Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction Read online

  As near as Barny and I could tell, Nate felt nothing.

  I don’t mean he lacked any sense of touch. If he stepped on a tack, he knew about it. But only in the sense that a computer knows if you type at its keyboard. The tack was just data to Nate. Nothing penetrated. He heard, he saw, he smelled and he tasted, but nothing moved him. Like dropping pebbles on a frozen lake, there were no ripples.

  All of this took time to nut out. At first we thought he had a skin disease or neural trauma. He even called himself ‘the Leper,’ the nearest he ever went to talking about his condition. He joked about the possibility of sitting on his hand at the cinema, and leaving it there like a half-eaten box of popcorn for the next session.

  But he was no leper. His nerves were fine. So too was his brain, apparently. It’s just that some connection between the two had gone missing, or dropped acid.

  So there you are. We three became a coterie. The blind, the deaf, and the feel-less? Nate hadn’t been put off by what probably looked like an icy reception on my part, and he was a welcome companion. He became the extra leg I sometimes needed to prop up the conversation with Barny. I’ll be the first to admit I get moody at times, but often I just love to sit and listen to people shoot the breeze. Let my mind wheel freely, shuttle back and forth and weave my own tapestry from their words and my thoughts.

  I forget when we let Nate into our little secret.

  Nate had his rapid mood swings though. I vaguely recall Mr Crossman listing such as a fixture of the tortureplex of puberty, but I’m half-convinced he was referring to girls at the time. (I refrained from plugging Nate with that one.) The clearest I remember came one humid March day. Summer hadn’t really bothered that year and appeared to be making a late push for its reputation. We slapped our bums down in the shaded part of the quadrangle, my starched shirt stained with drinking fountain water and clinging coolly, deliciously to my chest. Nate said something about Miss Turner’s nose looking like a turnip and wasn’t that a coincidence and wasn’t that argument for a Creator. Barny chided him in his gentle way, and I wished I could see so as to look at Miss Turner’s turnip, when Nate swore and laughed in the same breath, muttered that it was too bright, and strode off.

  His mood swings weren’t always so explosive. Often—I’m sure I was the only one who heard it—I noticed something in him change, as if a dimmer switch had been turned down inside him. Other times it was as if a signalman in his brain threw a lever, causing his conversation to rumble off in a new direction. He would be talking about a stereo he wanted to buy, then clouds would move in, and suddenly he was talking about speakers and the way their carbon cores sucked and pounded like a heart.

  So when, in that foodhall in August, Nate seconded Barny’s idea about going to Blackwall Reach, I thought it merely another freak weather change in the fickle atmosphere of planet Nate; It would blow over and Barny would locate his temporarily misplaced sense.

  But it didn’t blow over, and Barny, apparently, hadn’t sent out a search party.

  We weaved a web of half-truths among our parents, and later that night there was seen a line of three quiet boys hopping penguin-like onto the last-chance 377 from Southlands Shopping Centre to Attadale.

  I could imagine the bus driver’s eyes on me as I scrabbled through my wallet for the tokens that would buy me passage. Nate passed me, pausing only to buzz-click his multi-rider. When I finally yielded the coins to the driver, I caught the whiff of Betadine, and felt the brief touch of his hand, which was leathery like a gardener’s glove. He must’ve been an old-fashioned sort, and if he suspected there was some mischief afoot, he didn’t let on.

  Nate made a b-line for the back seat, apparently, and I uncharacteristically kicked every other seat leg or floor rivet on my pilgrimage to the back of the swaying bus. When Barny and I plopped down next to Nate, he was poking about in his backpack.

  We were silent for a time, until Nate pressed two objects into my hands. “Bread. Juice,” he said. “Rations,” followed by words I couldn’t make out above the sudden roaring whine of the bus as it geared down. I heard Barny murmur thanks from the other side of Nate.

  We bit and munched in silence and then Nate began plugging us with questions—questions about what we had seen and heard that day. Ever since we had told him our secret, he’d been intrigued. But lately his interest had hit some sort of critical mass—become a neutron star of fascination. That night in the bus it burned such that I fancied I could feel it radiating from within him.

