Rapport – Nick McGinley

Mathieu dreamt he could fly all the time. When he woke, he was always disappointed that his legs wouldn’t move. It was then he remembered and it all started again. He hadn’t let his little accident, the sharp collision between his T6 and the ground, slow him down. He’d insisted on speeding through rehab, becoming expert in the chair in record time. At first, he felt like one of those poor run-over Jack Russells with wheels where their hind legs should be, a griffin on casters, half-clown/half-machine, but he quickly learned that the mind and body were very adaptable things. By the second week, he could roll for a metre on one tyre. He took to going backways down escalators sliding his hands along the rail just to freak out shoppers. He practised his stunts with a helmet and pads at the skate park and then wasted no time in throwing down the gauntlet to his partners Denis and Vincent: they’d continue, they’d evolve, only this time, he’d perform on wheels.

When he was able-bodied, the troupe had visited children’s hospitals and schools for the disabled. It was just one of the things circus folk did. Now he returned for more heart-wrenching pep-talks. He wasn’t sure who was doing the pepping. The kids were all veterans, he was a newbie, a handicap rookie who could now use whatever words he wished to term himself: PC went out the window when you were part of the minority demographic described. Dominique, a congenital quadriplegic and one of the angrier teens he met at the school, disparagingly labelled him a ‘non-con’ and made a crack that made him wince before he smiled: ‘I know you wanted to prove that we were all the same, but do you not think you went a little too far?’

After the fall, his mother told him that she regretted his choice of career and that she wished he could go back to when he was ‘whole’. He’d been angry with her at first because he didn’t regret a thing. There were the people who ruminated on the past and those who looked to the future. Mathieu quickly realised that he could use his rage as motivation to an extent, but that he had to let most of it go or it would consume him. He had to learn acceptance, even if some of those close to him could not. He had to concentrate on what he could do now. That didn’t stop him from wanting to walk again.

Irene had been sick of waiting for a participant to come to them. She was underemployed in Lyons and needed the project to move on to the next stage so that she could immerse herself in it. If she wasn’t using her faculties to their furthest extent, she felt guilty and ill at ease. Her academic clock was ticking – if she didn’t publish something ground-breaking soon, she’d be viewed as an also-ran and quickly relegated to full-time teaching or worse, journalism. Her employers would allow her to claim her research in so far as it didn’t disclose any patent information. She had the budget, she had the time, but when the success or failure of the tests greatly depended on their subject, it was nice to be in a position to make an active choice. She had set aside two weeks for a talent-scouting trawl. The traits she sought were intelligence, strength of character and courage, or failing that, a sense of having nothing to lose. When she saw a paraplegic wearing a crash helmet hurtling down a steep slope on the poster for Chance de Chute, her heart jumped. She went to the show three times and when she was ready to talk to him, she waited in the foyer for the scheduled Q&A.

The venue was a town hall ballroom. After a run of outdoor festival slots, Mathieu liked the atmospherics, the contrast between their grubby mise en scène and the fading grandeur of the mairie – the industrial wasteland of an abandoned ballbearings factory re-constructed under chandeliers and elaborate cornicework. He, Denis and Vincent played three louts messing around the derelict space. The teeming thousands of tiny metal spheres meant that the floor beneath their feet and his wheels was a moving thing – that was one good reason for taking to the air. Denis and Vincent scaled metal ladders, jumped from gangways and swung from girders. In keeping with the spherical theme, they fired rubber balls at each other with sling-shots to test each other’s balance and terrify the audience. Mathieu hauled himself and his wheelchair up a flight of steps to the top of the structure – he used to be lithe, now he had the upper body bulk of a monster. He attached the chair to a winch and slipped out of it and shot headfirst down a purple plastic rubble chute to a crash-mat below. Then he grabbed the other end of the winch chain, lowered the wheelchair to a mid-air halfway point, fixed the chain fast and climbed, hand over hand, to reclaim his seat twenty feet in the air and then pulled himself back up while seated. This time, he barrelled down parallel assembly line slides, one tyre on each and over a jury-rigged ramp clearing the heads of his partners by an inch to land on a bed of foam balls. He did it again, the haul, the cannonballing, but this time performing a double backways flip. At this point, his colleagues feigned jealousy that he was stealing the show and Mathieu’s character was dragged from his chair and stuffed headfirst into a bin. After the protracted, painfully arduous comedy of his escape, he commandeered a forklift and exacted his revenge. They built a whole show around this thin narrative and it held, all through the inherent tension of ‘is this for real?’ and ‘will one of them fall?’

