Social Demography and Global Citizenship

At this point everything opened up in a way that had me searching for an underlying logic, some kind of universal algorithm around human connectivity, the domino effect of open doors.

While around us the evergreen bushland was unchanging, in the courtyard the pear trees were bare, leaving a last layer of crimson red leaves scattered on the pavers. In the morning when it was quiet the currawongs flew down to forage in the leaf litter and the benches got splattered in bird shit.

As for Rachel, my focus had been on making good on my undertaking to stop staring and to mind my own crap. My recent plunge into the world of brainwaves had made that a lot easier than I’d anticipated. Whenever she appeared in class or in the kitchen, even at the waterhole, I managed to hold my gaze steady and estimate the impact of her presence on my oscillations. The brain varied day to day; the heart was constant. All that was left was to wait, as I did each night, for her to take up my invitation and come to the courtyard.

Greg hand-delivered the first of my weekly reports.

‘As per your request,’ he said in a tone I disliked.

I thanked him (fuck you), closed the door and sat down on my bed with the orange envelope addressed to me, c/o the School. The document inside had a cover sheet with my name and date and a small image like a company logo: the bottom half of three blue capsules sprouting green leaves. The second page was a series of sketched headshots—aerial view—colour-coded and set out in table form, five by five, with horizontal and vertical descriptions cryptic enough for me to scan them and turn over into the explanatory text. In just over three pages, it addressed two things: my areas of high-level under-arousal, and my areas of high-level over-arousal. The fact that the lingo sounded more sexual than neural made me suspicious. Without reading on, I jumped up and performed my umpteenth search for hidden cameras in the area of the shower recess.

When I resumed my reading, my concerns were dispelled. This was strictly about my brain—and, more particularly, what personality traits my brainwaves were producing, or not producing. Nothing came as a surprise: in the domains of fogginess (their word), easily hurt feelings and low self-esteem, I barely rated; at the other end, I was pretty much off the scale in impatience, agitation, and holding of resentments (again, their term; I liked that one). By the final paragraph it was starting to read to me like one of Mary’s weekly horoscopes. And there was definitely an unfair focus on the surplus and deficits—too much, too little—but I wasn’t bothered, and Greg could go to hell. It was mine, my brain dysfunction, in my hands. I wouldn’t have let go of it for the world.

Outside of the report there was more. My growth spurt continued (another 4 mm over two weeks), and Rachel actively sought out my help with a calculus question after PW refused her any. (‘He is a complete cock,’ she said, loud and powerfully alliterated.) Tod had started making gnocchi with burnt butter and crispy sage—I’d never eaten anything like it, nor do I think I have since. And on top of that, Alex was making signs of re-entering the biosphere. He still spent most of his spare time in his lesson room with the door closed, but in class or in the kitchen he was a living, breathing presence again (as against the rotting amoeba cluster he had become). And most importantly, he returned to the midnight sessions. One night he just showed up, commented on the almost-full moon and crawled into his sleeping bag.

‘You know, Alex,’ Tod said after only a few seconds of silence. ‘You can talk to us about things you might think we don’t want to hear.’

‘Thanks Tod,’ he replied. ‘That is good to know.’

In an effort to avoid boring anyone, Tod stuck to questions. His persistence eventually bore fruit, Alex telling us stories about his father and their hinterland house.

‘He reckoned we should live at one with nature,’ he said. ‘We had this big old macadamia tree outside the kitchen. It was too close to the house and the roots messed with the plumbing but Dad wouldn’t touch it, said it’d been there longer than we had…And he had a thing with birds. He filled the balcony with grevilleas and then left the doors open so the birds could come right inside. We got a nest of blue wrens in a wall vent once. Even when it brought rats, Dad said they had a right to be there.’

Tod sought clarification. ‘You mean the birds?’

‘Birds, rats…whatever. I guess it sounds pretty weird.’

As I’d been listening I couldn’t help but compare it to the flats. ‘Sounds exceptionally cool to me,’ I said.

‘You’re right, Dan,’ Alex replied. ‘It was. He was.’

