The Totality Road

The opening of chapter 1, "The Nag". Excerpt.

Get out of my head!

What are you? What is this? I can feel you digging in, worming your way deeper. Looking for some place to make yourself... comfortable? To make... a nest? Is this you, putting these images into my mind?

I’m clawing at my eyes, thrashing in the dust and yet at the same time I’m watching myself dispassionately, from a calm space about six feet in the air. I’m six feet tall. Is this... is this a memory? Is this happening now, this pain and this feeling of you burrowing your way into my mind? Or did it all happen years ago, and now I’m reliving it?

I choose to take control. Now I’m back inside my skull, with you. God, it’s like knives or hot knitting needles. It’s like a drug, something designed to burn out a tumour or growth. But you’re not a tumour or growth, are you? Nothing to do with my own body turning against itself. You remain a self-contained nightmare. You’re pathological. Something I caught.

Thrashing in the dust, yes I said. Here I am, lying on some hardpan, by the side of some road. Cracked macadam, double yellow lines in faded paint. The pain behind my right eye is still insane, tears are still streaming down my face, but I force myself out of the foetal ball and I look to my left.

There’s the wheel of a car, heavy rubber tread, little pebbles and crushed insects gummed up in there. I lift my right hand and jam the heel of it into my eye, pushing hard against the yielding mass of my eyeball. It seems to relieve the pain, a little.

I sit up, and the world zags crazily around me. Equilibrium returns and I look around. There’s my car, a sporty white hatchback, deceptively low key, but covered in thick red dust for some reason. I never drive where there’s dust. That car is a city car, has always been a city car.

Then I see, all around me, the desert. Stretching in every direction, a flat place of red soil and a few spindly plants. There are telegraph poles along the road, but only a single wire loops from crossbeam to crossbeam. My good eye follows the wire all the way to the horizon and I can see flat-topped mountains there.

The last thing I notice before I pass out is that there are two suns.

Are you comfortable now? Have you found your place, some section of my cerebellum seemingly non-essential to my day-to-day functioning, that you can hollow out and make your own? Though who knows what long-term effects your residency will have. I don’t want to think about it. I can’t not think about it.

I’ve crawled out of the dust now and back into my car. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open and the seat tipped all the way back. I have a T-shirt from my overnight bag balled up and pressed into my eye. The pain is manageable.

A little way behind the car, on the shoulder of the road, is the letterbox. That’s where you were hiding, though you don’t need me to tell you that. With the pain a slow and steady throb now, I can remember how I took all those wrong turns, ended up in the countryside cursing my sense of direction.

I can remember... what can I remember? This desert, those hills... no, I don’t remember those. I remember the letterbox. I remember it standing there alone in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. Innocuous, strange even. No house, no drive or fence. Just the letterbox.

A traditional thing, battered white with a curved top. A little red flag on one side, like you see in the cartoons. I remember pulling over, getting out of the car, my boots crunching on gravel. I remember reaching out, I can see my hand reaching out for the letterbox, pulling open the little gate. I remember looking inside.

That’s when you jumped out at me. I didn’t see you, I just saw an impression of movement, and of ferocity, and then I was staggering backward as my eye seemed to explode. I bounced off the car, fell into the dirt, thrashed there and...

...and this is where we came in.

Gingerly, I take the T-shirt away from my injured eye. I crack the lid. There’s a crust there already, and I feel a few eyelashes pull loose. The sunlight is harsh but I can see. A little blurry, but I can see.

Two suns, close to those flat-topped hills. What is this?

I can tell you’re mining my memories. I want you to know that. I understand – is it intuitive, or do you want me to understand? – that you’re part recording device, part data-miner. You want me to experience things, so you can watch. But you also want to go through my mind, sift through my memories and... feed? Will you feed on the ones you like? What will that mean for me? Will I forget, even as I remember?

I need to give you a name. Well, perhaps not a name. A label. Something I can think when I think of you. I can feel this pressure in my head now, this compulsion to both drive and think. You want me to drive to whatever waits in the foothills at the end of the road, but you also want me to remember who I am, the experiences that made me.

This constant whine, this niggle in my head. I’ll call you the Nag. Yes, that’s a good name. And if my mind has thrown up an image of a ghastly horse’s head, all rotten and crawling with maggots, laughing at me out of some dusty culvert far out in the desert... well, so be it.

Drive. And think. Or sit and remember? I know what you want, but I’m in control... for now. Fragile, nearly shaking, but calmer. I grip the steering wheel, feel the warm leather. The suns – those two, strange suns – are lowering themselves toward the mountains in irregular, jerky movements. Like clockwork, sticking against ungreased gears. Are the suns really moving like that, or is it just my consciousness, dropping in and out?

Petit mal seizures, lapses in awareness. And all around me the shadows on the rocks growing longer, in fits and starts.

I’m reaching for the shifter – you’re reaching for the shifter – beginning that muscle-memory action of pulling away and driving on, but I put my right hand back on the steering wheel. I squeeze, a little tightly. Then I likewise squeeze my eyes shut. I squeeze so hard some of the pain comes back and then I tear them open, bug out my eyes.

The cracked dashboard. The desert. The hills. The two suns jerk again, and this time I know I’ve seen it. I’m here, and you’re in my head, and this is my reality.

Sol Passey. I make no attempt to keep that from you. That’s my name. Passey is an Anglicised version of my grandfather’s name – De Passey. He changed it when he left France and came to live in England after the war. Meaningless trivia, you can have all this.

Or is it meaningless? Perhaps I was too hasty. A name is a powerful thing, after all. But mine is yours now, there’s no use crying over split timber. My father used to say that. He was a big man, at least around the belly. A heart attack took him. For my mother though, it was the concrete abutment they hit at 110 kilometres an hour. My parents were the first. Many others followed, right up the chain, all the way to Great Grandmother Georgette. Now I’m seeing fire.

You’re drawing this out, I know. Some... ability you must have, deep inside my mind. To send perhaps tiny tendrils to find the most nutritious memory, the most intriguing. The tastiest. Of course you went for my name. My identity. You found that, somewhere deep, in a place I don’t even know.

You find more. Sol Passey. The locksmith. The man who can fix your locks. I come to your house in my little white hatchback – the Golf GTI that Sarah calls The Indulgence – and perhaps you’re standing on the porch in your dressing gown and slippers, and you’re hopping from foot to foot because you need to use the bathroom. But you just popped out to get the mail and the door swung shut behind you, and the finality of that thick, closing noise was absolute because your keys are sitting in the little nook with the stained glass window the previous owners of the house put in. You are stranded. But you have your cellphone.

So along I come in my little white car, and I have with me my box. And my box unfolds, layers upon layers, and it’s filled with all kinds of wonderful tools. And I use my tools – I insert this and wiggle that, and I make my little jokes, and soon enough your door pops open like magic.

Like magic. See, now I’m smiling. Holding the steering wheel before the dancing suns, and smiling. No teeth – just a slight curl of the lips.

You have found my secret. Such skill. Less than an hour inside my mind, and you’ve found my deepest secret. No one else knows. Just you and me now. We know.

We know that while my tools are real enough, I have no skill with them. We know that as a locksmith, I have no training. Give me a bobby pin and a paper-clip, I can’t crack a safe. Give me a drill and a file and just the right amount of plastic explosive, I can’t breach a vault.

But I can still open any door. This is my Talent.