Acid Song (22 page)

It was too early for bed. Simon turned off the television. It’d only make him angry, and then how would he dream? Weather slapped at the silence. He was already angry. He walked to the fridge and opened a beer. Just the one. Just tonight. His jeans slipped down as he walked. He needed another hole in his belt. Fuck he’d lost some weight. His mother would complain next week when they visited. She’d be cooking for days, trying to fatten him up.

He found himself standing at the phone. The more his dreams became like life, the more his life became like dreams. He couldn’t remember it being like this before. He. Now there was a puzzle. He’d been warned about this too, down at the university. Dislocation, they called it. He was asked about it, at the last visit. He’d lied, or rather heard himself lie. Now he stood at the phone, watched his fingers push the buttons he knew by heart. He felt the flutter in his stomach; the child at the counter, reaching for the sweets, slipping them quietly into his pocket, safe next to the small change he would save for another day. It rang, once, twice, three times. He thought about hanging up, but told himself not to be stupid. Just a phone call. He called her all the time. It didn’t mean … told himself lies.

‘Hi. It’s Simon.’

‘Simon.’

He liked the way she always used his name, passed it back to him as if giving a gift. He liked the lift in her voice, the energy that hung buzzing at the end of her sentences.

‘Hey, Eve.’

‘How are you?’

‘Good.’

‘What are you up to?’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah now.’

‘Oh, um, not much. Apart from you know, calling you. Bored.’

‘Where’s Amanda?’

‘Filming. You know, the conference thing.’

‘Oh right. Yeah. You been watching the …’

‘Depressing.’

‘Let’s go out somewhere.’

She made it sound inconsequential, the way adults learn to. No big deal. The deal we do and undo, that does us and undoes us. The ideal. The we deal. No big deal.

‘I haven’t got the car. It’s still in the garage.’

‘Wouldn’t ride in it anyway.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Twenty minutes? I’ll call round.’

‘Ah, yeah, sure. Hey, um, I got through. To the next round.’

‘You’re joking?’ She shrieked her delight. ‘That’s amazing. Fucking wonderful. I knew you would. I told you. That’s settled then. We have to celebrate then. See you soon.’

Simon and Amanda had talked about it only once, and it had ended with him swearing at her. That was just after Amanda first moved in, their first proper argument. Eve had come round for dinner. Amanda was out helping a friend set up lights for a play in the Fringe, but the guy providing the gear didn’t turn up and Amanda came back early. Nothing was happening. It never had. Eve was Simon’s nothing-ever-happened woman. Amanda noticed straight away. The way they tried too hard to include her. The sheer effort it took to make the nothing-happening natural. Three people sitting together in a space set for two. Later, when Eve left, Amanda confronted him.

‘What was happening here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You weren’t pleased to see me back here.’

‘We were in the middle of a conversation, that’s all. Stuff from the old days. You wouldn’t have been interested. We didn’t want to leave you out, is all, so you know …’

‘I’m not stupid. Why do you treat me like I’m stupid?’

‘I’m not.’

‘I can see when something’s happening, even if you can’t. I can tell, Simon. She wasn’t pleased to see me.’

‘You’re being fucking ridiculous.’

But she wasn’t. They both knew that. Simon promised there was nothing to worry about, and believed the promise as he gave it. He still saw Eve occasionally, caught up for lunch, sent long emails that always received prompt replies. He knew. He’d always known. Ever since they first met.

That was just after Simon bought his first car, a beat-up Nissan from a friend of his uncle, a taxi driver looking to offload it. He was taking it up to Auckland, an excuse for a road trip, and a mate from work (the storeroom days) knew Eve was looking for a lift. She offered to pay the petrol in exchange for a ride. It was summer and he picked her up from the beach at Waikanae, where she was renting a little bach with a shed out the back for her paintings. They were shit, but he was nineteen and easily impressed.