A couple of weeks after his comeback, Alex flagged me in the corridor and said he was behind on his video game hours. I was too. Off we went like a pair of old chums, settling in for a session of Dark Souls Rising. It was Alex’s favourite. You are a bank teller in a shopping mall that is infested with chainsaw-wielding zombie killers. Pretty soon the place is plastered with decapitated heads and nude body parts. Alex was right: the graphics were ‘out of the park’, the howls of the injured so real you wanted to go back and put the poor bastards out of their misery.

Sitting back in defeat, the blood-smattered screens seemed an obvious segue into the as-yet-untouched subject of the time I busted him on blood porn. But where to start?

‘That night on the computer, the video,’ I said. ‘What the hell’s that all about?’

During the silence that followed our eyes remained fixed on our scores. I sensed that he went to speak a couple of times, then finally: ‘You think I’m fucked up.’

‘I guess it depends on why you watch it. Like, yeah—if you’re getting off on it, I think it’s fucked up.’

He laughed, then stood up. ‘It might be better if I just show you.’

My first thought was that he had a little library of videos and he was planning to share, but when I started to decline he told me to get up and I dutifully pushed myself out of my beanbag and followed him. We walked around the low-lit corridor, the courtyard still dipped in the orange glow of twilight. When we stopped at the door to his lesson room, he turned around and bit his bottom lip. I felt a nervous, almost erotic excitement. His head cocked at an awkward angle, his pupils just a pinprick in his blood-rimmed eyes.

‘I’m not sure if this is a good idea, showing you this…I mean, like you might just think I’m fucking crazy.’

He was looking at me for an assurance, and I was drawing a blank. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea either. But when he started stepping back I realised I wanted very much for him to open the door. The words of Dr J came into my head: You ask him what we are doing. And then come back and we’ll talk.

When I spoke, my voice was surprisingly firm. ‘You are showing me this because I want to see it,’ I said.

He looked relieved, grateful. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well that’s that then.’

The room was dark. When the light came on, I just stood where I was and took it in: a series of large whiteboards, some handwritten or hand-drawn, others with printed maps and diagrams, each of them dotted with hundreds of coloured magnets and post-it notes filled with unreadably small text. It seemed I wasn’t the only one spending my days charting new worlds. This is what he had been doing, day after day, all those hours.

I stepped closer, moving from board to board, Alex by my side all the while, watching me, waiting for a cue. I could hear his tentative breaths, feel his eyes following mine.

‘The thing on the computer,’ he said. ‘This is why.’

On the biggest board was a series of colour-coded world maps, each with the same legend at the bottom of the map with a range from Data not Available (pale green) to Extreme (blood red). There was no explanation of subject matter, so I pointed to the one closest to me.

‘Child slavery,’ he offered.

In the bottom right there was a bar graph of the corporate perpetrators. He tapped a red country with a black spot. ‘Cocoa farming—to make the chocolate bars for the kids in the yellow countries.’

Something about what I was seeing brought to mind the children in the videos on the Doctor’s computer—the boys playing handball and the girls at the art table; the different classrooms. But Alex had already moved to the next board.

‘Landmine fatalities.’

Then malaria, then drought, then school shootings…

He is saddened by the state of things.

On the second board was an index of countries—Zimbabwe sitting at extreme, all the way up to Denmark. On the third were two more maps: the percentage and growth rate of the world’s evangelical population (North America out in front on percentage; fastest growth: North Korea), and last, a whole map and index just for Yemen.

‘The woman you saw the other night,’ his voice wobbled. ‘That was Yemen.’

Others turn away, or just don’t look. He looks.

Alex shook his head. ‘Yemen,’ he repeated, like it was enough just to say the word.

I nodded to confirm that it was, suspecting he might offer more of the detail or pull up another video. Sparing me that, he braced himself and stepped over to the last whiteboard. This one offered a closer analysis. There were labels, so I had a go at interpreting it myself.

It was brain-bending stuff. From a single dot point in the bottom right-hand corner labelled A Guide to Human Suffering, faint lines reached out to other nodes, each with a theme and a subset of branching lines: a spider diagram. There were twenty or more on the board, like the map of a starry sky, the themes ranging from social disorder, infertility and ignorance through to war, injustice and the absence of God. The graphics were a dog’s breakfast, the tiny text decipherable only at close range, but the content was strangely compelling. The subsets drilled into the primary theme. From human death, for instance, sprang not just starvation, cannibalism and urban fires, but also inadequate riot control, child martyrdom, unnecessary gynaecological procedures and dangerous toys. There was a messy crossover into human disease and disability, which extended itself to include desynchronisation of bodily rhythm by international travel. (Who knew?) Crime encompassed erosion of moral values, addiction, urban slums, antisocial behaviour and late-night entertainment and finally, in the case of mental pollution—the least populated of the themes—it confined itself to individualism and ugliness. Ugliness?

