“Why?”
The tears came first. He covered his face with his hands, hiding himself from the truth of the world around him and wept. When he was spent, a rage grew in the vacuum behind his sobs.
His shaking hands reached up above his head and took hold of the tube. In response it stiffened and clung harder to his skull. He drew down some slack from the sky and with a force summoned from the core of his soul, he ripped it from its housing beneath his hair.
Two screams echoed high in the hills, one of which was not his own.
Through the cloud of pain around his head he stared into the open end of the tube and saw traces of his own blood around its opening. Inside the tube were smaller, open-ended tubules leaking clear fluids and several strands of what appeared to be wire and fibre optics. The tube pulsed in his hand with a life of its own, bleeding some kind of serum onto the barbecue apron he was still wearing. Around the opening of the tube, six thick, curving needles clawed and clenched at the air. Then, with a force he could not resist, the tube was drawn quickly upwards and disappeared into the clear morning light. He tested the wound on his crown with tentative fingers and could feel tiny holes where his skull had been penetrated by the workings of the tube. He thought he felt fine, considering the nature of the damage, but he seemed to have developed a problem with his vision; everything he looked at now appeared vaporous and insubstantial.
He walked back down to his car with blood leaking through his hair and down onto his collar. He drove the car back to his house but had difficulty controlling it, as if he were handling the wheel and gear shift several pairs of gloves. After several collisions with roadside barriers, he abandoned his car near the bottom of the hills and walked the rest of the way home with his thumb out. No one stopped.
He found Angelina hugging the children on the sofa. All of them were crying.
“It’s OK, Angie. I’m back. I’m alright.”
No one looked up.
“Angelina, kids. It’s me.”
No one with a tube ever sensed Johnson’s presence again.
Chapter 10
For a few days he wandered through the town visiting work colleagues and friends, each night returning home to his family. There was no response from anyone no matter how loud he shouted. When he tried to touch people his hands slipped through them as if they were spirits. The only things that he could touch in the world were the tubes. He discovered this when he knocked Bill Shuckman’s as he tried to touch his previous superior’s head. Shuckman had jumped in shock and shaken his head, as if to clear it, before carrying on with what he had been doing.
He understood then that it had never been his tube pulling at him. The tube, he realised, was the only real thing in the world and all it wanted was to remain a secret. He reasoned that someone else had torn free of their tube just as he had. They had been pulling on his tube to get his attention. Whoever it was had succeeded.
Chapter 11
Each night he sat with his grieving family, talking to them, trying to reassure them that he was all right. The world continued to be indistinct to him and his influence over objects remained lessened but not gone. The temptation to pull on Angelina’s tube to let her know he was still with her was hard to resist. He thought about it all the time.
Finally, one night, as she and Matthew and Rebecca watched TV, he stood behind her place on the sofa and reached out to take hold of her tube.
“I believe that would be a mistake, Robert Johnson.”
He turned around to see a face he found familiar but could not place. It belonged to a man about his own age; a man whose body, unlike everyone else’s appeared clearly defined and solid. The man stood in the doorway to the kitchen, unnoticed by anyone else despite his rather commanding tone and presence. Just like Johnson, he was tubeless.
Johnson let his hands drop to his sides.
“You can see me?” He asked.
“Yes,” said the man. “Very clearly. These others, however, are a little…misty.”
“You’re the one that caused me to do this?” Johnson leaned forward to expose the place on top of his head where his hair had begun to grow back.
“I’ve set you free, have I not?”
“No you haven’t. Not at all. This is a worse prison than the last one. Far worse. No one even sees me now. No one can touch me.”
“Isn’t that a relief?”
Johnson ignored the question. He stepped towards the man and reached out. He took hold of the man’s shirtsleeve and rolled the cloth between his fingers. It felt real. It felt good. When the oddness of such a gesture struck Johnson, he let go.
“Who are you?” He asked.
“My name is Milo Fiori.”
“Why do I know that name?”
“We went to school together.”
“God, yes. I remember. Something happened to you, though. Everyone said you’d been kidnapped.”
Milo shrugged.
“Now you know the truth.”
“You’ve been…like this all this time?”
“I grew up this way. At least, ever since…” He made a pulling motion over his head and made a comical pop with his lips.
“Milo, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. I have to know everything now.”
“I don’t know everything. What I do know will take time to tell. We should go somewhere.”
“I can’t leave them.”
“Trust me, Robert, it will be easier if we do it my way.”
“Will I be able to come back again? See them?”
“Of course, why not?”
“I don’t know. I just…”
“It’s been hard on you. It’s the same for everyone. Come on.”
Johnson followed Fiori into the night and for a long time they walked the streets of the city. Along the river where houseboats and barges were moored. Around the square in the city centre where Johnson had worked. Through the malls where people could shop all night. Fiori told him how the
world really worked.
“So, it’s people like us on the other ends of the tubes?”
“Just like you and me.”
“And they experience everything we do?”
“Everything. But the difference is, they don’t feel pain so much and they feel pleasure more. They can also experience what it’s like to be an animal or even a rock or tree.”
“Like the mountain?”
“Exactly. That particular tube splits into several hundred others. ‘Being the mountain’ seems to be one of the most popular experiences. After being human.”
“Why would they do all this?”
“Because they’re scared of life.”
Fiori told him how people had become what he termed ‘indistinct’. After generations of using gene technology to phase out certain unwanted traits in their offspring, humans had become unable to resist disease.
“The tube acts as a conduit for vicarious experience—what they call ‘the real reality’. Meanwhile, the receiver lies protected in some kind of safe environment where neither disease nor any other kind of adversity can enter.”
“How do we get to these people?”
“We don’t. They’re inaccessible.”
“Can’t we fly up to them?”
“When did you last see a plane, Robert? Or a helicopter or a fucking hot air balloon?”
It was one of the many truths that landed like punches on Johnson’s already battered consciousness. They walked away from the city and towards the suburbs where they traced their way through neighbourhoods and around the sports fields of schools.
“How do you know all this for certain, Milo?”