Rana smiled regretfully. ‘Well, the offer’s always open. You and Javeed would be welcome as our guests, any time.’
‘Thank you.’ Martin didn’t doubt her sincerity – and he could forgive her for scanning his house for signs of incipient Widower’s Squalor – but he wasn’t ready to let the last traces of structure in his life start melting away. He’d finally given up on the shop and put the business on the market; if he lost control over his own domestic routines he’d have nothing.
‘So how is everyone?’ he asked. He hadn’t visited Omar’s home for a while, nor discussed his family, and it turned out that after six years on a waiting list, Rana’s father-in-law, Mohsen, was about to have new prostheses fitted: fully-functioning mechanical legs that he’d be able to control by thought alone. Javeed listened in amazement to Rana’s sketch of the process: they’d already implanted electrodes in Mohsen’s spinal cord and he’d spent two months practising with virtual copies of the limbs, fine-tuning the interface in preparation for the real thing. Martin was surprised that Omar hadn’t mentioned any of this.
Rana left, and they wolfed down the stew. Though Martin did not forget to take the medication that helped with his impaired digestion, he ate so rapidly that he got stomach cramps anyway, and Javeed spent the rest of the evening teasing him about his greediness and bad manners. Laughing made the cramps worse, which only egged Javeed on. When Javeed finally climbed into bed, Martin sat smiling in the darkness, clutching his side.
Just after midnight Javeed woke, crying for his mother. Nothing Martin did comforted him. Finally, at his wits’ end, he brought an electronic photo frame loaded with pictures from the Australian trip he’d taken with Mahnoosh the year they’d married. Martin had never got around to showing them to Javeed before, and something about the unfamiliar images fascinated and calmed him. It was as if this evidence that his mother’s life extended far beyond his current knowledge of her gave him back a small part of what he’d lost: a sense of her continuing, a sense of a well that would never run dry.
When Javeed fell asleep, Martin went back to his own bed and tried to conjure up Mahnoosh beside him. All the hours he’d spent in the scanner reliving his memories of her had robbed him of any hope that he could be surprised by some long-forgotten incident, but that wasn’t important now. All he wanted was her presence, even if it was utterly familiar; even if it offered nothing new.
But the darkness remained blank, the pillow uninhabited. He’d wanted her to haunt the Proxy’s thoughts the way she’d haunted his own – so was that the trade-off? Was that how it worked? At his behest, had she already acknowledged the succession?
Martin paid the taxi driver and walked slowly past the protesters, who seemed to regard him more with curiosity than malice. Who was this sick old man visiting Zendegi day after day? He was surprised that they didn’t know yet; that they hadn’t guessed, or got the news from an informer on the inside. After all, he was here to commit a sin that made Azimi’s whoring of his God-given talent about as serious in its blasphemy as a love potion or a lucky charm.
Inside, he willed the elevator to fail; if he had to take the stairs he could spin that out for at least fifteen minutes. But the door sprung open and the usual insufferably cheery woman’s voice asked him in Farsi to state his destination. Martin let her cycle through English, French, Arabic and back to Farsi before responding.
Nasim was caught up in a meeting that had run into overtime; Bernard helped Martin prepare for the scanner. ‘How long are you planning to stay in Tehran?’ Martin asked him.
‘It was going to be six months,’ Bernard replied. ‘I’ve been training some local staff to use this machine. But I might be staying on; I’ve met someone I like.’
‘Congratulations. But you should take him back to Europe, to be safe.’
Bernard was surprised. ‘You’re kidding, right? I thought no one had been prosecuted for years.’
Martin said, ‘If it’s still considered political suicide to take the laws off the books, I wouldn’t treat them as defunct.’
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.