Dark Matter Read Online Free PDF Page B

of possible moves—he responded: “I see only one
move ahead, but it is always the correct one.”
    Capablanca perceived the game in stark
contrast to the novice, for whom the chess board stages a seemingly random
clutter of pieces, of barely understood capability and worth. Capablanca could
name that bishop surrounded by a gaggle of pawns— a fianchettoed bishop in
the castled kingside . His mind was the product of year upon year of study,
reflection and refinement, where each insight folded into the previous until
all were submerged by their own weight into his subconscious.
    In all likelihood Capablanca wasn’t being
arrogant to say he simply chose the correct move. Intuition might well have
been the only object perceptible to his mind, the residual tang of
long-forgotten fruit.
    For Rasputin, the sublimation of his
rudimentary drawing skill had taken but a single day. The speed of transition
afforded him a kind of double-vision, with which he saw the old way and the new
way, the old clumsy perception that created rude sketches and the new that
transcoded memory or vision directly to paper.
    But that double-vision produced an
unnerving sense of disjointedness, so he forced himself to forget the old. Now
he saw, he drew. Hadn’t it always been that simple?
    When Dee visited the next day, the room was
already littered with a dozen portraits. Even the newspaper man had been
immortalised, as much as something committed to serviette can be said to be
immortal.
    It was mid-morning when she poked her head
around the curtain that hid the bed from curious passers-by. Rasputin was
watching kids’ television that appeared disconcertingly like an acid trip. Her
arrival supplied the impetus he needed to switch it off.
    She hugged him, a rib-creaker. It had all
of her in it today. Part of his mind mused over why she hadn’t become a nurse—she
had always been such a physical person—while another part tried to read her
mood.
    She sat and began unpacking supplies from a
shopping bag. She didn’t stop chatting as she pulled item after item from the
bag and distributed them about the room: magazines, a toothbrush (substitute for
the ‘hospital’s tile cleaner’), his age-cured thongs, and enough chocolate to
make a hippy diabetic.
    “Want a portrait?” he said.
    He lobbed the question like a stone into
the flow of her words, grinning at her back as she put a photo on the windowsill.
It was of the three of them, poorly exposed, taken at dusk on a sandbar in the
river. She paused mid-reminiscence, the water curled around the stone, it sank,
and she continued as before.
    He guessed she was still disturbed by the
sketch. It irked him, felt like a slur on his character. Since yesterday he had
marshalled what were, to his mind, more convincing explanations. But they stuck
in his throat. There was something else amiss with Dee. Her mood was like a
chord with a note he could not put a finger on: she was unsettled; happy to be
talking with him about mundanities; and...what?
    She emptied the bag at last and dropped
into an armchair, silent, and content it seemed for her eyes to roam the room.
    “You could have come earlier,” he said,
casting a glance at the dead eye of the TV poised above the end of his bed.
“Nearly got my second head injury watching that crap.”
    She crooked an eyebrow. “Kids’ TV is
standard for trauma patients,” she said. “It’s back to square one for you
junior.” She smiled as she said it, and it almost came off. But there it was
again. Her gaze would not stay with him. It drifted out the window.
    “There’s a boy chasing ducks down there,”
she said. “There are enough ducks that if they gang up, he’s dead meat.” She
looked at Rasputin finally, pupils dilating to suck in the light. “Sorry. I did
mean to come earlier.”
    “Knock it off.”
    “Patricia’s dead,” she said.
    Her words evoked an image of a funeral
party gathered about a Volkswagen-sized coffin.
    She went on, “I turned