Dark Matter (20 page)

Lloyd held out a hand, inviting Rasputin to
sit in the chair. “Now, if you’ll please?”

Rasputin sat, feeling the cool of the vinyl
penetrate his jeans and numb his skin. Lloyd lowered an apparatus hanging from
a segmented metal arm that sprouted from the back of the chair, and settled it
on Rasputin’s head. The apparatus resembled helmets he had seen in Sci-Fi
movies from the Sixties: it was thick at the back and reached forward in three
tapering extensions that curved over his skull, past each ear and over his
crown. Lloyd explained it would keep his head in roughly the same place for the
duration of the experiment.

Lloyd stepped away to verify all was in
place.

“The guide,” said Lloyd, and rapped a
knuckle on the helmet, “also has built-in microphone and speakers, so we can
communicate as we go.”

“You’re not staying?” said Rasputin.

“No. I’m in there,” said Lloyd, indicating
the mirror.

“Alone?”

Lloyd smiled. “Does it matter?”

He left the room and soon Rasputin heard a
faint hiss and crackle come through the headphones.

“Quick sound check. Can you hear me?”

“No,” said Rasputin.

“I actually have to mark this down. Can you
hear me?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good. Let me tell you what we’re doing
today. You’re going to see a sequence of images appear on the screen in front
of you. I need you to say the first thing that comes to mind for each image.
Don’t worry. There are no right or wrong answers.”

“So if you show me a picture of a spatula
and I say ‘urine monkey,’ that’s okay?”

“If that’s the first thing that pops into
your head, yes.”

If only exams were that easy.

Question: Name the principal event that
catalysed persecution of the French Huguenots.

Answer: Why, Buttermilk, my dear fellow.

...but then, he supposed exams were that
easy, now.

Lloyd was speaking again. “That’s the first
phase of the experiment. I’ll explain the second when we get there.”

“How long is this going to take?” said
Rasputin, feeling the cold of the chair colluding with his bladder.

“About an hour.”

I can do an hour, thought Rasputin, and
attempted to locate whatever muscle clamped his bladder shut to give it a
workout.

“Ready?”

“Bring on the urine monkeys.”

He heard a faint click from above. Colour
burst onto the screen in front of him. It was the projector’s test image. A
moment later it was replaced by a photo of a vivid green hillside set against a
clear sky. The grass on the hill’s flank was speckled with yellow wildflowers.

“First thing that pops into your head,”
said Lloyd through the headphones, sounding as if he were speaking from within
Rasputin’s head.

“Juicy,” said Rasputin, and straightaway
feared Lloyd would think him a nutcase.

Rasputin mentally audited his answer. He
traced the word,
juicy
, backwards through the fading residue of his line
of thought, like the flight-path of a pinball that had rattled and bounced with
light speed logic through his mind’s machinery. The connection that had
prompted his answer was the memory of a cow licking up wet tufts of green
grass. He had been close enough to hear the great, moist smacks of its hairy
muzzle. Crisp dawn air, the smell of manure, and that sucking sound. And green
grass. All of these senses bundled up organically into a single memory.

The image changed to a photo of a
skyscraper.

“Lift,” said Rasputin, now fearing Lloyd
would think him simple.

The sequence of images grew. Rasputin and
Lloyd settled into a rhythm, each couplet of image and answer taking about
seven seconds. Rasputin stopped worrying about what Lloyd thought of him and
focused on capturing the first word to flutter from the cage of his mind.

Lloyd had photos of trains, faces, animals
of all kinds, clouds, crowds, and shopping malls. Rasputin responded with an
equally varied range of concepts. Once he had warmed to the task, it was as
though he had pulled a plug from the bottom of his mind, and all sorts of
rubbish was draining out of it through his mouth. He gave up trying to trace
the source of each answer, concluding his head was a hopelessly tangled mess.

At 37 minutes and 13 seconds into the
experiment, according to his internal chronometer—which he now knew to be the
equal of any watch—a photo hit the screen that shocked him, broke his
rapid-fire responses. He had seen it before. It was a famous photo. In it, in
the middle ground, was a child hunched low over its knees. The child’s sex
could not be discerned, obscured by a belly bloated by malnutrition. Its head was
large, too heavy for one so small, its limbs an ineffectual accretion of
tangled branches. Death was drawn near enough to touch. The parched earth and
bleak vista told of a land familiar with death. The one spark of vital life in
the scene dwelt in its sole witness, beside the camera operator: a vulture.

Rasputin’s face became hot with held-back
tears.

“Suicide,” he whispered finally.

Lloyd must have heard. Another image
mercifully obliterated the once-living child.

But the reprieve was only momentary. An
image of a carnival wheel was replaced by another photo Rasputin had seen
before: a napalmed Vietnamese girl, running toward the observer, her eyes wild
with pure terror.

Rasputin pulled his gaze away. “Robin
Williams,” he said.

Two more images in succession pictured
hell, the first, Nazi ovens, and the second, a dog that had been beaten to
death.

Rasputin burst.

“What the hell is this?” He swivelled to
look into the two-way mirror, feeling the helmet tug against his head. The walls
amplified his voice to a shout.

Lloyd’s voice held its own tremor. “I’m
sorry if you’re finding this distressing, but these are the images given me by
Professor Thorpe. We’re almost done.”

Grudgingly, Rasputin settled back in his
seat and gritted his teeth to face the final images. For an anchor he looked to
his promise to Thorpe and his hope for a cure, and grasped it. But his hand
shook with fear. Each of the gruesome images had passed through his eyes and
fallen on his mind like a hammer on fired metal, sending sparks skittering in
every direction, threatening to kindle wildfire in his mind. Most of all he
feared that one such spark would alight in the memory of his sister—that spark
would find not tinder but dynamite.

