An Astronaut's Life (5 page)

The devotion François demonstrates through sustained anger and ongoing development
of new swear words goes beyond anything Sean has experienced and he is not sure that,
were their roles reversed, he would be capable of the same.

The very fact that he's here at midnight to meet a group of vengeful strangers in
the darkened halls of the university is a betrayal of his friend's trust. But the
thing about François is, for all his loyal anger, he's only angry out of loyalty.
It didn't happen to him.

The high-five did count as touching. Sean has filled it into his secret chart under
the heading T, for Touch.

As he approaches the Gratton Building, Sean slows to a walk and steps off the path
onto the grass. He disappears into the darkness of the horticultural gardens, crouching
in the shrubbery to wait for a signal.

If he focuses, listens past the shriek of fruit bats and the rumble of traffic beyond
the university gates, he's pretty sure he can hear it. Scientific consensus is it
doesn't make a noise, but Sean is confident that even
the smallest particles in motion
have got to sound like something. He's read that hearing sensitivity deteriorates
with age, which could explain why the others don't seem to know it's there. All he
knows is that, from his point of view, the machine makes a hum.

Sean must have missed the signal because a shadowy figure is already on the move
towards the basement window. He catches up as Edward O. Wilson hefts himself down
on to all fours, more gracefully than might be expected from a man of his size.

Sean follows him through the window. The group is all there.

‘Hi Charles,' they say.

Everyone in the group has a name. Sean's name is Charles Darwin. Already present
are Linus Pauling, Gregor Mendel, Rosalind Franklin and Euclid. A series of thirty-four
naked photos of Euclid, drunk and slack-jawed, can easily be found on the internet,
grouped together as The Hope Series. No one in the group has searched for these images.
Not only because they are illegal or because it would be unethical to view an adolescent
girl in this manner. They just don't view one another's material. It's one of their
rules.

‘Let's begin,' says Gregor Mendel.

They do not talk about their experiences anymore. That's another of their rules.
This is not a self-help group.

‘I've got big news for you all,' he continues.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness of the basement, Sean makes his way to an empty
chair to join the group. The machine's hum is unusually loud and he knows, with a
soaring certainty, what Mendel is about to say.

Earlier that evening, Mendel told his wife exactly where he was going—to the university—but
she didn't believe him.

She'd followed him out to the driveway and for a moment Mendel thought there was
going to be a scene.

‘There's something important we need to talk about,' she'd said gently.

If she had made a scene, raised her voice, screamed, struck him, he might have found
it a relief.

‘I know sometimes people turn to gambling because winning at the casino is a way
they can get back the dignity they might have lost,' she said.

She was leaning in the driver's window. His hands were on the wheel and the engine
was already running.

‘I want you to know that I've figured it out,' she said. ‘I understand.'

‘I'm going to the university,' he said. ‘I have a meeting.'

But it must have seemed ridiculous to her. And anyway, his regular absences and ongoing
withdrawals from their bank account supported her suspicions. She rested her forehead
against the car and he could feel her breath on the side of his face.

They did not discuss the thing he'd done before all of this. Not the way he'd been
fired from his position at the university, or how long it had been going on with
the girl, or if anything had been going on at all. She did not describe how she felt
the first time she read the email from her retiring husband to his twenty-two-year-old
student, the descriptions it contained of the young girl's body and mind. As if dwelling
on the content of the email might somehow hasten its spread.

But it had spread. Through social networks and forums and incalculable inboxes, to
the pages of news websites and then to actual print newspapers, too. Their friends
and neighbours looked at them with pity as they passed in the street. Someone even
edited Wikipedia to reflect that this previously distinguished scientist had been
a lecherous old man all along.

His wife placed her hand over his on the steering wheel.

‘Don't go,' she said.

It seemed important to her, this theory about the casino.

‘I'm due for a win,' he said. ‘I'm so close tonight. I can feel it.'

Now, in the basement of his former workplace, the last of Mendel's conspirators takes
his seat. They're an unskilled group of varied education, but they've shown an unyielding
passion for his cause. These late-night discussions—the six of them huddled over
plans in the dark, sourcing materials and exchanging funds, plotting their way to
a different and better world—have become a comfort to them. So much so, Mendel fears,
that for some the group itself is now more important than the plan they are putting
into action. That's why he came up with the rules about sharing personal stories.
He needs their certainty to keep his doubts at bay.

‘Let's begin.'

His confidence returns.

‘I've got big news for you all,' he says. ‘We've got some decisions to make.'

After the meeting, Sean returns home the usual way, on foot and alone, nervous about
the possibility of discovery
but also thrilled to be outdoors.

This week, there's something else. A feeling that isn't frustration or anticipation,
although it is like them. A yearning maybe, although for what he can't articulate.
Whether it has something to do with Mendel's news, or whether it's more of a physical
thing, a bodily response to the feeling of running in the night, back to the locked-up
house where he'll be shut away for the next week, Sean can't say.

At home the yard is dark and Sean wonders if suburbs like his might be the quietest
places in the world. He climbs back up and in through his window, strips down to
his shorts and slides into bed. He lies still under his sheet. The unsettled feeling
stays with him, but sleep comes anyway.

When François visits on Saturday afternoon, he finds Sean in an uncharacteristically
bad mood. François has been in the park, playing cricket all morning with some younger
boys from the neighbourhood and a couple of girls from their school. François's dark
skin is flushed from the sun, or from the effort of the game, or from excitement.
He presumes these factors, his perspiring face and breathy tales about runs scored
and catches
made, are the cause for Sean's mood.

‘I ran here,' he says, in his defence. ‘That's why I'm puffed. I lost track of time.
I wanted to tell you about the game.'

