‘You been drinking, Roy?’ Fats eventually asked.
‘Actually no. Nothing like that.’
‘Well, what then? You been gone a long time, son.’
‘I can’t explain. Not right now. Later. I promise.’
‘Drugs.’ He hit the steering wheel. ‘Hack, nè?’
‘Fats, you gonna have to trust me on this one. Please, broe.’
‘So that’s what you’re going to say when we get back? That’s your explanation? Eish, Roy. You won’t pull it off. The kids are alone. All the adults are trying to track you. That was my fifth time at the CSIR.’
‘I’m sorry, Fats. I must have passed out. I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m sitting on the bench and the next you’re shaking me—’
‘But you can explain. You’ve just said you will explain one day. So don’t give me any of this I-don’t-know-what-happened shit. Nxa!’ He snapped his head straight. I sunk myself into it. In truth. In cold, honest truth, I couldn’t at that point in time have constructed any kind of explanation that would have made sense. Not to myself. Not to Fats.
And certainly not to anyone else.
And that’s how we left it.
When we got back to the farm I went straight to my house, asking Fats to humour me for a few more hours. I fell into a deep, shocked sleep, waking past noon like I had been on a binge. My head was heavy and the roof of my mouth was sticky and my stomach was wrapped up in a series of loose and painful knots.
I crawled to the kitchen, where the air was rich with resentment. I started with a formal apology to the girls, and then specifically to Fats for my lack of communication the night before. I then delivered a quasi-formal speech in which I laid out my case – which was, in a nutshell, that something extremely strange had happened to me while I was sitting on my usual CSIR thinking bench, and that while I could piece certain threads of it together I was not yet at the point where it made enough sense to explain it to other people, and that please, please, I would be extremely grateful for the tiniest bit of mental space while I tried to figure it all out, and when I did I would most definitely explain, and no, I had not been drinking.
It was all I had, and it wasn’t enough. It would have served me better to have claimed booze or something similar that, while distasteful, had logic to it. All I had offered was hot air and pained shrugging and they took this seeming flippancy to heart. I was frosted out of things for a long time after – a frosting compounded by my inability to produce the promised explanation. I tried to let the thing dribble away, but the distrust lingered. I had been deceitful. I had deceived. I was deceiving. Everyone knew it.
The most obvious and immediate reaction was an increased adult presence whenever I was with the kids. Traditionally, a single adult would take the pack for whatever session was scheduled. It was a question of shared responsibility and the systematic generation of a precious slice of quiet time for each of us. But now heads poked around corners, looking for small, arbitrary things. Figures appeared on the horizon, watching.
The kids themselves were also cautious for a long time after the Great Roy Hunt. They were quieter, more watchful, less likely to hug and less generally present. Fewer knocks on Roy’s door. More wide, querying eyes.
I could hardly blame them. Any of them, adults or kids. But on the other hand I was completely lost within myself. My memory of the content of the conversation was precise, but my physical memory was shot to hell. I didn’t remember the sun falling, and no matter how much strained imaginative effort I put in I now couldn’t even bring the full contours of his face to mind. It was as if he had been erased in all the important areas. Regardless of effort, I couldn’t locate the sense of time. It was simply beyond my recall.
Was I mad?
Did Madala exist at all?
Later I set to with my charcoals and acrylics in an attempt at a forced, detailed recapture. I started by drawing, in an elevated, receding perspective, two figures down below on a bench, small but precise. Five, six, seven pieces in a row from the same place. Then I tried to zoom in – to create the same figures from closer, from the left or from the right, but I could find no detail. The charcoal insisted on hard, broken strokes, on cut-outs with heads and arms but only slits for eyes, the broadest circles for faces.
Eventually I dropped the charcoal and the paints and the paper and resorted to a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil. I started writing the conversation down, word for word, and now there was no trouble at all. It poured out.[8] In exact detail – precise and clearly formed. I had never been able to write in that way before. The flow became a stream, which become a powerful, all-knowing flood:
‘There are many things you can’t understand, Roy – your brain doesn’t have the capacity.’
‘You can’t increase capacity?’
‘I could increase the speed. Power. But it wouldn’t help. You have structural limitations that define what you can understand and experience.’
‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’
‘Think of a rabbit. Yes?’
‘Yes. A rabbit.’
‘Imagine taking that rabbit brain and stimulating it so that it ran at two hundred times its original speed.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, do you think it would be easier to explain the special theory of relativity to this rabbit than to any other?’
‘I’m the rabbit.’
‘You’re the rabbit. Even with more power, you have natural limits.’
Page after page after page. I didn’t stop to think or to remember. Not once did I need to reach in and pull out.
‘So is there life after death? Yes or no. Binary question. You have to answer.’
‘I can’t answer it until the definition of life is recalibrated. With your limited understanding of what life is, the question becomes moot. Whether I say yes or no, you will achieve no greater clarity.’
And God:
‘Humans need God.’
‘Why? I can see no benefit for the species from God. What has God ever done?’
‘The question is more what has he not done.’
‘Christ, you’re so fucking cryptic. I would take this conversation much more seriously, I would take it deep into my fucking heart, if you weren’t so cryptic all the time.’
‘I am explaining as best as I can.’
‘So, what, it’s my brain which is too limited to grasp the complexity of what you’re saying? Of why we need God?’
‘Exactly. Your most prescient observation yet.’
‘Fine, but you still haven’t told me why you want to be God.’
I scrawled and scrawled and scrawled and his answer – which made little sense at the time – became clear. Clearer, at least, than it had been.
Madala explained how slim the chances were of our little farm actually growing as we intended. The kind of lucky twists of timing and circumstance that would have to occur for us to actually be able to build our way out of our stagnant, inbred state of subsistence. Not only would we require what amounted to the will of the genetic gods to make it through the early phases, but we would require something far greater and more profound. We would need to stumble into a significant intellectual accident to prevent the knowledge and tools at our disposal from becoming old, useless pieces of paper and plastic.
He explained, several times, how far below rudimentary our collective scientific knowledge was.