  “What has our friend been up to?” he said, and by that he meant the man on whose vision and hearing we had been eavesdropping.

  Yes—Barney’s new ears, and my new eyes, came from the same man. This much we knew, and more.

  “Burning his fingers,” I said nervously. The rattling cage of the bus was making me edgy. The whole thing was not right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I took Nate’s silence to mean go on. “Just a pulse today. An image. He snuffed a candle with his fingers,” and I pressed my thumb and forefinger together to indicate. The man’s fingers had looked dry.

  ‘The man’ was pale and thin. He had brown hair that was curling at the edges for want of cutting. Sometimes I glimpsed him as he stared, motionless into a mirror. Sometimes I would catch a shard of his reflection in a window or the blade of a knife. His name was Stephen Brand, age 36, 6’11’’ as it turned out.

  “Shouting,” said Barny in a low voice. I felt Nate’s attention leave me.

  “Shouting what?” said Nate. “Was the woman there?”

  “I don’t know. Not words.” He paused. “Words on groans. It made me feel sick in the stomach.” Barny fell silent. Nate grunted with strange satisfaction then.

  The woman seemed to go with the man. She appeared in many of my visions—was perhaps in half of all the things I saw. Not the woman of early on, when I first began to see. No, she had gone, as had the other man, the one with the smiling eyes. This lady was different altogether. She was slim, with blonde tresses, and had about her a nervous air, as though she were a penned animal who now and then sensed the hidden bars. She appeared often, smiled often, or had done. I saw her in ways that made me blush, but—and this will sound weird—I was not ashamed. Those visions came like especially gleaming gems among other pretty stones, lovingly, gently gifted to me.

  The bus rattled on toward Blackwall as the night drew down, and its motion lulled me. But there was no fader knob at play in Nate that night. The further we went, the more the cyclones tore through him, as though time were compressing to the end of all things and each maelstrom was eager to spend its strength before it lost the chance. One minute he was probing us for information, the next he would slap the window or thrust his head between his knees.

  We got off the bus, same penguins, same order, and in the wake of the rattle and sway of the bus, it felt as though the cool air settled on my shoulders like a shawl. We walked down a road that Barny said looked over the river and, in the distance, the alien lights of Perth’s pocket of skyscrapers. A breeze was stirring, and it brought up the tang of salt and river-weed.

  I guess you’re still wondering what we were doing there? Well, it has to do with our man, Mr Stephen Brand. For all I know, his mug shot was plastered on the back of our bus, which whined its way off into the dark streets as though it had never been there. You see Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-36 was a missing man.

  That had taken a bit of figuring out. Barny must have seen Stephen’s face on TV in the missing person’s slot before Law & Order many times and, likewise, I had heard his name each time before the show’s trademark dun dun percussive. But had it not been for the wiles of serendipity, we would never have made the connection, and might have been at home that night, tucked up in bed.

  Brand had been missing since January, his wife also. No family contactable. The details given in the missing persons blurb had the feeling of flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of unknown lives, stumbled on by investigators and yielded up to the public
almost apologetically. Mr Brand, said the blurb, was an amateur musician, and collector of rare and exotic instruments. We knew our man was a musician. I had watched his hands dance, and sometimes trip, across fretboards and frames, and Barny had heard snatches of alien sounds. But we would never have made the connection if the blurb hadn’t mentioned one harmless little detail. It had noted one instrument in particular, a sitar. Neither of us had a clue what a sitar was—until a classmate show-and-tell’ed his specimen at school. I felt the thing, Barny saw it; and that was the spark to the tinder.

  Our man had a sitar, there was no doubt, and being boys this meant the missing man might be one and the same. It didn’t take long for us to marry the other clues up to this hypothesis, his apartment, rented with the tiniest sliver of a river view, his job as a nurse, and in no time, as far as we were concerned, his identity was a fact.

