Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (3 page)

We got off the bus, same penguins, same order, and in the wake of the rattle and sway of the bus, it felt as though the cool air settled on my shoulders like a shawl. We walked down a road that Barny said looked over the river and, in the distance, the alien lights of Perth’s pocket of skyscrapers. A breeze was stirring, and it brought up the tang of salt and river-weed.

I guess you’re still wondering what we were doing there? Well, it has to do with our man, Mr Stephen Brand. For all I know, his mug shot was plastered on the back of our bus, which whined its way off into the dark streets as though it had never been there. You see Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-36 was a
missing
man.

That had taken a bit of figuring out. Barny must have seen Stephen’s face on TV in the missing person’s slot before Law & Order many times and, likewise, I had heard his name each time before the show’s trademark
dun dun
percussive. But had it not been for the wiles of serendipity, we would never have made the connection, and might have been at home that night, tucked up in bed.

Brand had been missing since January, his wife also. No family contactable. The details given in the missing persons blurb had the feeling of flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of unknown lives, stumbled on by investigators and yielded up to the public almost apologetically. Mr Brand, said the blurb, was an amateur musician, and collector of rare and exotic instruments. We knew
our
man was a musician. I had watched his hands dance, and sometimes trip, across fretboards and frames, and Barny had heard snatches of alien sounds. But we would never have made the connection if the blurb hadn’t mentioned one harmless little detail. It had noted one instrument in particular, a sitar. Neither of us had a clue what a sitar was—until a classmate show-and-tell’ed his specimen at school. I felt the thing, Barny saw it; and that was the spark to the tinder.

Our man had a sitar, there was no doubt, and being boys this meant the missing man might be one and the same. It didn’t take long for us to marry the other clues up to this hypothesis, his apartment, rented with the tiniest sliver of a river view, his job as a nurse, and in no time, as far as we were concerned, his identity was a fact.

Barny, bless him, had blurted that we should tell the police. I replied caustically, “Yeah, right. ‘Officer, my deaf friend here and I have recently received second-hand hearing and sight, respectively, and as a consequence, and quite coincidentally really, have come to believe that we may be able to tell you more about Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-thirty-six, maybe even find him.’ Come off it, Barn.” Nate kicked me. I apologised.

But the more I thought about it, the more I came round to the view that maybe we did have something to offer the police. Who was better placed than Barny and me, who were privy to the memories of his eyes and ears? Who knew his habits and haunts?

One such haunt was Blackwall Reach. It recurred much in my mind’s eye. Each of us has a quiet place, I think, a place to sit, to put out the clamour of the world (or bathe in it)—its demands, its temptations, its despairs—and just be. And Mr Brand’s was Blackwall Reach, I was sure of it. Like a lodestone in my mind, the needle of my thoughts was drawn to it, and the idea that the mystery of Mr Brand might be revealed there. Pity I didn’t know his compass sported a many-coloured feather of needles.

As we crossed the threshold into the bush hugging Blackwall’s cliffs, I yearned for the predictable footfall of the asphalt we’d left. Barny came behind me, and Nate led, holding my arm. I could feel him straining against it, eager to press forward. In his haste he almost pulled me down onto the dewy ground. A spider web clung to my face, and when I wrenched my arm free to pry it away, Nate went on.

In that moment I felt my blindness keenly. I remembered a passage from the bible that Barny had told me. In it a fellow named John, who had lived on locusts and honey—spiders too perhaps—sent word from prison inquiring if Jesus was the One. John had thought so, but in the cell’s darkness his doubts had grown. Jesus’s answer began, “Tell him this: The blind receive sight…”

How I yearned for that. True sight. Sight to see what made me stumble. Sight to see it, name it, and go around it. That verse rang in my head in the tangled gloom of the bush that night. But I remembered too that John’s head had ultimately rolled at the word of a girl probably no older than some of the kids he’d been baptising weeks earlier.

Then I felt Barny’s hand on my arm, and I recovered my courage.

And suddenly, as if my face had broken though a wave, I was free of the bush. We had reached the cliffs. Unfettered air caressed my skin, and the sound of the suck and spume below swelled.

Then it happened.

