Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

What always seemed so ordinary to me is transformed, turned inside out. The words make me see myself very close, from a distance. I become ‘the subject’, and secret observations of my behaviour produce words like ‘paranoia’, which means a fear in the subject that he is being secretly observed. There is mention of suspicion and withdrawal, of self-destructive impulses. The subject may compensate by a series of sleeping or waking dreams which assume for him the force of reality itself. The most central aspect of all this is the control of the memory. The ability to change or obliterate the past in specific areas may become automatic, no longer a conscious act. It may be a means of holding back bad memories or a compensation for not being able to affect the course of everyday events in the present. Something which is a conscious weakness becomes an unconscious strength. At that level it can produce psychopathic results. Actions can be destructive whilst the mind remains creative and inventive. Dreams retain the truth and replay it, a super-reality.

The subject sits at the table and lets the almost weightless piece of paper float from his hand.

At the motel I had spread out the sleeping pills on my palm and known what would make death beyond all doubt. What had I admitted to myself that would account for such an action? I had realised that Perrin would die, I even imagined him entering the research centre at that moment and switching on the machines; but that was a matter of betrayal for us both, not demanding a death from remorse or guilt in return. It would seem accidental. What else? Peter was dead and Joanne had gone. How many tablets was that worth?

I put my head back now and gaze up at the white ceiling. From a long way off, the faint glitter of reflections on water sends wavering ribbons of soft light very slowly across the surface above me. The real light on the water, I know, is hard and metallic, it hurts the eyes. I remember the Maori hiding beneath it, and the downward pressure of my hand. Then the struggle, against a force of my own making, a will inside me to blot him out. Gradually the image of his head sinking, and the face that just died in the corridor below with its eyes that refused to see me and mouth that spoke to nothing even as it drowned on itself, both blur into the image of the child I helped to death. Now I know I am going beneath that surface myself, here, in the room with the liquid reflections rising across the walls to the ceiling, the memory pressing on my face and submerging the resistance in my mind. I know that I killed Peter. A darker flood rises even above that, like the death pouring from the mouth of the body below. I hated him , the child was an embodiment of what I hated, a parody of myself; sealed off from all feeling of life. My gift to the world was a mutation of my own nothingness. The shock when his eyes had finally looked at me was recognition. We saw ourselves in each other.

The self-deceptions break down like a shell of bone collapsing under pressure. The realisation bursts inside me with enormous force: the lethal factor is within myself; it is me. My reflection is all that stares back from glass and water and unclosed eyes. I was the cause. Worse still, immune to the Effect. The mechanisms meant for my removal had gone massively wrong, events had turned inside out like the twist in the Moebius loop or the endless protective repetition of the double helix.

Disconnected images revolve in front of me and begin to overlap in loose focus. There is a world somewhere which continues without me; and yet my consciousness can perceive it. There is another, full of clear sequences trapped in a mind of broken matter, a circle of limbo where beasts squat and run and a figure I seem to recognise appears from mists over and again, and I must kill it and escape. There is a world in which doctors discuss the continued brain activity and rapid eye movements of a patient deep in a barbiturate coma and wonder what kind of world he inhabits. And a future in which a scientist’s hand moves to switch off a machine an instant before it pulses back into the electromagnetic grid of an entire planet a resonance which will be the decoding and unravelling note of all basic protoplasm, so that only those with the strangest immunity would be isolated from the transformation. Or the instant is missed, and there is a world vibrating as if struck by a massive hammer. In another world, evolution enters a new dimension.

I am standing on the flat roof in bright sunshine. The images twist round, inseparable, tightening together like the strands of a rope. I look down. I have the power to break them. It is a sheer drop to the flat concrete of the path next to the street ten stories below.

I look round. It is a fine afternoon. I remember so much. I think of being alone in the motel room at Thames in the nearness of ages ago as I selected some tablets and swallowed them. But it was uncertain, not like this. Now I climb over the safety rail and stand on the edge of the drop. No remorse. This will be complete, and finished. I believe in nothing else. Because nothing could be worse.

All I have is the power to end.

I lean outwards and let go.

The pull of the earth takes hold of my spine, my limbs spread over space. There is the breath-beat of falling, spiralling, the air pushing hard for a moment and then letting go. The light splits open my eyelids. It is brilliant, drained of colours, painful. An immense silence rushes around me. My throat is trying to make a noise, to beat it back. The light pulses red. Then the silence explodes.

I was sitting bold upright in bed breathing fast and staring at the wall. The daylight was streaming into the motel room through the slats of the blinds. I seemed to have been awake, and asleep, for ages. I lay back and remembered where I was. The silence persisted. My watch at the bedside had stopped at 6.12. Reaching out, I shook it and the second hand began flicking round again. How long had it been stopped? I got up and went to the window which looked out onto the main road; my arm moved up towards the cord of the blind. What?

I paused. What was happening? The casual movement, everyday, ordinary, towards opening the blind had been interrupted by something, by an impulse to stop, which had no sensible origin at all. It was so curious and extra ordinary that I was pausing not because of the impulse itself but in a conscious effort to find a reason for it. But I had forgotten. My mind seemed to resist. The silence pressed in thickly. It was exactly like forgetting the name of a place you’ve visited dozens of times; it’s just on the tip of your mind but you can’t find it. You stop and think, and when there’s no answer you go on. Perhaps, later, you will know.

Then I reached up and opened the blind to the enormous light.

CRAIG HARRISON was born in Leeds in 1942 and educated at Prince Henry’s Grammar School, Otley. His rocket experiments in 1958 drew press and police attention, and an invitation to address the British Interplanetary Society.

Harrison attended Leeds University, where he received a BA and an MA. He organised the Liberal Party campaign in Ripon Division, Yorkshire, for the 1964 general election.

He arrived in New Zealand in 1966 after being appointed a lecturer in the English Department at Massey University. There he devised a course in art history, which he taught from 1968 until his retirement in 2000.

His award-winning satirical play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (1974) was performed for a quarter of a century, including in the Soviet Union. The novel that was its genesis, Broken October , was published in 1976. He is the author of five other plays, including the prize-winning Ground Level (1974), which led to a comic novel of the same name (1981) and a television series, Joe & Koro .