  Barny, bless him, had blurted that we should tell the police. I replied caustically, “Yeah, right. ‘Officer, my deaf friend here and I have recently received second-hand hearing and sight, respectively, and as a consequence, and quite coincidentally really, have come to believe that we may be able to tell you more about Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-thirty-six, maybe even find him.’ Come off it, Barn.” Nate kicked me. I apologised.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I came round to the view that maybe we did have something to offer the police. Who was better placed than Barny and me, who were privy to the memories of his eyes and ears? Who knew his habits and haunts?

  One such haunt was Blackwall Reach. It recurred much in my mind’s eye. Each of us has a quiet place, I think, a place to sit, to put out the clamour of the world (or bathe in it)—its demands, its temptations, its despairs—and just be. And Mr Brand’s was Blackwall Reach, I was sure of it. Like a lodestone in my mind, the needle of my thoughts was drawn to it, and the idea that the mystery of Mr Brand might be revealed there. Pity I didn’t know his compass sported a many-coloured feather of needles.

  As we crossed the threshold into the bush hugging Blackwall’s cliffs, I yearned for the predictable footfall of the asphalt we’d left. Barny came behind me, and Nate led, holding my arm. I could feel him straining against it, eager to press forward. In his haste he almost pulled me down onto the dewy ground. A spider web clung to my face, and when I wrenched my arm free to pry it away, Nate went on.

  In that moment I felt my blindness keenly. I remembered a passage from the bible that Barny had told me. In it a fellow named John, who had lived on locusts and honey—spiders too perhaps—sent word from prison inquiring if Jesus was the One. John had thought so, but in the cell’s darkness his doubts had grown. Jesus’s answer began, “Tell him this: The blind receive sight…”

  How I yearned for that. True sight. Sight to see what made me stumble. Sight to see it, name it, and go around it. That verse rang in my head in the tangled gloom of the bush that night. But I remembered too that John’s head had ultimately rolled at the word of a girl probably no older than some of the kids he’d been baptising weeks earlier.

  Then I felt Barny’s hand on my arm, and I recovered my courage.

  And suddenly, as if my face had broken though a wave, I was free of the bush. We had reached the cliffs. Unfettered air caressed my skin, and the sound of the suck and spume below swelled.

  Then it happened.

  If I’d had the presence of mind in the minutes before to think clearly, I would have known what was coming. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.

  I would have felt the terror in Barny’s clutch, for that’s what it was. I’d have asked, and he would have wailed at the maelstrom of groaning and crying that had made his head ring the nearer we went to Blackwall.

  I would have seen that as I fought my panic on Nate’s trail, images peppered me like never before, of Stephen Brand beating his way to the cliff’s edge, and noted it for the path of a madman, a pioneer, a zealot.

  Instead, all I experienced was the totality of sense that encompassed each of us, three-and-one, at the cliff’s edge, past and future combined: A stark vision of a woman standing there, dripping at the bush’s edge, for it was raining, and in her hands a gun. Pointed at me. At Stephen Brand. A flash of fire at its muzzle, and the oddly surprised, wondering “Uh.” This last not from the mute memory, but from Nate’s own mouth.

  Then Nate fell.

  And in my mind’s eye I fell too. I saw water and rock fly toward me, and then utter dark. It was the last vision I ever had.

  A kindly wave swallowed the sickening crunch as Nate met with the jagged limestone below. He was dead. I knew it without asking.

  I don’t remember for how long we stood and cried at Blackwall Reach.

  Given Nate’s ‘special’ status, and his parents desire to clear his name of any shadow of suicide, there was a post-mortem. I read the report. Naaman Gould, age twelve, suffered a heart attack, whereupon he fell to his death on the rocks beneath Blackwall Reach. His heart stopped, he fell, and his adolescent body crumpled like a soft drink can on the rocks below. That was forty-three years ago. And in another forty-three, if you so happened to pull up the report, you’d find it read just so, printed matter-of-factly in black and white.

  But I don’t think that’s what happened.

