Dark Matter (4 page)

Bert didn’t even notice. He had slipped a
laptop from his bag and was watching it wake from hibernation. Dee picked the
fingernail up and flicked it at the bin, her habit since the same class. Jordy
hid a smile behind his hand and visibly relaxed.

The laptop emitted a symphonic ping. Bert
swivelled it to afford Rasputin a view of its screen. A layer of dust lay over
it in a faint sheen, visible until an image blazed onto it. It was a photo of
Bert wearing a pink paper hat, the kind found in Christmas bon-bons, and below
his rosy-cheeked face, sitting in his lap, was a boy who had to be a grandson.
The whir of the laptop’s hard drive filled the silence, and icons began to
spatter the photo. Bert clicked one lodged disconcertingly by his nose, and a
banner appeared to pacify the onlookers while the program loaded. It read:
EFACE(tm) v1.1.

“This is new stuff. I’m still getting used
to it,” Bert said, squinting. Faraday glanced up from his phone and smiled privately.
“But the idea is to build an image of our man from bits of computerised
face-Lego, then let the machine work its magic to smooth it all together.” The
hard drive whirred again and a palette of faceless, bald heads filled the
screen.

“You’re not going to draw?” said Rasputin,
and felt a tug of disappointment. He had dabbled at sketching since childhood,
and was eager to watch a forensic artist at work.

Bert shook his head.

Rasputin suppressed a sigh, and had just begun
scanning the first row of heads when Bert switched the screen off.

“We’ll get to that,” said Bert. “First I
want you to take me back to, say, lunchtime on the day of your accident. Can
you do that?” he said, his voice holding a warm, avuncular tone.

Rasputin cast his mind back.

“Every detail you can recall,” said Bert.
He leaned back in his chair, and rested his hands on the rumpled cotton shirt
covering his paunch. He appeared to have forgotten the computer.

“I had lunch on campus.”

Bert interrupted. “—The University of WA?”

Rasputin sensed an alumni’s fervour.

“Yes. I had a test that morning. Tests
always make me hungry. This was on seventeenth century British empiricists.
They make me famished.”

Bert cut in again. “Studying philosophy?”

“Today,” said Jordy, and avoided Rasputin’s
glance.

“I could’ve killed something stodgy like a
Yorkshire pudding,” Rasputin continued. “For all I know it
was
Yorkshire
pudding. With a drink it came to $7.85. I ate in the café beneath the Reid
library, overlooking the moat. I sat at the end nearest the study area, on a
chair scabbed with three pieces of dried gum, and tried to figure out how there
could be more teabags stuck to the ceiling than I could count and yet have
never seen anyone drink tea, let alone hammer-toss them up there.”

He paused. Bert was silent, eyelids
drooping.

“Did I over-detail?”

Bert’s eyes flicked open.

“No, no. But I feel confident moving on
now. Let’s talk about that night. What do you remember?”

Rasputin told him how he had caught a bus
to the foodhall. He mentioned the sweet-and-sour pork, the quiz show, and even
of hearing Napoleon.

Bert chuckled, but his eyes now had a
questing cast.

Rasputin avoided any mention of Amitriptyline,
and said only that in the carpark’s gloom he had almost returned to watch a
movie, some brainless piece of schlock that Jordy would have sublimed with the
epithet
Hollywood Therapy
.

Rasputin paused mid-description, and said
to Jordy: “Should’ve gone with your theory.”

Jordy and Dee had both become still. He
pressed his lips together. She stared at her lap.

“Jordy went that night,” she said. “If
you'd taken a minute longer at dinner, you might have bumped into each other.”

And I
wouldn't be sitting here with staples in my skull, talking to a forensic
artist.

“The carpark,” said Faraday.

Rasputin shook the thought off.

It was when he returned to his memory of
that night that he was shocked by its crispness. Far from being vague or
proportionless, like photos in cast-off newspaper, distended by water or
smeared by grime, it had definition,
edges
that might cut. To recall the
carpark was to be embodied within it, as though he walked in a film-set
replica. He realised he had been describing the scene in present tense.

“How’s the light down there?” said Bert.

“Dark mostly, but over by my car there is a
pool of it.”

A pulse of adrenaline was the first warning
Rasputin was not alone on the set. Another actor appeared. “He’s standing in
it.”

“Is he below you? At eye-level? Above?”

“A little below. I think I’m taller, but he’s
crouched.”

“What is he wearing?”

“A grey hood top—stolen, I think—black
denim pants, frayed over the right knee, and converse sneakers that might have
once been white.”

“Is the hood down?”

“Yes, but I can see his face.” The boy had
turned toward him.

“What age would you say he is?”

“Young. Sixteen? I’ve never been good at
ages.”

“Hair? What amount of hair does he have?”

“Black hair, maybe. He’s been in the rain.
It’s slicked onto his forehead to just below his eyebrows.”

“Do you have a good image of his face?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. I knew it was in there. Hold
that face now.”

What Bert seemed to want, that Rasputin
should isolate his memory of the boy’s face, and preserve it by dint of will,
struck Rasputin as redundant. On the contrary, he knew that Bert could ask for
any or all of that mental simulacrum, today or a thousand years hence, and
Rasputin would have it.

Rasputin heard Bert sigh, and glanced over
to see him coaxing the laptop back to life. The screen was again filled with
rows of faceless heads.

“Still holding that face, which is the best
match?” said Bert.

Rasputin trawled along the line-up, first
row, second, last.

“None of them.”

“Which is closest? Give me your first
guess, then we’ll hone and home.”

Rasputin stabbed a finger at a faceless
head that looked no worse than any other. Bert clicked on it and another batch
of heads appeared, all more or less patterned on the one he had chosen.

