Bernard adjusted Martin’s goggles and gestured for him to approach the MRI. ‘I think I’ll take my chances,’ he said. ‘If we go back to Europe, in three months I’ll be wearing a wedding ring.’
Martin lay down in the machine. His body was rigid; he took a few deep, slow breaths. He closed his eyes before Bernard flipped down the goggles. His fists clenched; no gloves today. The motor whirred.
Bernard said, ‘Martin? Can you open your eyes please?’
Reluctantly, Martin complied. The goggles were feeding him street scenes of Sydney in the eighties, accompanied by snatches of music and news. Hunters and Collectors sang ‘Carry Me’, the vocals as raw as an open wound. Tim Ritchie on 2JJJ introduced The Residents’ eerie, pulsing electronic version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Whatever its faults, the machine had certainly learnt how to take him back.
Martin tried to relax and follow the cues as the state premier, Neville Wran, floated in front of him, waffling gruffly about nothing comprehensible. Martin couldn’t recall having any particular opinion of the man. State politicians just made him think about trains – train drivers’ strikes, trains coming to a halt in the middle of the night. Once he’d been travelling home from the city, close to midnight, and the train had stopped on the bridge over the Parramatta River for forty minutes, for no apparent reason, with no explanation. He’d looked out over the dark water and thought about diving in and swimming to the shore, just to put an end to the waiting. The memory was vivid; he could see red paint flaking off the carriage’s old-style, manually operated doors. He could have jumped out; there’d been nothing to stop him. But he hadn’t been quite foolish enough. In fact, he hadn’t really been tempted at all.
And he’d been back to that carriage a dozen times already under the scanner’s gaze. Was it something he desperately needed the Proxy to remember? Had it been a great defining moment for his world view, his moral framework? No. So why was he wasting time thinking about it when every second he had left was precious – and every second in this machine doubly so?
Now the goggles showed Midnight Oil on stage at Selina’s nightclub. Martin could almost smell the spilt beer and acrid sweat… but so fucking what? No doubt something in his head lit up at the sight of this performance; he’d been there on the night, or one very like it. But he was just spinning his wheels, deepening the ruts memory had carved out by pure chance. The machine didn’t know how to take him anywhere new from here. It knew it needed more from him, but it didn’t know how to find it.
The machine seemed to reach the same conclusion; it gave up on the nostalgia trip and started showing him photographs of strangers. An old man stood in the ruins of a house; the style of his clothing and what remained of the building made Martin think of the earthquake in Kashmir. A woman with a dark blue, lace-trimmed headscarf held the hand of a young girl in a pink floral dress, on a crowded street somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia. Individuals, couples, families; each image persisted for just a second or two. Though Martin couldn’t help noticing clues as to where and when the pictures had been taken, Nasim had reminded him many times that this wasn’t meant as a trivia quiz, a tool to boost the Proxy’s general knowledge. The aim was far more abstract: the images were like flashes of light, positioned at random in a vast space of possibilities, and the record of his brain’s responses was like a collection of shadows of a single complex object, cast from many directions. If the Proxy could be sculpted so it cast the same shadows, that would help strengthen its resemblance to him.
The metaphor was imperfect; the real process was neither as simple nor as passive as that. But it did include a hint of one potential pitfall: a thousand acts of illumination from the same direction would reveal no more detail than a single flash. Nasim and her colleagues did not understand the process well enough to know in advance which images would be freshly revelatory and which would tell them nothing new. The only solution was to throw so many different scenes at him that the unavoidable dilution of their effectiveness would be overcome by sheer force of numbers.
Martin caught himself being distracted by these meta-thoughts and forced himself to attend more closely to the images themselves. Two boys in a parched rural landscape prodded an ants’ nest with a stick as their dog looked on dubiously. Two tearful women embraced on the steps of a courthouse. A drunken youth swung a punch at another man outside a nightclub while a woman sitting awkwardly on the pavement looked up at them, scowling. Martin struggled to keep his eyes open; he succeeded, but it felt like a superhuman task. A frail-looking child rode alone on a merry-go-round, seated on the back of a red horse with a garish green saddle. An elderly woman gazed sadly at a framed black-and-white portrait of a uniformed man. It was like being trapped in a never-ending Benetton advertisement. Martin thought about the contents of his freezer; Rana had brought them a meal the night before, and if he bought two more frozen meals on his way home he’d be fine until the weekend. Then he and Javeed could go to the bazaar together, and cook something in the afternoon. He loved chopping fresh dill; the scent was exhilarating.
Nasim said, ‘Martin, we’re taking you out.’
The goggles went blank; Martin waited for the servo to withdraw him from the scanner.
When his face was uncovered he sat up and turned to Nasim. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I know I lost focus. I didn’t get much sleep last night; maybe I just need some more coffee.’
‘I don’t think coffee will do it,’ Nasim replied. ‘Even when you’re attentive we’re getting nothing useful now. The rate’s been trailing off for days.’
Martin felt a chill of fear. ‘You’re not giving up?’
‘No, of course not!’ Nasim sighed. ‘This is my fault; I should have been on top of this sooner, but I’ve been a bit distracted by the inquisition.’
Apparently the investigation into Zendegi’s breach had been generating resentment and discontent among the staff; Bahador had made some acerbic comments about a return to Khomeini-era paranoia the last time he’d bumped into Martin.
‘We’ve pushed the current methods about as far as we can,’ Nasim continued, ‘but that’s not the end of it; it just means we have to change tack.’
Martin said, ‘Okay – but how close is the Proxy to completion right now?’
‘It’s improved a lot over the last few weeks,’ Nasim assured him. ‘Quantitatively, statistically, we can show that. But at this point it’s not…’
‘Foster parent material?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What about mind-the-kid-while-I-duck-into-the-shops material?’
Nasim smiled uneasily. ‘We’ve got some way to go, but I’m not discouraged. We always knew this wasn’t going to be easy.’ Martin appreciated the way she declined to point out that she’d originally told him it would be impossible.
‘Is there still a chance we could complete this in six months?’ he asked. ‘If you find a new approach, that might even be faster than the old one, mightn’t it?’
Nasim didn’t answer him directly. ‘Give me a few days,’ she said. ‘Take a break from the scanner. I’ll talk to the people at Eikonometrics who’ve been working on some other side-loading projects. Between us, I’m sure we can come up with a better way to pick your brains.’
‘We won’t want the books!’ The man, Reza, laughed as incredulously as if Martin had offered him a good deal on a blacksmith’s forge. ‘We’ll take over the lease, but forget about the stock and the business. We want to use this space for a gym.’
Martin resisted the urge to throw Reza’s derisive laughter back at him. ‘A gym? Here?’ He gestured at the shop’s display windows stretching from floor to ceiling, just centimetres back from the pavement packed with pedestrians and motorbikes.