Vincent used to be the spokesman for the troupe, but now Mathieu was the one mobbed with questions, so he ran the talks – feeling like the drummer in a band promoted to frontman. A dark-haired woman at the back of the group raised her hand for the mic. ‘How has your injury affected your identity?’ she asked in an Irish accent.

‘What do you mean?’ Normally people danced a little around their curiosity first, but not this girl.

‘I mean you’ve had to radically change your role.’

‘It still says Mathieu Fournier on my passport.’

‘And incorporate your disability into the show-’

‘How could I not?’

‘You could sit at home. Or you could direct shows, instead of performing in them.’

‘You don’t know me very well if you think I could do just that.’

Mathieu’s flash of steel was met with her own. ‘The other two torment your character, they keep his chair out of reach, they imprison him and tie his hands behind his back. Are you consciously interrogating how society treats paraplegics?’

He figured she was a sociology student brandishing sixty thousand words on Societal Ethics on Impairment or Hazardous Acrobatics: an accidental workplace. Or perhaps she was a theatre post-grad doing a Phd called Lecoqian Perspectives: Clowning and Disability.

He smiled. ‘Your own Mr. Beckett wasn’t averse to forcing his actors into bins. He would’ve got the cruelty of the prank. We’re, ah, veering off piste here though, so perhaps you could buy me a drink afterwards and I’ll answer some more of the general questions now.’

Once the throng had dispersed, he beckoned her over to a table by the back wall.

‘You can have the comfy seat,’ he said, indicating the banquette. He noticed she wasn’t made uncomfortable by his awkward little joke.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ coquettishly tapping him on the forearm.

Up close, she appealed to him more. She seemed to Mathieu less affected than French women. There was a rural Irish gaucheness to her.

‘I have just become the butt of the gags. That’s how it’s changed on-stage. Before I was the straight man, Miss-?’

‘Irene.’ This was how they met.

They shook hands – he was conscious of the calluses on his palm scraping against her soft skin.

‘You can call me Miss Purcell, if you’d prefer.’

The waiter brought over a carafe of house red for them. Mathieu knew how this encounter would’ve gone two years ago, so that was another way his identity had changed.

‘Well Irene, you’ll be pleased to know that a man came to the show last week and had a strong reaction to the cripple-baiting stuff as well.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes – he jumped onstage and pushed me out of the chair.’

‘What did you do?’

She had a pen lodged in her ponytail that the fingers of her left hand flew up to fiddle with.

‘Nothing beyond demonstrating the, ah, uselessness of my legs. He wasn’t to know – he felt outraged that we were mocking people who couldn’t stand up for themselves, literally. I liked him.’

‘Did a hole form in the stage and swallow him up?’

‘No, we, what’s the word, defused it and made him part of the show. He became my slave as his penance. And got a standing ovation by the end.’

‘That old lady you strapped to the board tonight and swung around on the forklift – that was a set-up, right?’

‘We never use plants.’

‘Then why did you pick someone so old?’

‘Because it’s funnier.’ He opened his scuffed hands to her in mock supplication like a Gallic Robert de Niro and she laughed.

Irene liked his verve, his anger, his indomitability and the way he pronounced her name. She wondered if she would’ve liked his prior incarnation. As he was now, for her, Mathieu was perfect. Was it his tragic accident that made him as sensitive as he now seemed to be? When he was in her company, he lavished his entire attention on her. Had he always been like that? From the winks and muttered asides of his co-stars, it was reasonable to assume that the tanned, pony-tailed acrobat touring festivals around Europe could have been something of a womaniser. She wondered how many he’d slept with. Just what bed notch score had been tallied by his fall. She doubted that she would’ve liked that Mathieu, but this one wanted what she could give him and she could give him so much if he fully engaged with the process.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Guess.’

He felt her presence as a nudge, as a flow of air, as gut feeling, as animal instinct, although this instinct was no longer entirely his. It was strange to think that she was in there somewhere, watching from the shadows. It wasn’t so much a voice as a will that was sometimes stronger than his own, dictating things to Mathieu’s reluctant body. He felt Irene as the silent aftermath of a cogent argument, guiding him along a path. They had linked him up with her to help generate new motor neuron networks in his cerebral cortex. It turned out he hadn’t quite accurately clocked Irene’s occupation on their first meeting. She made her pitch to him on their second encounter and he’d said ‘Yes’ before she’d finished the sentence. She was now his mind-trainer, a kind of mental physiotherapist. The electronic tattoo she stuck to his forehead read signals as accurately as an EEG.

‘You see? It’s thinner than a human hair,’ she said. ‘The older version looked like a swimming cap with electrodes. This is much prettier – like gold needlepoint.’