The conversation was polite for the first thirty kilometres. Growing up, Simon hadn’t had a lot to do with Chinese, and even though Eve was third generation, her vowels nasal and blunted, her clothes in those days showing more than a touch of bogan, he found himself treating her like a tourist. Passing through Levin she took control of the stereo and somehow talk of music led to talk of school, of growing up, and in the way of a journey with a clearly marked exit point, a wistful sort of intimacy developed. They talked for seven and a half hours, with a five minute toilet break in Taihape, not long
enough to gather his thoughts.

It would have been ridiculous to have admitted he had fallen in love with her in under six hundred kilometres, so he didn’t. They exchanged phone numbers, and over the next ten years contrived reasons to stay in touch. Now Eve was his oldest friend. She claimed the same. She’d married, divorced, travelled, had an abortion, kept him informed. She’d been back in Wellington for six months, after another stint in Dublin. A lawyer, she always paid for their meals.

Ten minutes later, Eve knocked on the door. Simon’d barely had time to change. His nothing-ever-happened woman hugged him at the door. This was a new development. There had been an unspoken rule between them, a careful gap maintained, a place to throw words and laughter. Eve was shorter than Amanda, not as broad at the shoulders. She stepped back and handed him a bunch of flowers he somehow hadn’t noticed. Simon tried to read her expression beneath the strands of jet black hair that fell carefully over her face.

‘Congratulations. You’re going to be a star. Come on, follow me. Time to party.’

‘Wait a sec. I’ll just grab my phone.’

Simon paused at the kitchen table, and beneath Amanda’s hurried note scribbled his own.

Just gone out for a drink with Eve. I’ll text you. Hope filming went well.

He looked at his handwriting, messy beneath Amanda’s neat hand. Punch and counter punch. An accidental, instinctive collision awaiting its apology. Tomorrow, after the dreaming.

RICHARD OBSERVED THE quiet tremor of his hands. Palms down, fingers spread: thick for an academic, built for grasping tools, digging holes, tightening wires. But his father had always been proud his son had chosen an academic path. Never once had he suggested Richard stay on the farm.

‘You’ll do important things,’ he’d said, and part of Richard had always believed him. That when he too sat propped up in the hospital bed, when family and friends filed in, to make small talk, to hold his hand, to do all they could to hide their bewilderment, the still-living would say, as they walked away through disinfected corridors, ‘He was an important man, you know. He did important things.’ It was enough, in the end, to be able to imagine that.

Time, though, was running out. A lifetime of the urgent crowding out the important, of the actual never being substantial enough to secure the possible. Belief and experience drifted tectonically apart, and each day the leap became harder to imagine. Was that it? Was that why William went out kicking at the air? Was hope in the end the problem?

Richard’s hands trembled. As if the body knew of his decision first. Had he been the sort to write out speeches or prepare PowerPoints there could be no such illusion. Folded in his suit jacket pocket or jammed onto his flash drive there would be the map of his life to come. But Richard preferred the unplanned
moments,
everything oozes.
He straightened in front of the mirror of the staff toilets, a three minute walk to the lecture hall where he would deliver his keynote address, and tried to force a decision from his reflection.

‘Come on you old bugger, show some backbone, make a call.’ He searched his eyes for an answer and found only the question staring back at him, flat and disappointing. Tonight the self had floated free. He followed it down the corridor to the elevator, his hands still gently shaking.

The lecture hall was packed, a full muster of the well-dressed and well-meaning. They would be an attentive audience. Academics relaxing on a night off, wealthy benefactors collecting on their investment, here to partake in the collective assertion of cleverness. And a few keen students from the lab, post-grads slowly feeling their way towards a ritual of their own.

Richard had avoided the front entrance on the mezzanine floor where later the guests would mingle and drink and keep a fearful eye on the large screen and its election news. He’d come in the side door and it was only now, as he leaned forward to acknowledge the offered hand of a mathematician he’d not seen in over a decade – Franz the Cyclist they called him, an obsessive vegetarian who specialised in hyperspace topography – that he was noticed. Someone halfway back started clapping. Richard tried to calm them with a dismissive wave but it was too late, others were joining in and a ripple of sound chased its echoes around the room.

