The Subjects

Case studies, all of us. A series of diverging and replicated experiences: metrics, not narratives.

Now I am starting to see that what matters is the purpose for which it is all collected: the proof point. What is the larger story they are trying to tell?

On one of our last nights at the waterhole, Alex told us about the day he first walked home from school alone.

He was eight years old. He and his father had just moved away from the city, and Alex had ‘gone quiet’. At first his dad said that was okay; but it had been long enough, and now it was time for him to ‘claim the place’ and ‘own his path’. The first step in achieving that involved them standing together barefoot in the bush behind the house, closing their eyes and imagining roots springing out from the soles of their feet into the ground, as far down into the earth as their minds would take them, and then permitting the energy to reverse and surge upward into their bodies and arms, to eventually sprout out through the tips of their fingers. In effect, to become trees. This, his father assured him, would foster their own growth and sense of belonging.

Step two was easier for Alex to grasp as a concept but a much greater challenge: to walk home alone from school. It was six kilometres, and his father calculated that if he maintained a steady pace it would take him about an hour.

He did not underestimate the size of the challenge for his son. In the lead-up to the big day they marked out the best pedestrian route (four backstreets, two sets of lights, one long winding road to the front gate), and on the day itself, he dropped Alex at school and handed him a printout of the directions. (Knowing full well the boy’s chief concern was not getting lost, but getting home alive.)

What are you afraid of? his father would ask when he found Alex in various states of paralysis. And the answer?

Death. In his more fluid moments, he could put it into words. ‘I am dying.’

As Alex spoke, we didn’t interrupt him, not even Tod. He traced his steps that day as though every tree and pothole were etched in his memory, starting as he walked out the gate of his school. By the first street corner his heart was pounding in his ears and his body was like a leaking tap—‘I was sweating and crying and I kept needing to take a piss.’ He started counting, like his dad had told him to. He got all the way to a thousand.

I could relate to his fear of the streets—like the bush to me, a minefield in the mind, a series of horror-flashes of what is real, what is imagined…The sound of a dog barking: yellow teeth puncture flesh. A roar of acceleration: body dragged into the rusted underbelly. Any sighting of people on foot or behind wheels: chloroform and knives and white vans—every bad story he’d ever heard about bad people.

And with each image, he was falling into the bottomless well of non-being, cold and airless, his mind a blank, his organs failing: something akin to that happened eleven times between Alex walking out of the school gate and turning into his street. With the stops and starts it had taken him almost two hours. His shirt soaked through with sweat, his head pounding, he was at the point of collapse. It wasn’t until he reached the next door neighbour’s house that he saw the figure standing at the gate. As Alex approached, his father motioned him through in a definitive gesture and commenced a series of deep breaths, continuing until Alex could repeat at least one, and then: ‘After me,’ his father said, as he began to pound his chest with both his fists, slow and rhythmic. ‘Come on, with me…’

And Alex did what he asked. He pounded his chest. He lifted it up, to the extent that he could, and pounded it again, and again, until his father was satisfied the motion was driven by his heart and not his hands.

They sat on the front steps for a long time, the silence broken only when his father turned to look him in the eyes and said: ‘You are good and brave.’

Four years later, when Alex’s father died in front of him, he took his son’s fear of death with him. Partly because whenever the fear crept in, his father loomed up in his psyche and no part of Alex would allow himself to be anything but good and brave. (Most times he conjured the image of himself pounding his chest in time with his father; once he even caught himself doing it.)

But another factor was more transformative. Death was now his most-loved father’s permanent state of being—so as time went on, and Alex missed his presence more and more, he hankered to be closer to it: to find a deeper understanding, a kinship. He embarked on a comprehensive research project to consider death from every angle and resolved that there was nothing to fear because there was, in fact, nothing to come. That a decomposed corpse was simply a nutrient for the soil.

In time, it was Alex’s continued existence that formed the subject of his dread—specifically, the uncertainty around the duration. For young people the term of life can feel like a life sentence. What Alex required was a way to exercise control. The basis of his second project was his need to know that in whatever circumstance he found himself, he could end it. He needed an exit pass.

He began to consider his surrounds, scoping heights and sharp edges, bodies of water. Imagining the shape it might take. When he was satisfied his death was possible in a practical sense, he could relax. In the idea of non-being he found his solace. Death was his friend and confidante—dare it be said, his soul mate.

