ASIM issue 55 Page 21

  Once a year, I do what I can to stave that off by fudging, the slightest bit, on the colleagues’ comments section of his annual performance review.

  “Ah, Tacey! Yours will be mostly a formality,” he says as I sit.

  I help myself to a butterscotch. He’s started every performance agreement for the past five years with exactly those words.

  But his very next sentence deviates sharply from what I’m expecting.

  “There’s an issue with your social income,” he says. “I’m afraid you fell short on your quota for the month of February.”

  I nearly choke on the butterscotch. There’s a black howl in the back of my mind which makes it impossible for my racing thoughts to back-calculate how many streams I added in February.

  The trick to passing is the same as any successful lie: don’t get caught, even by something little.

  “My connection’s been down for ages,” I say. “At home. Really erratic behaviour—there’s nights I can barely get the search engine to load. I think there was a whole week in February I couldn’t connect at all.”

  “The algorithm is supposed to take care of those sorts of issues.” He shrugs. Then he pastes something that’s probably supposed to be compassion across his face, and asks if things aren’t “a little quiet lately?”

  He’s noticed, he adds, that my lunch breaks have been a little short.

  His manner as he waits is two parts patience and one part interest. Mostly a formality, he’d said—because my answer can’t affect the course of this interview, I realise. If it could, there’d be wariness from him. He’d be frightened on my behalf. Just in case. But there’s no fear in him, it’s all in me, zipping and zapping through my neural pathways and setting my palms to itching as I try to remember just how short my lunch breaks have been over the past month. I’d been as careful as usual about taking them at the same time others did; and about varying the days on which we bowed to our low incomes and ate in and the days we treated ourselves to meals out at one of the neighbourhood cafes, with their ear-assaulting clamour. Maybe I’d been a little too careless with ducking off early, but it was never more than a minute or two, just a minute, surely enough to pass as no more than diligence?

  “Have they?” I manage, but not quite with the casual disinterest I’m aiming for. “I’ve been pretty busy. I have six portfolios coming up for completion all at once, and I’m trying not to have any overdue. Achieving together, and all that,” I offer up last year’s mantra. It’s a sickly effort.

  “Your workload isn’t any more onerous than that of your colleagues,” he says. “I’m afraid you’ve been flagged for a higher testing level.”

  He looks over my head, and I turn in my seat to find two med-cos in his doorway, wearing identical red shirts with a black vertical pinstripe and plastic smiles.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it’s just an error in the system,” Bold Bill hurries past the awkward moment, eager to wrap up his involvement in the proceedings. “Files get flagged routinely, or so I understand. Test thresholds are set lower than really necessary, because it’s better to pull in some false positives than risk missing a false negative. Or something. Hasn’t happened to our team before only because we’re such a small outfit, or that’s what I’m told. It’ll come to nothing, I’m sure, and the tests will show you’re aligned just fine and simply going through a quiet patch, is all.”

  There’s silence while we all pretend that isn’t a lie. There are too many wrong reasons, and no right ones, for a quiet patch.

  * * *

  The nearest centre is across the road in the old Bryant & May match factory, its clock tower and wax vestas logo as always drawing my eye. The hands are pointing at A and T, or near enough, as we approach, the med-cos flanking me and every eye on the street following our progress. This area used to be mostly residential, but it’s turned into shopfront after shopfront of trendy cafes and they’re always packed to jostling with patrons and noise. The tennis courts from the factory’s old days are still there, and still in demand by the office workers stationed in the vicinity, but the rest of the grounds are thoroughly closed away behind a hedge grown so thick it obscures the chain link fence supporting it. The ground-floor windows are barred, and all of the windows sport dark purple glazing to guard against curious glances.

  Inside, I sit through the barrage of their profiling questions with the desperation of a rat running a maze, the familiar parameters of which have turned suddenly deadly. The newscasts are always reporting on people being successfully reintegrated after completing their treatment—but they write about the failures, too. The facultatively cankerous, those in whom the blight has bitten too deep. Such extreme cases of misalignment require lifelong quarantine lest their incurable state infect others. I’ve never personally known anyone to go in for treatment, but there are rumours—there are always rumours: second- and third- and fourth-hand details—of those who never come home.

  That won’t be me, I promise myself while I wait for the results to be analysed. For I have no doubt I’ve failed: they were monitoring my brain activity during those questions, watching for any discrepancies between thoughts and words. The system has filtered me out, a bubble of silence borne along in the racket, and now I am trapped, with no way out except through their treatment.

  The trick to surviving is adapting.

  Finally, long after my resolve has started to wilt beneath the anxiety and forethought of estimating what’s to come, I’m ushered through a set of swinging glass doors marked Diagnosis & Prognosis, along a white corridor pocked with window-fronted offices, and into a small boardroom. It has a table topped with black glass, nine empty seats, and three med-cos—one man and two women. None of them wears the uniform sported by the pair who fetched me, which tells me these three are too highly placed to be mere orderlies. In front of the middle med-co rests a notepad (blank), and a manila folder with three bright coloured stickers on its spine (green M, grey I, yellow C) and, in neat block letters, a handwritten MICAH, Tacey.