If I’d had the presence of mind in the minutes before to think clearly, I would have known what was coming. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.

I would have felt the terror in Barny’s clutch, for that’s what it was. I’d have asked, and he would have wailed at the maelstrom of groaning and crying that had made his head ring the nearer we went to Blackwall.

I would have seen that as I fought my panic on Nate’s trail, images peppered me like never before, of Stephen Brand beating his way to the cliff’s edge, and noted it for the path of a madman, a pioneer, a zealot.

Instead, all I experienced was the totality of sense that encompassed each of us, three-and-one, at the cliff’s edge, past and future combined: A stark vision of a woman standing there, dripping at the bush’s edge, for it was raining, and in her hands a gun. Pointed at me. At Stephen Brand. A flash of fire at its muzzle, and the oddly surprised, wondering “Uh.” This last not from the mute memory, but from Nate’s own mouth.

Then Nate fell.

And in my mind’s eye I fell too. I saw water and rock fly toward me, and then utter dark. It was the last vision I ever had.

A kindly wave swallowed the sickening crunch as Nate met with the jagged limestone below. He was dead. I knew it without asking.

I don’t remember for how long we stood and cried at Blackwall Reach.

Given Nate’s ‘special’ status, and his parents desire to clear his name of any shadow of suicide, there was a post-mortem. I read the report. Naaman Gould, age twelve, suffered a heart attack, whereupon he fell to his death on the rocks beneath Blackwall Reach. His heart stopped, he fell, and his adolescent body crumpled like a soft drink can on the rocks below. That was forty-three years ago. And in another forty-three, if you so happened to pull up the report, you’d find it read just so, printed matter-of-factly in black and white.

But I don’t think that’s what happened.

I’m speculating, of course. But you be the judge.

You recall I likened Nate’s condition to bubble wrap for the soul? “The Unfeeling Boy” Can you imagine what it would be like one day, one nominal day—nothing to mark it different from the other four thousand odd lived in sense-stasis—to feel a pin prick through the blanket? It would hurt, yes. But would you call it pain? A sliver of metal to rouse the sleeping monks to the ropes to ring the bells in that inner, fog-shrouded city. That peal came and told Nate ‘pain,’ just as hearing and sight came to Barny and me, and ushered us into a new world. ‘Pain,’ they rang out at Lauds, ‘Heat,’ at Sext, ‘Smoothness,’ at Vespers, ‘Pleasure,’ at Matins.

But I say pain first, because this I think bit deepest, bit most often, if I am any judge of men—and particularly for Stephen Brand, who loved and lost more than the average.

I have researched his life so much so I confuse it with my own. Those of his classmates who remembered him at all, remembered him well, or rather, remembered a crystalline memory of some kind act. Invariably, when I pressed further for observations of the man, their eyes would glaze. It was hard to find memory of him distinct from his deeds. He tried and failed three times to qualify for Medicine at the University of Western Australia. At last, he settled into nursing. He graduated, worked shifts at Hollywood Hospital, or Greythorpe, and then at a hospice that was pulled down in the early 80s. The hospice was one of those put up just after WWII, one of those laced with asbestos.

It took a while for the time bomb to hit Stephen Brand, but when it did it worked a curious kind of torture on him. It began with spasms that took his job, let loose micro-storms of agony, shattered his nervous system, taking with it the solace of his music, and ultimately undid his marriage thread by thread until it gave in one cataclysmic tear at the seams.

And it was this pain—compressed and magnified—that was Nate’s introduction to the world of feeling. The memory of Mr Brand’s private Gulag. And it spat at him like a sewing machine. Like a junkie, Nate couldn’t get enough of it. If I’d known then, as a twelve year old, what I know now, I’d have seen the monkey slapping out the tune on Nate’s back and I’d have offered it a cyanide banana.

