A gift bestowed upon him by the Strobe.
To begin with he couldn’t remember anything about what had happened post initial flash. Plink-plink, plink-plink ... The doctors promised his folks they would monitor his condition, try different treatments, but reassured them that it was nothing to worry about. This wasn’t the middle ages and many people were in the same boat.
Not likely.
So life went on for him as before, apart from the fact that he couldn’t go to Babel’s and couldn’t sit through films and TV shows with flash lighting effects. But then one night, as he was making love to Adele, it came back to him. When he climaxed, Adele squeezing him tight with her thighs, her hair swishing from side to side, Lang’s brain suddenly sparked off and he recalled the glimpse of something he’d been given back in the nightclub.
He used to think of sex as “touching infinity”—how stupid that sounded now. Sex was just sex, especially at his age. For he’d experienced the infinite and it was a million times more incredible than any orgasm, than any drugs that were being handed around in Babel’s on a nightly basis.
His entry into the white room: a room that wasn’t the toilets, but somewhere else, somewhere even brighter. A place of pure tranquillity, pure susceptibility, pure ecstasy—not the manufactured variety. And although he hadn’t realised it at the time, he’d come back changed. He’d come back with a few answers. Answers to questions he didn’t even know he’d asked.
“Robere,” Adele said, her husky, breathless voice merely a ghost-whisper. “What is it?”
But he couldn’t answer her. Lang was too busy trying to unlock and fathom out his memories. To discover why he could now see various patterns in the static.
The very next morning he went shopping. The lamp was small, it was all the electrical shop had in stock at the moment, but it would do. Lang enlisted the help of Denver, although it had been an uphill struggle to convince him.
“No way. I can’t believe you’re even ... Are you fucking insane?”
“I don’t think so,” Lang told him. “Please, Denver.”
“After what happened the last time, you’d put yourself through that again?”
“It’s because of what happened the last time that I have to do it again. I need to know whether it was real or not.”
Denver snorted. “Oh, it was real all right. I was there, remember? I was the one the cops fucking well dragged off because they thought I’d spiked your drink.”
“Not that ... I need to know if what I saw was real.”
“And what did you see?”
Lang couldn’t explain it to Denver, he simply stated that he was doing this with or without him. Of course, it would be safer with him, but ...
“Okay, okay,” Denver said, holding up his hands. “I’ll watch you. But I still think this is crazy, man.”
So they retreated to his room on campus, and did the deed. Minimal exposure. Lang lay down in the recovery position, so he wouldn’t choke or anything, and then Denver turned on the juice.
Plink-plink, plink-plink ...
A sudden jolt, pain ... And he arrived. The same feelings of bewilderment, disorientation, nausea. Everything around him was different, the walls, the ceiling—all white like snow, like sightlessness; and yet here he could see things oh-so clearly. It was like the equivalent of being born: he shook, he spun. Or was he stock still and the room—the white room—was spinning? Moving, a constantly shifting cacophony of euphoria ...
Flickering images leading to a frozen moment in time.
Then he was shaking again, only Denver was the one doing it for him. Rousing him, slapping him awake. The whiteness was gone, Denver had pulled the plug, and Lang was back in his student accommodation.
“How ... how long ... ?” mumbled Lang.
“Ten, fifteen seconds. Are you all right?”
Lang nodded. But he wasn’t all right, and probably never would be. Denver asked him again what he’d seen, and again Lang couldn’t explain it. How could he describe his experiences to anyone? Denver wouldn’t understand even if he tried. And besides, what was the point?
In any event it hadn’t been long enough. He needed longer.
Once he’d seen that no harm had come to Lang, Denver reluctantly agreed to more of the experiments. At first it was only once every week, but then the sessions became more frequent and the exposure periods gradually lengthier.
It affected him outside of the white room; how could it not? Lang’s work suffered, his appearance suffered, and his relationship with Adele suffered. To start with she thought he might be seeing someone else, in spite of Denver’s protestations to the contrary, but then she began to suspect that he actually was on drugs this time.
“Look at yourself, Robere,” she said to him one day during lunch in the cafeteria. “What’s happening to you? It is like none of this matters anymore.”
Lang told her that it didn’t.
“And does that include me?” she asked.
He said nothing, so she got up and left the table. Lang felt like he should regret doing that to her, but he had found a new love now. In a sense she was right. It was a drug, except it was more potent, more addictive, than anything currently “on the market”. Denver spotted the similarities as well: “I’ve seen it before. You’re becoming a junky.” He refused to watch his friend slowly destroy himself, do untold damage to his brain and body. Said he couldn’t stand to see him shaking and convulsing on the ground no more, sputum dribbling from his mouth.
Lang went it alone. He took the lamp down to the university’s dark rooms and paid the technician to fix a timer onto it. He skipped lessons, skipped life, to worship at the temple of the Strobe. And in return it taught him many things, gave him tantalising visions of a perfection he could never attain in the world he inhabited most of the time. In fact, it showed up that world for the sham it was. Disconnected him from it piece by piece. Presented him with the ability to see the markers, the codes, the staples and sellotape that held it together at the seams.
But always, always, it would end just as he reached the frozen moment.
By the time his parents came over—separately—again to see him, to find out just what the hell was going on, why he was screwing up his education, his one chance to make something of himself, Lang was gone.
No one had seen him for ages and no one in that city would ever see him again. He remembered hiding near the gates, waiting for Adele, for Denver, just to see them one last time. He didn’t know why; sentiment maybe. He was tempted to speak to them, but held back when he saw Adele with another.
Lang boarded the coach and left.
Which is how he came to be here, today, many miles away in the squat. He’d bought another lamp, of course. A much bigger one. The biggest he could find. Wasn’t the instrument itself, only what this could do, what this contained. It had taken most of his savings, but then he didn’t need money where he was going. Didn’t need anything, really.
Certainly not the timer—he’d already pushed it as far as it would go anyway ... and still craved more. More time: as if that was even relevant. On his mind now was a one-way trip; Lang was in this for the duration.
He lay down on the duvet, facing the lamp. Night was drawing in, but soon it wouldn’t be dark. Soon he would (What’s happening to you?) leave this fabrication far behind. Lang rubbed his stubbled chin; the flesh