had carved
into his cane. A glint of silver caught his eye. Its source was a triangular
nameplate sitting on the desk. It read: Alexander Thorpe, MBBS(Hons), FRAC,
PhD. It lay at an angle to the desk’s edge. On reflex Rasputin aimed the butt
of his cane at it and nudged it straight.

“Why did you become a neurosurgeon?”

The weariness fell from Thorpe’s face like
a sheet unveiling a sculptor’s masterpiece. He rose, leaving his chair spinning
with imparted momentum, and bent his head in thought. He was not, Rasputin
thought, searching for an answer—he lived and breathed the answer. His problem
was where to begin.

Abruptly he rounded on Rasputin and said,
“We should take a drive.”

“I’ve got nothing better to do.” It was
true.

They left at Rasputin’s top speed. Thorpe
told the receptionist to cancel the remaining appointments as though it were
the easiest thing in the world. (Rasputin imagined the
ka-ching
of a
cash register coughing out a $1,000 refund.) The receptionist appeared
confused, and Rasputin was struck by the intuition she had already been told to
clear the afternoon. He was sure of it.

Minutes later Thorpe threw his Jaguar onto
the freeway on-ramp with little regard for its gold-plated suspension, but his
face registered detachment not joy. His mind seemed elsewhere as the car
growled up to 100kph with a pulse of the throttle.

They crossed a tributary of the Swan river
on the Mt. Henry Bridge. The freeway was clear. Noise flowing off the Jaguar
bounded back from concrete walls in weird patterns, tinny and melodic, as
though the radio had tuned an alien channel. The car ate the distance to the
CBD with ease. On their left, a vista of the bay unfurled. It was littered with
yachts, which from the car’s low elevation appeared bunched into dangerous
clots. Ahead loomed the green buttress of King’s Park, and opposite it Perth’s
skyline.

Thorpe’s grimness fell away with the miles,
but Rasputin knew he was not joy riding. Surfacing in the surgeon’s posture was
eagerness to be somewhere. Rasputin wished he knew where that somewhere was.

Rasputin recalled the handful of times he
had been driven blind. His brain offered a billion-faceted breakdown of the
experiences, but it needn’t have bothered. One statistic spoke to his need: all
bar one had ended badly. The exception had occurred one time he lanced his hand
on a knife. His father’s idea of first-aid had been to drive him to a McDonald’s
for ice-cream. He suspected Thorpe was not going to buy him ice-cream.

They exited the freeway left onto Mounts
Bay road, a thin strip of asphalt frowned over by the steep, rocky bluff of
King’s Park on one side, and threatened by the hungry lapping of the bay on the
other. Rasputin felt doubly enclosed by land and sea as the Jaguar hugged the
bluff’s skirt.

When they emerged from the bluff’s gloom,
the view broke open, and Rasputin knew at once their destination. The tower of
Winthrop Hall poked squat like a Norman keep above trees bordering the
University of Western Australia, his university, and home of the Bletchley
Chair in Neuroscience, a chair that strained beneath the weight of the man
behind the wheel.

Rasputin had asked him why he had become a
neurosurgeon. The answer, apparently, lay not in a clinic room, but in the
halls of academia.

The fat, green, wobbling back of a bus
expanded as Thorpe closed to within feet of it. It was familiar to Rasputin. He
had known the route’s timetable by heart even before the accident. It would
trundle through the traffic lights, pull over, and disgorge a clot of students.
His life had moved to that deep rhythm for years.

Thorpe swung the car left and circled the
campus, past the curve of Matilda Bay, arcing around the back of the campus. A
minute later he manoeuvred the Jaguar onto a one-way lane bordered by masses of
shrubs, and drove under an arch and into an alcove formed by the complicated
backside of a building. Rasputin didn’t recognise the place, and was struck by
the idiotic thought he had been abducted by Batman.

The back entrance to the building was
barred by a stout wooden door. It had been retrofitted with an electronic lock.
Thorpe swept a card through a slot and held the door open for Rasputin, waiting
as he took the steps one at a time down to the small landing.

Air from the old building funneled through
the doorway. Rasputin caught a whiff of age-browned paper and cold tiles and
urinal cake: a familiar
parfum
.