Dark Matter (5 page)

Bert’s eyes remained on the folded
portrait. He rubbed his nose with a finger.

From somewhere within Rasputin a surge of
fury welled up. Its heat prickled his skin as though he had stepped from shadow
into full sun.

“I don’t know where the hell that came from.
But it saved us another hour staring at a bloody screen. You should all be
happy. I’m tired. My head hurts. And—”

He caught the sharp tone in his voice like
the whiff of something dead. With effort he reined in his anger. “Maybe I
needed today to do that, a prod.”

He changed tack, petitioned Bert. “Isn’t
that how it goes? In spurts? Years of practice with nothing to show, then bang:
you crack it.” Bert lifted his gaze as though it weighed a ton to meet Rasputin’s.
His smile was a shadow of its winning best.

“Monk,” Jordy said, and paused, gathering
all attention in the room. “You’re left-handed.”

Rasputin took a moment to comprehend. He
lifted his right hand, turned the palm up, and splayed his fingers. The tips of
his thumb, index and middle finger were smudged with ink.

* * *

When José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba,
world chess champion of the 1920s, was asked how he decided his next move—how
deep he delved in the labyrinth of possible moves—he responded: “I see only one
move ahead, but it is always the correct one.”

Capablanca perceived the game in stark
contrast to the novice, for whom the chess board stages a seemingly random
clutter of pieces, of barely understood capability and worth. Capablanca could
name that bishop surrounded by a gaggle of pawns—
a fianchettoed bishop in
the castled kingside
. His mind was the product of year upon year of study,
reflection and refinement, where each insight folded into the previous until
all were submerged by their own weight into his subconscious.

In all likelihood Capablanca wasn’t being
arrogant to say he simply chose the correct move. Intuition might well have
been the only object perceptible to his mind, the residual tang of
long-forgotten fruit.

For Rasputin, the sublimation of his
rudimentary drawing skill had taken but a single day. The speed of transition
afforded him a kind of double-vision, with which he saw the old way and the new
way, the old clumsy perception that created rude sketches and the new that
transcoded memory or vision directly to paper.

But that double-vision produced an
unnerving sense of disjointedness, so he forced himself to forget the old. Now
he saw, he drew. Hadn’t it always been that simple?

When Dee visited the next day, the room was
already littered with a dozen portraits. Even the newspaper man had been
immortalised, as much as something committed to serviette can be said to be
immortal.

It was mid-morning when she poked her head
around the curtain that hid the bed from curious passers-by. Rasputin was
watching kids’ television that appeared disconcertingly like an acid trip. Her
arrival supplied the impetus he needed to switch it off.

She hugged him, a rib-creaker. It had all
of her in it today. Part of his mind mused over why she hadn’t become a nurse—she
had always been such a physical person—while another part tried to read her
mood.

She sat and began unpacking supplies from a
shopping bag. She didn’t stop chatting as she pulled item after item from the
bag and distributed them about the room: magazines, a toothbrush (substitute for
the ‘hospital’s tile cleaner’), his age-cured thongs, and enough chocolate to
make a hippy diabetic.

“Want a portrait?” he said.

He lobbed the question like a stone into
the flow of her words, grinning at her back as she put a photo on the windowsill.
It was of the three of them, poorly exposed, taken at dusk on a sandbar in the
river. She paused mid-reminiscence, the water curled around the stone, it sank,
and she continued as before.

He guessed she was still disturbed by the
sketch. It irked him, felt like a slur on his character. Since yesterday he had
marshalled what were, to his mind, more convincing explanations. But they stuck
in his throat. There was something else amiss with Dee. Her mood was like a
chord with a note he could not put a finger on: she was unsettled; happy to be
talking with him about mundanities; and...what?

She emptied the bag at last and dropped
into an armchair, silent, and content it seemed for her eyes to roam the room.

“You could have come earlier,” he said,
casting a glance at the dead eye of the TV poised above the end of his bed.
“Nearly got my second head injury watching that crap.”

She crooked an eyebrow. “Kids’ TV is
standard for trauma patients,” she said. “It’s back to square one for you
junior.” She smiled as she said it, and it almost came off. But there it was
again. Her gaze would not stay with him. It drifted out the window.

“There’s a boy chasing ducks down there,”
she said. “There are enough ducks that if they gang up, he’s dead meat.” She
looked at Rasputin finally, pupils dilating to suck in the light. “Sorry. I did
mean to come earlier.”

“Knock it off.”

“Patricia’s dead,” she said.

Her words evoked an image of a funeral
party gathered about a Volkswagen-sized coffin.

She went on, “I turned the key this morning
and all I got was a whir and a rattle. Called the RAC, but the guy said it was
the death rattle. Or repairs upwards of a thousand bucks, which is the same as
saying it’s the death rattle.”

He stared at the sheets for a moment. “It’s
odd, but I’m going to miss that purple monstrosity.”

She nodded. “So I called a taxi.”

“A taxi? I really was kidding.”

“I know.”

He was first to speak again. “Speaking of
death, the physiotherapist visited me this morning.” He swivelled his legs over
the edge of the bed and sat up. “No, not for my brain,” he said in response to
her blank stare. “Apparently the brain is connected, indirectly, to all sorts
of things. Who’d’ve guessed.”

He eased himself over the lip of the bed
the way he had slid into a heated pool just two weeks prior. But the air in the
room did not buoy him as the chlorine-saturated water had. Instead it seemed to
thrust down upon his shoulders, threatening to buckle him at the knees. He
stood up straight and waited for the fireworks behind his eyelids to die.

“What are you doing?” she said, alarmed.

