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Authors: Sonja Dechian

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BOOK: An Astronaut's Life
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I don't know if there's any way around it. I think it might be the kind of compromise
everyone makes but you always think you won't have to until it happens. That's why
Rolf rides. He finishes early, stops home for a nap then heads out on his bike for
an hour or two, sometimes more. It's getting longer each day.

The year of the Athens Olympics I watched the swimming with Mum and Jean. I remember
Ian Thorpe winning a lot of medals, I don't know how many, but his races would start
and we'd scream at the TV. We'd be running on the spot, pumping our arms, as if our
muscles were linked to his and our goodwill and racing hearts would bring him home.

In the pool that week every kid swam like an arrow. I never expected to be a champion,
but I felt slick and powerful in the water. I was moving beyond my potential, my
arms slicing all resistance away. That's how Rolf is when he's riding in the hills,
the muscle memory of two hundred Tour de France riders driving him on. He is empty
of thoughts—a direction.

On TV, a breakaway group of cyclists starts up the incline. The camera glides back
to the main pack, the peloton is what they call it, where riders stay to conserve
energy. It benefits the riders to work together to cut down on air resistance, but
eventually someone's got to go against the group. In your typical race it's just
everyone for themselves all the way, but not cycling: there's something both altruistic
and animalistic about cycling—all those riders working together, knowing someone
must break out at the right moment, always preparing to sabotage the group to further
the success of their own.

I turn to tell Rolf about this, but he's asleep. I kiss his cheek and he doesn't
wake, so I leave him. He needs more rest, it's good. I try to go back to my thoughts,
but without him the race lacks structure, so I switch to the news and they're replaying
an interview about the
discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that
physicists have been searching for. A line of text crawls across the screen:
Search
for 112 asylum seekers to resume at first light.

I try to think of what they are feeling, but they remain ghosts to me, ragged breaths
in the dark.

In my experience, you always feel cold after a while in the water, regardless of
how warm it seems when you get in. By now they would be shivering. Probably wanting
to take moments of sleep, but I doubt you could. It's not worth the risk, no matter
how exhausted you become. I wonder if there's a point where you get so worn out that
tiredness overrides the fear.

I picture a stranger again, legs dangling in the water. If she falls asleep she will
release the wood or whatever she's holding on to; it will slip from her hands and
she'll sink beneath the surface. Her arms and legs will no longer have the strength
to resist.

I'm tired but I keep my eyes open, like it's something I can do. On the TV, cyclists
pump their legs, muscles burning although they don't let it show. They can't dwell
on that, they must remain as determined as the electric currents that guide their
hearts and lungs. I don't even blink. I see Rolf's thighs twitch like they're trying
to
get out from under the lycra. It's the exertion of riding and working all day.
In his dream he's riding up some imaginary hill, fighting to be king of the mountain.
To arrive. The cyclists' legs are on fire. Maybe it's the fear, uncertainty, the
salt water drying on their skin. Their hearts race with effort, with the strain of
holding on. Darkness disconnects them from their limbs. Their feet slip against pedals,
they can't hold on. Can they see it? The light of a boat in the distance? It could
be there but it could also be something they imagine.

Their mouths begin to fill with water, but they hold on.

The door pulls shut and I wake.

Rolf's outside. I don't hear him right away, but I know, and I wait for the sound
of his tyres crunching the stones by our driveway. His bell is loose so it rings
itself as the bike swings under his feet and he heads off along the street. I am
the only one who knows what it's like—these sounds of being left behind by Rolf.
I think how I might tell him about it later, but I realise I'm wrong: Jean's awake,
too.

I can sense her at the edge of things, a threat and a comfort. How often is she awake
and listening too?

I pull the blanket to my shoulders. I should move to my bed before she's up but I'm
too tired, I close my eyes and right away I am in a dream where Rolf is back on the
couch watching TV, but not with me. It's only as I wake I realise: I am not even
in my own dream.

Shove over, I hear Jean say, and she squeezes onto the couch with her laptop before
I can be awake enough to move my legs.

Ouch, look out.

Only thirty-two survivors, so far, she says.

She tells me she has spent a lot of time wondering what their rescue is like. She
describes it to me and I let her.

They are huddled on the deck of a boat, she says, tired shapes wrapped in blankets
and oversized jackets, but I can't picture their faces. I can't ever picture their
faces, she says. I can't see what's in their eyes.

I don't know what to tell her, I don't really know what she means.

Do you remember that movie, she says, we saw it when we were kids? That one where
the girl went out in her boat with her pet cockatoo and then she was lost on the
ocean?

I know it. I try to remember what it was called.

I can still see the way she went, Jean says. I can still see the dotted line, her
route on the map, after all this time.

I try to picture it, but this is different. With so many hundreds of people, it's
too abstract and when you try to account for them all you end up with thousands of
crisscrossing lines; they fill in the oceans until they're just black patches on
its surface, like the shadows of huge clouds.

CHARLES DARWIN'S REVENGE

Sean has been home-schooled since May, when his parents received their fifth email
of the photograph and proceeded to shut off contact with the outside world. He's
still allowed some DVDs and access to the home telephone but no mobile. Certainly
no internet. It's for his own protection.

‘What are you going to ban next? Velcro?' he jokes with his parents because they
need to know they're doing the right thing.

But Sean has already seen the photograph.

It had been slipped into his locker back when he was still at school. Someone had
pasted it inside a
With Condolences
card and written his name on the envelope.

When he thinks about it now, Sean presumes whoever put it there watched him open
the card, but it's not possible for him to recall much about that day. He remembers
a long pause while his eyes and mind cooperated to confirm what he was seeing: inside
the card was the photo of his sister's body after the accident.