I am trying to think now when I sensed Alex was no longer marching beside us. He put on a good show, I can say that. Later I thought about his father at the gate and I realised that, day in day out, coming to lessons, walking us through his whiteboards—that is what he was doing: being good and brave. He was convincing enough to let us believe we were mapping a collective future, marching with the fervour of purpose…It was just a matter of time before he had to show it up for the made-up story that it was, before he had to show us what was real.

A couple of days in a row he said he was tired, and then he didn’t show up for a session with PW and I remember I was more disappointed than concerned. It was the last day of an exercise to track gamma, and Alex and I were trailing way behind Rachel. PW had taken on a whole new aura around the three of us. Smiling, he’d shake his head and repeat, ‘You guys…you guys…’ Not dismissive, but in a marvelling kind of way, sometimes resting a hand on our shoulders.

And then: no Alex. No big deal. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. When he came in to breakfast a couple of days later, it was to tell us he’d be skipping PW’s sessions.

He kept coming to the whiteboard sessions, but even then, he wanted to work more alone (a seven-slide PowerPoint on hazardous waste in Honduras): fixated on a particular problem, more granular than ever before.

What ‘doing more Doctor’ meant—I learned this only on reading the transcripts—was that twice a week over two weeks he sat in a chair in his office while the Doctor collected a baseline of twenty-one sites of his brain. There was some argument in the proceedings about the need for this, given the precariousness of his mental state, the Doctor providing cogent reasons as to why observing the patterns of one’s own brainwaves might produce positive clinical outcomes. There were pages and pages on the risk assessments that were performed or not performed and how the decisions were made—the decision not to medicate, the delay in treatment, and then back to the results of the tracking.

The overall theme of the questioning was that whatever he was doing, the monitoring and the feedback, whatever combination, whatever magic potion, it didn’t work. The Doctor disagreed. It was during those sessions, he said, that Alex was at his most frank and open.

COUNSEL: Could you give us an example of that, of something he imparted to you in one of these discussions?

DR J: I can. He said he wanted to curl into a ball and enter into a state of non-being.

COUNSEL: You mean die?

DR J: That is what he meant, yes I think so.

COUNSEL: And your response to that?

DR J: I encouraged him to curl into a ball, and assured him he would not die.

Let me explain what it looked like in practice, on the concrete floor of the classroom, under the second whiteboard. One arm clutched at a knee, the other leg outstretched, a hand cradling his ear, eyes open, unblinking. It was a shape similar to the one I’d seen that day in his dance class, then with the teacher kneeling beside him. Because I’d seen it then, and because Rachel had pretty much lived it, we weren’t overly alarmed. I did what the teacher had done, knelt down. I was nervous about touching him, but I did; I placed a hand on his shoulder and when he didn’t flinch, I moved closer and put my whole arm around him. Rachel came down on the other side and held on to the outstretched leg with both her hands. It was an odd configuration, but it felt like what we needed to do for him to know we were there. There aren’t that many of them, the times when what you do really matters, when you can change the course of things. We said his name. We said he’d be okay. We said we weren’t going anywhere.

I lay down on the floor to get to eye level. It was what I had seen before, as he stared into a computer screen late at night, but when the noise came it wasn’t something I’d heard before. There is a sound that is made when you rub your finger around the rim of a half-filled glass. It is like a musical note that is held. It is a sad song, low-pitched, clear and beautiful. It is the vibration of crystals transmitting into air. That is the sound that emanated from him now, the sound that had always been there, waiting. It was telling us something but we had no way to interpret it.

Rachel and I looked at each other in an unspoken pact: now that he had us, we would make it go away again.

It is what is known as the pointy end of the proceedings. Was the management and treatment of the children appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances? Helen K was recalled to give further evidence about the research project, how and why it came about.

COUNSEL: So you embark into a universe defined by everything terrible, everything that might lead a young man to conclude there is no point in living.

HELEN K: As I said, we couldn’t ignore what was in his head…

COUNSEL: What was in his head; yes of course, you took such good care of what was in his head. You support a course in which a boy with a history of chronic clinical depression is taken off his medication and you feed his mind with stories, depictions, of child sexual slavery and the public stoning of women…

HELEN K: I did not provide him with those stories. Our focus was statistics and mapping.

COUNSEL: No stories, no videos?

HELEN K: That is right.

COUNSEL: What about this one?

[Video played in court]

There were four pages of questions on how Alex got hold of the Yemen video. It was not through Helen. It was a USB drive on his computer. Before this, Dr J had been asked the same questions and provided the same answers. At no time during the proceedings did they get to the bottom of it.

If I could go in to bat for Helen for a minute—because I’m not sure she did such a good job of it herself—it wasn’t that she didn’t try to steer Alex a different way. He just always found his way back.

