Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (2 page)

People often ask me what a blind person sees. If I’m in a surly mood, I’ll say floral wallpaper themed sub-cranial pink. Otherwise, I’ll explain that it’s different for everyone. Some get fireworks, some get phantoms. Me, I get jet black. Once in a blue moon, and for no reason I can discern, I’ll get sable. But uniform, liquid jet velvet has been the order of the day for as long as I remember.

Now imagine on that January day, as a freak summer storm raged outside my window, how it felt to see that first
glimmer
. It came while I lay on my bed, the faintest flicker of light. There and gone in the same breath.

Was I dreaming? Had my mind torn this ember of memory from my primordial past?

Perhaps I was having an aneurism.

I waited to die, and when I didn’t, I fell asleep and forgot the episode altogether.

But it was not
altogether
. Because I remembered, sure enough, when it happened again, and this time with a searing clarity by contrast. The second time it flared into being in the vault of my mind as I lay in bed, smelling the frangipani through the window. I’d tossed and turned on my sheets, and now was well and truly into turning and tossing. I had no idea how late it was, as my sweat-slicked fingers on the talky clock’s button had yielded only a drunken buzz.

In that melancholy moment a visitor entered my world and drew aside the curtain on a bonfire-blaze of a face. It was all fuzzy, smudges of dark and light, but it was a face, I was sure of it. A woman’s face.

Over the next days and weeks the visions came again and again, with growing clarity. Sometimes they would begin as a faint haze, snowy static in blackness. Other times they would slam into my head with a force that shocked my balance. But all the time, after those first few, they came with such detail, such presence, I could have reached out my hands and
felt
. I was seeing, but it was someone else’s world; It was stolen vision.

These images were disjointed mostly. Wooden bars. Wind billowing gauze curtains. Goldfish gobbling at fingers. And the woman. More than once I must have looked a fool, standing in the school hall, my hand outstretched mutely to trace the crows feet beside her thick lashes and the contour of her cheek bone.

As I said, these visions—
memories
, I’ll call them—were disjointed in time. I knew this after the sudden appearance of a man. One day he bundled into my thoughts clean shaven and blowing raspberries on my stomach. The next, he wore an inch of black-grey mottled beard, and the skin beneath his eyes had pouched and gone dull grey. But his eyes still smiled.

I didn’t tell Barny about my ’vision’ until well after we’d moved to Bungaree Special School. The move had been ‘to a more appropriate learning environment,’ which was short for Mrs Yates had gotten fed up writing twin syllabi for her year 8s—normal and other. It was my fault. I’d failed to assume an appropriately remorseful demeanour following an incident of culpable boredom. Barny came with me without a fuss, but I didn’t tell him right away. Not that I didn’t trust him. But I—we—had only just become happy, faceless amoeba, and I was loathe to rattle the petri dish so early on. I had just for the first time in memory been stamped ‘normal’. I wasn’t keen to go freak-squared so soon after.

But tell him I did, and Barny, in characteristic fashion, just silently soaked it up and gave me a pat on the back. Then my deaf friend said those words that spring to life every so often and ricochet around inside my head to this day: “I’ve been hearing.”

We sat there and I don’t remember hearing anything but his voice until the end-of-lunch siren rang. He told me how these sounds had intruded first as a low
thump thump
that had sent him scrambling onto his knees in the middle of the night. He thought he was dying. I believed him too. He sniffled it out to me and I could feel him shaking as he recalled it.

So you can guess what the topic of conversation was pretty much for every moment we were alone together from then on. There was no draining this cistern. Imagine it!

That’s how we were the day Nate came. Barny was saying, again with tears, “Paahlie. Last night my ears travelled to a symphony. A symphony!” He struck my shoulder in faux outrage. “Why didn’t you tell me that something invisible could be so beautiful?”

I had no reply. And neither did I hear the newcomer, Nate, approach through the leaf litter beneath the oak at the far angle of the playground. Because Barny had just derailed my train of thought and sent it crashing into icy water.

I
had been to the symphony too. The previous night as I lay on bed and gave full attention to my stolen sight. My eyes had drunk in rows of flashing, duelling violin bows, fingers flickering along slender flutes, and the mad gesticulations of the conductor—a magician with fly-away hair whose wand brought to life the chimeric beast before him.

Barny had heard a symphony; I had seen one.

It was a coincidence that stretched credulity.

And when I cast my mind back to examine each conversation since Barny’s confession of hearing, every instance of stolen vision and sound, I discovered they fit, tooth to ward, like a key in a mile-long lock. For a month Barny had been hearing what I was seeing.

In hindsight it was so obvious. But what did it mean?

A nudge from Barny finally alerted me to the arrival of Nate, who for some inscrutable reason, had picked us to make his first introduction. And it took me no time to sense that Nate was not like any other student at Bungaree Special School.

I said Barny was a giant, and he was, God rest his soul. But Nate—Nate was a dragon, or a genie, or a fey elemental. I just didn’t know it at the time.

He wasn’t one to talk about why he was at Bungaree. Most of the other kids were happy to. We did it with a cathartic rush, similar I imagine to the confessions of an AA meeting. Not that we accepted the world’s labels, mostly. In talking there came understanding, pride even. But Nate was different.

My first impression of Nate was strengthened by the attention he attracted from the visiting medicos. He was forever joining us at break time surrounded by the cloying odour of the infirmary, almost as though he were a specimen they unbottled, shocked into life, and sent shambling into lunch and recess to observe the customs of the living.

So, I guess, they poked and prodded him. And then there was the media on occasion, who poked and prodded him in their own way. Perth, Western Australia, was a small place—the end of the world, really. When there wasn’t something as galaxy shaking as a football hero running from a booze bus or a model’s pants falling off (imagine the apoplexy if it had been the football hero whose pants had fallen off), there was always the ‘Unfeeling Boy’ to fallback on. ‘Case follow-up’ they called it. Serialised reality soap opera way before its time.

But we didn’t bug Nate about it. I think we were kinder than your average twelve year olds, and perhaps that’s why he had come to Bungaree in the first place. It had been his decision. When you’re the only known case of a medical condition in the world, I guess being surrounded by others of some condition at all, regardless of the ilk, rendered living more tolerable.

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.