Dark Matter (51 page)

His young self rounded the rear corner of
the car for the third time, feeling the slap of thongs on his bare feet, and
lost sight of his sister. The next memory to come from the bundle would be his
shortcut across the front seats, then that sense of shuddering, of the heavens
turning. The scream. The sight of his sister’s tangled body pinned beneath a
tyre.

He gritted his teeth to endure.

But here the memories ceased to fall as
they had so many times before.

Instead, shocked by this departure from the
script, he went on around the front of the car, trailing a sandy hand over its
silver grill. Not until the return lap, his hand now brushing the white paint
of the car’s flank, did it happen. With a faint groan, as of a strut taking
weight, the rear of the car dipped.

His young mind registered no panic. He
continued on to the back of the car, which now sloped at twenty degrees.

He saw her then. She was pressed beneath a
wheel. Perhaps she had hidden behind it. The sand bank that rose to meet the
grass had subsided. The car had plunged with it.

Alarm registered in his young mind. Even at
three, he knew something was desperately wrong.

Rasputin watched, tears streaming unheeded
down his face, as little legs pumped through sand and up the collapsed bank.
His thongs caught in the dry hummocks and came flying off in turn. He scrambled
onto the passenger seat and looked at the hand-brake. Hadn’t he been warned not
to touch it?―danger, danger, his dad had said. But he hadn’t touched it, and
danger had attacked his sister anyway. Maybe now was the time for it.

He clutched the brake, tried to force it
down like he had seen his dad do so many times, longing for the
thock
of
the brake’s release. He leant his weight on it. The release tripped and the
shaft fell flat to the floor.

But nothing happened. The car did not move.
It stayed stuck, at an angle.

His young self sat slumped in the passenger
seat and began to cry angry tears. The vision of his bare, sand-encrusted, feet
blurred. Through the windscreen he saw two people, adults, running toward the
car, growing bigger.

At last Rasputin tore his gaze away. This
grief, rediscovered in adulthood, had begun to scab over. He didn’t need to
pick at it.

He let it go, and rose again toward the
present.

His passage to the surface felt as thought
it took days. He didn’t linger, even when he passed forgotten joys. For much of
the time he did not observe, being lost in thoughts that ran to consolation: it
was an old memory. She was forever beyond pain’s tyranny. He was sure of that.

Slowly, he began to see he had not needed
exoneration. That was the gift. He had already seen through to the truth: his
sister would have forgiven him. What a valuable insight to have lost, had he
already known there was nothing to forgive.

He blinked his eyes open. Water sloshed
inches below his face in the hull of the yacht. He rose gingerly and sat. He
stretched his neck, feeling it sting in the creases and knowing he would be
sunburnt.

He recalled the words that had come to him
at the bottom of the well of his being―beneath it:
I desire mercy not
sacrifice.

If he had carried them there with him, he
could not remember where he had read them. He determined to search for them,
but not in the basement―that door was shut now. He would bar it over. This search
would be of the old-fashioned sort.

As he stretched stiff muscles, he felt the
bulk of an object in his pocket. He drew it out. It was a block of wood,
engraved with the symbol of Infinity: Cain’s chop.

Clotho’s message had carried a postscript
to the effect that the chop and the wealth it represented were now Rasputin’s.
To
the victor go the spoils.

He tilted the wooden block, watching one
face catch the sun. True to its symbol, Infinity, it represented an unknown.
Who knew how much money it stood for? He already had plans for it. He had a
ticket booked that took in Hong Kong, and Burma―where a certain orphanage would
receive an unlooked for and anonymous injection of funds―then Prague, and a
long overdue talk with his parents. From there it was open-ended, as he did not
yet know how cold the trail would be when he found it, or where it would lead.

He gazed up into the azure dome that
encased the river and its city, and had a flash of recall of the first time he
had sailed with Reim. The stars in their constellations pulsed through the
blue.

But unlike then, he no longer felt at the
centre of things. He smiled, and drew up the anchor. A current began to work
the nose of the craft round to home.

“...the sprinkled blood that speaks a
better word than the blood of Abel.” Hebrews 12:24 NIV

EPILOGUE

No
one smiles like a redeemed orphan.

Rasputin screwed his nose up at the
thought. Too abstract. He tried again.

No one smiles like
Mary.

Better.

Mary, found on a rubbish tip, thrown away
like all the other rubbish by a stepfather who had no time for a girl.

She had sat atop the stinking pile for two
days. Fixed to the spot as though it were Fate that had put her there, and
there she must remain, until Reim’s daughter Ineke had found her.

No one smiled like Mary.

But today it was the absence of her smile
that had prompted the thought.

She sat in the dirt next to Rasputin, her
eyes wet with tears, her arm in his lap. Along the baby-smooth skin of her
forearm was opened a deep gouge. Blood was seeping from it in every direction.

Ineke De Groot’s husband, Andrew, had
bought a basketball ring from downtown Yangon. The older kids had rushed to
gather wood, nails, and hammers with which to build a support frame. An hour
later the kids were shooting hoops. No one had noticed the nail that had not
been folded over until Mary had fallen on it.

Rasputin sat nursing the bloody arm while
Andrew hunted for the first-aid kit. Before Andrew had left he had warned
Rasputin with a gesture and a word, “Blood.”

Blood. He meant HIV. Mary was HIV positive.

But sitting there, watching Mary’s tears
drip and mingle with the blood, Rasputin couldn’t help himself.

