Dark Matter (19 page)

Rasputin jerked his shoulders square and
billowed his cheeks.

Well, Professor Thorpe, you might get a
surprise at what you find on your hook...

He cupped his hands around his skull,
normally a reflex of over-tiredness, and held it gently, with control. He had
the feeling that what lay between his hands was only beginning to wind up. He
fancied he felt it sucking in force from the aether like a driven magneto.

This time you hooked something with
teeth.

Reluctantly he retrieved the papers and set
them in order. He read the cover note properly and realised with a start that
the bold print was alerting him to the fact that his first appointment was
today. This morning.

No longer was he a comet gliding through
the morning on a trajectory for rendezvous with a Mediaeval history lecture
that afternoon. One short burst of laser, courtesy of the morning mail, had
knocked him onto a collision course with a nearer, nebulous body:
psycho-cognitive assessment.

He heaved himself out of the lounge chair
and jog-hopped into the bathroom. There was no time to accumulate the normal
routines of showering, shaving, and (de-)perfuming. Pinched for time, tooth
brushing trumped them all. Personal hygiene was more
Bridge
than
Battleship
.
He brushed like most people mow a lawn, touching every surface once, and only
once.

So when a knock at the door came with his
lower jaw untouched, his whole day felt threatened. By the time he finished,
and sent the toothbrush careening off the sink, he was sure whoever had knocked
had given up and gone.

He needn’t have worried.

“Dee?”

“Hi.” She bustled past him, and put
something in the fridge.

“What are you doing?”

She reappeared, strangling an empty plastic
shopping bag. “Taking you to uni.”

“Does Jordy know?”

“What?”

“That you’re having a phone affair with
Thorpe?”

Rasputin thought she might have steeled
herself against his bad mood. If so, it didn’t seem to have had much effect.

“So sorry I happen to give a shit,” she
said, with tears in her voice, and went back out the door.

Rasputin picked up his backpack from the
floor where he had dumped it the night before and went after her.

The silence was like clear glue packed
around them as Dee moved through the peak hour clog on the freeway, stabbing
forward only to stop again. The radio was off. A nameless rock anthem leaked
into the car from someone else’s jacked-up stereo.

Rasputin desperately wanted to say
something, anything, to dissolve the glue that fixed his face forward, and cut
them off from each other. He felt like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a
goat and now decided what it had really wanted was the salad.

With pain, he regurgitated the goat.
“Sorry.” And that was all he said, but the air became air again.

“I like the new car,” he said.

“So do I. It followed me home, so I kept
it.”

He snorted. “Good luck with the vet bills.
You kids never think about the bills.”

They were silent again for a time. The
traffic cleared a blockage and began to flow. A car was parked in the emergency
lane. It hadn’t obstructed any other lanes, but its hazard lights had enough
people rubber-necking that it may as well have sat in the middle of the
freeway. A young boy sat in the back of the car, head in hands, staring back at
the passing traffic, while his mother spoke into a mobile phone, painting her
predicament in large brush strokes with an arm laden with bangles.

“Did you ever wet your pants in school?”
Rasputin said.

“What?” Dee neighed, spraying spittle at
the car’s spotless windshield. “No I never wet my pants in school.”

“Bet you did. You just blocked it out.”

Dee was shaking her head.

“Okay then, ” he said. “What’s the most
embarrassing thing you ever did as a kid?”

She checked his expression, evidently to
gauge whether he was serious or winding her up.

“I don’t know about most, but I could compile
a top five, maybe even a top ten.”

“Pick one.”

“I killed a hamster once.”

“That’s tragic, not embarrassing.”

“No, it was embarrassing. I was told a
minute before to watch where I sat.”

“Tragic and negligent, then.”

“Okay, okay.” She paused while allowing a
car to merge ahead of them.

“I sat in a urinal once.” When he said
nothing, she explained. “I took a piss in a urinal.
Comprende?
”

“How old were you?”

“Seven. Dad was always on call, so Mum
usually took us out. I’d never seen a standalone urinal before.”

Rasputin tried to imagine it. Dee took a
hand from the wheel to slap him on the chest.

“It’s not that funny,” she said. “It was a
school excursion.” Then, lower, “My teacher, Mr. Gilbertson, walked in.”

Rasputin suppressed a laugh. “More tragedy.
The only way that could have been more tragic was if you’d peed on a hamster in
a urinal.”

Dee pressed her lips together. Rasputin
predicted he would hear nothing more from her top ten.

He drew in more breath than needed, then
said, “What about regrets? Is there anything you really regret doing?”

They passed beneath an electronic billboard
telling them the freeway ahead was crawling. Useful information once you were
on it.

“There are so many of those. I regret
not
doing something. I regret it every day.”

Rasputin could not look at her face.

“I never told my Dad I loved him before he
died. Not in words.” She glanced at him apologetically, “That’s kind of cliché,
I know.”

He couldn’t believe it. Of all the people
he knew, Dee was the one who said that word the most.

“But we’re not talking about me, are we?”
she said. And Rasputin immediately found himself uncomfortable in the trap he
had laid for himself.

“Hey, I’m not the hamster killer,” he said,
and propped himself against the arm rest and gazed at the far-off silhouette of
Winthrop Hall’s tower. It was thrust into the sky, an axle about which the wide
bay seemed to turn as they drove.

“You can’t shrug everything off with a
joke, Monk. That’s no way to live.”

“Seems to work for most,” he said, sounding
mawkish in his own ears. Perhaps to raise the tone, he reached for an
authority: “What is life, but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.” Did he believe that? He guessed not. “But, I suppose it
takes one to know one, and there we hit a paradox,” he said, feeling the childish
bookend slot home with pleasure.