He ran his hand over the braille bar-code above his brows. ‘Finally, I am a circus cyborg,’ he said, ‘with my handler on speed-dial.’

‘You should have just thought that, instead of saying it.’ She settled into her chair and gave him a wink before closing her eyes.

At first, she helped him push a cursor between the interminable white lines of a two-dimensional maze. It was like playing early Pac-Man with a debilitating hangover and sticky controls. They were building him up for the main challenge. Limbering up their combined brain power for the big task that came after strapping him into the harness, of operating the exoskeleton by thought alone.

Irene was also his liaison with the scientists behind the glass. They were on campus at Lyons University, but there was no student access to this lab. The college didn’t foot the bills here. The company that did, paid for a whole wing of laboratories, so retaining one for special projects was filed under one of the university’s excellence initiatives.

Mathieu could never hope for a full recovery of locomotor function without mechanical assistance. Instead of a straight Brain-Computer-Interface, hooking him up with Irene helped, as he wasn’t flailing away in there on his own. They’d recruited him for his mental strength, but she helped him with discipline, with funnelling that iron will – whenever his attention wavered, whenever he changed his facial expression or moved his eyes and the noise of the extraneous signals threatened the task at hand, Irene would step in and steer the ship. It was teamwork and he was used to the see-saw rhythms of that.

When Irene revealed her real reason for attending his show, she’d detected some disappointment on Mathieu’s part because of the undeniable spark between them but when the implications of what they were to attempt together became clear, she knew he understood they’d get to know each other as intimately as if they were indeed a couple. She’d been taken aback by the strength in his grip and by the force of his personality – she wondered if she’d be able to control him if he was hellbent on going the wrong way.

So far however she was extremely pleased with how Mathieu’s training was progressing. She knew that she’d discovered an extraordinary man. And just at a time in her life when it was her work that sustained her. She’d been devastated to discover that living abroad came with so heavy a freight of guilt attached. It wasn’t possible to follow this branch of research in Ireland, yet she felt hollowed out by longing to see her elderly parents in Cobh. She visualised them in their respective seats in their sunlit living room, her Dad cocooned in his worn, corduroy recliner, her Mum in the nook with her legs propped up on the purple pouffe. Irene wondered if they ever spoke of her – if there was resentment for the loss of their only child. Geographically, she was so close to home – this was not Perth or Alaska – and that somehow made her feelings of estrangement all the worse, for being less justified. She was shocked to find herself dreaming of walking the streets of her hometown, comforted in the night by the embrace of the familiar. Even after years studying in Aberdeen, she now yearned for her place of birth. She spoke passable French but knew no one beyond her colleagues who were mostly older men who found it hard to maintain eye contact and when they did listen to her, it was only to satisfy their magpie urges of appropriating her contributions as their own. She had learned to stay quiet and commit everything to paper. Evenings and weekends became a sea of time to fill, so she filled it with this project.

With most subjects, males especially, the better she came to know them, the less interesting they became to her, but Mathieu contained multitudes. He was unpredictable and unsurprisingly, prone to depression, but on most days, his determination to improve his situation and prove himself to her pushed them both up and onto the next level. He wasn’t malleable, but his competitive streak was her way in – when he was flagging, all she had to do was appear fresh and unfazed and he’d goad himself to keep up with her – it was like subcontracting the stick to his subconscious, while she held the carrot. She conceded to herself that perhaps she was the carrot – a scientific honey trap. She had made sure to leaven her professionalism with light-touch flirtation and wear clothes that showed off her best features as she bent over him to adjust the equipment, to change his settings. She enjoyed feeling his eyes on her as she moved around the lab.

When she sat at her console and put on her headpiece, she willed him to look over at her. He rarely did then but she knew he was aware of her. Being linked up with Mathieu gave Irene a sense of peace she had yet to find in the arms of any lover. She’d happily spend all of her free time in the chair thinking his thoughts with him and roaming his mind.

He and his boys were finished both the tech run-through and three bottles of wine.

‘Deni, it’s your turn to clip my feet-claws, grab those bolt-cutters over there.’

Denis picked up some sandpaper and inched forward holding his nose. ‘Maybe we could just snip off the toes so I’ve less work to do, you won’t feel a thing. How about that?’

Mathieu cocked an eye for any lingering venue-staff and lit his cigar. ‘I may need them for balance yet – raise your paper cups my friends – the trials are entering a critical phase.’

‘It’s an awful lot of work to put in,’ said Vincent, ‘just to snare a pretty professor.’

‘If I didn’t know any better Vincent, I’d say you were jealous.’

‘It also takes time away from the act.’