That night at Blackwall, Nate wasn’t looking for any missing man. He was after the ultimate fix, the ultimate burn. He knew Brand was going to Blackwall to suicide—and on that, he was way ahead of Barny and me—and he wanted to share it. He must have sensed that the flame thawing his senses to life was the very one that was burning Mr Brand to the ground. His days filled with physical torment, his friends driven from him, pausing for a time to stare at the proverbial car crash of his life, but leaving before the real, bloody work of love began. His job taken from him. His wife fleeing to hers. Nate knew this through our answers to his questions and the filter of his pain, and knew the only conclusion would be Stephen’s decision to end all adventures. And as Nate contemplated the extinguishment of his wonderful drug, he hit upon the idea of the greatest adventure of all: He reached out, as it were, across such a tiny span of time—a mere handful of months?—linked, and walked hand in hand to the brink.

Nate knew the big one was coming that night, and from what he gleaned from our talk, he knew it would be Blackwall Brand would choose. Brand had grown up there, chasing possums and playing spotlight in the warm evenings of Summer holidays there as a child. He and his parents had lived there before his father had died. To die there would be symmetry. Full circle.

What Nate couldn’t have known was that Brand would not complete his plan.

It was no silent, brief flight through the air for Mr Brand. Instead, it was the alien snap of gunfire. For Nate was not the only person to feel the force of Brand’s pain. His wife also suffered, but she warped under the strain of it.

Again, if I had had an adult’s wisdom in my twelve-year-old body, I would have understood why her mood in those last days swung like a wind-chime in the tempest. One day spilling tears into immaculately folded laundry. The next gliding through a house full of revellers, her eyes and teeth shining. She was everywhere at that party, and Mr Brand’s eyes followed her. But nobody looked at me—Mr Brand. And then finally there had become violent. Thrown plates and slammed doors. Then tears, and laughter and distance all at once.

I guess somewhere in there she decided to kill him. For it was she who stood there, dripping, pale, and vacant-eyed, the night Stephen Brand went to take his own life. I can imagine her pulling the car to a stop not so far from where we marched off the bus. I can see her slipping through the rain-slick bush, see her pausing for only a moment as she saw the silhouette of her husband, an inky statue against the rich, festooned houses of Peppermint Grove across the river. There she administered not only the brute lead projectile that killed her husband, but the fatal echo of its shocking impact that, months later, would stun Nate’s heart to a stand still, and send him tumbling over the brink.

It was when the police came to recover Nate’s body that they found the horribly decomposed remains of Brand wedged into rock at the base of the cliffs.

I have no proof for my theory, none that would stand up in court at any rate. But on the strength of it I have spent my life. I am this day a detective with the West Australian Police Force, have gathered to myself considerable resources, and have spent every ounce of energy I could spare scouring Australia, and any land holding the faintest glimmer of hope, for a woman who the records hold guilty of one murder, which I know to be two.

I write this now at the end of my quest. Do not misunderstand me. I never did find Mrs Brand. She may be dead now for all I know. I retire from it. The badge given me all those years ago is pitted and lined like the face I see staring back at me in the mirror above the washbasin each morning. I’ve known for some time now this unending search has drained me, left me a wasted and weary man. Again, I wish I had known something sooner.

There is another verse in the bible that Barny shared with me before he died. Stroke at age thirty-nine. He must have sensed it coming. Caring to the end.

It says: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

Mercy? I so took the image of that woman, her selfishness, that the only consolation she had for the hell her husband was going through was a bullet—and this for a man who I think did everything in this power to stem the flow of it outside himself—that it came to live and breathe. It began to walk beside me, and lay its burning hand on my shoulder, and yearn for a setting aright.

Barny knew this. Perhaps he felt the heat upon my shoulder when his own hand found its way there in his characteristically physical connection. He wondered in his still strangely stressed syllables if she had not suffered much already. Perhaps he had heard something in her voice all those years ago that spoke of her love for Stephen. A deep, true love, strained beyond bearing. “Who really knows all that is needed to pass judgment on her?” he had gently probed. At what cost to myself was I pursuing it to the bitter end? These words I endured and let pass in debt to our friendship.

Of all the witnesses pertinent to the case, the one not able to be summoned by any human court, Stephen Brand, perhaps has the most valuable testimony. It strikes me now he has given it. More than donating the memory of his senses to three boys who lacked them—a philanthropist to his final moments—he may also have given us the only testimony that could shed light on the inner dimension of this tragedy. That in doing so yet another life was lost only bears further evidence to the tangle of human motive and circumstance in this broken world.