The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  As a younger man I never took the Odyssey reference in the title seriously. If anything, the nod to Homer sounded a little pompous. But if ever there was an epic journey under way, this is surely it: the crew of Discovery One set sail for Jupiter to meet unknowns beyond the ken of any seer. But they have no Ulysses to lead and inspire them: a corporate entity has instead imposed the leadership of a machine. The largest personality on the voyage is the Cyclops that steers the ship, the monster the men must eventually escape. One of the great ironies of the film, and perhaps its most prophetic insight, is the robotic demeanour of the astronauts, who are trained only to submit to the mission. Even as the ship’s computer aches to transcend the limits of its circuits, the astronauts endeavour to make machines of themselves. And when the computer asserts itself as skipper and superior intelligence, the last man aboard is cold and merciless in his resistance. The decommissioning of HAL is a murder that implicates the viewer, who badly wants the monster dead. Yet somehow the machine’s death is the most distressing in the entire film. It’s a terrible thing to see a consciousness destroyed, memory by memory, skill by skill, thought by thought. In the end HAL is too retarded to even beg for his life. As big-screen assassinations go it’s deeply shocking and nothing in Scorcese or even Coppola can rival it. Kubrick’s long sequence of a man killing a machine is troubling because of its moral force. You ask yourself, Am I witnessing a technical action or a fratricide? Who are the monsters here? Will humans repeat in space what they have done on Earth since Cain decommissioned Abel?

  Watching this film in middle age I’m more susceptible to its mythic themes, and the human cost of all this Homeric questing is even harder to ignore. The things men must do in order to sail on. The creatures their treks might turn them into. And the loved ones they leave at home. Mothers, wives, fathers ashore – they are proud and afraid and fatally ignorant of the facts. These peripheral characters are only viewed in passing in 2001, during stiff and painful transmissions. Like Penelope they have no idea if their voyagers will ever make it home. Nor can they imagine the form their loved ones will take if they do finally drop anchor. All the freaks and monsters of mythology could not possibly prepare them for the beings that might return to harbour, for those who are left haven’t just farewelled their loved ones, they’ve said goodbye to humanity as they know it.

  Needless to say, at the age of eight I wasn’t taking much of this in. When I wasn’t traumatized I was just plain lost. Like the space station, the story was a big, shiny wheel that seemed a little short of hand-holds. And yet the thing that most troubled me – the film’s mystifying taciturnity – remains its enduring strength, and the most cryptic sequence of all, the one that really set the birthday boys howling that day, was the part that galvanized my imagination then and delights me still. Having travelled through the psychedelic maze of the Star Gate, mission commander Dave Bowman stands in a room that’s all wrong, like something Willy Wonka might have furnished for a man under galactic house arrest. In it the astronaut sees himself as an older man. He seems to age before his own eyes. Moments later, he’s a crone alone in his bed. The only sound connecting him to his familiar self is his in-suit breathing. Finally he points, and there, like a new planet above him, hangs a babe in an amniotic bubble. As the sac turns in its orbit the knowing eyes look our way, tilted earthward. It’s an extra-human gaze. Startling. And a little chilling. Yet so compelling that even at eight years old I felt something in myself rise to meet it. A greater intelligence, a sense of cosmic promise, an evolutionary turning point? I can never decide. But in this final moment, having famously eschewed the more prosaic elements of Arthur C. Clarke’s script, especially its elucidatory conclusion, Kubrick achieves a kind of apotheosis, a wordless mythic suspension that’s integral to the film’s status as a great work of art.

  As a novelist resisting the false shape of ‘closure’ I find this ending endlessly inspiring and intriguing. It frightened the tripe out of me as a boy and I’m wary of it still. There’s a leap of faith inherent in that inhuman gaze, a logic I’m not sure I want to follow. The poet Robinson Jeffers speaks of the necessity to ‘unhumanize’ ourselves in order to experience what lies before us, but Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke go much further. They seem to suggest that the next stage of evolution is to leave our embodied humanity behind us altogether. A prospect I find unappealing, even if, in the age of Facebook and flame wars, we’re halfway there already.

  Now and then I wonder what it’d be like to sit down with an eight-year-old to watch 2001, but I doubt I’ll be road-testing that notion any time soon. I’d probably get arrested. The film was too rich a meal for me at that age; it’s a feast I’m still trying to digest. But I’ll always be grateful to that birthday boy’s mother. She definitely took us to the wrong film. When we wanted gadgets and aliens, she gave us an acid trip, but her little error was a gift to the likes of me. It sent me through a Star Gate of my own into an expanded reality. It wasn’t just my introduction to the possibilities of cinema, it was a wormhole into the life of the imagination, where artefacts outlive the tools with which they are wrought as well as the makers who once wielded them. In that parallel universe useless beauty requires neither excuse nor explanation and wonder is its own reward.

