6
MY VISIT TO the sanctuary, my apparent forward momentum on the job-seeking front, and a night spent making mini vegetarian pizzas and watching Grand Designs reruns with Mum and Dad, all buy me a relatively nag-free week, which I spend in my bedroom.
I love my bedroom. It’s always been my haven. When I was a kid, it was a place to practise kissing my hand, to eat my Royal Melbourne Show Cadbury showbag stash, to write dramatic prose in my leopard-print-covered diary. Later it was a place to read sex scenes in novels and imagine they were me and Lockie, to try on outfits I thought Lockie might like, to call Rach and dissect for the one hundred millionth time whether or not we thought I had a chance with Lockie. Now it’s a safe space, one of the few places in our house that isn’t trigger-loaded with painful memories of Charlie flicking me like a rubber band to the heart every time I turn around. Unlike the beanbag in the corner of the rumpus room moulded to his shape from hours of playing FIFA on Xbox. Unlike the piece of padding he taped to the bottom corner of the kitchen’s island bench after I broke my toe running into it not once but twice ( What is literally wrong with your coordination gene, Lucky? ). Unlike the faded soap streaks on the bathroom mirror from the ‘thoughts of the day’ Charlie would scribble there—‘when a tree falls in the forest’ kind of stuff. Sometimes absurd. Sometimes profound. Sometimes unsettling. The types of questions Charlie thought about when he wasn’t doing something distractingly difficult; when he wasn’t achieving. If all your cells replace themselves every seven years, then are you still you? Aren’t happiness and love just chemicals circulating in our bodies and brains? Can soap ever be dirty?
‘Thy household scholar has imparted his wisdom in the poop room,’ he’d announce, strutting into the kitchen for breakfast to the sound of my groan, Mum’s laugh and Dad’s snort. ‘Fill thyself with knowledge as you free thyself from excrement.’
I pass much of the week doing six things:
Eating cornflakes and fresh passionfruit
Hoping Ninja is recovering okay
Trying to bury what happened with Ben and his dad somewhere deep and inaccessible
Ignoring Jacinta’s messages
Reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh to validate and romanticise my moping
Spending hours on socials, changing positions only when my arm goes numb or the sun through the gap in the curtains reaches my eyeballs.
I scroll through endless hours of people doing pranks on their schoolmates or showing off their decorated uni dorm rooms or doing triple flips off cliffs into the sea or telling the story of their ADHD diagnosis. I double tap to send hearts. I comment with emojis. I DM Bella Darling, telling her I love her videos, the familiar tiny thrill running through me when I get her automated response: hello my Darling. i can’t reply to every message but please know that ur seen and ur loved and ur special xxx
I think about a possible new theory, a version of the one-transcendent-thing theory: every human has the potential to go viral once in their lives. It’s like that thing people say about everyone having a book in them, but this is more like everyone having one moment in them that a million people, or more, would watch. And the thing I like about this theory is it’s not really about talent or skill. It’s not about accomplishing anything particularly impressive. It’s more about luck: a right-place, right-time kind of thing.
I spend one very half-arsed day trying to go viral myself. I don’t dance or create any original content, and I’m not putting the time into any video editing. I copy the simplest current trend, miming to a voiceover or attempting some tricky hand thing. I’m not completely lacking in effort, though—I open my bedroom curtain for the best light and add a filter that hides most of the food stains on my rotating selection of oversized T-shirts.
I don’t think too hard about why it would feel good to go viral. I guess I just like the idea of it. That many people seeing my face, liking and commenting, would be undeniable proof that I’ve made a mark on the world, however small and superficial, or at least that I’m alive. The aching, longing, wanting—this feeling that’s coursed through my veins my whole life—fizzes like pins and needles under my skin. But then I’m reminded that, like the ever-expanding universe, the feed is endless. No matter what you create or achieve online, it will all be swallowed up by the infinitude of content.
And then I try to stop it, but it’s too late. My mind tumbles back to that summer five years ago.
It was the summer of the meteor shower. As far as space things that sound impressive but are actually underwhelming go, this meteor shower was pretty high on the list, but Charlie and I still took it as a sign. We pooled our pocket money and bought a telescope to look for undiscovered planets. Of course, our telescope was this $49.95 thing from Target with a picture on the box of a kid looking at the moon, which should have been a dead giveaway about how little we’d be able to see.
Charlie didn’t want to waste time waiting for the dark, so when it was daylight we’d use Dad’s iPad to watch YouTubes about astronomy. We’d pull the heavy living room curtains closed and spread out on the cream couch with popcorn and lemonade, approved by our parents for couch-adjacent consumption because of the low stain factor.
