“My name is Neil Henderson.”
Then he said nothing for thirty seconds.
The lecture theatre had been built at a time when universities still wished to intimidate the young into gratitude. Its walls were panelled in a blond and expensive wood; its seats descended with parliamentary severity towards a shallow stage; and above the stage, suspended where a crucifix might once have performed the same administrative function, hung the university crest. Sixty people looked down upon Neil Henderson. Neil Henderson looked back.
At first, the silence was merely the silence after a sentence. It possessed grammar. It was the little white space in which another sentence collected itself.
At five seconds it became a delay.
At ten, it should have become a mistake.
By fifteen, the audience should have begun to assist him. Someone should have coughed. Someone should have adjusted a bag with needless vigour. Someone in the back row should have smiled at someone else in the back row, inaugurating that small republic of ridicule by which strangers protect themselves from witnessing a public failure. The professor who had invited him should have felt the first proprietorial twinge of regret.
None of this happened.
Neil stood with his hands lightly touching either side of the lectern. He had brought no notes. He wore a dark jacket, a white shirt without a tie and the expression of a man neither waiting for permission nor withholding anything for effect. He did not stare them down. That would have made the silence a contest. He simply remained where he was, available and unembarrassed.
At twenty seconds, the room settled more deeply into itself.
At twenty-five, a young woman near the aisle noticed that her shoulders had dropped. A man two rows behind her stopped pressing his tongue against a troublesome tooth. Professor Alice Venn, seated at the far end of the front row, experienced the unfamiliar pleasure of having arranged an event whose success she could not yet explain.
At thirty seconds, Neil smiled.
“Well, that was odd, wasn’t it? You come for a talk and I give you thirty seconds of silence right after announcing my name. You should be dying of secondhand embarrassment, and I should be lying on the floor from experiencing it firsthand.”
A pause.
This one was shorter. It was also different. The audience could feel itself being asked to inspect the silence that had just passed through it.
“Did that feel … pleasant?”
There were a few nods. Then more. A subdued laugh moved across the middle rows—not derisive laughter, but the sound people made when caught agreeing to something before they understood its price.
“It did to me,” Neil said. “But then almost everything does now.”
He stepped out from behind the lectern.
“Three months ago, I was bedridden. Not metaphorically bedridden. Not taking calls from bed, answering emails in bed, having what people with functioning lives call a duvet day. I was twenty-seven years old and I lived in a single room whose door was six paces from the bed. On a good day I could reach it. On an excellent day I could open it.
“I had severe anxiety, severe depression and agoraphobia. Those were the official names. I collected names because names were among the few things still capable of reaching me. Panic disorder. Major depressive disorder. Avoidant behaviour. Derealisation. Intrusive ideation. Each diagnosis was delivered as if a committee had finally discovered the correct Latin inscription for the stone on my chest.
“I had not been inside a shop for fourteen months. I had not travelled on a train for two years. When my mother visited, I sometimes pretended to be asleep because being loved created obligations I did not have the strength to misunderstand. I knew the dimensions of my ceiling more intimately than I knew another human face.”
No one moved. This was partly courtesy and partly arithmetic. They had already calculated the distance between the man described and the man before them. There was no visible route connecting the two.
Neil indicated the room with one open hand.
“This is my first time at this university. It is my first time at any prestigious university, although I did once deliver a parcel to one. This is also the first talk I have given in my life. Professor Venn has been very brave, or very irresponsible, in lending me forty-five minutes of institutional credibility.”
Venn smiled. The room laughed again, more freely now.
“Three months ago I could not cross the landing without preparing for it. Today I came here by train, ate a sandwich in a crowded station, asked a stranger for directions and stood in silence before sixty people while my body neglected to kill me. You are entitled to ask what happened.”
He looked towards the clock mounted above the rear doors. It showed 6:06. There were forty-two minutes left.
“Five dreams happened.”
The laughter did not return. This pleased him.
“Five dreams over five consecutive nights. Or five transmissions, if you prefer the word she used. The distinction matters, but not yet. The entity who contacted me gave me a human name by which I could think of her. Fah. F-A-H. It is borrowed from Thai and means sky. It is not her name because her kind do not possess names in precisely the form we do. But conversation requires handles, even when one of the speakers is not human.”