Jed Carter, an Institute up-and-comer and chair for the evening, skipped to the microphone, grinning widely as if he was the reason for the outburst. To Richard’s great satisfaction the clapping finished and Jed’s smile was caught stranded in a moment of silence. Jed was, Richard supposed, cleverer than he had ever been. Elizabeth told him it was a trick of ageing, that everything now appeared brighter, faster and shinier, but in this case at least, she was wrong. Beneath
Jed’s brashness there was the type of confidence only brilliance could provide. He was one of those rare beasts that could cope with the smallest of details and the biggest of pictures simultaneously, resolving discrepancies between the two in a feat of real time iteration Richard could only envy. In meetings Jed was consistently the first to realise the implications of a new finding, and the first to suggest a means of clarifying a puzzling result. Intellectually his credentials were beyond question, the sort Richard should have had no trouble trusting. Yet Richard didn’t trust him, had never once considered sharing the secret with him. Insecurity perhaps, professional jealousy almost certainly, but there was something else too. It was the very quality of the man before him, short and slender, restless, an attention-fuelled reaction in need of constant feeding. Ambitious, dismissive; too clever by half.

‘… but ladies and gentlemen, you are not here to listen to me’ (and didn’t he resent that?) ‘and you hardly need me to summarise the credentials of the man who remains synonymous with The Institute’s finest achievements. Ladies and Gentlemen, there is simply no better person to mark the climax of this weekend’s celebration than Richard Bradley.’

They clapped again, rising this time from their seats to make clear the extent of their goodwill. Richard edged quietly towards the microphone. Up the back of the theatre he saw the liberated Amanda standing beside her cameraman, whispering instructions.

‘Thank you, Jed. I am of course both humbled and honoured to be here, and troubled too. Standing here on a night that marks so many things – for The Institute, for the country, for myself personally and professionally – I realise how inadequate my powers of communication are. How, no matter which words I choose, I will fall short of conveying to you the message that strains to be heard. I suppose I should have paid more attention in school.’

Richard could feel it happening, the linguistic unfolding that was
his habit, as the message itself assembled in the wings, taking its last minute breaths, tingling as the cue approached.

‘We all, I suppose, as we grow older, experience a sort of coming apart. A fragmenting of self, you might say. This phenomenon has come as some surprise to me. I imagined that as I made my way through life the version of Richard Bradley I carried in my head would become more coherent. Growing to know oneself, or some other such revolting phrase. I remember well starting out in this career, possessing the naïve confidence required to leap from one position to another, trying each on like a shopoholic in a clothes store, confident that eventually I would emerge if not fully satisfied, at least fully clothed. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about the way your elders dress, but as time goes by we trade coherence for comfort. Although we may never lose our taste for the new idea, we find it harder and harder to discard the old favourite. Sartorially and intellectually we become layered creatures, and there are days we can hardly bear to look in the mirror. To make this sad state respectable, we embrace paradoxes as a hallmark of wisdom, confusion becomes a badge of membership, to be worn with false humility.

‘It is the custom at events like this to recycle the older thoughts, the tried and the true expositions. We become signposts on the journey which must in turn be taken up by those like Jed, who have not yet drifted apart entirely. I can assure you I have such a speech prepared ladies and gentlemen, a retrospective which will make both myself and The Institute appear fully worthy of this most generous celebration. My problem is this. I am not at all convinced I should deliver it.’

Richard paused: not for effect but to acknowledge the tightening in his throat, which would now need to be carefully managed.

‘Yesterday a very dear friend of mine took his own life. I have had in my possession for quite some time a gaudy new jacket which I
have been too frightened to don in public. In memory of a good friend and a respected colleague I offer you, with some considerable hesitation, a story not of the past but of the future. I would like to unveil tonight the preliminary results of a piece of research which I have not yet shared with another living soul, and which until this morning I was convinced I would take with me to my grave. So good friends and supporters brace yourselves, for you will no more like hearing this than I will enjoy delivering it.’