He has an idea who spread the email from the police photographer, but if he says
his parents will know he's seen it. The photo turned up again in an email that afternoon,
and in two text messages later that evening. He didn't tell anyone. What would he
have said? He didn't want his parents to remember her that way.

The following day someone emailed the photo to his father multiple times. When Sean
came home from school and saw his parents' faces, he knew.

‘What's up?' he said in the upbeat tone he'd adopted since the accident.

‘We need to talk to you.' His father was diplomatic.

‘You can't go to school anymore,' his mother said.

‘Okay.'

He gave in too easily. He couldn't bear to make them explain.

Sean is still allowed to make calls to his school friends
on the landline. For a
while he did so, but it soon became impossible to maintain contact with people who'd
seen the photo. Rumours circulated that his parents had become born-again Christians,
or that his mother was so destroyed by grief she had become catatonic. During the
phone calls, his friends were intent on both protecting him from the rumours and
also ascertaining their truth. Sean was interested only in hearing new rumours and
measuring how far the photo had spread.

Lately, when he takes the phone up to his room, Sean calls the local cinema and listens
to the recording about screening times, as if attending a movie were something he
might do. If his mother is listening outside the door, he pretends to hold a conversation
with an imaginary friend.

François is the only one who visits. In front of Sean's parents, he maintains a shy
formality, pretending to know nothing of the photo. But up in Sean's bedroom, François
says things like, ‘Those filthy fucking cum bags. I'd cut their balls off if they
had any.' He watches violent and dirty films and recounts them so Sean doesn't fall
behind in knowing about things. Together they develop new swear words to describe
the people responsible for
the photo. They also work on the punishment.

It was François who smuggled in the mobile phone. At night Sean can pick up a weak
wireless signal from one of the houses along the street. He knows there are nine
websites hosting the picture and at least forty-five linking to it. People discuss
it in forums and no doubt share it by email, but there's no way for him to keep track.

Sean and François have been discussing an idea for a virus that will bring down the
sites in question, but this no longer seems enough. Now, according to their revised
plan, when the virus is let loose, it will not only bring down any server that hosts
the image but will also seek out and corrupt the file itself. If you then try to
open it, the virus will destroy everything on your computer. In this way the picture
will be irretrievably wiped from the world's memory.

Today, in his bedroom, Sean and François consider taking things further. Sean is
lying on the bed, while François is on the floor with his back against the bedside
drawers. From his position, Sean's hand sometimes brushes François' hair as he talks.

‘Then,' Sean is saying, ‘if you access your computer the virus will travel right
into your body and infect your mind. It will destroy all your memories of it.'
It
means
the picture. ‘If you just saw it once, by accident, fine. But if you looked
at it over and over, if you're one of those people who get off on it, then most likely
your whole sick brain will fall apart once the virus starts tearing things out. The
virus isn't specific; it just grabs the whole area of memories. Can't remember the
names of your friends or your family? Or what your house even looks like? Don't even
know how to eat anymore or get dressed? Well good, because you must be one of those
dirty—'

‘Fucking cum bags,' François says. Sean isn't as good at insults. His hand brushes
François' hair again, but they don't really touch.

‘I know it sounds unreal,' Sean says, ‘but there is nanotechnology that could make
this happen. I've heard about it.' He hopes François will ask where he has heard
this.

‘I've heard about it, too,' François says.

He reaches over and they high-five without force. The high-five doesn't count as
touching, either.

‘Got any chocolate?' François says, because one thing Sean is allowed is whatever
food he likes.

‘As long as you don't use the wrapper to build some kind of antennae to let me make
contact with the outside world.'

Sean grimaces at his joke and he jumps from the bed. The two head downstairs.

Sean's room is rarely unoccupied. He spends most of his days there, carrying out
homework assignments set by his parents, or just reading. There is a desk by the
wall, an old wooden one with a map of the world on top and, as far as he understands,
some of the places marked on the map don't even exist anymore. In name, anyway, they're
gone. Sometimes he sits at the desk and seeks out these places, imagining they will
be grateful to him for tracing their forgotten borders.

Sean's books are lined up on the windowsill and some are stacked beside the desk.
A lined piece of paper has been folded four times and slipped between the pages of
a textbook at the bottom of this pile,
The Fundamentals of Biochemistry
. Every week
or so, when Sean's mother sneaks in and unfolds it, she checks the marks her son
has made in each of five roughly drawn columns. The ticks in the columns called V
and T accumulate at a rate of two or more a week. Although Sean's mother has no idea
what this data means, she takes a certain relief in the uninterrupted emptiness of
the next three columns. She discovers nothing else in the room to
suggest her son
has been damaged by the events of the last six months.

It is late on Thursday night when Sean slips out through his window and clambers
over the verandah before dropping to the grass. He lands with a thud, but his muscles
and bones absorb most of the sound, so it's louder inside his head than out. He has
already oiled and adjusted the hinge on the front gate so as it swings closed behind
him it makes no noise at all.

This escape route is no secret: Sean's been using it since he was ten, yet his parents
have never taken measures to seal the window. He figures it's a matter of trust.
There's also something naïve about the risk of falling from a rooftop that they don't
seem to mind. He might sneak out to drink with friends, but such old-fashioned rebellion
is, comparatively, no threat to their family.

Sean doesn't drink, though. He has a meeting to get to.

He hasn't told anybody about the meetings. He sneaks out on his own and jogs the
twenty-five minutes to the university campus. He'd like to tell François but worries
it may come between them, given the recent
intensity of their conversations about
the punishment. As he runs, Sean recounts the way his fingers brushed François' hair
as his friend sat by his bedside.

BOOK: An Astronaut's Life
4.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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