North of Nowhere, South of Loss (23 page)

“What I notice, whether I'm in Boston or London or Toronto or Paris, you always manage to wake me up. You do it on purpose.”

“I am utterly consistent,” he protests. “I call when I'm feeling low.”

“Or high,” she reminds. “You call when you're manic.”

“If you mean that I call when there's some intense intellectual issue that needs discussion, I plead guilty. You should be honoured that I always choose you.”

“Purely habit on your part,” Philippa says. “And the fact that I put up with it because it's the only way to stay in touch with you, you bastard. Where are you calling from this time?”

“Japan.”

“Japan!”

“Osaka. This'll be ongoing, for half of each year.”

“Is it a research company?”

“Research partner. We're teaming up. He's at the university here, but he'll spend half the year in Melbourne. We just got a huge grant.”

“So this is a high.”

“Well …” he says doubtfully. “To some extent. Partly. The living conditions are hell, though. People live in
cupboards
here. And the noise level's worse than New York.”

“So you wake me in the middle of the night.”

“You understand, of course, that time is a completely artificial construct. It's quite arbitrary.”

“I saw this film,” Philippa says, “about Glenn Gould.”

“I've got his Goldberg Variations with me. Wouldn't travel without. I'm living in a fifth-floor pigeonhole beside a freeway overpass and the noise is unbearable, but Bach at full volume helps.”

“It's called
Thirty-three Short Films about Glenn Gould”'

“I know. I've seen it.”

“He used to drive around Toronto all night and call his friends from payphone boxes. He'd talk for hours. He could only connect with other human beings by phone.”

“I know. I've seen the film about six times.”

“Made me think of you.”

“What? There's no comparison. He was a genius, but he was really screwed up. I have a whole other life when I'm not on the phone.”

Philippa laughs. “Do you?”

“What do you mean, do I? When I'm working, when I'm in my lab, I'm alive two hundred per cent. There's nothing like it.”

“Can I hear sirens?”

“I remember once, when I was a kid, losing control of my bike on a steep hill. Well, on Newmarket Road, as a matter of fact. You probably don't remember. It was fantastic, the speed, the rush. I knew I was going to crash, but it was worth it. My work's like that.”

“Brian, am I imagining it, or can I hear sirens?”

“What? Oh, all the time. Freeway traffic. It drives me crazy. I've had to invent my own white-noise machine. And this is university housing for full professors with grant money. Imagine the living conditions of the junior faculty and graduate students.”

“How many firetrucks are there?”

“They're ambulances. Looks like a whole convoy from here.”

“Sounds terrifying. Like a scream choir from hell.”

“There's a writer for you: emotive and imprecise. No objective or neutral observation. Nothing of the decent reticence of the scientist. It could be said of you, Philippa, that no matter what your senses take in, all you see and hear are words.”

“As opposed to numbers and equations. Brian, listen, speaking of hair-raising sounds, there's something I've always wanted to ask. When we were kids –”

“Kids? Philippa, you should realise that childhood is something I work hard at not remembering,” Brian says.

“I don't know if this is something I imagined or not.”

“Who
would
know?”

“But it's important. Sometimes at your house I used to hear, I think I used to hear, someone, or something, in pain. Wailing, moaning, I don't know how to describe it.”

Osaka ambulances streak across Philippa's room, her lamp flashes blue blue blue, her walls weep. She hears a fence splinter. She counts flashbeats, heartbeats, white vans. They are years and years long.

“Brian?”

“Yeah.” He sighs heavily. “It was my father. War nightmares.”

“You never seemed to hear anything, you never seemed to know a thing about it.”

“My goal has always been to know everything,” Brian says passionately.
“Everything.
Preferably before anyone else.”

“I heard it again, just once, years later. The most awful sound. It was the day before we both left Brisbane. You acted as though you couldn't hear a thing.”

“I heard it,” Brian says. “I always hear it. But
you
couldn't have, Philippa. Not then. That was a few years after my father had died.”