  The man smiles, and I mistrust him immediately. “Hello, Tacey. I hope you’re feeling well?”

  “Can we get you anything?” the woman on the right asks. “Glass of water? Cup of tea?”

  “No?” the woman in the middle picks up the conversation after only a slight pause. “Well, then. My name is Cecily. This is Vera, and Ike. Shall we get started? Do you know why you’re here, Tacey?”

  Cecily and Vera and Ike all have the same expression of stoic concern. Ike’s the best at it; Cecily the worst. It doesn’t matter; I know what they’re doing, with their use of first names and trying to engage me in my own diagnosis. I just haven’t decided the best way of dealing with it, because I’m not entirely sure the testing is done with. There’s a predatory interest in Cecily’s manner, and an undercurrent of tension in the way Vera and Ike eye both her and each other.

  “I’m here because my file got flagged,” I say, just in case it is a test. They kept me waiting for an hour and a half, after all—perhaps my results are borderline, and this interview is some kind of tie-breaker. “Frankly, I think this is all a mistake.”

  The twist to Cecily’s smile says she sees right through my paltry attempt.

  “Why don’t you tell us what you did this weekend just gone, Ms Micah?” she says. Already we’re back to surnames.

  “I visited my mother.”

  “Who was not at home,” Vera adds what I’ve neglected to.

  There’s a terrible, damning silence then, while my mind scrambles to process their impossible knowledge and they all three bestow their disappointment on me.

  Ike folds his hands in front of him and leans forward. “It’s routine, when a subject is first identified, to run background checks. Our reach in such checks extends further than most realise. Cross-checking people’s movements is quite a simple, and telling, exercise. You’d be surprised how often reticents indulge in visiting an empty house, or occupying an otherwise empty room during the ostensible visit.” />
  Cecily is less subtle. “So not only do we know the quiet, quiet details of the weekend just gone, we also know you spent six out of your previous ten weekends in similar solitude. Visits to your mother, or your cousin—who just never seem to be home, do they?”

  Fear makes the hair on my skin stand on end. The newscasts sometimes tell of entire families afflicted, I remember.

  “It’s clear your family have been sheltering you, providing empty homes so that you can be seen to be socialising,” Cecily continues. “That’s called harbouring silence, and it’s illegal. At this stage we’re willing to consider their involvement unwitting. We’d very much hate to find it was otherwise.”

  I decide I dislike her the most. Not because I’m beaten, but because she’s enjoying it. I think about arguing back—which would even help my case—but that would just make me into the noisemaker they want. That’s the one scrap of defiance and silence I’ve allowed myself, and I’m not about to relinquish it now.

  Even so, I still have enough presence of mind—or scraps of habit—to know the answer that gives the right balance between admitting defeat and a healthy acceptance of my fate.

  “What do I need to do?”

  Ike and Vera beam at me.

  * * *

  Cecily’s suspicion runs deeper, but whatever politics are in play, Vera sternly reminds her she promised to abide by the majority vote and Cecily subsides. The look she shoots me says it’s only for now.

  Privately, I note the chink in their otherwise united front. In one way, it’s not exactly surprising: committee unanimity was one of the first casualties of the new social order, which prizes frank expression from all participants. But still I hadn’t expected to find it even here, in the administration of treatment regimes.

  Ike tells me to follow, and together they lead me down more corridors, each of them decorated with faux-art prints and landscape photographs of the outback turned into motivational slogans, and finally into a circular room. The walls are white rendered concrete, and they’ve gone to the trouble of putting in a false ceiling, but the only place this room can be is in the stack; at some point over the years it has obviously been connected to the main complex. The room holds nothing but two doors, the one through which we entered and another directly across from us. This second door looks perfectly normal, and completely out of place. It’s a single slab of wood without carving or embellishment other than a wrought-iron knocker mounted in its centre. I don’t know enough about wood to guess its source, but it’s a lovely golden-red colour.

  Vera draws a stopwatch from her pocket. So, I’m to be timed.

  “Where does it lead?” I ask, because it’s obvious I’m to go through the door.

  “To what we call the layers,” Ike says, then suggests, “Think of it as a metaphysical storeroom for lost things.”

  That doesn’t sound promising, and I can’t help but shoot a glance at Cecily. Am I now considered a lost thing—is quarantine on the other side of that door?

  She misinterprets my worry. “You should know I voted against this approach,” she tells me.

  There it is again: the gap in their method, and I’m at the heart of it. But I don’t see how it can benefit me: it’s just two different hoops I have to jump through.

  “Trust is a precious commodity,” Cecily says. “It should not be squandered upon those who have already abused it, nor upon those who are too ill to exercise it, and as far as I’m concerned even a mild case of misalignment dangerously impairs judgement. That is why I’ve made sure the trust we’re extending you is finite. You will have one chance, and one chance only. If you have not healed yourself—and I don’t mean shown progress, I mean cured—you will be immediately declared a reticent, and advanced to a more stringent treatment plan.”

  Ike pats me on the shoulder, giving Cecily a pained look over my head. “Cecily’s just nervous,” he says. “Before you, no other patient has been allowed through this door.”