‘Are you saying I’m not pulling my weight?’ Mathieu shifted himself in the chair, took a puff of the cigar and stared his partner down.

‘No, no, of course not Mr. Guevara – you’re the star attraction, breaking your back was the best stunt we ever pulled, but,’ he looked to Denis, ‘we worry that she’s maybe getting your hopes up.’

‘Hey there, don’t implicate me,’ said Denis, ‘you worry, I never worry. Do what you think is right Matti.’

It often came out in their drunken chats that Vincent assumed Mathieu brooded on the moment, on the mistake, but in actual fact, he rarely thought of it. His hand had slipped, that was all, it could’ve happened to any of them.

‘Imagine the possibilities when I climb into the exoskeleton and stomp around after you. It beats a forklift. Tops a big yellow digger. People would pay to see that alone.’

The image silenced Vincent and spurred a shared reverie along lucrative lines as Mathieu smoked contentedly and Denis sketched out set ideas for the next production.

What Irene experienced being synchronised with Mathieu was equal parts disconcerting and fascinating. The link between them was meant to enhance or amplify his own mu and beta rhythms so that he’d eventually be able to operate the exoskeleton on his own. She was his temporary co-pilot. Yet Irene found that there were leakages. When Mathieu thought of the colour red, both of their visual cortices lit up on the PET scan and her imagined field of sight was washed with a reddish hue – as if the sun was beaming through her eyelids. Her colleagues were intrigued.

She had always been interested in other people’s thoughts – that’s why she’d studied neuropsychology. It was also why, before she went to sleep each night, she read fiction. It seemed to Irene there were plenty of ways of getting out of one’s head – drugs, sex, meditation, adventure sports – but few means for getting into other people’s. She would’ve loved to study the rapport between musicians, if she’d had any musical expertise, but instead, she’d found this.

After experiencing the colours that nearly coalesced into images, she was disappointed she wasn’t privy to full thoughts from Mathieu, only feelings and impulses. At different points, she’d had a vested interest in knowing what went on in men’s minds. She had asked two different men ‘Do you love me?’ and at each crucial stage, dearly needed to know their answers. But she was over all that now. She had Mathieu.

‘So you’re the encoder rat and I’m the decoder rat, is that right, or have I got that mixed up?’

‘Look who’s been reading his science journals,’ she said. ‘No, you’re more like a macaque monkey I used to know – he wanted to be sprung from his cage, I wanted more intellectual conversation: it just didn’t work out.’

Mathieu pulled his best monkey-face at her and shifted in his chair – despite his best efforts to hide his discomfort from her, he seemed to be experiencing more and more pain.

‘Today, we’re going to do some motor imagery. I want you to imagine doing some of the lower body exercises you used to perform. Which one first?’

‘Seated leg curl – heels going back towards the bum. How about some tunes? – gym-work is easier with a beat.’

She answered with a flick of the switch and they settled down to their mental workout in silence bar the background whirr of the computer fans. Even though the trials were happening at the university, Irene was employed by the company that made the machine and she was nothing if not efficient.

At the five-minute mark, Irene relented and put the original mix of We Are Your Friends on through the lab speakers to give him an endorphin boost. He winked at his co-conspirator and kept pumping in his mind’s eye, only slightly distracted by the memory of a girlfriend passing him a pill tongue-to-tongue and the connecting idea that this would be a great space for a rave.

After twenty minutes, Mathieu’s chair was soaked and he looked like he’d been doing all the reps for real. Irene noted that his legs were bone dry, but his torso was sopping – he didn’t sweat much below the injury site. He pulled the patch off his forehead.

‘So tell me Miss Professor, will this have real-life usability or are we just continuing tests in a research setting?’

Irene was impressed that he knew the best way to get her attention was to deploy the jargon.

‘I know it’s hard Matt, but when you literally are the operating environment, all of it has real-life usability. Studies suggest these mental exercises have physical effects.’

‘Well you can see the physical effects right here – it looks like someone threw a bucket of water over me.’

‘I mean that there’s evidence that firing signals down there stops the muscles from atrophying.’

Mathieu grabbed a handful of spongey thigh and shrugged.

After he’d rested, they tried another set of repetitions again starting in silence – his anticipation of music kicking in imminently giving him extra stamina.

While Mathieu was busy visualising his bunching calf muscles, Irene tried to focus on detecting any simmering feelings or moods from him. She did feel a resistance or a building frustration which probably meant he sensed her probing and put up unconscious blocks. The thought that Mathieu was having just at the moment Irene was pressing inwards was that this two-way-connection between them was as risky as staging summit meetings without the diplomats. Irene didn’t catch this distinct idea but picked up a grey shadow of it which led her to think to herself while cycling home, just how disastrous it was for an individual’s privacy to link two people’s cerebral cortices. She laughed and pulled in off the bike lane and dialled her supervisor – she knew she’d just experienced a delayed thought from Mathieu for the simple reason that she totally disagreed with it.

