Bridge, p.37
Bridge, page 37
Her arm was still bleeding, and I helped her re-bandage it and called the police, who were already in the vicinity, attending to a shooting on the stretch of road two miles away.
I watch the kids sometimes, try to do the best I can. I know Bridge has been back. Budgie told me about the voice note. I could have encouraged her not to listen to it. Told her it was part of her mental illness, another episode, waited to see if she spun any more worms from under her skin. But I’m not evil. I’m not going to keep my daughter as some kind of dreamworm breeding ground.
I already have the one I removed from her arm when I was bandaging it. When she was out of her mind, thinking she’d killed someone, weeping on the couch. A simple matter. A pair of tweezers. Three inches of worm. It won’t get me far, but it might be far enough.
To the other Joanne, the one who isn’t a failed science teacher, bankrupt from trying to get custody of her grandchildren and paying for rehab for her fuckup of a daughter. Joanne the scientist who gives talks at international conferences.
I have the box. I know how to build a new one and I have been experimenting with other frequencies.
I’m going to burn this now, cher journal. So no one will find me. No one will come looking. I’ve learned.
People can change.
Acknowledgments
I’m so grateful this book gave me an excuse to hang out and talk to the most fascinating experts on neuroscience and parasitology and music and medicine and police work and more. I have taken huge liberties with all of these subjects, and any mistakes are mine.
Some of the very useful books I read for background include This Is Your Brain on Parasites by Kathleen McAuliffe, Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer, Rosemary Drisdelle’s Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests; The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict, Shoot Like a Girl by Mary Jennings Hegar; The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains; Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth, and Adam Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. On that note, Understanding Music’s YouTube video essay on “Understanding Toxic” was influential, as was Radiolab’s episode “Bringing Gamma Back,” on how certain light frequencies applied to rat brains can destroy plaque caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
The people I spoke to were more important than anything I could have read or listened to or watched.
On the brain stuff, my dear friend and neuroparasitologist Dr. Hayley Tomes at the University of Cape Town let me hang out in her lab and showed me all the equipment and workings, explained tapeworm life cycles repeatedly, and invited me to take home a slice of (uninfected) rat brain of my very own. (Obviously, I said yes, and his name is Pinky.) She also read this manuscript over and over, and the plot was hugely shaped by our conversations.
Likewise, neurosurgeon Dr. Sally Rathemeyer sat at my dinner table and explained epilepsy, drew diagrams of where Jo’s tumor would have been, and how it would have been treated over the decades and wrote Jo’s physician’s report. I’m grateful also to her colleague Dr. Graham Fieggan, to Professor Joe Raimondo, who allowed me to borrow some of his bio for Jo’s own studies, to Dr. Anil Seth, who sent me a copy of Being You before it was published and talked consciousness and invited me to try out the Dreammachine experience he worked on. I’m eternally indebted to immunologist and helminth expert Dr. Bill Horsnell, who literally saved my life and someone else’s. You know how.
Huge thanks to Twitter friends Dr. Alastair McAlpine, for giving me real medical advice for novel ailments, to former Chicago cop Joe O’Sullivan, for talking me through the intricacies of army training, police work, and corpse disposal (and the indelible image of Shrimp Head Man), and to Scott Hanselman, for walking me through Portland.
I learned so much about music theory and resonances from award-winning composer, musician, and forensic musicologist Simon “Fuzzy” Ratcliffe and from getting to hang out in the studio of Mr. Sakitumi, aka Sean Ou Tim. Anil Seth introduced me to Jamie Perera, whose work explores social issues through music and sound, including the Holocene, COVID deaths, data privacy, consciousness, and making a soundtrack out of guns for Amnesty International. He also introduced me to Alice Eldridge, a “reader of sonic systems,” who makes feedback music designed to induce altered states both on her own and as part of the Brain Dead Ensemble but focuses mainly on eco-acoustics, which involves listening in on ecosystem health, about which I could write a whole separate novel.
Thanks to Nica Cornell for inspiring me to go to Haiti in 2015 and to Richard Morse at the Hotel Oloffson, especially for putting me in touch with the houngan Anis, who plays bass in his band. Anis spent three hours talking vodou with me in his home and was kind enough to give me a reading and laughed when I mistook the young woman doing her physics homework in his basement for a mambo-in-training. Thanks to Jojo Maislin, whom I met while crashing the U.S. ambassador’s party, and architect Nathalie Jolivert, who showed me another side of Haiti and took me for dinner with her mom and sister. Lee Hirsch gave me excellent introductions in general, but especially to Patrick “YouYou” Payin, my wonderful fixer, guide, and interpreter. Both Patrick and Nathalie were kind enough to read over the Haiti chapter to ensure the representation was respectful and accurate. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine.
I am hugely grateful to my friend and comic writer Vita Ayala for sharing their awesome life stories, Puerto Rican perspective, and lived nonbinary experience to help me understand Dom. Pablo Defendini, Erynn di Casanova, and Leila Rodríguez helped me with the use of Puerto Rican Spanish. Thank you, too, to my careful sensitivity readers. Again, any mistakes are mine.
I’m grateful to Chris Denovan for inviting me to share his studio space and watch his new exhibition come together at the same time as this novel did, and our upstairs neighbor Caro Jesse, whose studio inspired Mina’s. Thanks to Paige Nick for her sea views, to Juanita de Villiers, who helped me out in between doing their own cool projects, to Page Wicks for expert life-running, to Sarah Lotz, forever and always, and Charlie Martins, who helped me to change worlds. I miss you, friend.
Thank you to my editors Josh Kendall, Jessica Leeke, Fourie Botha, Helen O’Hare, and Catriona Ross, and my ace copyeditor, Tracy Roe—and, of course, to the passionate teams at all my publishers, as well as my agent Oli Munson.
This book wouldn’t have been possible at all if not for my first and best readers, Sam Beckbessinger, Tauriq Moosa, Hayley Tomes, Sam Wilson, Dale Halvorsen, and especially Helen Moffett, my longtime editor and coconspirator who, like a dreamworm, is inside my head. Helen, you know I couldn’t have done this without you.
And finally, thanks to my daughter, Keitu, in every world, every life.
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About the Author
Lauren Beukes is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of The Shining Girls, which has been adapted by Apple TV+, as well as Zoo City, Moxyland, Broken Monsters, and Afterland. Her novels have been published in twenty-four countries, and she’s also a screenwriter, comics writer, journalist, and award-winning documentary maker. She lives in London with two trouble cats and her daughter.
Also by Lauren Beukes
Afterland
Broken Monsters
The Shining Girls
Zoo City
Moxyland
Slipping: Short Stories, Essays, and Other Writing
Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past
Survivors’ Club
(with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly)
Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom
(with Inaki)
Wonder Woman: The Trouble with Cars
(with Mike Maihach)
Lauren Beukes, Bridge