There it was. The first unmistakable absurdity.
The audience accepted it with admirable professionalism. A beard was stroked. A pen moved. Somewhere in the upper rows, a laptop key was pressed with judicial emphasis.
“I know,” Neil said. “We have arrived rather quickly.”
Another small laugh.
“Professor Venn has heard the whole account. She has not endorsed it. The university has not endorsed it. No faculty, department, laboratory, funding body or distinguished dead benefactor has endorsed it. I say this partly for their protection and partly because endorsement is irrelevant to what I am going to tell you.
“I have no evidence that would survive an examination. I cannot produce Fah. I cannot show you the mechanism by which she reached me. I do not have a blurred photograph of a machine in the sky, a fragment of unusual metal or a recording spoiled at exactly the useful moment by interference. What I possess is information, and the peculiar fact that receiving it cured me.”
A young man in the third row raised his hand.
Neil nodded to him.
“Cured you completely?”
“No,” Neil said. “It did not improve my eyesight, straighten my teeth or make my father easier to speak to. It did not eliminate grief, irritation, pain, indigestion, boredom or the possibility that I may one day be hit by a bus. It removed the disorders I named. My anxiety vanished. My agoraphobia vanished. My depression vanished. Not gradually. Not through exposure, discipline or a heroic rediscovery of exercise. They vanished because I learned why they were happening.”
The young man lowered his hand, dissatisfied in a thoughtful way.
“I need to be exact here,” Neil continued. “Fah did not persuade me of a theory. She did not present an argument whose propositions I weighed and accepted. She installed the explanation as grounded truth. That phrase may sound evasive, but you already know the difference. You know facts that can be challenged and facts upon which the act of challenging appears to stand. If somebody asks whether you truly believe you are awake, you can entertain the question. You cannot inhabit it for long. Wakefulness is beneath the discussion.
“What Fah gave me sits there. Beneath discussion.”
He placed a hand flat against his chest, not sentimentally but as if indicating the position of an internal instrument.
“I feel highly privileged that she contacted me. I did nothing to earn it. I was not selected because I was spiritually advanced. I was selected because I was nearly unusable.”
The sentence produced no laughter.
“My suffering had ceased to be productive, even to those producing it. I was an exhausted circuit: too frightened to enter the world, too depressed to imagine losing it. There was almost no remaining distance between what I hoped for and what I expected. That distance is important. We will spend quite a lot of time on it this evening.
“Fah was also approaching the end of her life. That is why she spoke. She belongs to a civilisation whose continued comfort depends upon our continued disturbance. Her people intend to increase that disturbance beyond any level they have previously attempted. She believes the result may destroy us. She also believes it may destroy them. Whistleblower is our word for her position, and it is good enough.”
A rustle finally passed through the theatre. It was not yet disbelief. Disbelief tends to be cleaner and more enjoyable. This was the discomfort of sensing that an outlandish claim had come equipped with an internal structure.
Neil waited until the movement ceased.
“She revealed the information over five nights because the human mind is not built to receive the whole of it at once. On the first night, she showed me what consciousness is. On the second, what had been done to ours. On the third, why her species did it. On the fourth, what they intend to do next. On the fifth, she showed me the one part of the system they cannot completely control.
“Us.”
He let the word remain uncomplicated.
“A direct transmission is not what I can offer you. I cannot install this account in your minds as Fah installed it in mine. A lecture is words. Words become propositions, propositions invite judgement, and judgement is rarely unattended by vanity. Some of you are already composing objections. Some are diagnosing me. At least one of you is deciding whether this would make a good dissertation provided all references to nonhuman entities were replaced by references to late capitalism.”
The loudest laughter so far came from the postgraduate rows.
“That is fine. I am not asking you to surrender your judgement. I am asking you to notice what occurs immediately before judgement arrives. The little contraction. The internal noise. The impulse to defend a position you did not know you occupied until something approached it.
“Fah calls the absence of that noise resonance.”
Neil returned to the lectern, took a sip of water and placed the glass down without looking at it.
“I touched on resonance. Resonance is simple. It is harmony. It almost doesn’t need any explanation because our consciousness is built for attunement. But dissonance?”