And this led to a suggestion of upping the ante. After all, the company didn’t confine their R&D to just BCIs and exoskeletons.

She was worried about how Mathieu would react when she gave him the bad news: the tattoo wouldn’t transmit enough information to pilot the machine alone. They lost too much of the signal as it passed through his dura, his skull and scalp. If he wanted to move independently, they’d have to go for invasive surgery and implant an electrode array directly onto his motor cortex. No one can shrug off a craniotomy as a minor procedure. She also couldn’t guarantee the long-term efficacy of the array. She decided not to bother sugaring the pill.

‘What’s that?’ he asked when she placed a board of spiked electrodes onto his forefinger with a pair of tweezers.

‘A Utah array. We need to put a few of these guys onto the surface of your motor cortex. How would you feel about that?’

‘What reactions do you normally get with a date-night question like that? It looks like a tiny bed of nails you want to stick into my head.’

‘Female subjects typically describe it as a really sore-looking hairbrush. The tips record the firing patterns of around a hundred neurons.’

‘What are the risks?’

‘Infection and non-biocompatibility. Meaning glial scarring which can inhibit function and hamper our ability to retrieve data. Plus we can’t be sure how long it’ll work before it’ll need to be replaced.’

‘Necessitating further brain invasions.’

‘Correct.’

He took just a beat. ‘When do we start?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘If there’s a chance it’ll help me walk in your machine, then yes, let’s do it.’

When Mathieu woke after the surgery, he heard a snatch of conversation about ‘phagocytosis in the test site.’ He did his own experiment by trying to move his head towards the window, but found his cranium was locked into a padded clamp. He had however alerted them to the fact that he was awake.

‘Mathieu, you have an infection at the entry point, where the wire pierces the skin.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘An inflammatory response is always going to occur at the introduction of a foreign object to the CNS – we’ve the best chance of combatting it if we put you under again and let your body do its work.’

He nodded and watched the sedative course through the drip-line like a speeding scalextric car or indeed a mini-Mathieu zipping down a rubble chute.

Once Mathieu’s infection subsided, the tests went like a dream. His intentions were translated faster and more accurately than before. After having worked through the limitations of the external tattoo and navigated the risks of implantation, Irene felt vindicated. Her star was rising.

They manipulated a robotic leg through a variety of movements from bending the knee to stretching it out straight to striking a ball. She only had to intervene when he started to tire. Their connection seemed stronger too – the signal-to-noise ratio jumped up exponentially along with their problem-solving abilities, doubling their resources, sidestepping pitfalls, allowing esprit de corps to win out. The only speedbump came with a flash of anger on Mathieu’s part. In tandem, Irene felt her own mood dip sharply and her stomach started to churn.

‘We need to stop the test,’ he said.

‘Go on Matt – let’s push right through the barrier.’

‘Stop the fucking test and unhook me!’

Irene slipped off her headset and approached him to remove the wires when she smelt faeces.

‘Oh Matt – I’m sorry, I didn’t-’ Irene inwardly cursed herself for saying anything.

Mathieu shook his head and wheeled himself towards the door.

The day had come for the maiden voyage. The machine stood before them, a polycarbonate plastic and titanium frame with electric motors and hydraulic joints. Although anthropomorphic, it was an ungainly, lopsided prototype, not sleekly housed in the burnished steel of sci-fi. Its power source came through a thick black cable running along the roof, like an old TV remote that was only as remote as far as its wire extended, or a black anaconda plunged into your spine.

Mathieu was impressed.

‘Looks like my forklift got an upgrade,’ he said.

‘Think of this as a technical rehearsal,’ said Irene.

It took him seven minutes to haul himself up and into the harness. She knew better than to offer any assistance. There were haptic patches at each point the suit touched his skin monitoring the muscular inflections in his trunk for indications as to the movement his legs wanted to make. Vincent and Denis had made the same Ironman joke, but Mathieu was more reminded of the murdered flic who wakes up to be Robocop.

There were a few more whitecoats and suits behind the glass today, which gave Mathieu a familiar spurt of adrenaline – as nervous as he was, rarely did he disappoint an audience.

‘Now from proprioception to movement through space.’ Irene’s ringmaster tone also acknowledged that this was a performance for their benefactors. She sat at her console and affixed the tattoo to her forehead.

