Dark Matter (3 page)

“Someone tried to steal my car.” He laughed
in disbelief. “With a screwdriver. Pushed me in front of a car. I hit my...” It
was a revelation to him. He fell silent, staring at the nurse.

She stared back, the clipboard dangling
from the end of her arm, apparently forgotten.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “I’m not
sure he meant for that. He bolted and—”

She sprang to life again, slotted the
clipboard over the bed rail, and strode toward the door.

“Hey! Where are you going?” he said with a
hint of hysteria. “How did I get here?”

“I’ll page your surgeon,” was all she said.

He eased back into his pillows, stared at
the bar of dazzling light between the curtains, and tried to think of anything
but the memory of the void that sat like a stone in his mind.

The pinprick of light bored into his
eye.

“Good,” said the surgeon, and clicked the
penlight off.

 
Rasputin clamped his eyes shut and watched the
afterimage turn green and fade.

“For a man who sustained a serious head
injury a week ago, you are in excellent shape.” The surgeon flashed a perfect
set of white teeth amidst an expanse of five o’clock shadow. “The power of
youth is unequalled.”

Rasputin reckoned the power of feral
automobile had given it a run for its money.

The surgeon stood up straight and ran an
appraising eye over Rasputin. Behind him a group of what Rasputin assumed were
interns was clustered and mimicked the surgeon's movements, unconsciously it
seemed. They were the latest in a procession of rubberneckers that included, by
his tally, seven different nurses, orderlies, flower ladies, and a newspaper
man who had twice asked him if he wanted
The West
.

“Questions?” said the surgeon.

Questions were all he had. He just didn’t
want them answered by plebiscite. He remained silent and let his gaze flit
across the faces. The surgeon either didn’t catch the hint or didn’t care.

At last Rasputin said, “Who are you?”

The surgeon’s face betrayed mild shock. “Of
course. I am Alexander Thorpe, holder of the Bletchley Chair in the Department
of Neuroscience at the University of Western Australia. I practice here when I’m
not there.” He smiled as though this information had been a patent gift. “You’re
lucky I was here and not there.”

Rasputin’s train of thought finally
connected the surgeon standing before him with the notion of surgery. His hand
went involuntarily to the bandage covering his temple. Its coarse touch didn’t
surprise him this time.

“Why did I need a surgeon?”

Alexander Thorpe sat on the bed. He paused
for a moment in obvious thought, and then swivelled his large shoulders to
bring Rasputin beneath the beam of his deep grey eyes. Movement rippled through
the congregation as though in response to an unseen signal.

“You presented here last Friday night with
an obviously serious head injury.” His hands squared off against each other as
if he was telling the story about the one that got away. “Standard procedure is
to score your response to a battery of diagnostics—”

“How’d I do?” Rasputin said, cutting him
off. He was an exam junkie. It didn’t matter that in this case he had been
unconscious. He still wanted to know how he had performed.

“Very poorly,” said Thorpe gravely.

Rasputin assumed he was embellishing the
narrative, as clearly the ending was happy. He raised his eyebrows, waiting for
more.

“I’ll spare you the details. You only
managed a five.”

Rasputin leaned back into his pillows. A
five? He had scored worse. His first physics test had been a novel thirty-three
percent, and he had been conscious for that. “Not too shabby,” he said
philosophically.

“The range is fifteen to three,” a helpful
intern interjected. “Higher the better,” he finished, and looked to his
co-interns for confirmation.

Thorpe flicked an irritated glance at the
amateur screenwriter flinging ink across his script.

“Prognosis for such a score is, ah,
guarded,” he said, leaving Rasputin to wonder which word he had almost reached
for. “You had pressure building in your head and we operated to relieve that
pressure and repair the damage done to your skull. You have stitches there,” he
indicated Rasputin’s bound temple. “They’ll come out in a few days.”

Rasputin still felt there were empty spaces
surrounding the surgeon’s deliberate sentences.

