The Day Tripper, page 24
Dr. Defrates rocks his head side to side. “No cast-iron proof, perhaps. But I’m certain. I know it to be the case.”
“There’s...evidence?”
“Does the name Frank McVie mean anything to you?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“No reason that it should. On the face of it, he was a wealthy man from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was considered to have a few mental health issues. He died in 1969 at the age of forty-one, following an unfortunate run-in with a flatbed truck. Unremarkable, in the grand scheme of things.”
“Sure.”
“Do a little digging, though, and it gets interesting. He was from a poor background. Eight siblings, father was a laborer who squandered most of what he earned. Frank was working on building sites from age fourteen. Hand-to-mouth existence. You’ll find all this on the net if you care to look.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Aged eighteen, and Frank’s laboring on a build in the center of town. Three stories up and he trips on the scaffold, falls onto the street twelve meters below.” Defrates slams his palms together in an enthusiastic reenactment. “This was 1946. No care given to workers’ safety.”
“Of course.”
“Frank McVie nearly died right there. Long recovery. But he did survive. And he went on to become very well-off indeed, a series of exceptionally prudent investments in the stock market. Bought a mansion on the outskirts of town. Renowned for his generosity. It was a bit of a local joke—that his bang on the head was responsible for this carefree attitude he had to his money.”
Defrates is a natural storyteller, and he’s finding his stride.
“But something was driving him mad, Alex. Driving him nuts. Someone of lesser means would have ended up having themselves committed, most probably. But Frank had other ideas. He employed the services of a Lucien Watts-Cook, a psychiatrist with a reputation for being somewhat unorthodox. In other words, someone open-minded enough to not have his patient banged up. Watts-Cook moved into Frank’s house. Was there for years. He knew exactly what was going on with Frank. He studied him, wrote reports, tried various medications—sedatives, LSD, Largactil, you name it. To see if it would make a difference.
“Now, as I’ve already told you, Frank died young. How he died—that is interesting! He was walking into town. Perhaps he was a touch dozy on one of his psychiatrist’s libations, maybe it was a simple accident—who knows. He tripped at the curb, stumbled into the path of a lorry. He passed away instantly.”
“You think he was in the same situation as me?” I ask. “He was...atemporal?”
“His live-in psychiatrist, this Watts-Cook fellow, was certain of it. Wrote thousands of pages about his time with Frank McVie—how disorientated his patient often was, how his memory was not linear, how he knew things that hadn’t happened yet. There’s little doubt about it, this was a case of atemporal consciousness.”
“Fascinating.”
“It gets much better, Alex.” There’s glee in Defrates’s voice. “It was Frank McVie’s untimely death that brought with it a few clues. You see, he died in the same place where he’d suffered the earlier accident on the scaffold, the point at which his atemporal consciousness began. In fact, it’s likely the two injuries occurred in the exact same position. An interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Seems pretty unlikely.”
“Coincidences are unlikely, Alex. It’s rather their defining characteristic.”
“Point taken. Go on.”
“Lucien Watts-Cook formed a hypothesis. He proposed that if someone were to suffer a particular brain injury twice, some time apart, leading in both cases to a drop in brain activity to a certain level of subconsciousness, and if these two injuries were to occur in the exact same geographical location, this might lead to a form of temporal confusion. A slipping from the grid, if you like. The time frames of the two injuries becoming muddled.”
“You think this is it?” I ask him.
“Science leads us to believe that all of time, and all of space, exist in a preexisting block—everything that is to happen has already happened. Our memories, our lived experiences, they are indexed against this passing time. Cause then effect, cause then effect, ad infinitum. But if an error occurred—a person’s consciousness jammed between two points on the map of time—where might that leave them?”
I nod, take it on board. What else do I have to explain this?
“From the perspective of the victim,” Defrates continues, “life would appear to become disordered following the first injury. Which, in the case of our Frank McVie, made him a lot of money, but it cost him his sanity.”
“I’m exactly halfway there,” I say.
Defrates laughs heartily.
“Why isn’t this widely known about, this atemporal consciousness?” I ask.
“Lucien Watts-Cook published his findings, only to be shunned by the medical community. Written off as a crank. Or worse, a charlatan—a little too keen to relieve poor old Frank McVie of his cash.”
“I can’t imagine medicine and metaphysics are terribly compatible.”
“Indeed. But there are other cases too, Alex. Tito Raminhos, for example. Portuguese bare-knuckle fighter. In his case, less than a year between the initial injury and the last—a fatal blow in the same ring as the first. A year lived in random order, if his reports are to be believed.”
“Incredible.”
“And it’s not just him, Alex. In every single case, the one uniting factor is the two traumatic brain injuries, both at the precise same location.”
“So when I top myself here, when I throw myself into the water, I’ll suffer the exact same brain injury I did when Blake Benfield sent me in?”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes.”