‘It's okay,' Sean says. His mood has nothing to do with François. He isn't jealous.
If anything, the simplicity of his friend's happiness is reassuring. It's only that
it makes Sean guilty.

‘I need to talk to you,' Sean says, by way of introduction. ‘It's about the punishment.'
He sits on the corner of his bed and prepares himself for the conversation.

François comes closer. He sweeps down with an awkward hug and Sean is caught by surprise.
He stands and slips his arms around his friend's back and they stay like that for
a few seconds.

‘The whole time we were playing, I was thinking how much better it would be if you
were there,' François says.

Once he is alone, Sean slides his biochemistry textbook from his pile of books and
unfolds the sheet of paper he keeps inside. He marks a tick in column ‘V', for Visit,
as he always does. Sean still hasn't told François the truth
about what is going
to happen. He wants to mark down François' hug. On any other day he would consider
naming an entirely new column for it, ‘Hug' perhaps, or ‘Embrace.' But today he can't
do it. Sean folds the paper and closes it into the pages of the book it came from.
This is the last time he'll look at it.

Over recent weeks, Gregor Mendel's work has progressed at a rate that would probably
be rewarded with significant federal funding, possibly even an award of some kind,
if he were still part of the university establishment. As things stand, his only
outlet for sharing these developments is the internet—and, as he discusses with the
group, there's no point in that. They laugh at the irony.

This week's meeting is unsatisfactory and mildly confrontational, and at its close
Sean leaves quickly through the window but doesn't head home. Instead he huddles
in the foliage of the horticultural gardens, watching others shuffle off under the
cover of darkness. They're probably as conflicted as he is, but when Mendel said
‘I think we're close' for the second week in a row, they were overwhelmed by doubt.
It was only he and Euclid who argued for immediate escalation.

Sean doesn't think of his sister. He has erased all trace of her. Sean does not recall
her face, her voice, or the lectures she gave him about rearranging the collection
of ceramic frogs she'd lined up along the windowsill in the upstairs bathroom into
sexually explicit positions. He does not remember the way things changed after she
started smoking, the way she gave him the finger almost every time she rode off down
the street, including the last. Her rebellion is gone, with the rest of her and with
all the parts of his life that contained her. What Sean does remember, carefully
and almost constantly, is the way the photograph took everything from him.

Mendel is last to leave. He walks slowly along the edge of the garden, crouching
in the shadows. By the time he reaches the front gate, Sean is already there.

‘I want to see it. I really want to see it.'

‘Shit, Charles,' says Mendel. ‘You scared me.'

‘Sorry. I was waiting.'

‘Clearly.'

In the presence of the boy, Mendel takes on some of the professorial character of
his former self. Charles Darwin is sometimes his favourite member of the group. He's
sharp, full of questions, focused. It's the thing Mendel always liked about his best
students; their candour about the things they don't yet know about the world.

‘I can hear it,' Sean says.

‘You can't hear it,' Mendel whispers. ‘It can't be heard.'

‘It can. I can. Please let me see it.'

It's true. A low hum stretches out behind their conversation. It's the machine. Deep
in the back of the basement, behind a locked door which leads into a storage room
where brooms and buckets and broken office chairs have been stored and forgotten,
the machine is producing a steady vibration that rumbles through the wooden floorboards,
deep into the building's foundations and the soil and trees and air that surround
them. Sean imagines the buzz of a thousand self-replicating nanobots preparing for
release.

They hurry back towards the building. Mendel's locked the basement window from the
inside, so they'll have to use the door.

‘It's different for the others,' Sean says. ‘It's easier, anyway. They don't need
to go through with the plan because, if they're honest about it, they all want to
forgive.'

‘And you don't?' Mendel unlocks the front doors. ‘Wouldn't you rather move on with
your life than spend it chasing revenge?'

He shows Sean inside and closes them into the darkened hall.

‘If I were you, if I had my whole life ahead of me the way you do, I might listen
to what the others are saying. Maybe I'd move away and start over.' He reaches for
Sean's arm. ‘Hold on. It's pitch black in there.'

They start along a corridor.

‘It's not possible,' Sean says. ‘There's no such thing as starting over.'

‘You could go where no one knows you.'

‘No,
you
could. You could change your name and get married again. There are other
careers you could do, and people will forget. It's different for me.'

They come to a staircase and Mendel leads Sean down and then across the basement,
beyond their usual meeting spot. There's enough light from outside for Sean to make
out the door to the storeroom. Mendel slides it open.

Inside, a series of shelves are stacked with boxes and cobwebs.

‘That's it. I can hear it.'

Sean can't see any sign of anything that might be the machine. He follows Mendel
into the room.

‘You can't hear it, Charles,' says Mendel.

‘No, you can't hear it,' Sean says.

‘It's not so simple. This is incredibly complicated science.' Mendel squints. ‘Yes
I could leave my wife and start a new life, but I'd never have a moment of peace
knowing I'd abandoned her. She was hurt most by this, but she stuck by me, which
is a burden, but I can't leave her and have the one person who still has faith in
me disappointed. You've had it tough, I appreciate that, but other people's lives
are usually harder than they look.'

‘So that's why you made the machine?'

‘That's why.'

‘To save your wife from remembering, or to save you from leaving her?'

Mendel shrugs. ‘It's not that easy,' he says.

Mendel makes his way across the tiny room, finding spaces in the clutter to place
his feet. He rearranges brooms and shifts a crate out of his way, and a soft blue
light spreads over the floor of the room. It's bigger than Sean expected. The machine
extends over three of the cupboard's shelves, a series of wires and circuitboards
and some larger tubes and boxes. He can't even tell where it finishes.