‘Imagine lifting your right foot, raising your knee and moving your leg forward,’ she said as the first command.

Mathieu did so. So did she. And so did his right leg in a tentative, jerky fashion. He turned and grinned, instinctively playing to the gallery.

He had walked his new machine-tooled body halfway across the room when he saw a pink bike in his mind’s eye as he triumphantly cycled around an unfamiliar house, a stranger with bushy sideburns running behind, urging him on. Mathieu’s joy had triggered the image. He knew Irene was seeing it too. Because it was her memory, not his.

‘Irene, what part of the brain is responsible for emotions and recollection?’

Irene looked over to the glass and nodded at a colleague – their viewers filed out like a hastily dismissed jury.

‘The hippocampus and the amygdala.’

‘Where are they located?’

‘The medial temporal lobe.’

‘I’d like to see the consent forms again.’

‘I can save you the trouble Mathieu – it includes the implantation of arrays there too.’

His anger and her shame flashed in unison and coagulated making them feel both betrayed and guilty at the same time.

He saw a classroom of jeering schoolgirls, she saw a punch breaking the nose of a primary school tormentor. He saw a screamed argument with a man in the street, she saw the tears on the cheeks of a woman he’d loved. He saw a man punching the dashboard of a car. She reached for a hand in the air and missed – the sawdust floor rushed up towards her. The emotional intensity coursing through them both felt wrong. It felt too large to accommodate.

Irene thought, ‘we need a code-word.’

Mathieu thought ‘Respite.’

They both thought ‘Respite.’

The feelings surged, peaked and the lights went out.

And it all stopped.

Then the backup generator kicked in and the power returned.

Mathieu walked the prototype back to first position, unbuckled himself and slipped down into his chair. He looked over at Irene. She seemed inert, pale, her hair mussed. He felt a flash of hatred towards her and was glad that a session had finally taken an equivalent toll on her too. He left the lab.

Irene felt a strange sense of dislocated dreaminess as she removed the sensors. She had worked so hard to get into Mathieu’s mind, she felt like she was still floating in it.

Matthieu’s head was pulsing as if he was still hooked up. He wheeled himself fully clothed into the shower room and turned the water up as hot as he could stand it. His screams ricocheted off the tiles.

Whenever Irene felt this depleted, she went into auto-pilot, habitual mode. She left the caretaker to lock up, got on her bike and cycled homewards on her regular route. She didn’t really feel there at all but dislodged and flying above as her bare white legs spun the spokes.

Mathieu looked down at his wet wheels on the linoleum corridor and imagined himself whizzing along the city streets.

It was a Saturday, so traffic was lighter and Irene wasn’t paying attention as the delivery truck in front of her decided late on a hard-right turn, indicating as he yanked the steering wheel around. He never would’ve seen her. She didn’t stand a chance.

It wasn’t about being woken in the middle of the night. If Mathieu didn’t go under at precisely the moment when he was most tired, which was usually pretty late, then he was doomed til dawn. He had lost his ability to slip off the pier and slumber – he thought that perhaps it was lingering shock over Irene’s death, or his phantom pains, but equally it could’ve been caused by the motorcyclist next door who kept his bike idling at the kerb as he pulled open and eventually shut his garage door with a clatter. Or maybe it was the starlings nesting in the eaves. Or the alsatian in an adjoining yard who barked whenever he clicked the bathroom light on.

He had also been getting excruciating headaches since the infection. But then again, he’d always gotten headaches after tears and these days, there was, privately, a lot of crying. He didn’t seem to be in control of his emotions anymore. He tried to cut out all coffee and wine and thinking the insomnia was a symptom of his simmering depression, tried meditative breathing, but really, he knew – it was because she was always there – that he never had peace to be alone, to be just by himself, not anymore.

He felt her inside his head. Not boldly declaring herself, but furtively, darting in and out of his awareness. Sometimes she tried to conceal her presence, but in various circumstances, she just couldn’t help herself from pushing her own agenda. He’d severed ties with the university and the trials but tended carefully to a compulsion to look up articles on just such experiments. He had no interest anymore and yet the first thought of every day was Has someone else eclipsed us? And then at dawn he’d be back staring at the laptop. Whenever a pretty girl put up her hand at the Q&As, Mathieu felt compelled to point to someone else. Even when an attractive woman appeared on TV, his hand would reach for the remote and switch over. This was most unlike him. He directly tested his theory by looking up some tame internet porn and got an instantaneously-delivered migraine. The thought that came into his head was I’m all the woman you need.

