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“The whole procedure will take roughly twenty minutes. You’ll feel a slight pressure behind your eyes.” Dr Abram peers through bushy black lashes and narrow, wire-rimmed spectacles, his face contorting into an expression of concern. A neuroscience researcher, it’s no mystery why he didn’t pursue general practice. This strange, neurotic little man’s weirdly contrived attempts to connect, soothe me nonetheless. He slides a clipboard across the perspex, a conspicuously single sheet of tiny black print clenched in its jaws. Why the clipboard? Isn’t the clipboard’s customary purpose to tidy and tame multiple papers? The absurdity of this complex apparatus hauled out for a single leaf of paper makes me laugh, out loud. “Sorry, nerves.” Scratchy, crackpot smile. Scribble my name.
I did feel the needle go in. I also feel the chip cling intrusively to my cerebellum – or maybe I imagine that. Straightening, I reach for my chair. Hauling down this skin suit of blood and bone, this carcass dragged about life for twenty-two years now, I sink into the chair’s wearied, soft embrace. Dr Abram coughs, awkward and silently pleading with the nurse to do the talking. I can hear her smiling: “The implant takes effect immediately, David.” Her slippery-sweet words hover on the infinitesimal brink of pure potentiality, catalysing an explosion of sensation. So much, too much sensation. Blood platelets hum about their daily rounds, ducking and weaving through valves, popping in on Liver and Brain, rushing giddy to the tip of each finger, tingling life force below the surface just a paper-cut away from the outside world. I feel my organs chafing, jostling about, pressed against bone, tight like a drum. I feel the air inflating my lungs, the last two balloons in a 6th birthday party pack – hot, diffuse, straining anticipation. I feel my legs.
I walked the entire twenty kilometres home, ran the last five. Lucy was there waiting for me. We sat on her bed and cried together, limbs sweaty, knotted like the big old Oak in her mum’s garden. It’s 2:24 am as we unload my wheelchair from the Mobile and wheel it into the middle of the old Bunnings carpark. I’d tried to convince Lucy to burn the van too, pointing out that, once these head chips take-off they’ll be redundant, but she insists we sell it. Piled high with timber and leaves and that broken red banana lounge, I hold the lit match to a pungently businesslike trail of petrol. Starting out shy, the quiet flame is a pale tangerine easily snuffed under an outbreath. It quickens though, an effusion of horns and spikes that lick at my old captor’s wheels, ravenously persistent, energy spit-firing round a ruthless blue core.
Blink
Back stares David, contemplating this strange and ineffable notion of ‘I.’ I’m gnarling, morphing, quicksilver, voracious in the force of my weightlessness. The alchemic power in these quickening sleeves is visceral as I wave ravishing orange over a last virgin twig and, streaming across its knobbly skin, I feel it subside to ash in my violent embrace. Curiously, I don’t feel the heat, innocently insatiable for more. I rush to consume, a kinaesthetic kiss straining at David’s eyelashes, teasing Lucy’s hems. Then, humbled by thrashing winds, and as suddenly as my incendiary emergence, I hush back into Mother Earth. And there, silent revelry in the transcendent resonance of order restored.
Blink
I beat fragile wings against the gaudy blue and never-ending sky, a dainty speck of determination amidst seven million square kilometres of rainforest. Eager, speedy, elegant, I weave through vivid green leaves and skim across crystal waters, projecting the ripple effect of technicolour life, beneath the surface. I float to stillness, a stone’s steady beat draws me in; it’s smooth and reflects the light like Dr Abram’s bald head. Pinpricks of sun’s incandescence – hazy diagonals slanted through layers of curled leaves – speckle my holographic wings with a million tiny crystals. Each prism holds a tiny, miraculous mirror to the world.
Blink
My technicolour lights compete with a peculiar array of visual noise, vying for the punters’ attention. Doing my best to lure potential suitors, I’m dinging bells, flashing LED bulbs— all colours, all movement. I yell, “Minor jackpot $2500, major jackpot $10,000,” roll an assortment of tantalising images across my screen, including Oriental Lady Smiling And Wiggling Head and Flames In Shape Of Dragon Surrounding Large Gold Coin. People loll about, like fat ginger cats basking in the midday sun, strolling between games in gluttonous stupors. Some eyes bear that rabid sparkle – they’re down, looking for a major jackpot to Put An End To This Once And For All. Finally, a bite! My fanfare reaps its reward. I silently gloat at Fat Fortune and Lightning Cash. We know before they do, see. That familiar passing glance followed fast by flash of attraction – we flirt with the possibility. Sitting a plump bottom across my inviting black stool, she feeds a $50 note eagerly into my mouth, as if for the first time all over again.
Blink
A frothy pink ballerina girl tugs at my nylon mane, matted by a thousand sticky little fingers. Every few seconds, she yanks on reins attached to the button concealed beneath my acrylic smile, and a sound issuing from deep within me—but that isn’t actually me—says, “Neeeeigh.” I scoff. But she doesn’t hear me scoff, because all I say is, “Neeeeigh.” Who the fuck programs a unicorn to neigh? I’d roll my eyes if they weren’t painted on. Miranda Kerr’s signature smoulder seduces passers-by, a stout woman in jeggings stopping momentarily to gaze up into that sultry allure behind a wristful of pearls, her eyes flickering to the Michael Kors store conveniently nearby. “Neeeeigh.” But suddenly her arm is near torn clean out its socket by some leashed entity. The entity? Not, as one might assume, some tiny terrier but, rather, a boy—small, ruddy, altogether overstimulated—leashed to a backpack shaped like… a chicken? “Neeeeigh.” Jesus.
Blink
Out here Nothing envelops it all, her midnight pelt moulded to the orbital shells of an amazement of planets, stretching beyond and beyond beyond. The concept of infinity is scientifically ungraspable by the human mind; staring out into an unconquerable void, I wonder if I’m close. Her guiding hand nudges me ever outwards, guiding stars lighting a then, a here, and a there in this endless expanse. She spins me weightlessly up, around, and down again, and finally I see it. Home, the most beautiful planet of all. Exotic greens and blues swathed in gauzy tranquillity. Home to what felt like everything that ever was and ever would be. Home to worms and lily flowers and Amazon Same-Day Delivery. Home to David and his family and his bung legs. The ridges cut into my cool smooth metal flesh read Voyager 12, A memory washes over me – or over Voyager 12… am I Voyager 12? Hot heat, sense-blinding heat, 3141 degrees to be exact, carves at my bottom, and the smell of me burning diffuses an acrid finality over white tiles. The welder leans back, satisfied, peels off that black mask. Reflected in the glistening tiles, I see my branding: NASA. It’s all worth it though; I have the best job in the universe. And the most important job, well that’s what Bruce always said. To pierce the Milky Way, to dodge black holes and meteorites and aliens. Maybe not aliens. Earth’s most brave, most intrepid, most formidable interstellar voyager.
Blink
At last, I’m me again, staring into the fire. I rest David’s familiar hands in David’s familiar pockets, pondering those ‘sensible’ warnings against unbridled participation in clinical trials. I hold infinity in the palm of my hand and eternity in this hour.