An example: a lesson like any other, we pulled out our tablets and headsets. The intro (a response, I assumed, to Rachel’s request) was a few images: Hitler, Superman and shelves filled with thousands of brains in Petri dishes. According to script, we worked through how the Führer had used Nietzsche to justify mass extermination—taking ethics out of it and keeping the focus on excellence, seguing neatly into the possibility that we were all being drip-fed, our values manufactured in a meta world, the brains-in-the-vat theory. Like the Matrix. Our version of the world fed to us through neuro-electrical signals. (I’m not saying we started light, just that it was Alex who led us into the dark.)

We were getting into some mind-bending fun facts when Helen stopped to pose a set of questions, which she asked us to consider through a number of different lenses—historical, scientific, philosophical. These and subsets of the same: Who am I? What is time? Is it okay to grow brain-dead babies to harvest their organs? We embarked pretty merrily on that. Whether or not fish could reason morphed rapidly into whether it was okay to have sex with animals (animals more generally, not just fish).

Some questions didn’t generate much heat: what happens after death is that we cease to exist, agreed. A little more on whether we should start putting terminally ill people out of their misery. Rachel came in hard here that we couldn’t trust people to make decisions for other people. Alex? No surprises there: as soon as we’re brought into this world we must have the right to leave it. And then a question of his own: should we have a right to give birth when we don’t have consent of the child that it wants to exist.

He didn’t seem opposed to the idea, and there we had it: the downward spiral, the millions of babies born into a core of pain and suffering…

‘Okay, Alex,’ Helen said in a last brave attempt: ‘But is all suffering bad?’

‘Maybe not,’ he replied, ‘but let me give you some recent examples of bad.’ And none of us could stop him.

Perhaps I willed the distraction; anyway, at some point during that lesson I heard voices outside and I went to the window. It was raining, the view to outside skewered through the foggy glass and the rivulets of rain. The window looked out to the driveway. I rubbed the glass and pressed my forehead against it.

I could see someone standing at the gate next to a blue car, twenty or so metres from the building. It was Greg. He was facing the direction of the front door, shaking his head, talking to someone who was out of our view. Rachel and Alex came up behind me and Alex put his finger to the window, chasing the drops as they fell. I rubbed the glass again but when the other person came into the frame, we stood back from the window so as not to be seen. It was Tod. He walked right up to Greg. They were arguing again, their voices rising against the clatter of rain. It was getting hard to see. At one point, Tod pointed in his face and I think Greg laughed and I remembered what Tod had done to his teacher. Whatever the reason he was taking Greg on, I was glad of it. A part of me wished he would lash out. He didn’t. He turned back; Greg got into the car and drove away.

A couple of weeks had passed since Dr J had taken over his lessons when I glimpsed him sitting at his desk. It was otherwise empty, all his bits and pieces packed away.

‘Hello, Daniel,’ he said. His T-shirt was pale pink, a skeleton wearing a bandana. ‘I think you’ve grown again.’

I sat down and walked him through what we’d been doing, my struggle with sub-personalities…He was shaking his head and smirking, then he started getting a bit weird, putting on an American accent and spinning lines:

It was sort of funny but not. He looked sorry when I asked him what he was talking about.

‘I don’t know. I actually don’t know…’ He went quiet for a while and when he started again he seemed to be making his best effort to explain: ‘I had this girlfriend once,’ he said. ‘I thought she was perfect. And it went to shit. She wasn’t what I thought. Same kind of thing. I loved this place. You hear what I’m saying? I just think I should get out of here.’

Neither of us said anything. I had a sick feeling in my stomach about what he could tell me if I asked.

PW looked at me, waiting to catch on. I told him about the videos, the other children, the other places.

When I told him, he nodded like I was confirming something for him, but when I asked who they were, he stopped, stood up and pulled his bag onto his back. I felt a sudden surge of panic. I didn’t want him to go.

I knew decisions were being made in distant places, and I knew that the basis of those decisions was not the fostering of our well-being—our education, rehabilitation, treatment—whatever you want to call it.

What we could never have suspected, and what seven days of legal enquiry never even touched on, was that at some point right around now, a set of circumstances necessitated a shift in the corporate objective: the endgame. It is concealed somewhere here in the database. I have looked, searched through subject headings, guidelines, operations. There is no manual I can find…But somewhere it is there in the missives between mothership and satellite, a change in direction: from the laissez faire—‘let it play out’—to a more determinative outcome: to demonstrate failure.