From instructional videos on effective telescope use, the algorithm soon led to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot , that video with the photo of earth taken from the Voyager 1 space probe, then a three-minute animated film about ‘amazing space facts to make you feel small’, and then a video narrated by some American guy with a super smooth voice that started off with stats: how many people live in New York City, in the whole of the US, on the entire planet, not just now but ever in the history of humanity (117 billion). Then it moved on to how long the universe has existed—13.7 billion years—and the fact that humans have only been around for 0.00145% of that time. While all these unnervingly large numbers were flying around my head, images of space scenes floated across the screen in hazy blues and pinks pinpricked with glittering starburst. They were probably computer-generated but they looked real. And there was Earth, floating like a marble in the middle. Then the video began to zoom out. It zoomed out and out and out and out at the speed of light until we were so far away from our starting point that Earth could not be seen.
When the video finished I had half-moon fingernail marks on my palms and I felt panicky in a way I didn’t recognise and didn’t like, as if I was standing on the edge of a very tall cliff and barely keeping my balance. I looked over at Charlie, who was frozen and staring wide-eyed at the screen with a what-the-hell expression that told me he was definitely feeling something too. I opened my mouth for a moment, maybe to ask what he was thinking, maybe to try to put some words to my own thoughts, but that’s not what came out.
‘This is boring,’ I said, shoving popcorn in my mouth. ‘I’m going to my room. Reconvene at moonrise?’
Charlie didn’t reply so I stood up and walked off. I flopped on my bed and read my current epic fantasy obsession until I felt like I was on stable ground again. But for the rest of the day, when I emerged for a drink or to find my phone charger, Charlie seemed strange, stuck, snagged on that video, with a look on his face like he, too, was on the edge of that cliff—but as if he was deciding whether or not to jump.
After that day Charlie started spending more and more time watching YouTubes with long voiceovers, reading websites with dark blue backgrounds and blocks of small text, following videos and links down weird rabbit holes. When he tried to get me to watch something philosophical with him about, like, the nature of time and consciousness, or when he asked one of his brain-breakingly deep questions about life that inspired Lockie to nickname him Professor Existential, I mostly ignored him. I tried not to think too hard about any of it, because it actually kind of freaked me out. Not that I think it didn’t freak Charlie out too—a type of vague anxiety that somehow felt related to how hard he trained at footy, how much he needed that maths award or even to win at a family game of Monopoly—but he was drawn to this stuff, burning with the ferocity of a star, while I watched on from the sidelines.
If we had discovered a new planet that summer, I always assumed we’d name it after Charlie. I didn’t even try to fight the unspoken rule. It was the natural way of things. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t wish we could name it after me.
·
I decide I should probably get off my phone. I stand up and open the window for some fresh air then collapse back on the bed, with the sound of a whipper snipper and the smell of mowed grass wafting in and floating around Charlie’s ghost. I pick up my book and try to read, but I can’t focus. The words are jumbled and blurry.
Since my brother’s death there’s been a black hole in my chest. It’s sucking and swirling, and it takes every ounce of my mental strength not to get dragged in by the celestial undertow. I lie there with my hand on my rib cage, trying to breathe while panic shimmers across my skin. Please, please, I don’t want to go down there. I don’t want to know what’s down there.
The black hole is terrifying enough—this feeling like falling, this dark dread inside me that I can’t let myself surrender to. But what if it’s bottomless? What if there’s no end to the plummeting and, if I slip in, I’ll fall deeper and deeper forever and ever until the pure mass of the thing crushes me? The possibility scares me in a way I don’t have words for, and I know I have to do everything I can to stop being pulled inside.
I put down my book and pick up my phone again, opening one of Bella Darling’s YouTubes to watch at random, concentrating hard on every word that comes out of her mouth, and eventually the indefinable feeling mostly passes. But Charlie’s ghost stays. Because somehow, I know my brother would get how I’m feeling. Somehow, I know he’d understand the aching, longing, wanting for something I can’t quite pinpoint fizz-bubbling in my blood, the black hole spiralling somewhere near my heart. That he would be able to tell me what they mean. What they’re made up of. That I’d listen to him now, and his explanation would help me. But he’s gone. And now I have no idea how to figure it out and the terrifying sense that if I don’t, I’m going to feel like this forever.
‘Far out, Lucky,’ I hear Charlie say, with a warped kind of amusement. ‘You really should have appreciated my mind more when you had me. But you know what they say: most geniuses aren’t acknowledged in their own lifetimes.’
I roll my eyes, the memory of how annoying my brother could be dragging me momentarily from the darkness. ‘This coming from the guy who used Mum and Dad’s work photocopier to take gross scans of his butt,’ I say to the ghost.
Charlie laughs. ‘Oh yeah. Turns out those things have hard drives. Who knew? Long live my butt!’