“I’m clearly not a vegetable,” he said,
exasperation rising.

There was a crotchet-pause when his heart
seemed to skip a beat, before Thorpe spoke again.

“No, to be honest you are making a good—
a
remarkable
—recovery. Only time will tell if you sustained any lasting
damage. An impact like yours.” His million dollar hands mimicked his mind as he
groped for the right words. “Can cause widespread, microscopic damage,
undetectable by scans. It jiggles things up.”

Jiggles?

“I got a bad boo boo on the noggin, huh?”

Thorpe’s expression tightened.

Rasputin went on. “I could have brain
damage, is that what you’re saying?”

“To be precise: D.A.I,” said that intern.
Apparently he couldn’t help himself. (Rasputin wondered if neuroscience
students made a fraternal joke of pronouncing it
die
.)

When Thorpe spoke again his words came fast
and in a tone Rasputin guessed he reserved for theatre.

“D.A.I: Diffuse Axonal Injury. Neurons are
long cells. When impact shockwaves wash through cerebral matter, they are
temporarily displaced, as with any fluid or elastic material. Some don’t
appreciate the ride. They are stretched to breaking point and pop, but unlike
programmed cell death, they don’t even clean up after themselves.” Thorpe rose
from the bed as he finished, his voice a jackhammer: “Enough break and you lose
faculties. We call it neurological deficit. How much you have, if any, is hard
to predict. If enough neurons die, you become a vegetable.”

Rasputin processed the information,
mollified and feeling sheepish.

“Thank you.”

A gap opened in the wall of interns
allowing Thorpe passage to the doorway. He paused on its threshold.

“Time is all you have now. We’ll see if it’s
your friend or not.” He smiled with an odd intensity that left Rasputin
wondering where his preference lay.

After the interns had drained from the
room, swept along in Thorpe’s slipstream, the room felt all of a sudden
cavernous, and silent, barring the clunk of the second hand winding its way
around the utilitarian clock hanging on the wall.

Rasputin dug his hand behind his back and
under the pillows in search of the TV’s cabled remote. Its volume control didn’t
zero, and the speaker built into the remote put out a perpetual liminal buzz,
audible even buried beneath pillows. He dragged it by its cable into his lap,
stabbed the
On
button and ramped the volume up. He stopped when the
clock’s tick had been drowned, and let his gaze wander to the window and the
rippling foliage of trees it framed.

He turned his attention inward.

How did you take inventory of your brain?
His thoughts swirled, but kept returning to that word:
vegetable
.

“Never did like that word,” he said, just
to hear the sound of his own voice.

The flow of nurses continued through
the morning, but by lunch had begun to ebb. He guessed he was fast losing
celebrity status.

Surely he was still more interesting than a
half-dozen delayed bowel movements?

A man appeared at 1.33PM—the clock, it
seemed, seeped into his subconscious despite attempts to put it out—and
Rasputin knew at once the man was not of the hospital. He introduced himself as
Detective Faraday, and asked Rasputin if it was true that he had been pushed in
front of a moving car. Rasputin hedged, saying that ‘pushed’ was too strong a word,
and tried to convey his sense of what had happened.

Faraday left ten minutes later, saying, “We’ll
nail this guy.”

“I don’t want to nail anyone.”

“Yeah you do.”

The afternoon dragged. Rasputin’s memory of
Thorpe’s warning wore a rut in his mind until tiredness began, inch by inch, to
bend it upon the dream loom. He was soon engulfed by a nightmare in which
Thorpe was doing the dishes in his skull.

He was shaken from the dream by the
telephone. Its noise caused the dream to flash with its inorganic blare, an
outside source too strident, too discordant, for the loom to thread into its
weave.

He fumbled for the receiver once with his
mummified left hand before reaching with his right. He pressed the cool plastic
to his ear, and before he had time to speak heard a voice gush forth.