‘Where did you get this stuff from?’

‘Websites. And some of it she gets in for me.’

‘Helen?’

‘Yep.’

Me and my beta waves, Alex and the human misery project.

I remembered one night in the courtyard he talked about when he was a little boy and he had ‘bad thoughts’, how he wrote them down on scraps of paper and folded them up and stashed them around his bedroom. A decade later, and this: what was real instead of what was imagined, whiteboards in place of folded notes.

After a pause, I said, ‘Awesome,’ because it was. He peered back at me as if to gauge that I was genuine before allowing himself to smile, proud of his work.

‘It is good, I think,’ he said, ‘to set it out like this—to get a handle on it.’

Again he was seeking confirmation from me, which I gladly gave. I sat down and listened to him flesh it out: how many people in how many countries suffering in how many ways. He was doing that thing where he slowed it down, slow enough for someone to take notes: ‘They haven’t done the estimates in a while, so with the conflicts and refugees and the sea levels, it would be higher again.’

Next he turned to a laptop on the desk and scrolled through another set of tables (human trafficking, vitamin A deficiency, malaria, teen suicide) to a page where the numbers were constantly ticking over.

‘And this one,’ he said in a tone of wonder, the crimson rising into his cheeks, ‘this is real-time, per second—see here, these two: as of this morning there are 670 million obese people in the world, while just today, twenty-five thousand have died from hunger. And it’s only 5.48 pm.’ Tick tock.

Alex wasn’t finished, rolling us now into the fastest-growing causes of death. There was more; there was always going to be more. As his audience, it started to feel to me like gluttony. As his friend, I began to see the shape of the beast that he was feeding. Placing my hand on his shoulder, I looked around at the hundreds of scribbled thoughts, and back to the blazing eyes of their brilliant creator. It isn’t an illness, Daniel. There are no pills for it. The question I’d had in my mind—and we need to know all this because?—was answered. Same reason I’d got swallowed up in my brainwaves—same reason, same strategy:

Know your enemy.

Know all there is to know.

The same strategy, I thought, just a different target. His enemy was the world around him; mine was within. When it was time to go he found me staring into one of the spider diagrams in the Guide to Human Suffering.

I pointed at a spot: at the centre was ‘behavioural deterioration’ and around it the branches of traumatisation, conflict and malevolence.

‘I guess we work out where we fit,’ I said.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘I never thought of that…’

With a tilt of the head, he looked on me gently, if briefly, and then ran his finger across the board, pausing midway. ‘I think where you fit would depend.’

‘Depend on what?’

He squinted, hesitant. ‘On whether you’re talking about what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you?’

I don’t think Alex would have put the question directly to me. Alex felt no need to unpeel other people’s problems. He was more high-level than that. What he was framing now was an empathetic response to my query within the scope of the broader project. He must have felt me stiffen.

‘I mean, where you fit depends on that…I imagine there is a bit of overlapping.’

If anyone cares to ask me these days about my thoughts on human connectivity, the first thing I’d say is that I don’t think we really see each other. I don’t mean that necessarily as a criticism. My sense of it is that most of the time we are pretty happy with that—sneaking around in the shadows, until we are not happy at all, alone, misunderstood, invisible. (Some of us seesaw more rapidly between the two extremes.)

By and large a shadows man, it wasn’t until I got to the School that I considered the value of transparency. Through Dr J and then Alex—the way he was looking at me now in front of his whiteboard—the School was my introduction to the fact of the matter: sometimes we need to be seen.

Through his lens—from his angle—as the seconds passed, a perspective emerged. Alex didn’t just see the problems of the world; he saw mine too, more clearly than I had ever suspected.

What you’ve done or what’s been done to you.

The overlapping…

For the first time, it entered my mind that they were one and the same thing.