“And now?”

Rasputin picked again, with equal
ambivalence.

The hour wore on and the pattern became
entrenched. They progressed from heads to eyes, noses and lips, and even skin.
With each iteration the computer appeared to draw a tighter rein around the
features of subsequent candidates.

At 3.43PM Bert wiped a sheen of sweat from
his brow and clicked a button. Faraday failed to stifle a yawn. Nothing happened
for the time it took him to stretch as far as his starched shirt would allow.
Then alone, framed within the laptop’s screen, appeared a face. It was not a
human face yet—it appeared hewn from orange stone. Then its angles disappeared,
blurred into softer lines, and over its surface various shades pulsed and
wriggled as though it were a worm-eaten apple in time-lapse. Stubble dotted the
skin, lifting the face to photo-realistic detail, and finally it became still.

The face had become a person. A boy in his
late teens. He stared with dead eyes at Rasputin.

Bert paused, breath held, then said, “Is
this our man? The one who pushed you in front of the car?”

Rasputin stared back at the face.

“It can be an emotional time,” said
Faraday, without lifting his gaze from his phone.

Rasputin said at last, “Looks nothing like
him.”

Jordy laughed. Faraday excused himself to
use the toilet. Bert deflated beneath his crinkling brow.

Rasputin tilted his head and squinted. “It’s
okay,” he said, in a salvage attempt.

It rekindled a spark in Bert’s eye, and he
said, “What would you rate it out of ten?”

“A four—” he began, but saw the spark die
again. “Make that a five,” he amended. “His chin wasn’t like that, and—” He
cast about with his right hand clutching at the air, groping for a way to
communicate the missing five.

His gaze happened upon a pen left by a
nurse on the bedside table. He picked it up along with a clean serviette
leftover from lunch. He put the serviette on the trolley table over his midriff
and began to sketch the boy’s face.

He merely meant to give Bert an idea, a
nudge in the right direction. Anything to get the wreck back on the rails. But
when he brought the pen into contact with the serviette’s shallow weave and
conjured the boy’s face to see its contours, a strange thing happened.

For an instant a single eye, the boy’s
left, flared in the vault of his mind. It cast everything else into darkness.
The intensity of its gaze pierced him with an almost physical pain.

He began to draw it.

After the initial shock, his
flare-blindness died, allowing all of the boy’s face and what surrounded it to
seep back into view. But Rasputin’s inner eye remained riveted to that eye.

As he left the first strokes of black on
the serviette, he began to catalogue the eye’s features, iris, pupil, white,
veins. But no sooner had he brought them to mind as precursor to sketching
them, than the ties between word and thing, abstract and concrete, evanesced,
faded and disappeared. Lost too was his perception of where he was and who he was
with. Even the ticking of the clock vanished from his consciousness, although
this realisation came later.

He was aware only of face and pen, and the
flesh that connected them, aware of it as never before, at a creaturely,
instinctual level. He felt the bundles of nerve-lines, infinitesimally small,
that fed circuits of motor cells driving the brute pack of muscle that encased
his shoulder, driving it in concert with bicep and triceps, and finer muscles
that worked tendons like puppet strings to grasp the pen and nuance its stroke.

Stroke by stroke, ink left the nib, stained
the paper, and began to mirror an eye.

As he began to sketch the other eye, he
examined the one he had drawn. Its detail surprised him: the thickness of the
lower lid, shot with clusters of highlight that ran along its length till it
met the marbled iris; the inner corner of the eye, an inlet whose waters were
girt by twin strands of lid that terminated in the dark bowl at the wall of the
nose; and the haphazard tangle of eyelashes sprouting from the top lid, clumped
in irregular sheaves.

He wondered, as the second eye emerged from
his pen, how it was that two objects so different could ever be called a pair.

As he drew the nose, beginning with the
negative space made by the cheek and puffy underside of the eye, he realised
with a start that his mental self—the one standing within the carpark—was
touching the boy’s face. Rasputin’s finger was tracing the contour of the boy’s
nose, feeling its shape, conjuring its substance, so that he could express it
in two dimensions.

His was the only movement in the otherwise
frozen scene. His hand spidered over the face, his touch that of the sculptor
testing his art—wondering if he had caught the likeness, fearing to mar the
stone further.

He drew straddled between two worlds—the
mental and the real—until he had coaxed the portrait into the hospital room’s
seventy-watt light. The face emerged, beginning in the centre of the serviette
and growing outward, as if it had been submerged in water then brought to the
surface by its own buoyancy.

When he at last lifted the pen from the
serviette, he did not scuff or shade to amend a stroke or obliterate an error,
as in the past. There was nothing to remove and nothing to add.

He grasped the serviette in both hands and
appraised it in the whole. Seen through a slight squint, it could have been a
black and white photograph. It was immaculate.

Only then did he hear the ticking of the
clock again. It was the only sound he could hear.

Everyone was staring at him.

He tossed the serviette into Bert’s lap
with a flippancy only skin deep. It folded in flight, and Bert’s mottled brown
fingers did not move to open it.

Rasputin broke the silence. “Why don’t we
run with that.”

Faraday was the first to pop. “Why didn’t
you bloody well say—” Hysteria bubbled through his professional mien. He
crossed his arms and sat back so quickly the cushion on his chair hissed.

Rasputin was caught without an answer. He
spluttered, “I can’t remember the last time I drew—”

Dee cut over him. “You’ve
never
drawn like that.”

He met her gaze but couldn’t read it. Or
perhaps he could. It was something he had never seen in her green eyes: awe.

Jordy knitted his brows and his gaze made
laps between the serviette still folded in Bert’s lap and Rasputin.