I think back to the things Dr. Defrates has told me previously. They make a curious sort of sense now: his claims that I already have escaped, that I have my reasons for being in this situation, that I’m luckier than I think. I will—or did, rather—end a life of misery by jumping into the Thames as a forty-eight-year-old man. And this is, what—a chance to right that failed life?
“A lot to get your head around, yes?” he asks.
“You could say that.”
“It’s reassuring, no? Having a reason? Knowing there have been other cases?”
“I suppose. Need to let it sink in, make sense of it.”
“I’ll help you wherever I can.” He says it in that glib way of his that I’ve previously thought to be insincerity; perhaps it’s actually him playing down his efforts, how much he cares.
“So you’re my Lucien Watts-Cook, I guess?”
Defrates laughs. “Hardly! Psychiatry is a long way from my field.”
“I’m a sort of case study for you, though? That’s it, right?”
He huffs, fumbles with his words. “No. I wouldn’t say that. This is merely a subject in which I am...interested. I’ve given a fair share of my life to its study, I suppose.”
“You’re being cryptic again. I’m sure you said you’d tell me everything.”
“Yes, yes.”
“How did you find me?” The question blurts out of me the moment I think of it.
He gives a resigned chuckle. “Well, there is that.”
“How would you know that I have this atemporal consciousness thing?”
He’s silent for a minute, gently nodding. “There will come a time when you will do your own research into this phenomenon. You will, by then, be a little more proficient with the internet and the wisdom it holds. You will discover eventually the same cases I’ve told you about. And in the course of your research, you’ll discover me.”
“How so?”
“Simply because I’ve written a few articles on the subject. Not in what you might call mainstream publications, mind, but I am perhaps the closest thing to an authority you’re likely to find. Certainly in this neck of the woods, anyway. You will contact me. You shall want to discuss your condition.”
“But I already know you.” It’s a stupid comment, but I’m not understanding him at all.
“Let’s put it another way—you’ve already looked me up online. You’ve already made contact. Some time ago.”
I wrestle with my confusion for a moment. “No. Sorry. That’s not how this works.”
“I appreciate that,” he says apologetically. “February 2015—that’s when you’ll get in touch. Or when you did get in touch, depending on how you prefer to look at things.”
“I haven’t been to February 2015, though. I’ve not lived a day there.”
“Well, no, not yet.”
“Sorry, but we’ve discussed all this,” I tell him. I’m trying to piece together how to articulate that what he’s saying is impossible. It is impossible. “It was you who found me. When you turned up on the day of the eclipse in ’99. If I’d contacted you first, since all this began, I’d know about it. I’d remember doing it.”
“Yes. Exactly right.”
“So if I haven’t done it yet, if I haven’t yet done my research and sought you out, if I haven’t experienced that February day in 2015, how do you know me? How did you know to come and find me?”
“There you have me.” He gives me a half smile.
“Give me a clue here, mate.”
“Everything I’m telling you is true, Alex. I know you are atemporal, because you contacted me for advice.”
“This doesn’t...work. What is it I don’t know? I’d have to have already been atemporal to have a reason to look you up. So unless I was so blind drunk at some point that I’ve forgotten living an entire day...”
“The answer is far simpler than that.”
I shake my head.
“Let’s put it another way—how could I have experienced something that, as far as you are aware, is yet to happen?”
“I’m tempted to say it’s impossible, but that word’s kinda redundant these days.”
Defrates chuckles. “You’re an intelligent man, Alex. Think about it.”
It takes no more than a minute for it to dawn on me. I turn and meet his stare. Yes.
“You’ve worked it out, haven’t you?” he asks.
“Maybe I have.”
“Go on,” he says, enjoying the suspense.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
He winks at me. “Very good, Alex.”
“Traumatic brain injury?”
Dr. Defrates nods. “Unfortunate incident on a steep railway embankment. If the train had been moving any faster I’d be a goner. Nasty accident, from which I have a classic case of atemporal consciousness.” He grins. “My name’s Paul Defrates, and I’m atemporal!”
“Welcome to the club. It’s kinda shit.”
“I’ve been at it much longer than you, young man. Unlike you, though, I don’t have anyone to tell me how it ends.”
“I reckon I know where it ends.”
“Yes, indeed! My least favorite stretch of railway track.”
The humor burns out. We sit in silence, consider our mutual tragedy. “I’m sorry, mate,” I eventually say. “How long’s it been?”
“I was thirty. November 1990. And the latest days I’ve seen are 2028, so I guess things end round there.”
“How much of it have you lived?”
“Most, I’d say.”
“Christ. You must be sick of it.”
He shrugs. “The days can be very long, but the years short.”
“You think we’re missing a trick?” I ask. “Reckon we should take a leaf out of Frank McVie’s book—make a load of cash?”
“To be granted this unique perspective, and to squander it on simply accruing money? Not for me. Nor you. Money’s not your god, Alex.”
“I don’t know...”
“People who pursue money are those with nothing better to pursue,” Defrates says, enjoying his own wisdom.
“I guess.”
