The Current by Yannick Thoraval Tour Excerpt
The Current by Yannick Thoraval Tour Excerpt
She was forever consumed by the thought of seven billion people. She could not shake the image of that writhing mass of humanity swarming the Earth all at once, and had begun to imagine them all as a squirming, wriggling ball of maggots heaped on a decomposing carcass. They crowded her mind, these people, and her own thoughts competed against the volume of their imagined conversations. These people. All of these people lived and loved, and lost, and cried and did so just outside the fragile prism of her own reality. How many people were dying—or had died—the minute she finished that very thought? Hundreds? Thousands? They were people that she would never meet and never know, and yet she felt the weight of their presence was never far removed from her own experience. She imagined them all in rapid succession, gasping their last breaths, just as somewhere, someone else would be drawing their very first. How many people were sleeping right now? How many were eating? How many people were defecating this very moment? Vomiting? Coming? And what would it look like to assemble the total mass of that effluent? What was the scale of the excrement produced in that moment, and what would it look like all heaped together?
This colossal mound would be enough to fill stadiums, lakes and rivers, and all of that damage excreted, inflicted in the time it took her to imagine the activities of a few nameless, faceless people half a world away. The thought of them all would have driven her mad, were it not for the calming reassurance that above it all, looking down, was the peacefulness of God. He was not some old man living on a cloud. She thought that image ridiculous; felt that image of the bearded patriarch had done a great disservice to the church. It was bad branding. God was so much more than that. It was people’s attempt to understand Him that caused them to invent such petty and earthbound approximations of His true grandeur.
The lecture theater fell silent as the professor handed out the astronomy midterm exam. “Keep the booklets face down until I say you can begin.”
The exam had been a source of worry for Gracie. There would be calculations to make and formulas to employ. The whole class, really, was more math than stars, and Gracie had never been very good with numbers.
She had studied for the exam, but each practice question had only intensified her anxiety. The questions demanded a discipline and order of thought that felt wholly unnatural to her
Gracie had always hated math, ever since grade school. Times tables, algebra, trigonometry, the formulas and equations had piled up in her mind, an untidy heap of numbers and symbols. An exam expected her to dive into that clutter and retrieve a single item. It was too much. Solving a math problem felt like tracking a single minnow in a writhing school of fish, and soon overwhelmed her sense of the individual. Any fish seemed like the fish.
Why had she taken this course anyway? It was supposed to be the easy way to a science credit. She could have taken geography, or earth and ocean sciences. Joanne had taken biology. But all of those subjects were too hard. Joanne could have her biology.
From her seat in the back row at the top of the lecture theatre, Gracie looked down at the other students with their pens, pencils, calculators and scrap paper at the ready. She tried to pick out the people whom she imagined would ace this exam and envied the discretion of their minds, longed for the mysterious thing that enabled them to block out everything they knew except the ‘right’ answer. Why were Asians always so good at math?
The whole of university was a bit of a joke, really. It was all just a lot of talking.
“You may begin.”
A fluttering and flapping of paper ensued as students turned over their exam booklets.
“You have just under ninety minutes to complete the exam,” said the professor. “If you finish early, I strongly recommend you take the extra time to double-check your answers.”
Some people had already begun scribbling on their pieces of scrap paper. Others quietly flipped through the booklet, getting a sense of what lay ahead.
- What is the difference between an inertial reference frame and a non-inertial reference frame?
- Light travels at 3 x 105 km/sec. There are 3 x 107 seconds in one year. How many kilometers are there in the approximate distance to the Andromeda Galaxy (2 x 106)?
- A right triangle, shown in the above diagram, as it would look at rest, moves with respect to you at a speed of 198,294 km/sec in the x direction. In an instant, you measure the length of the side that lies along the x direction, and you get?
A familiar disquiet settled over Gracie as she approached each problem set. She read the questions carefully, determined to unpick the hidden clues and apply the desired equation for the correct answer. Did this question call for Kepler’s law? Wien’s law? What was the difference again? Wien’s law was about temperature, wasn’t it? Was it (lE/ lV) = (TV/ TE)? Or was that the Minkowski formula?
- Travelling in the family car at 60 mph, how many years would it take you to reach the outer edge of the solar system (105 AU)?
Gracie looked at her scrap of paper. She drew a quick sketch of a car. It was a frivolous thing to do, she knew that, but it had felt good to make long, fluid lines with her pencil, before attempting the short, brisk strokes of a calculation. She began to work out her answer.
v1 =v2 + V
1+v
3 x 105 km/sec 30,000 x 10, 0000 – 60sec
3 x 105 km/sec 2 x 106 light years AU 149 597 871kms
3 x 105 km/sec x 3 3 x 107 seconds = 2.2 miles per Km 2.2km per mile
Gracie’s breathing was shallow; she took a deep breath and looked up at the clock. Taking too long.
About Yannick Thoraval:
Yannick Thoraval is a professional communications adviser and university lecturer.
Best known as an essayist, Thoraval has published widely for both academic and general audiences.
He formally studied film, philosophy and American political history, attaining a masters degree from the University of Melbourne before leaving academia to pursue commercial writing interests. He ended up working as a copywriter in marketing and communications.
Thoraval’s fiction has received critical acclaim. His first screenplay, Kleftiko, was a finalist in the International Showcase Screenwriting Awards. Judges of the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Australia, highly commended his first novel, The Current.
The novel draws from Thoraval’s personal and professional experiences of working in the Victorian State Government, particularly his work in international development with the nation of Timor-Leste.
He is a career migrant and has lived in the Netherlands, France, Cyprus, Canada and Australia. Moving internationally from a young age has left him feeling culturally stateless, despite holding three passports.
Thoraval is a quiet advocate for refugees and asylum seekers. He is a founding member of the World Writings Group, which helps refugees write about their experiences of forced migration.
He has pledged to donate 10% of the proceeds of this book to assist the settlement of refugees.
He currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches professional writing and editing. He is working on his second novel.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/YannickThoraval
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008295216884
Publisher: Ingram Spark (September, 2014)
Category: Literary Fiction, Climate Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-9925916-0-1
Tour Date: November, 2014
Available in: ebook, 312 Pages
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