  “The tests identified you as yearning towards quiet,” Vera adds, as if that’s an explanation. “It’s quite extraordinary, really—not a result we were expecting any time soon! The media have already started broadcasting your story.”

  After a pause, perhaps for me to speak but I don’t take advantage of it, Ike says, “You represent something of a triumph for us, Tacey. Yearning is the mildest case of misalignment possible, and you’re our first diagnosis. This is proof that the system is working, that we’ve weeded out the worst cases and soon we’ll be symptom-free as a society.”

  I can see by Cecily’s face that she doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t correct him.

  Good cop to her bad, Ike slips into the chiding tone of a parent once again forced to remind an inattentive child of the lesson at hand. “I know you don’t truly understand this right now, Tacey, but silence is not an integral part of you. It’s a disease, straight out of Pandora’s Box. It took us a long time to understand that, but humans didn’t evolve to be silent. A healthy person put into isolation will hum, sing, even talk to themselves. Silence is a danger call, our way of indicating that something is wrong. Embracing it is not normal.”

  Vera says, “We’re here to help you, Tacey. When you understand that, you’ll be halfway to healed.”

  I nod, because they’re expecting some response, but my voice has gone, and anyway what can I say to that kind of promise? I’m beginning to think I prefer Cecily’s more caustic approach.

  Dissatisfied, Ike chides me. “Willingness is key in this process. Particularly in the early stages. Those who embrace the realignment and actively engage in the exercise are far less likely to relapse, or to progress to a more dangerous misalignment. We’ve been waiting a long time to diagnose a yearner, and now that we have we’re trusting you with a measure of control over your own treatment. I hope you won’t waste the chance we’re giving you.”

  “What is it I’m supposed to do, once I go through?”

  “Come back intact,” Ike answers promptly. “Humans are a gregarious species, and those blighted with reticence have usually lost one or more qualities. Connections to other people; energy; even just a healthy fear of silence. Yours is a simple case, so there’s probably been only the single loss so far. You’ll find the layers have a way of accommodating abstracts,” he adds.

  “Find the little girl, while you’re at it,” Cecily says. “See what it did to her, this silence you reticents hold so dear, and then tell me it’s worth fighting to keep.”

  Ike strides forward and pushes open the door. It moves without complaint on its well-worn hinges, revealing only blackness in its mouth.

  I step forward, then hesitate before it. Willing or forced, that blank hole in the world is unnerving.

  “Listen for the knock,” Ike says. “That’ll be us, calling you back.”

  “Whether you’re ready or not,” Cecily says. “Trust is one thing, but abandoning you to the silence is quite another.”

  As Vera clicks the stopwatch, I step into the nothing.

  * * *

  I’m expecting some sensory impact, a sense of falling or my skin prickling, but my right foot touches down on firm ground as my left foot lifts off the floor in the stack, and just like that I’m in a back alley cobbled with bluestone. Formed variously out of the fences and hindquarters of houses, the alley walls are a variegated procession of corrugated tin and plastered brick and splintering wooden beams turned silver with years of neglect.

  Being outside is disorientating: the door had looked like a main entrance, and without knowing it I’d expected to find myself indoors. But it’s a relief to be standing in winter sunlight. And silence.

  All the silence and solitude we’ve lost from the world.

  It’s like sinking into a hot bath, when all your muscles sigh as the heat soaks through them, and even your thoughts start to unsnarl, and I feel better instantly. The hush of this place is soothing my overstrained nerves and buoying my energy levels. It’s filling me up, caulking the cracks and punct
ures that noise has made in my mind. Called to by the emptiness, the hollows inside me are stretching out and releasing, turning me into something that can be swept open and cleaned through by the wind, something that can sink through the layers of the sleeping earth, a creature made of stolen sunrises and desert sky stars. The desolation of this place is strengthening me, knitting together the neural pathways broken by years of exertion until, with the way made whole, I can think again at last.

  Then I realise that the segment of wall I’d catalogued as corrugated tin with a snarling panther spray-painted across its face is now three stories of plain red brick, with tiny web-mouthed holes pitting its white mortar.

  The bluestone cobbles of the alley have been replaced by packed earth, drought-dry and unforgiving.

  I turn in a slow circle, my attention narrowing in and spiralling out, but it doesn’t matter where I look: everything is changing, flicking from one form into another, like slides flashing into place on a screen. First a Victorian terrace cottage with wrought-iron curlicues, then a backyard gone to seed and given over to rusting scrap. A weatherboard wall sporting a window (one pane smashed) turns into a seamless concrete-rendered expanse, which in turn gives way to a chain-link fence standing in front of a pansy-pocked flowerbed.

  My head is spinning. A storeroom, Ike said, for lost things.

  This world is a palimpsest of everything discarded. Layers of the lost and the left-behind and the erased, stacked one atop the other, each simultaneously overwriting and showing through all the rest. A stutter-stop miasma of slumbering centuries.

  And my heart sinks.

  Even if this place can accommodate abstracts, the task Ike has set me is impossible. It’s silence and space that I’ve lost, and they don’t want them retrieved. Everything else he suggested I look for isn’t missing—it simply never existed in the first place.