“So now you finally have your answer,” he says, smiling again, “as to why I’m so damned interested in this subject!”
“Thanks. For coming to find me that day.”
“Like I say, it was you who found me, really.”
“Whatever. So what is this, an atemporal consciousness support group?”
“I hope we can do a little better than that,” he tells me.
“What’s the plan?”
“I’ve given a lot of my life to researching this. To understanding it. You’re a great help.”
“Cool.”
“So much still to know,” he says.
“Like?”
“Like how random is it?”
“The order we get the days in?”
“Exactly. Is there a reason? A logic to it? I’ve looked for patterns, for an algorithm, but I’m drawing blanks.”
“Interesting. I’ve got a question.”
“Only the one?”
“Can we escape? Get back? Have a normal life?”
“Gosh, you do like asking that question, don’t you? Another answer I one day hope to have. Trouble is, Alex, it’s not always easy to keep focused on my research. You know what it’s like—the time that gets wasted orientating ourselves every day. Then I have my students, names to remember, syllabuses to keep abreast of.” He says it with a smirk.
“You enjoy it, don’t you? Being kept on your toes. Why else would you do it, the teaching as well as everything else?”
“It’s rather good for the intellect, yes. Life is rarely dull!”
The night is still warm when eventually we rise from the side of the river. People milling about on the concourse are noisy, loosened by booze and August. It’s impossible not to recall the terrace bar that was once here, stretching to the river’s edge. Where I drank with Holly. Where I fought with Blake Benfield.
“Thought I might treat us to a few overpriced confections,” Dr. Defrates says, pointing toward the artisanal chocolatier in the building the bar once occupied. The shop is in the process of closing for the night.
“Sure, why not.”
We pause a moment by the memorial in the middle of the concourse: granite plinth, soaring chrome doves. Unvandalized for once.
“Nasty business,” Defrates says, gazing down at a single bunch of flowers. “I despair of the human race sometimes.”
I scuff my shoe on the ground. “What a day. Can’t believe I buried my mum. Well, cremated her. Crazy.”
He gives me a sympathetic smile. “You did well. She’d be proud of you.”
“Dunno about that. A booze-addled failure with nothing to his name, in a charity shop suit? Hardly an achiever. Cheers for coming, though. Means a lot.”
He waves it away, no worries. “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” he says.
“Sure.”
“Just keep living well, Alex.”
“I am trying. I think.”
“Keep it up. Strain at the weight of your history.”
“Keep running into the headwind,” I add.
“Real change is possible, Alex.” His eyes burn into me. “Take the initiative,” he says firmly. “Whilst you know change is possible.”
“You think the opportunity passes?”
“Rot sets in,” he says. “You live a life you’re not happy with for long enough, and it’s possible to forget that things could be different.”
“Sounds like my life in a nutshell.”
“You know the life you want,” he says.
“Sure I do.”
“You’ve already done good things, Alex. Strike whilst the iron’s hot.”
“Do you...know something? What is it you know?”
His trademark self-satisfied smile returns. “Just friendly advice, no more.”
“All right.”
“But I’ll tell you this—you may be nearer to the cusp than you think. A step or two in the right direction, and who knows what might happen?”
“Understood.” I nod and think better of quizzing him further.
He stares again at the base of the memorial and shakes his head. “Terrible.”
We’re standing side by side. He has the appearance of someone paying their respects: head bowed, silent contemplation. I wait on him, glancing down myself at the brass plate with its inscription.
OMAR JASSIM, WHO FELL HERE JULY 4, 2014.
MAY HE REST IN PEACE.
“So it goes,” Defrates says.
He turns on his heel, a sudden shift in mode. I follow as he struts toward the chocolatier. “Cognac truffles, I think,” he says. “Yummy, yummy.”
APRIL 23, 2000 | AGE 24
Rise
It is the sort of spring morning that is capable of making me smug that I’m up when the rest of the world is yet to wake. I crack open the Venetian blind, and stripes of sunlight fan across the kitchen, revealing the aftermath of a poker night: grease-steeped pizza boxes, drained tequila bottles, scattered playing cards—some of which have been partially incinerated in an act of comical sore-losing that I have to accept was probably me. This is the terraced bachelor pad in Balham I share with Loz and three other lads. Not that there’s much chance of any of them rising anytime soon; 06:28 reads the clock on the microwave.
The instant coffee I fix myself is so strong the milk disappears without a trace. It scours the taste of booze from my throat. My head is woolly, but I’ve no plans to sleep it off. I know from the radio alarm that woke me at six that it’s Easter Sunday and, according to the highlighted schedule in my bedroom, I’m supposed to be working at the Blue Moon today, early start.
I take a seat on the back doorstep. The garden is dotted with crumpled cans, bulging bin bags at its perimeter. Yet in defiance of the neglect, it bursts with new life—shocks of bright green grass, scores of daffodils proud beside the crumbling path. In the distance, a mist hovers over London, bronzed by the rising sun. The air is green with the smell of a landscape awakening after winter.
