Free Dark Matter by Brett Adams Page B

Rasputin fingered posters
plastered so thick on a billboard they hung in curls like dog-eared paperbacks.
Graffiti covered them in an urban poetry of expletives and tags. One oddly
unobscured phrase caught Rasputin’s eye. It was scrawled in paint like prop
blood, and said, “There is a hope.” Or perhaps it said ‘home’.
    They crossed the Yarra River at Flinders Street
Station and found a café on the Southbank strip to unload their feet and eat
Turkish bread. Rasputin watched cruise ferries chug to and fro on the brown
water of the upside-down river while he tried to force the bread down his dry
throat. He gave in and laid two-thirds of the sandwich down. He hung his head
over the back of his chair, closed his eyes, and sighed. The lowering sun filtered
through his eyelids a deep red, and warmed his face. For a moment he forgot
about the audition.
     
    Chunks of Turkish bread were still
inching down Rasputin’s throat when he entered the waiting room. It was an
anteroom crammed into the guts of the Crown complex, which lay along the river,
and rose up in stacks of identical casino floors, and restaurants, bars, and
shops. The mood of the crowd was that of a proctologist’s waiting room.
    The doors opened at 5pm sharp. Jordy said,
“Good luck,” thumped Rasputin on the shoulder and left.
    The audition, which had reared up in
Rasputin’s imagination as a many-headed, clawed thing with bad-breath, was, in
the event, a written test. He received a blank piece of paper and pen, and
allowed himself a smile.
    A twenty-something girl, dressed in a neat,
black executive suit-top and skirt, with channel-9 badge affixed, instructed
them in an overly loud voice.
    “Fifty questions. A few seconds to answer
each. Any questions?”
    “Fifty, apparently,” he quipped to himself,
then readied his pen.
    “Question One.” She glanced at her folder,
and launched the first challenge: “Who was Australia’s first Prime Minister?”
    He panicked.
    It was his driving test all over again and
he couldn’t find the steering wheel. In his mind, second hands raced on the
faces of a million clocks, while part of him worked the question backwards to
pry it for hidden meaning.
    Then clarity.
    It was a simple question. A primary
schooler’s question.
    Only a second had passed.
    He wrote the answer at the top of his
sheet, Edmund Barton.
    The studio exec spoke again. “Name the
architect of New York’s Guggenheim museum.”
    Sucker punch.
    He knew without looking up that a smile had
fallen from most faces in the room. He could hear them drop. But he was still
smiling.
    He braced himself, and dived. He went within .
Like the prodded anemone, he triggered a controlled implosion. He opened the
Eye, and willed himself to its centre. He became Rasputin condensed, splinter
of himself, ghost in the machine, psychonaut, homunculus.
    And a side serve of crazy.
    He spoke into the vastness. “Who was the
architect of the Guggenheim?”
    The eye gyrated on its axis. It sucked at a
constellation, pulling stars from an earlier epoch so close he would have
burned to a cinder had they been real.
    A blue giant dominated the cluster, and its
name was Ayn Rand . It had birthed a star, a red dwarf that burned
angrily. And Rand had birthed a book, The Fountainhead . He remembered
reading it two years earlier, prompted by a lecturer proselytising Rand’s
philosophy. The book’s text bubbled over the surface of the globular memory
like pepper in tomato soup. It was all there. He could read it now, but he only
wanted the answer to the question.
    He peered at the memory, searching for the
answer.
    Two objects swung in ellipses around the
book-star, like planets gripped in its gravity well. One was the book’s angular
protagonist, architect Howard Roark . Roark was one half of a binary
system, a coupling of planets. The other was a real person, Frank Lloyd
Wright , the architect of the Guggenheim. Rand had denied that Wright was
her inspiration for Roark