“Whoever said that?” said Dee.

“Some yob. It doesn’t matter. I just
concluded he was an idiot.”

“Why did you ever get into philosophy? I
swear it’s corrosive, for you at least.”

“Why did you get into microbes? They can be
pretty corrosive. Why did Hitler get into genocide? Ditto.”

He sensed she knew he was just playing with
her now. He hadn’t meant to. Deep currents within him were doing everything
possible to draw him away from what he really wanted to say.

He sought to bring it back to the level:
“Someone else said: ‘It’s perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind.’ He was
right. You’re right.” He examined a lonely cloud, its wind-wrought warp and
woof, but saw nothing in it.

He sighed. “But you might as well tell a
crack junkie that the stuff eats his organs.”

“What do you regret, Monk?”

He looked at her along his eyes. The
eastward sun cast her profile in shadow, and limned her silhouette a
luminescent gold. In that moment he knew Dee to be beautiful, and in the same
moment was deeply happy that Jordy loved her. He wondered when Jordy would tell
her.

She continued, eyes on the road, hesitant.
“Is it your...sister?” She spoke the word as if her tongue were navigating the
contours of a foreign word.

Sister
. It
would have punched a white-hot spike through his head, if he were genuinely
synaesthesic. But he had wanted it. Wanted it to be out there, in the real
world. Now it was.

The car wound off the freeway exit and onto
the bay road, the same he had travelled with Thorpe not twenty-four hours
before. He thought he had been scared then. He let the silence stretch.

They were soon banked up behind the wide
backside of a bus about to bomb the university with live students. Dee edged
the car forward, attempting to ease past the bus and into a car park.

“My sister, yes,” he said, as the car
slowed. “It has to do with her. That I can’t even call her by name, because I
never found the courage to ask what it was. I regret that.”

Dee pulled the car over by a disabled
parking bay, and stared at him unblinking.

He opened the door and stepped out. He
shouldered his backpack and settled his cane by his side.

She said, “Wait,” and reached out a hand.

He thought she meant to grab him, said,
“Don’t,” and was startled by the ferocity in his voice. “That I don’t know her
name is a fly on a pile of shit the size of Mount Everest.”

For the second time that morning he
breathed air in like a man stealing his last lungful. The goat had been hard.
This felt like turning himself inside out.

“I never asked if I was the one, the one
that...” Tears sprang into his eyes. They blurred Dee’s face, fractured it.
“And the kicker: I can’t bring myself to regret that. I’ve tried. I can’t. I’m
terrified I never will.”

He failed to shut the door properly, leant
on it with his hip to squeeze the mechanism home, and walked away.

He had worried what Dee would say. That she
had said nothing was worse. Her bleary, pale face had just looked at him as
though he were a stranger who had opened a vein in front of her.

He walked through the leafy campus without
seeing it. He had agonised about mingling Dee with the memory of his sister,
which roiled within him. Her reaction clung to him like a fog. He waited for
the sun to burn it away.

He mounted the steps to the psychology building
still trying to shake his mood. Worse, he feared that to a trained eye, a
psychologist’s eye, he was broadcasting his thoughts like a signal fire, his
head ablaze in a flaming column of self-revelation.

A sudden fear wedged itself in among the
others: Thorpe had sent him here, for psycho-cognitive assessment, to lay him
open like a cadaver. Hollywood portrayed psychologists as modern day magicians,
able to pluck the very thoughts from a man’s head from nothing more than a telltale
twitch. Rasputin had always scoffed at the idea; who knew the thoughts of a man
but the man alone? But today he couldn’t find comfort in that assertion.

He followed the signs to the clinic up a
flight of stairs and was soon shaking hands with his assessor, Lloyd. It helped
that
Lloyd
was not a name Rasputin could easily imbue with magical aura.

Lloyd handed him a clipboard holding a form
and a pen.

“Put your name and details there, Mr. F.
Meat.” He laughed at his own joke, then pointed at the bottom of the form. His
fingernails were clipped in precise arcs and unnaturally white. “Don’t worry
about that part. It’s for subjects receiving remuneration. Usually you get $25
a session—which is pretty good if you ask me. Better than McDonalds. But I was
told these sessions won’t be covered by a grant.”

Rasputin said, “I’m covered. It’s fine,”
thinking that Lloyd didn’t know the half of it.

“Did you receive the waiver in the mail?
They get sent out so that subjects can read the fine print if they’re really
interested. If you didn’t bring it, no problem. You’ll just have to sign again.
“

So that’s what I am, thought Rasputin, a
subject
.
A subject in the encyclopaedia of life. He imagined his entry: Rasputin Titian
Lowdermilk, male, twenty-five, permanent student, permanent disability. Suspected
ongoing mental cataclysm. Imports goodwill and friendship. Exports moody
wisecracks. GDP in freefall, Trade deficit terminal.

He indicated to Lloyd that he hadn’t
brought the form. Lloyd produced one and Rasputin splashed his signature over
the line at the bottom of the sheet.

Lloyd then showed Rasputin to the
Media
Room
. It was a stark white cube, three meters to a side. One wall was taken
up with a projection screen, and the opposite wall was inset with a mirror that
Rasputin guessed to be two-way. In the centre of the room sat a chair that
looked transplanted from a dentist’s clinic.

“It’s a bit Orwellian, isn’t it?”

“That’s why we call it the Media Room. I
don’t think folks would be keen to help if it were called the Orwell Room. But
don’t be put off. We have to take care to satisfy certain protocols in
psychological experiments.”