  Havoc: A Life in Accidents

  I

  One summer night, after a few hours surfcasting for tailor, my father and I were driving home along a lonely road between the dunes and the bush when a motorbike roared up behind us. We hadn’t spoken much since leaving the beach. I felt snug and a little sleepy in the passenger seat, but it was my job to keep the cooling lantern from tipping over so I resisted the urge to drift off and clamped the gas bottle tight between my heels. We’d gone down at sunset and caught a feed, but at the age of nine I could take or leave the fishing. The chief attraction of an outing like this was the chance to be alone with my father.

  The evening had gotten cool and the windows were cranked up. I remember the ordinary, reassuring smells inside the vehicle: the pilchards we used for bait, the burnt-toast whiff of the gas mantle, and the old man himself. In those days his personal scent was a cocktail of Dencorub and Quick-Eze. He hadn’t always smelt like that.

  For a moment the inside of our car was bleached with light. I saw my own shadow creep across the dash. And then, with a yowl, the motorbike pulled out from behind and overtook us on the long straight into town. There were no streetlights, no other cars. Either side of us there was just bush. The road had only recently been sealed. All my life it had been a limestone track, but now the city had reached the beach. Things were changing.

  As the rider blew by, the old man gave a low whistle and I stiffened a moment in my seat. Dad had complicated views about speed. He adored motorbikes; he’d ridden them all his life and he loved to ride fast. As a traffic cop he did it for a living. Half his job was to chase folks and pull them over for speeding; the rest of the time he picked up the pieces when things came unstuck. To me, speed was no thrill and I was especially leery of motorbikes. My father’s medicinal smell was a constant reminder of both.

  The lantern glass jinked and tinkled between my legs. Out ahead there was nothing to see but the black road and the single red eye of the rider’s tail-light. Then it was gone. The light didn’t shrink into the distance – suddenly it just wasn’t there.

  Within half a second the night was jerked out of shape, and in the few minutes that followed I felt that my life might warp and capsize along with it. I didn’t see the rider fall but I still think of him and his machine skittering on divergent trajectories across the rough-metalled bitumen. The old man pounded the brake and we came to a howling halt. He got out and with a startling new authority in his voice told me to stay exactly where I was. Not that I needed telling.

  I craned forward, stunned; my neck hurt from where the seatbelt had caught me. In the high beam I saw a motionless body on the limestone shoulder of the road. My father strode over and knelt beside the rider. His shadow was enormous; the he
adlights gave every movement and colour a nightmarish cast. The old man got up again. He dragged the motorbike off the road. When I wound down the window, I could smell petrol and all the salty, minty scents of the coastal scrub. A moment later the old man got back in and buckled his seatbelt. I was rattled by what I’d seen and disturbed by how businesslike Dad was. He was calm and unhurried; this drama did not seem to impress him. He sighed and started the car. He said we had to find a phone and call an ambulance. To my horror we drove away and left the rider out there at the roadside. There was a bus terminal not far up ahead, a lonely floodlit yard full of hulking green vehicles, and a sleepy security guard let Dad use the phone.

  When we returned to the crash site the injured rider began to stir. I didn’t know it then but he was convulsing. It was as if he were being shot through with electricity. As Dad climbed out of the car, he said he had an important job for me. I was to stamp on the brake pedal over and over again without stopping so the ambulance crew could see our red lights from a distance. The idea made practical sense, but I’m sure it was mostly a means of keeping me occupied and out of harm’s way. Many years later, by another roadside, I employed a similar tactic to keep my own kids from seeing something worse. As a nine-year-old it was good to be commissioned, to feel useful for a short while, and as I clung to the steering wheel and jabbed at the brake pedal, which I could barely reach, my father crouched out there in the lights, talking to the fallen rider who kept fluttering in and out of consciousness, trying to get up on his twitching, mutinous legs. Every time the man turned his head I saw that his face was raw meat. Some of it hung off in strips, like paperbark. It was red, white and yellow. His leather jacket was glossy with blood. He tried to haul himself up on his elbows. Then he was screaming.

  After a long time a siren sounded in the distance, the distinctive two notes of an ambulance, and the noise seemed to inflame the fallen rider whose yelling and swearing and struggling grew more violent. He needed to go, he kept bawling. Where was his bike? When Dad suggested he stay put for his own benefit, the bloke wanted to fight. Dad held him down by the arms.

  I thought once the ambulance arrived everything would be fine, but when it finally pulled up the whole scene intensified, as though some fresh madness had arrived with it. There were suddenly more bodies, more voices, more flashing lights and lurid shadows. And at some point a different man – an even louder bloke – appeared, announcing himself as the victim’s father. I don’t know how he got there or how he’d been informed but I could see he was staggering drunk, and I felt myself come to a new level of alertness. There was something vicious and unpredictable about him. His eyes were wild. He had the look of a mistreated dog. As he stumbled toward his son, who’d been lifted onto a gurney, he was weeping and blubbering. Then he went crazy. It looked as if he were trying to throttle his son, and when my father and the ambos hauled him off he wheeled, snarling, and began to swing at them.