He tried to work through his novel problem of partial possession, but would become distracted, miss cues, lose his balance and put Vincent and Denis in danger. He tried to explain himself to them while concealing what he truly believed – he said he was grief-stricken, which of course he was not, because Irene was right there. In his head. He was getting frazzled, snapping at the boys, arriving late and exhausted to vital meetings. He wondered was he starting to resemble one of those hunted men suffering through bad marriages for the sake of the kids whose every movement was dogged by messages and choke-chain calls. He had noted a possessive streak in his pretty scientist during the tug of time between she and his partners-in-crime. But Irene didn’t need a GPS tracker to monitor Mathieu’s manoeuvres now, she just looked out through his eyes and sometimes decided the direction he could tilt his head.

On their last meeting, Vincent said to him ‘I’ll try to talk scientifically to you – I call it Yoko Ono-in-the-head-syndrome Matti. She’s dead. It’s over. To be honest we dodged a bullet. It was looking like we’d lost you. This is our second chance, don’t you see that?’

Mathieu’s knuckles formed a fist, despite having no wish to strike his old friend.

As for Irene, she was settling into her new abode. After she’d conquered the idea of dying and living on in a man’s head, she was relieved to be somewhat extant, although she found it difficult to imagine whether she was wholly or only fragmentally transferred – identity is a tricky thing to quantify when you see a chunky male paraplegic looking back at you in the mirror. She thought she retained her thought patterns, acumen and many memories, but a melding of two people didn’t seem to lead to a straight 50/50 share of resources, she thought to herself using her host’s addled cerebrum to do so. Mathieu wasn’t daubing on any extra cold cream to remove his stage slap and he certainly wasn’t glancing at any handsome men in the street. But she was witness to his underlying motives – Mathieu’s herculean work effort was driven by dual fears – of failure and attendant humiliation and since the accident, of having people pity him. The spurt of adrenaline to get him moving in the morning was invariably an image of his late father – a kind-looking patrician with a look of disappointment on his face. The only way to banish uncertainty was to do it again, and again and again, until the task, the stunt, the challenge had become hardwired in, like her. Unbidden, she experienced his memories as her own – she now knew it had been a Sunday afternoon in Lille when he was ten and sprawled with Top-Cat on the divan that Mathieu had decided, while gazing at Burt Lancaster in ‘Trapeze’, that he wanted to become an aerial acrobat. The cat was an acrobat already and more than happy to show him some moves, especially when given a little push off the couch. The mid-air torso swivel, the reverse layout and even a double-pike-twist, if he spied a nice juicy herring-head peeking out of the kitchen bin. And then she’d snap back into her own stream. But in French. Which she had to admit had vastly improved. She’d learned that Mathieu associated early morning birdsong with the walk home after youthful one-night-stands, that he’d only ever visited art galleries to impress girlfriends and that he hadn’t read a novel since he’d left school. Perhaps, she thought, no man’s unfiltered inner meanderings revealed the soul of a poet. Apart from poets. And perhaps even the poets were writing poetry in order to get laid. She just hoped they eventually outgrew their libido and the art took over.

Irene tried to behave like a silent partner supplying a whole new outlook and set of skills for him to draw upon. She knew she had to be kind to this man if they were both to survive a rather bumpy acclimatisation. To be kind to herself, she made a decision not to indulge in the self-torment of prompting him to look up her family members online or in real life. She rationalised it thus: Didn’t getting married in her mother’s day not subsume identity to a degree anyway? So hadn’t she just entered into a rather radically traditional marriage?

In purely intellectual terms, it was a little dusty in here, but she was firing up neural pathways that hadn’t been used in years and wasn’t this continuing ‘Irene’ living proof of cortical plasticity? It wasn’t that her intimate confidante, partner and landlord was dumb – he was just somewhat base in his appetites and instincts. She could eavesdrop at will on his thoughts or turn the volume down and although she wasn’t always disappointed in the discourse of Mathieu’s inner life, she tended to mute him. Once the miracle of cerebral co-habitation had been achieved – she could finally read, experience and shape this complex man’s consciousness – wasn’t it the perfect human reaction, within such intimacy, to find his inner babble banal and choose not to listen? If to truly know someone is to love them, then Irene loved the two-wheeled brute. She didn’t need to fight Mathieu on every bad habit or lazy construct – she just introduced some more abstract and esoteric concepts for him to ponder, most of it subconsciously – in fact, she’d discovered she could have quite a good time pursuing her own projects while out in his rather more practical Front-of-House, he went on daily greeting his audience of single-use-humans.