“Monk? Is that you? Please tell me it’s
you.” It was a female voice, breathless.

“Dee,” he said, and knew it had been her
silhouette he had seen the previous night.

“It
is
you! You're okay? It rang for so long I thought the nurse had got it wrong. But
what a horrible thing to get wrong, and—did I wake you?” Her words tumbled over
each other.

“It hasn’t rung before,” he said. “You’re
the first call. I thought it was an alarm.” He heard her gulp a steadying
breath.

“It was horrible, Monk,” she said slowly,
and he fancied he heard the rasp of her hair on the handset as she shook her
head. He was mute. Tears budded in his eyes without warning, and it took all
his strength to blink them back.

Dee said, “My boss is gone. I’m coming now,”
and hung up.

She appeared in the doorway twenty minutes
later, flushed as though she had run. Her eyes peered through a curtain of hair
that had come loose from a ponytail. The skin above her nose was pinched into a
delicate V. Behind her, with a touch of colour in his cheeks, came the familiar
clash of ropey limbs and buttoned-down dress that was Jordy.

Dee engulfed him in a hug, while Jordy
rested a hand on his shoulder and said, “Monkey boy, you gave us a scare.” The
hug and the hand lingered.

When the scrum parted, Rasputin noticed two
men standing with restrained politeness at the door. One of them was Detective
Faraday. The other was introduced as Sergeant Hills, police artist with
forensics.

“Call me Bert,” he said, and proffered a
hand, which Rasputin shook.

“Sorry, folks,” said Faraday, “but we need
a composite from Mr. Lowdermilk.” His body language said that as far as he was
concerned Dee and Jordy had already left.

Dee began to protest, but Jordy laid a hand
on her arm, and said, “We’ll grab a coffee and come back.”

“This could take hours,” said Faraday.

Rasputin noticed a frown ripple Bert’s
brow. “That’s a lot of coffee,” Rasputin said, to diffuse the tension he felt
arcing in the air over his bed.

Bert interjected. “Let them stay. They
might be of help,” he said, but Rasputin doubted he meant it.

The visitors dragged chairs up to the bed
and sat in a semi-circle around it, as though it were a pit and Rasputin a
campfire. Bert sat to Rasputin’s right, near enough for Rasputin to smell the
residue of his aftershave. The room no longer felt spacious, and the
temperature had nudged above the ward’s sultry default.

“So, Rasputin,” Bert began, and smiled in a
self-deprecating way that Rasputin found disarming, “—nice name, by the way.
Not run of the mill.”

“There have been days I would’ve given my
left arm for something like Bert,” Rasputin said, hoping it didn’t sound rude.

“I understand.
My middle name is Napoleon—”

Hearing the name caused Rasputin’s mind to
flare with a memory, a single slide slotted onto the viewing bracket of his
mind’s eye of a quiz show host smiling smugly. It shone vividly before Bert’s
voice whisked his attention back to the present.

“We’re going to try to build a sketch of
the fellow involved in your accident.” He fumbled glasses from a leather pouch
as he spoke, and had just seated them on his nose when he plucked them back off
and interrupted himself. “But we’re not after a portrait. Merely a likeness, an
effect, an impression. Often that is all we need to get our man.”

He replaced his glasses and eased back into
the chair. “You have all we need up there,” he said, looking at Rasputin’s
bandaged head, and tapped his temple. “Trauma can sear detail on the brain like
charcoal on a hamburger. It’s all in there. We just have to coax it out.” He
finished with another winning smile.

Rasputin was silent as he remembered that
at no point had he said he had seen the kid’s face. He suppressed a mischievous
impulse to say as much, and instead peeled a fingernail from his left hand. He
tossed it onto the bedside table, where it sat like a large piece of shaved
coconut.

The behaviour was a bad habit learned in
high school. His drama teacher had thought it clever to have a guest speaker on
body language. Ever since Rasputin had used it on new acquaintances, like
poking a stick at an ant hill.