The images came. With each, he felt again
an inward pull not of his willing, as though he were not himself to command. It
tugged in every direction at once. Each answer he gave dispelled that exploding
force, but he suspected his head didn’t come back together in exactly the same
way, like a child’s Tupperware ball, tugged open and left to spring together
askew. (And wasn’t the purpose of that action to allow the letters inside the
toy to fall out?)

Another image, a photo of a man whose face
had been horribly burned. Another maelstrom of pressure. Another answer: “Wax.”

The photo winked out, replaced by the
projector’s test image.

Rasputin panted quietly.

“We’ll begin the second phase, if that is
okay with you,” said Lloyd.

“Is it anything like the first?”

“I can’t answer that,” said Lloyd. “But
your instructions are to observe the screen. Images will be presented to you in
batches of eight. In each batch of eight there will be one image, and only one,
that you have already seen today. You need to indicate to me which one. If you
don’t know, say so. Don’t guess.”

Surely the worst images wouldn’t be making
a reappearance. Who would forget them? What would be the point?

The first set of eight images appeared.
They were all photos of cars. Red cars, to be precise. Rasputin knew
immediately which photo he had already seen.

“Third down on the left,” he said.

“Okay,” said Lloyd, “Let’s call that number
5, numbering left to right, top to bottom.”

The next set of photos were of skyscrapers.
Four of the photos were of one skyscraper taken from slightly different points
of origin. The other four, similarly, were a set of another skyscraper.

Again, Rasputin knew within a split second
which photo he had seen before—which skyscraper, and which perspective from
among the cluster of close vantage points.

But caution held his tongue. Any fool could
have spotted the correct red car in the previous set. And a good observer with
a healthy memory could spot the right skyscraper, even with the close red
herrings. But would he know them
all
?

Rasputin would. And that would be giving
the game away.

“Number Three,” he said, sparing a glance
for Number Eight, the correct skyscraper. It galled him to flunk the question.

The sets of eight came, and as predicted,
he knew the correct answer for every one in a fraction of a second. He
sprinkled his false guesses and I-don’t-knows with correct answers. The last
few sets were of shopping malls shot from the same vantage, flooded with people—so
similar only someone with a photographic memory could have aced them. He patted
himself on the back for having so quickly smelled the rat.

“How’d I do?” he said when Lloyd entered
the room.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss your
results,” said Lloyd. “That is for Professor Thorpe.”

Rasputin thought Lloyd sounded relieved
about that. “But we have an appointment on Thursday, don’t we? That assessment
is a more conversational, sit-down affair. Maybe we will be able to dig
into...things then.”

Lloyd pried the helmet from Rasputin’s
head.

Rasputin rose, kneading stiffness from his
shoulder, wondering what kind of a chat he and Lloyd would have. Would Lloyd be
drinking Earl Grey, and would Lloyd be asking him about his father?

“See you Thursday,” said Rasputin, and went
in search of a toilet. His bladder was screaming broken pact, and he didn’t
want to see if it was bluffing.

***

“Straighter!” she commanded. “Now hold
it. Give me another twenty seconds.”

Rasputin had liked the hospital
physiotherapist better. The physios at the University clinic, where he was now
strung out on a mat, struggling to keep a tremulous leg in the air, were
decidedly more fervent. Their veins still coursed with the ideology of the
scientifically-manipulated body, untempered by life’s messiness.

Dee had picked him up again that morning,
and he had succeeded in keeping the banter light. He had daydreamed in the car
about what physiotherapy might entail. His fantasies had featured hours of
remedial massage and talk about his ‘mobility goals.’ When he said as much to
Dee, she seemed to go along with it. In hindsight, perhaps she had been
tactful.

Physiotherapy, in the event, had turned out
to be more boot camp than day-spa. His physiotherapist, Donna, had given him a
breakdown of the anatomy of his leg, from big toe to hip. Her briefing had
featured a lot of Latin. Latin, in turned out, was the language of not Rome but
pain. Donna’s plans for their hour together had boiled down to turning his
“piece-of-jelly of a
Vastus Medialis Oblique
into iron,” and she had
delivered her decree uncomfortably like a coach from a gridiron movie.

But it turned out that gridiron coaches
were pansies.

Rasputin’s internal clock registered every
last second of the hour-long appointment. Each was an age.

“You’re done,” said Donna, at last. And he
was. Sweat slicked his body. He realised it had been minutes since anything
above a grunt had escaped his lips.

Between gasps, he asked what was all of a
sudden an important question: “If my problem is neurologic, how does this
help?”

“It helps me plenty,” she said—only, that
wasn’t what she said. His head wasn’t altogether together. Sparks danced in his
vision as he hauled himself off the mat. It took him a moment to recollect what
she had said: “In the past, we might have agreed with you. But we now know the
body is very complex. We talk about the brain as if it is a static lump that
drives the body, but evidence increasingly points to it being quite plastic.”

The word
plastic
made Rasputin think
of China-made toys.

Donna went on. “Think of the body as being
a car. The engine drives the wheels right? Break the engine, and the wheels
stop. Well, no. Apparently, sometimes driving the wheels on a broken engine propagates
change up the chain, and fixes the engine—or, it would be better to say, finds
another way to get the engine to work the wheels.”

Rasputin couldn’t shake the vision of a
world populated by beings running on Chinese-built brains. He nodded, more to
end the conversation and escape than indicate understanding.