  I’m speculating, of course. But you be the judge.

  You recall I likened Nate’s condition to bubble wrap for the soul? “The Unfeeling Boy” Can you imagine what it would be like one day, one nominal day—nothing to mark it different from the other four thousand odd lived in sense-stasis—to feel a pin prick through the blanket? It would hurt, yes. But would you call it pain? A sliver of metal to rouse the sleeping monks to the ropes to ring the bells in that inner, fog-shrouded city. That peal came and told Nate ‘pain,’ just as hearing and sight came to Barny and me, and ushered us into a new world. ‘Pain,’ they rang out at Lauds, ‘Heat,’ at Sext, ‘Smoothness,’ at Vespers, ‘Pleasure,’ at Matins.

  But I say pain first, because this I think bit deepest, bit most often, if I am any judge of men—and particularly for Stephen Brand, who loved and lost more than the average.

  I have researched his life so much so I confuse it with my own. Those of his classmates who remembered him at all, remembered him well, or rather, remembered a crystalline memory of some kind act. Invariably, when I pressed further for observations of the man, their eyes would glaze. It was hard to find memory of him distinct from his deeds. He tried and failed three times to qualify for Medicine at the University of Western Australia. At last, he settled into nursing. He graduated, worked shifts at Hollywood Hospital, or Greythorpe, and then at a hospice that was pulled down in the early 80s. The hospice was one of those put up just after WWII, one of those laced with asbestos.

  It took a while for the time bomb to hit Stephen Brand, but when it did it worked a curious kind of torture on him. It began with spasms that took his job, let loose micro-storms of agony, shattered his nervous system, taking with it the solace of his music, and ultimately undid his marriage thread by thread until it gave in one cataclysmic tear at the seams.

  And it was this pain—compressed and magnified—that was Nate’s introduction to the world of feeling. The memory of Mr Brand’s private Gulag. And it spat at him like a sewing machine. Like a junkie, Nate couldn’t get enough of it. If I’d known then, as a twelve year old, what I know now, I’d have seen the monkey slapping out the tune on Nate’s back and I’d have offered it a cyanide banana.

  That night at Blackwall, Nate wasn’t looking for any missing man. He was after the ultimate fix, the ultimate burn. He knew Brand was going to Blackwall to suicide—and on that, he was way ahead of Barny and me—and he wanted to share it. He must have sensed that the flame thawing his senses to life was the very one that was burning Mr Brand to the ground. His days filled with physical torment, his friends driven from him, pausing for a time to stare at the proverbial car crash of his life, but leaving before the real, bloody work of love began. His job taken from him. His wife fleeing to
hers. Nate knew this through our answers to his questions and the filter of his pain, and knew the only conclusion would be Stephen’s decision to end all adventures. And as Nate contemplated the extinguishment of his wonderful drug, he hit upon the idea of the greatest adventure of all: He reached out, as it were, across such a tiny span of time—a mere handful of months?—linked, and walked hand in hand to the brink.

  Nate knew the big one was coming that night, and from what he gleaned from our talk, he knew it would be Blackwall Brand would choose. Brand had grown up there, chasing possums and playing spotlight in the warm evenings of Summer holidays there as a child. He and his parents had lived there before his father had died. To die there would be symmetry. Full circle.

  What Nate couldn’t have known was that Brand would not complete his plan.

  It was no silent, brief flight through the air for Mr Brand. Instead, it was the alien snap of gunfire. For Nate was not the only person to feel the force of Brand’s pain. His wife also suffered, but she warped under the strain of it.

  Again, if I had had an adult’s wisdom in my twelve-year-old body, I would have understood why her mood in those last days swung like a wind-chime in the tempest. One day spilling tears into immaculately folded laundry. The next gliding through a house full of revellers, her eyes and teeth shining. She was everywhere at that party, and Mr Brand’s eyes followed her. But nobody looked at me—Mr Brand. And then finally there had become violent. Thrown plates and slammed doors. Then tears, and laughter and distance all at once.