White Matter

Crash test dummy

Is it better to be used than not to be wanted at all?

The next several weeks were highlighted by my new role as Graeme's voodoo doll brain. Looking back, it was an island of calm before the strangeness descended once more. True, the stuff that did not make sense – why I had been hired in the first place, whether I was supposed to be spying on someone, and if so whom – these things did not get any clearer, but as James explained to me at one point, the human mind is very good at filtering out facts that don't fit its world view. I availed myself of this process and got on with life.

The evidence was in my journal. Whereas in earlier days I had filled pages enumerating the arguments for and against Spurious Developments and their plans, my entries had now become terse one-liners. "Talked to Miranda before going home", "Wrote up two pages on PE tomography. Most of it cribbed from Wikipedia", and so on.

The sessions themselves took up two or three hours of each morning. Too routine to justify Graeme's own attendance, they were instead administered by Jeff the technician. Clamped sightless as I was, inside the head scanner, I came to know him mainly as a disembodied voice providing running commentary on what would happen next.

Mostly it was flash cards of the sort that James had shown me, but there were also interludes involving smell (from perfume and the aroma of fried fish to the stench of a sewer), sound (spoken words, music ranging from teched-up disco to Bach, a selection of sound effects), and touch (in which I was poked and prodded from various angles). Of the five senses, only taste was excluded. The equipment was "too expensive to get crumbs in," Jeff told me.

It was not taxing work. While Jeff was busy stealing my soul with his photographs, the only requirement placed on me was that my eyes remain open for the sight tests. Immobilized in the machine's grip, boredom was the only tangible risk. The highlight was when Jeff informed me one morning that I needed to run a set of tests drunk. "So we can broaden our base of data points." A bottle of rather good pinot noir was laid on. As I worked my way through it, Jeff and I had a long chat about life in general and what he did on his weekends.

Things started happening again one Friday night. I had received a call from Tane to tell me that a group of Resistance members, and assorted hangers-on like myself, were meeting up, that I would be welcome to join them. He named a restaurant, Hoot, and gave me a time: 7:30 that evening.

With the dog-leg home and then back into town being too wearying to contemplate, I decided to stay late and leave directly from work. Besides, James had been tutoring me about the role in his machines of some peculiar sensing devices – he called them squids – and I wanted to get the details into a draft before they faded from my head. I put this decision to work late down to my being paid by the hour. The alternative – that I was starting to become conscientious – was too much to contemplate just yet.

Despite this, I was still running a little early when I reached the city centre. With a half-hour to kill, and with the tension of my extended working day still clinging about my body, I decided to spend the time making the remainder of the journey on foot.

I had a rough idea of where I was going. Putting my trust in an ability to navigate by instinct, I left my phone in my pocket and made my way from downtown to city fringe, guided by contours of increasing scruffiness that reassured me I was heading in the right general direction, away from the commercial heart and into neighbourhoods I hadn't visited since my brief student days. I was reminded of that saying, to come back to a place and know it for the first time. As sayings go, this one was more elegant than apropos. There were features I recalled – a café exterior that felt familiar, a pub I had once been to with friends, their faces and names half-remembered – but the essence of the place felt new. Like rediscovering a movie first watched as a teenager, the nuances of which I had been too young to appreciate, the story largely forgotten, so that coming to it now the experience unfolded afresh.