Sometimes she’d shoot out a rogue motor impulse to raise his arm in the air to arouse his suspicions, but invariably, he’d turn it into a yawning stretch – confabulation in real time. He would co-opt the movement as borne out of his own motivations – he must have been feeling drowsy and thus it was time for a stretch. Even though the stretch came first.

On a personal hygiene note, she was making progress in swaying him towards the rational option of a colostomy – at the moment, their bowel cleaning regime took up two hours a day and the attendant disgust and sheer boredom just wasn’t sustainable. For either of them. There weren’t many unilateral demands she’d make, but this was one of them. She thought it for the third time since lunch: Convenience of a Colostomy Bag.

He’d get the message eventually.

Mathieu knew there was only so far his troupe-mates could be pushed. So he set out to give himself – and Irene – the Irene in his mind – a good talking to. If they were to treat his headspace like a fractious flat-share, they’d have to agree on some ground rules and a roster. He closed the windows in his apartment. He turned off his phone and put on a set of orange industrial head-phones he’d used in the last show and addressed the woman in his head.

‘Irene. We need to talk,’ he thought to himself.

Silence, bar the familiar tinnitus hiss.

‘If we’re going to be soul-mates, or just mind-mates, we each need to have some guaranteed peace.’

Silence.

‘I need to retain my total focus during the shows or else we’ll fall.’

Silence.

‘I also need an hour pre-performance to get into the right frame of mind. Any interruptions, conflict or turf-war distractions aren’t fair then, alright?’

Silence.

‘So I’m asking for three hours a night and in return, we can read up on the trials.’

He found himself shaking his own head.

‘Alright, I’ll enrol back in the trials.’

He nodded involuntarily.

It felt like mental couples’ therapy.

Irene gave him three hours of radio silence a night and was appeased every time Mathieu turned down his colleagues when a tentative suggestion was mooted of a post-show drink. They couldn’t understand where their gregarious friend had gone but put it down to a combination of approaching middle age and catastrophic spinal cord injury and decided to settle instead for the consummate professional who wheeled himself onstage each night to rapturous applause. Like so many bands and groups, what had started out as a gang of mates goofing around had become a business arrangement. They’d turn up separately, do the shows and leave.

Mathieu and Irene settled down into a routine that didn’t fully satisfy either of them, but that nonetheless somehow worked. Even vicariously, he still delighted in the physical – so any action movies with genuine in-camera stunts, foot-powered chases and dizzying parkour had the makings of a good night in for Mathieu, while Irene preferred François Ozon or the Quebecois prodigy Xavier Dolan. And as for comedy, a rare mutual favourite turned out to be a Friday night showing of The War of the Roses on TV.

Recreation choices were fraught – she didn’t like his cigars or his booze and punished him when he overdid it. And yet, Mathieu had to admit that, his health was slowly improving and energy levels were up – it seemed that this civilising presence, his node of good sense, was intent on making him a better man.

However, when Irene had been an autonomous human, she’d had a rather different circadian rhythm to Mathieu. She liked to be asleep by eleven and up with the birds, whereas he needed time to decompress after each show. If they could only solve this battleground issue of bedtime – if they could agree on that, they’d be fine. After all, the separate bedrooms solution wasn’t an option.

Irene was shocked at the level of pain that Mathieu had concealed from her under his swaggering guise as a freakish force of nature. The headaches hadn’t abated with their entente. The back pain was pronounced and now they’d added extreme stomach cramps to their portfolio. He’d been chomping difene and generic paracetamol for so long, they’d become chemical crutches that she was powerless to remove. This wasn’t to mention all the injuries he picked up on a nightly basis, ranging from skinned elbows to broken fingers and whiplash.

Irene sometimes broke her promise to be dormant when Mathieu was working and would slip in and synchronise with him as he whooshed down a slide or caught a falling Denis by the foot – it was just like the old days when they’d boosted each other’s concentration like a cognitive tag-team. Mathieu never acknowledged her help, but neither did he complain. How could she be expected to sit out the most vibrant hours of their life?

And then when Mathieu passed out while upended in a packing crate, it was Irene who clawed their way out. When a doctor in the audience examined him, it was Irene who croaked ‘Ruptured ulcer.’

When Vincent and Denis got him to the hospital, they were told that if they’d been even ten minutes later, it would’ve killed him.

Self-preservation on Irene’s part or no, as Mathieu regained consciousness, he thought to himself that there were advantages to settling down with someone who might just have saved his life.

He resolved to give his body a break and take an extended holiday. To Ireland. Why not? He’d never been and it was something they could enjoy together. Get a fitted-out rental car and tour around. Make their way down the coast. Maybe stop off in Cobh. They’d see how they felt about that when they got there.

And then he nodded.

Like a circus seal.