His smile tightened, though it did not disappear.
“Do you know that is the subject we humans cannot stop talking about? It causes all the complications in the world. Most stories begin when resonance ends. Most philosophies are systems for explaining why it ended. Most religions promise to restore it. Most industries offer to rent it back to you by the month.”
Pens moved now. The laptop keys lost their judicial character and became merely industrious.
“Resonance is not happiness,” Neil said. “Happiness is weather. Resonance is the climate beneath it. A resonant person may be grieving. A resonant person may be ill, afraid, angry or in pain. The distinction is that the experience does not immediately divide against itself. Grief does not say: You should have recovered by now. Fear does not say: Your fear proves you are weak. Pain does not say: This is your life forever, and it has happened because you are the sort of person to whom life happens.
“Dissonance echoes. That is its great economy. Something occurs once in the world and then a hundred times in thought. We relive the insult, prelive the catastrophe, rehearse the abandonment, prosecute ourselves on behalf of people who have forgotten our names. The original signal may be faint. We provide the amplification.”
The woman near the aisle looked down at her hands.
“You know this,” Neil said, more softly. “Not my explanation. The experience. You know the exhaustion of being both the frightened animal and the person standing over it demanding that it stop being frightened. You know what it is to feel lonely and then feel ashamed of loneliness, to doubt yourself and then treat the doubt as evidence, to suffer and then become the author of an additional suffering in which the first suffering reveals something contemptible about you.
“That second movement is not inevitable. More importantly, it is not entirely ours.”
He allowed them a moment, but only a moment.
“During the first thirty seconds of this talk, I gave you almost nothing to amplify. More precisely, I gave you something which ordinarily produces amplification—a man failing in public—but I did not generate the corresponding signal. I did not apologise with my face. I did not contract. I did not ask you, silently, to rescue me from my own decision. There was no embarrassment in me for your embarrassment to attach itself to.
“So most of you remained where you were.”
The room had become very quiet again, though this time the quiet contained the audience’s effort to understand its earlier effortlessness.
“You thought you were waiting for me to speak. For part of that time, you were not waiting. You were simply here. That is why it felt pleasant. Not thrilling. Not narcotic. Pleasant in the almost insulting way that something feels pleasant when it has ceased to interfere with you.
“For thirty seconds you did not have to manage me. I did not have to manage you. Nobody in this room was required to anticipate, repair or conceal the private judgement of anybody else. We were not sixty people succeeding or failing at being an audience. We were sixty fields of consciousness briefly falling into attunement.”
A hand rose at the rear.
“Are you saying you did that to us?”
“No,” Neil replied. “I’m saying I stopped doing something, and for a few seconds you stopped with me.”
“What did you stop doing?”
“Believing the disturbance was mine.”
The answer was so immediate that the questioner had no time to arrange a face for it.
Neil moved once more from behind the lectern. There was nothing evangelistic in his manner. Evangelists leaned towards their audiences, burdened by the need to close a sale. Neil leaned nowhere.
“This is the difficulty I face tonight. Fah gave me knowledge in a form that interrupted the echo. I can give you only an account. You may believe me, disbelieve me or entertain me provisionally as a thought experiment. The people Fah belongs to will prefer the second response, but they are perfectly capable of using the first. Frightened belief produces as much internal noise as frightened disbelief.
“So I will not ask you to believe yet. Belief is one of the complications. I will ask you to observe. When the explanation sounds impossible, observe the part of you that wishes to punish it for sounding impossible. When it sounds persuasive, observe the part that wishes to be saved by it. Neither reflex is resonance. Both are attempts to reach it by force.”
He glanced again at the clock.
“We have definitions ahead of us. Signals. Fields. Extraction. A civilisation that calls itself the Shomrim, borrowing—as it borrows nearly everything that makes its condition tolerable—a human word. We will discuss why human consciousness is both receiver and signal; how an external interference can reach the field without entering the private contents of a mind; why dreams exist; and why, after thousands of years of carefully managed disturbance, the management is failing.
“You will have plenty to object to.”
He rested his hands on the lectern exactly as he had at the beginning.
“But first I’m going to ask you a question.”
Sixty faces waited.
“Do you want another thirty seconds of resonance?”
A sea of hands rose up.