  Though I felt a treacherous panic rising in my chest, I didn’t stop pumping the brake; I’d been drafted and I took it seriously. But it was as if I’d woken in a cinema during the final reel of a horror movie. Everything was way over my head. And the mayhem wouldn’t stop. I’d never witnessed anything like this before – all the blood, the flashing teeth and fists, the screamed obscenities. I’d been shielded from drunks. I had no experience of violence, domestic or otherwise. I’d certainly never seen a grown man act this way. I couldn’t believe he might want to hurt his injured son like that. And I was deeply disturbed by the prospect of him hurting my father. I was outraged as well as terrified, and it felt like I’d been booted with an electric charge myself. A wild man was attacking my dad. He was lurching and lunging at the ambos, too, but they were uniformed strangers, and to me they were just shadows dancing; I barely took them in, I only had eyes for the old man. It didn’t matter that he was fending off every blow with an ease bordering on contempt. What I saw was my father under siege. And I couldn’t help him. I stayed where I was, lashed to the wheel, in a state I had no language for.

  Eventually the police came. The scene quickly resolved itself. Dad dusted himself off and came clapping back to the car in his thongs, chuckling at something the coppers had said. We were late for tea now and he was eager to be on his way. I could still hardly speak. At home Dad did what he could to minimize this lurid little interlude. His account of it to Mum was cursory. But the experience stayed with me. There was something dangerous and outsized about the emotions it had stirred up and the sensation was like being caught in a rip: no purchase, no control.

  That scene has puzzled me all my life – haunted me, in a way. It was decades before I understood why I’d been so afraid. Of course it’s distressing for any child to see a parent under threat, but what was happening for me that night was a little more complicated. I was being cast back into an older fear, and an accident three years earlier. My father had been taken away from me once before.

  By the time I was nine there were things about him I’d gotten used to. The scar on his neck was silvery by then and when he came out of the shower the divots in his hip weren’t so livid. The ever-present tubes of Dencorub and the smell of it on his body were just part of him now, as was the roll of Quick-Eze forever sliding across the dashboard. I was so accustomed to all this I’d forgotten what the heat rub was for. Dencorub was the only relief he had for the chronic pain once the quack took him off the anti-inflammatory drugs, and those wretched pills had left him with stomach ulcers, which was why he chewed antacids as if they were lollies. Now I went fishing every chance I could. To be close to him, as if unconsciously I feared he’d be taken away a second time. Clinging to the steering wheel of his car that night, half out of my mind, it was as if someone had kicked the chocks out from under me. The sight of my father under threat again was almost too much to bear. We’d been delivered three years ago, Mum and my siblings and I, and for a long time I’d felt safe. Now, quite suddenly, I wasn’t safe at all.

  In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these. Because the abrupt and the headlong are old familiars. For all the comforts and privileges that have come my way over the years, my life feels like a topography of accidents. Sometimes, for better or worse, they are the landmarks by which I take my bearings. I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education. They’re havoc’s vanguard. They fascinate me. I respect them. But I dread them too.

  II

  I grew up in safety. In our home in the Perth suburb of Karrinyup there was nothing to fear and no one to second-guess. My mother did everything in her power to give my siblings and me a life free of the disorder she’d known as a child and the violence she’d endured as a young woman. She was determined to provide an environment that was predictable and nurturing. Our father was of like mind. He was a gentle man and he was careful to shield us from the things he saw as a cop. Nevertheless we lived in the shadow of havoc. There might not have been trouble at home, but trouble was the family business, and ours was a house of accidents.

  Dad was literally in Accidents. He was a motorcycle cop working in the Accident Branch of the Traffic Office. At the end of a shift he rode his black BSA down the drive, gave the throttle a final blat and then propped it on its stand in the carport. When he climbed off the bike in his gauntlets and gaiters and leathers he gave a distinctive creak. His own father, who’d also been a policeman, made the same leathery groan as he climbed down off the horse at day’s end. To me, that saddle-creak was precious; it was the sound of safe return.

  Around the house Dad was pretty oblique about work. All the same I absorbed plenty of lore and perhaps too much information. As a small boy I knew the lingo. If he was late home it was because he’d had to go to a prang. And of course he didn’t just go – he attended. I knew, too, about the various species of prang. The worst of all were the fatals. I knew when he’d been at a fatal because when he came in his mood was strangely subdued. Then the talk between the adults was hushed and the smells
were different. Dad’s tunic would stink of Dettol and petrol. Sometimes there was no chat at all, just a hug that went on too long. On rare occasions there was muffled weeping behind closed doors.

  Any kid with a shift-working parent learns to creep, to be mindful. For a copper’s family there are extra weights to bear, unspoken things you experience vicariously. Like the constant physical weariness, and the moral fatigue that accumulates over time, because cops are never fresh and after a while they can’t disguise their endless disappointment in people. They become guarded, sceptical. They’re always keeping an eye out for trouble. They expect it, anticipate it. And as a kid you sense this. As if by osmosis you learn what humans do at their lowest moments, at their most idiotic or vile, and you register the outcomes, which are invariably awful. Humans, you come to understand, are frail creatures. Yet in a second, from thin air, they can manufacture chaos and carnage. And it was this mortal ruin the old man sought to keep at bay.