He gave his hand a quick inspection. No
broken skin. He took his handkerchief and mopped up what blood he could—it was
a deep gash—then folded his hand over the wound.

Mary leant her head into his chest, and
they waited like that, amid the laughter and whoops of the boys who were still
playing, until Andrew returned.

When Andrew saw Rasputin’s hand he shot him
a look but said nothing. He donned latex gloves, peeled the hand away from the
wound, and began swabbing it with sterile gauze.

Rasputin was watching Mary’s reaction when
Andrew said, “I thought you said it was deep?”

Rasputin looked at him and then down at the
cut. He saw not the deep gash he knew had been there, but a shallow scratch,
nothing worse than one would get from a broken twig.

Rasputin looked at Mary, astonished, but
seeking her support. She simply smiled, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world, and leapt up to join in the game.

Three days later Rasputin lay on his bed in
the dark. Three nights and still sleep eluded him. He was exhausted and wired.
He listened to mosquitos buzzing against the net that was suspended over his
prone body, while two thoughts baited his mind and kept him from sleep. He
chased them like a dog its tail, but could not latch on, bed them down, file
them away.

 
The
first was how Mary’s wound had healed. The second had risen out of it: he
should be dead. When he had stabbed himself to tap his blood and kill Cain, he’d
known it was a mortal wound. Known and been happy.

But here he was, lying awake in a dorm with
ten sleeping children in an orphanage on the outskirts of Yangon, the capital
of Myanmar, thousands of miles from Perth.

At last he could bear it no more. He threw
his sheet back and rose. He sent his hand under the net and rummaged by feel in
his backpack for mosquito repellent, and when he found it, slicked every inch
of bare skin he could find with its oily liquid. When he had first used it over
a month ago, the children had told him without English that he smelled, and
offered him the paste ground from the bark of the thanaka tree that they daubed
on their cheeks. He had replied, without English, that he preferred to smell.

He let himself out on tiptoes, and crept to
a gate that let onto the street running past the orphanage. It was padlocked.
He unlocked it with a key, closed the gate behind him, and re-locked it.
Sometimes relatives of the children came when they reached a
useful
age
and stole them away.

This far from downtown Yangon there were no
streetlights. Though the sky was dark, he could feel the weight of monsoon
cloud pressing down. It was late. When the rain came, the streets would turn to
rivers.

He had stayed longer than he intended. The
kids had gotten under his skin.

He passed a group of men standing around a
small fire, out late and biding their time till who-knew-what. The whites of
their eyes reflected the fire’s light as they watched him pass. Rasputin was too
intent on avoiding potholes to acknowledge them.

A quarter of an hour later he reached his
destination. Sheltering beneath the dark bulk of a banyan tree, snug in its
cage of aerial roots, was a little shack of corrugated iron. A doorway gave
onto a room lit by a twenty-watt bulb. A wide window was cut into the
street-ward wall. Standing on the other side of it was an old Burmese man.

“Mr. Rasputin,” the man said, smiling.
“Troubled dreams?”

Rasputin summoned a smile, ordered coffee,
and paid in kyats. He ducked his head and entered the shack. Two men were
drinking tea over a makeshift table of wooden cartons. Rasputin sank onto a
chair in the corner opposite, where the light was weakest.

His coffee came and he drank the strong,
bitter liquid.

And steeled himself.

Was this how it started?

Were these fluttering temptations the first
steps on the road to madness? To raving?

He thought of opium dens, jails without
bars. But he was already enduring torture.

He paused. One last chance to change his
mind. He could finish the coffee, return to the orphanage. Tomorrow, or the
next day, he would be on a plane to Prague.

But he couldn’t leave his head behind. It
would taunt him. Tease him about the thoughts that had run through it the last
three nights. Tempt him with the possibility that the miracle machine, his
hibernation, had aimed higher than the death of one man.

The machine worked from the imago’s deepest
desire. But hadn’t he, after all, had an even
deeper
desire than to
atone for the death he thought he had caused all those years ago? A desire that
dwarfed his guilt like the sun the earth?

When he had seen his sister crumpled
beneath the wheel, and remembered her in the years after, he had wanted
something more than to demonstrate his love unto death.

He had wanted her to live.

That couldn’t be. No power of man could
work that miracle.

But...

He closed his eyes, and for the first time
in months, went
within
.

He descended to the basement in his mind,
to the door that he had closed and barred and sworn never to reopen.

And found it gone.

The shock prickled his skin.

In its place stood a wardrobe. (
Perhaps
madness begins with a wardrobe?
) It sat exactly where the door had stood,
the door that had been ravaged by the atmosphere of the wounded eye sealed
behind it. The wardrobe was huge, oaken, and old. Carved into the face of one of
its doors was a wintering tree, and into the other a rampant lion.

He grasped a handle and yanked open one of
the doors. Inside were coats, and dust, and the smell of mothballs. He took one
step forward, and peered into the darkness, hearing only the blood pulsing in
his ears. Nothing moved but the sifting dust.

He sneezed, and sheepishly backed out. He
had begun to close the door, when he noticed something flutter in the corner of
his vision. He turned to find that a piece of paper had been stuck to the
inside of the wardrobe door with a drawing pin. There was writing on the paper.

He pulled it free and held it near to read
it.

It said:

“Greetings and salutations my little lamb.

My work is done; yours begins. If you are
of good heart, we will meet again. You’ve known me as judge, inventor, and
husbandman. Now know me as,

Your Friend.

PS: Shame on you for thinking the greatest
construction ever made worked only death.”