Philippa curls down into her bed and hugs the receiver. Her room is careening through the dark. Brian, she whispers, or tries to. Where are we? She clutches the headboard, her fingers white, but the slipstream is fierce. I can't catch my breath, she says. I'm afraid I can't hang on. I've got vertigo. Where are we rushing?

It's the tunnel, Brian says. There's no way out.

*       *

“Philippa?”

“Hhnnh.”

“Philippa? I can't hear you. Are you there?”

“Hnh.”

“Are you awake?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“There's something I've been wanting to ask you. For years. I've been wanting to ask you for years.”

“Mmm?”

“The high-speed thing. Sometimes I'm scared my mind's overheating. If the brakes fail … you know, if anything should happen, would you do something for me?”

Philippa's eyelids are weighted down. She concentrates, concentrates, tries to lift them. “Do what?” she mumbles.

“Be the curator of all my stuff.”

“Huh? Sure, okay. What stuff?”

“Everything. I'm leaving everything to you. Research, prizes, nightmares, everything. I want someone who'll cherish it. Make it make sense, that's all I ask. Otherwise it's unbearable.”

“Philippa?”

“Oh God, Brian, what time is it? I have to fly out in the morning to give a paper and I haven't finished writing it yet.”

“Is it too late?”

“It's horribly early. I've been working all night. Where are you?”

“Melbourne.”

“Can I call you back in three days?”

“You know you can't call me,” Brian says, agitated.

“Right. I know I can't call you. You keep your phone unplugged, except for calling out.”

“My work,” Brian explains.

“Right. Your work. Let me struggle to be circumspect and just say one little thing: this is uncalled for, Brian. I have the greatest respect for your work. Have some for mine. I'm not up for interruption tonight.”

“Philippa,
wait!
I'm in a pay phone box. I've been driving round for hours.”

“So keep driving. Call someone else.” She hangs up. She stares at the phone. She picks it up again, frantic. “Brian?” She hears dial tone, train wheels, the hollow rush of wind in a tunnel. “Brian,” she pleads into the dial tone. “Keep your phone plugged in tomorrow. I'll call.”

How many times, Philippa wonders, can an unplugged phone's ringer ring before the ringer wears out? Once, masochistic and curious, she counts one hundred chimes, a shrill tocsin, the tolling of guilt. Ask not for whom the telephone rings, she says into the receiver. She keeps listening. If a butterfly moving its wings in Brazil can cause storms in Maine … She is comforted, slightly, by the sense of connection. In Melbourne, fibre-optic cable vibrates in his walls.

She calls his secretary at the university and leaves a message.
Brian, you may call at any hour.

She lies awake listening for the phone.

She dials his number again and talks to the ringing in Melbourne.
I'm trying to tell this, Brian. I'm curating your life. I'm trying to cherish each detail and make it make sense.

She calls his department again. “I think he's in Japan,” the secretary says. “We never know. He's got teaching leave because of the grant, so we never see him. We have email connection, but in his case, you can't count on a response.”

Philippa sends distress flares by email.
Brian: Where are you? I miss you. On my honour, you may call whenever you want. Love, Philippa.

A week later, she tries again.
Brian: A curator needs cooperation. I'm trying to preserve everything, all the way back, but dread is interfering. It's affecting what I recall. It's affecting the order, it's affecting what I set down. If you called, I could tell it differently.

She posts cyber bulletins daily. Often, late in the night, she speaks to his phone jacks in Melbourne. She leaves messages in the air of his room.

There are no answers.

When the ringing comes out of the dark, Philippa knocks over the lamp.

“Listen,” Brian says, “I've got good news. I've remembered Bruiser's last name.”

“Oh Brian, thank God.” Gusts of laughter, like the riffs at the edge of a cyclone, buffet Philippa. She finds she is crying. “If you ever do that again,” she says, “I'll kill you, mate.”