“My catheter’s out (sure you needed to know
that) and I don’t fancy sitting in a pool of my own urine this morning.
Tomorrow perhaps, but not on a Sunday.”

He took a step with his right leg toward
the bathroom, and as he began to shift his left in the long familiar
counterpart motion, it dragged, biting on the sticky linoleum. It slowed him,
sucked at his balance. An alien sense of mutiny slid up his leg, and his shoulders
twisted to compensate.

Finally, grudgingly, the leg prodded
forward.

Dee moaned. He didn’t need to look at her
to know she had covered her mouth.

“It’s okay,” he said, reaching the bathroom
at last. He paused to catch his breath. “It’s just fallout. The surgeon said
there would be some. It’ll work itself out.” He didn’t tell her Thorpe hadn’t
said the last part.

They talked until lunch, and by then it
almost felt normal. An orderly laid lunch out and asked Rasputin where in his
skinny frame he was planning on stuffing it, all the while looking at the portrait
he had sketched of her at breakfast.

When Rasputin began to dig in the dishes,
Dee stood, hugged him over the lunch tray, and wedged a piece of paper among
the plates.

“I finally got hold of your parents,” she
said, and left.

He retrieved the note and unfolded it. It
was an A4 sheet. Crisp peaks and valleys remained where the paper had been
folded, dividing it into eight segments. Printed on it was a small amount of
text, and from its layout and font he saw immediately that it was an email.

He scanned its message:

“Our Dearest
Rasputin.

Deanne told us you have been in a very
serious accident, but have come through it! What a rich vein of insights must
now be open to you. We’re envious. :)

Her email caught us on the brink of
exploring Prague! We had intended on travelling direct to Moscow, but had a
little accident of our own. We were in Verona—home of Romeo and Juliet, you
know—and did not make it to the airport on time. Italians drive as if they are
walking in a mall!

Stay well. We
will trade stories.

Love, Beatrice
and Mark.”

Rasputin sat staring at the letter as the
echo of his mother’s voice died in his ears. He closed his hand in a fist over
the paper, destroying its symmetry, and flung it at the gap left by the open
toilet door.

He took his head in his hands and, for the
second time since coming out of the coma, broke open and spilled tears.

Two weeks later he sat in the hospital
foyer waiting for the courtesy car that would take him home. He wore blue jeans
and a faded green t-shirt instead of the pale blue hospital pyjamas he had been
wearing when he had woken from the coma. His chin and cheeks were unevenly
shaded with dark stubble. He hadn’t looked at himself much lately. The purple
seam of his surgical scar could just be seen beneath his cap. Its starkly
defined suture marks had what Jordy termed a Frankensteinish feel. Otherwise he
was the image of the young man who had entered the foodhall a month earlier
with a hunger for Chinese food. But only while he sat still.

His fingers drummed on the lounge’s vinyl
to the rhythm of a song he had heard belched from a mobile phone that morning.
He had heard only a sliver of the song, four seconds of ring tone, but it had
been enough to get the earworm wriggling. He had hummed it around a mouthful of
toothpaste, tapped it with his knuckles on a toilet’s porcelain, and even
pressed his thumb to his fingers in time with its rhythm while he rode a lift
in silence with a nervous couple taking their newborn home.

Perhaps that was why mobile phones were
banned in the hospital,
worms
.

The other reason for the worm’s
persistence, aside from its sheer groove, was what entered in when his mind
fell silent. Thorpe had visited that morning for his discharge check-up,
mercifully alone. He had given Rasputin the all clear, barring only the
possibility of a time bomb in his head. He had saved that revelation for the
finale. He charged Rasputin, with that odd intensity, to be vigilant for signs
of deterioration. He talked of biochemical cascades and listed symptoms: blurry
vision, loss of concentration, muscle quivers, seizures, irritability,
depression, mood swings. Rasputin was glad Jordy had not been there to hear. He
would have said Rasputin’s brain trauma was congenital.

When Rasputin realised he was laughing at
his own joke, he furtively scanned the foyer. It was empty save for a lady
shuffling toward the lifts with the aid of a Zimmer frame.

He looked at the walking stick resting across
his lap. It had become his twenty minutes earlier. He had arrived in the lobby
and laboured toward the lounge using a hired elbow crutch. A receptionist had
tracked his progress then followed him to the couch. She had borne the stick
and asked if he was Mr. Lowdermilk. The stick (black, plumed with a pink bow,
and riven by a scintillating blue lightning bolt) had been left for him, a
gift.

He knew straight away it was Jordy’s doing,
and briefly considered denying knowledge of this Lowdermilk fellow. But a
thought occurred to him: with bones needing breaking, a hefty stick would be
useful. He took it.

When the courtesy car eventually came,
neither the ring tone nor Thorpe’s voice was on the air at Radio Rasputin.
Without being aware of the transition, he had begun savouring the memory of a
lazy breakfast on the patio and Jordy’s banter.

CAIN

I called the enterprise of our
scientists and surgeons—their ‘progress’—short-sighted.

Another phrase springs to mind. In English
it goes something like: one cannot polish a turd.

You think me too harsh?

Consider this. When artillery blew a
soldier’s flesh off, the surgeons’ response was to attempt the reverse. But if
you had seen their sorry monsters you would have wept. Photos of these
creatures were published in medical journals and I was hard pressed to say
which was
before
and which
after.
Better to die a warrior’s death
than skulk forever in fear of your own reflection.

What was needed was a rethink from the
ground up. A return to the font. A revolution. You need only look at me for
proof, although I’m not the first.

Not that my appearance offered much proof
of anything when I stumbled from my tomb. You might well have taken me for a
gross caricature of a man. But I soon brought form to the chaos.