The Device

I am growing bored of his explanations about how the device works, largely because I don’t understand them. It’s hard to interrupt him while he’s talking (pacing rapidly up and down the room as he does so, gesticulating wildly) but I manage, eventually, to butt in and ask him what prompted him to design the thing in the first place.

“Ah, well,” he begins, pausing thoughtfully beside the fireplace, “it all started when I was reading through my diaries one night, you see. I was flicking through my entries for the previous year – or was it the year before that? – and I came across a description of an event from my childhood I had absolutely no recollection of. That is to say, it felt utterly foreign. It could’ve been written by a stranger. I read it over and over and tried to conjure up the memory, match the words on the page to pre-existing images and feelings, but nothing came. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind at that moment, you see; it wasn’t something whose various bits were lost in the deep black vitreous fluid of my subconscious, and whose frayed and tangled threads I could eventually stitch back together, reconstitute through careful labour. It was just absent. Gone. Erased. It gave a sensation a little like realising your phone isn’t in your pocket: a violent emptiness which you can’t penetrate, no matter how desperately you root around with your fingers…”

He stands silent for a moment, seemingly gazing at a point only a few centimetres above and behind my head. The shadows cast by the fire flicker balefully on his face. His expression is one of mystic ecstasy. And it stays like that. Statuesque. For almost a minute. An unsettling impression – like the hard autistic menace you feel when you walk into a pitch-black room.

I gaze down at the cup of tea in my lap, a little unnerved. “Well, and what was the memory?” I hazard to ask.

Suddenly roused as if from a dream, he laughs and slaps the mantelpiece above the fireplace – so loudly that I jump in my seat and spill my tea, scalding my thighs. The bad spirits retreat from the room.

“Why, my boy,” he booms, “the day I built my first circuit breaker!” (and here he begins again to talk about the minutiae of neural networks and other mundane shit).

By this point I am standing up and am patting down my soaked pant-legs, being careful not to let any of the tea drizzle onto the strange-looking headset which rests on the coffee table between us – the “device” he wants me to try tonight.

In the meantime Bruce (that’s his name, by the way) goes to the kitchen, grabs me a tea-towel, and then sets to work adjusting various knobs and levers on his invention. It’s fun to watch him do it. The pleasure of seeing him work, of observing him become completely absorbed at the flip of a switch in whatever he is doing, is half the reason I am friends with him – this strange man more than twice my age. He has a simplicity which I lack. He has never permitted me to read his diaries, but I almost doubt they would be worth reading. He is too earnest. All the eccentricity is external. So that I imagine that his ‘secrets’ must be extraordinarily plain – mere recitations of fact; bullet point descriptions of the quotidian. Whereas with me I am externally normal, externally ordinary, and all the strange scabbed flesh, all the gross mycotic difference, is stored on the inside, and you have to peel my skin away in layers to see it...

“It’s ready now,” he says, standing up, wiping his brow.

“Okay, and what do I do?”

“You put it on.”

“And it will work – just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Taking the headset into my hands – it feels heavier than I expect it to, and cold to the touch – I inspect it from several angles, feeling the hackles on my neck rise a little, before finally, gingerly, raising it onto my scalp and tightening the strap around my chin. Various lights flicker to life.

“Ahh, it is scanning your brain now…” he says, almost – I hesitate to use the comparison – almost sexually.

“And, um,” I swallow (a little painfully with the strap cutting into my Adam’s apple), “how will it know which stimuli to use?”

“Gah, weren’t you listening?”

That’s the last thing I hear before all my senses go dark. He said this would happen. That the device would induce, as part of its first phase, a sudden – and complete – sensory deprivation. But still, I am not ready for it. I gasp – or at least in an abstract way I mime the motor-intention of gasping, but without any of the feedback of feeling either my mouth open or of hearing my exhalation. The effect is frankly terrifying. And impossible to describe. You might be picturing me as some disembodied thing floating in a black void. But there is no ‘blackness’, for this would require vision, and there is no ‘void’, for this would require a perception of space. There is simply nothing. I am detached even from the subvocalisation of my thoughts. I can still ‘sense’ my thoughts, but in a remote, pure, indescribable way. It is like a perfect Platonic knowledge, an angelic knowledge; knowledge unmediated by sense input. And I dislike it.

And then the first pulse of stimulus hits.

The smell of cut grass. And dew. No, rain? Oh, and – and – and intermixed with it… a really peculiar smell. A smell I remember being a mystery to me even as a small boy. What is it? Is it dog shit? Wet dog shit? I find it unpleasant to acknowledge, but this is the sort of thing that leaves its mark on the brain. And the impression is powerful. Whole sensory landscapes flow back into my mind’s eye, a gorgeous ambrosial orgasm. The house we moved out of when I was only three years old. Replicated perfectly. Every lost detail restored. The stucco wall. The warped bit in the corner of the wooden floor from – I remember now! – when I spilled orange juice at my cousin’s birthday party and no one cleaned it up. Holy shit. Golden fucking emotions glitter sensuously in my brain. I cannot believe it. This lost world. God. This past life. The early 2000s décor. Cream-coloured carpets. Fat plump couches. VHS tapes. CRT monitors. My older brother playing Counter-Strike.

The sensory avalanche slowly recedes – like watery paint – and I am in nothingness again. And then the cycle begins anew.

Summer heat. Sweat. Cicada-song. Purple sunset.

Jelly Tots. Sour. South African boy in my class. The freckles on his arm.

Winter. Overcast sky. Bitumen – where we play four-square. Sitting cross-legged on the bitumen. Fiddling with it. Grinding little granules of stone together between my thumb and index finger. Pleasant grainy sensation.

Sunlight shining off of a car bonnet. Hot car smell. Melted plastic. Cigarette smoke. Older male family friend – brusque masculinity. White-hot seatbelt. Self-consciousness. Sense of adjusting, making accomodations, stuck in a demure mode I’m not in when I’m with my peers. Why have I turned girlish. His broad angry arms.

The beach. In the water. With another boy. His lips. His peals of laughter – white brilliant. Immense blueness. Immense godlike energy. Just intense eternity-feeling of the sunlight and the water extending in every direction. The sway of the sea. Huge massive forces. Salt smell. Cold water. Seaweed lashing at our ankles. Bare soles navigating the strange-textured unseen underwater surface. Wrestling with him. Slippery bellies chests sliding against each other. Moist reflective arms. Palms.

My mother. Her perfume. The scratchiness of her freshly shaven legs as I lie next to her under the covers. Strange vinegar smell too. The immensity of my mother. Her slow, quiet breathing. The dull darkness of the room.

This is dizzying. This in-and-out.

This dipping in-and-out.

This reliving of so many moments, really jumbled, schizophrenically arranged, madly assembled.

Oh fuck it’s actually like nausea. The way it starts slowly and peaks and then recedes and then starts slowly again. And I can’t stop it.

Will this cunt turn the machine off? I can’t stop it myself. I’m disconnected from all my limbs or I’ve lost the knowledge of how to operate myself. Maybe I’m flailing madly. Maybe I’m shitting myself.

Another memory is starting now. God, what is it this time. What’s this sensation?

&c.

&c.

&c.