“Do what?”

“Go silent for over two years.”

“For over two years?” Brian repeats the words slowly, interrogatively. He might be reciting Latin, translating to himself as he speaks. “Was it?”

“Where have you been?”

“I've been tracking down data. When there's a gap in the mourning chain,” he explains, “it's like a black hole. It sucks everything into it. If someone has never been adequately mourned, my father, for example, or Bruiser – Albert Brewster, that was his name – that creates an event horizon, are you with me? It's a question of absolute density. Once the event horizon has been crossed, game's over. Everything's pulled into that hole and crunched up.”

Philippa's lungs feel tight. “Something terrible's the matter,” she says. “I can tell from your voice.”

Brian laughs. The sound frightens Philippa.

“I crashed,” Brian says. “I've been in for repairs.”

“You've been ill again.”

“One word for it. I've been living inside a funnelweb, eye to eye with the spider himself. But I got out again. I've been patched up. I'm okay.”

“Can you talk about it?”

“I don't think I told you my second wife left me. Maybe that was it. And the children. She got custody.”

“Oh Brian. I'm so sorry.”

“And then, I don't know, things speeded up too much. The brakes failed.”

“I don't know what to say. How are you now? How are you
really
?”

“I've lost ground,” he says, anguished. “That's the unbearable part. I've lost too much ground. Lost my research partner, lost my place on the team. I don't know if I can ever catch up.”

“At least you're here. At least you're still with us. It's all that matters.”

“How can you say that? It's not all that matters. My research is the only thing that matters. But I'm picking up speed again, thank God. The thing about being at the edge of a breakthrough, Philippa, is you wake with an idea and it's pure adrenalin. It's like the scent of fox to a hound. You're off after it come hell or high water.”

Philippa gropes for the sound coming out of the dark. Where is she? The sound is too bright, too hurtling. She is on a night train, that much is clear, there is rush and a grapeshot of rain against the windows. The speed at which she is travelling is so great that her body has come unfastened and slipped off her shoulders like a loose jacket caught in a slipstream. She clutches at it convulsively.

I've got it, Brian says. It's okay, don't panic, I've got it.

I can't breathe, she gasps. Where are we rushing?

Into the tunnel, he says. There's no way out.

Philippa sits bolt upright in the dark, her hands frantic to shut off the sound. Brian! she calls, panicked.

I'm sorry, he says. I couldn't stop.

“Brian?” she says. “Brian? What? Who
is
this?”

“Philippa,” a voice says. “My name's Yvonne. We met once, years and years ago. I'm Brian's wife. Well, his former wife. His former second wife.”

“What's happened?” Philippa asks faintly.

“It's bad news, I'm afraid.” The voice reverberates, unclear, like announcements at airports. Philippa is floundering. She catches only the peaks of words.
Coma … barricaded himself in his own study at home a week before he was found
.
miracle
.
touch and go, but a very slim chance he may pull through.
“I'm at his bedside in intensive care now,” Yvonne says. “He wants to talk to you. He can't speak, but he's conscious, and he knows I've got you on the line. Will you talk to him?”

Philippa nods.

What she hears: exertion; a rush of noisy breathing like a broken bicycle swooping down a hill. What she sees: the funnelweb spider's eye.

Philippa can't speak.
Brian,
she pleads, but she is sobbing.
Don't go. Please don't go.

She can hear Brian's voice straining to escape from its leash, frothing like a tied-up hound at the scent of fox.

“Brian,” she says tenderly. “It's okay. I've got everything. I will cherish it. I'll try to make it make sense. Safe voyage, mate.”

She waits until his train pulls out of the station and slips into dark.

Sometimes, when it is after midnight there, Philippa dials the number of Brian's lab at the University of Melbourne. No one ever answers. They've retired your number, she tells him.

She says: I can't write your death. Not yet. The details are too terrible. But I keep your life in a jewel-box lined with silk.

It's a mess, he says. Always has been.