Free Dark Matter by Brett Adams Page A

hearths the world over. He picked it
up and enjoyed its heft. He toyed with the idea of boiling the kettle, but knew
it would wake Jordy. Besides, he wasn’t thirsty. He had plenty of caffeine
buzzing in his veins, which put sleep out of the question. The auditions would
start at five that night.
    He retrieved paper and a pen from his bag,
and then slipped through the door to the balcony. Outside the air was cold.
    The balcony was a concrete perch that held
a small table and chair. The view it afforded was of more grey blocks and, at
the end of the lane, a building façade running at right angles, aflame with the
rising sun.
    He sat, arranged the paper on the table,
and readied his pen. He prepared himself to recall a memory. Panic darted
foxlike through him. Then he forced his consciousness downwards, within ,
his will a hand plunging his own head beneath the waves. Swallowed by his mind’s
eye, he stood again at the centre, and in every direction the galaxies of his
memory blazed.
    He sought a very old memory, one of the
oldest. He found it quickly, amid the kaleidoscope, a distant supernova.
    He pulled it near, the eye’s focus
extending telescopically into the distance to retrieve it. The memory was like
a rose, wrinkles of interlocking manifolds, an organic, five-fold bundle of
sense.
    He pried it open.
    Laughter and screams wafted from it like
perfume. Something terrible had happened. But he already knew that.
    He was three years old, his
self-consciousness dawning. Though his eyes and ears had worked as they did
now, they were warped by the feebleness of a toddler’s understanding. Images,
sounds, and smells dashed against him disjointedly, and would not cohere. He
concentrated, tried to impose order on these unparsed senses. He felt the wind
bite on the sweat of his face.
    He hunted for a face. A girl’s face. Her
face. He dug for it like a dog at a buried bone.
    The first thing he saw was a flock of white
birds, and he felt the echo of his toddler’s excitement. They had been novel.
He could name them now, seagulls. The recognition unlocked another image, of
vast, frothing blue water. The ocean. That had been novel too. He felt more
than saw the presence of two people. Mother and Father. They were near and far
like the sky. He heard a giggle, saw a girl run past with bouncing hair. She
turned and he beheld her face, vivid and clear.
    Her arms were extended, hands cupped
together. From them came the gleam of white shell. Cockle shells.
    Cockles.
    The word was like the closing of a circuit
breaker. It was an itch his fingers had hunted for a long time finally
scratched. Another memory mingled with this for a moment— warms the cockles
of your heart —and was gone.
    Then the earth moved. An image, hitherto
hidden in the rose’s heart, smote him. He saw the girl crumpled beneath a car
wheel, one leg bent unnaturally. His adult mind knew she was dead.
    Dizziness swept over him. He realised he
had stopped breathing. He released the memory, let it collapse upon itself and
drift away. He opened his mouth and gulped air.
    The view from the concrete perch reasserted
itself. The daylight had grown stronger. The city’s hubbub was rising from the
streets.
    He had not found what he sought, but he
remembered her face. He began to sketch it.
    When Jordy woke an hour later, he found
Rasputin on the balcony, staring into space. Beneath his arm, secured against
the wind, was a portrait of a girl, cloven in two by the sun’s angling rays.
     
    * * *
     
    It was past two before Jordy and
Rasputin emerged from their hotel. As they navigated the CBD’s maze toward the
audition, Rasputin was struck by the contrast Melbourne made to Perth. Here
lush grass sprouted beneath ornamental trees and untended verge. In dry Perth,
even in spring, grass grew with restraint in foreknowledge of summer’s hammer. Melbourne
felt older, too. It spoke with the rumble and spark of trams, and wore clothes
fraying at the seams.
    Near the railway,