by Lech Blaine
The problem with running away all the time was eventually I arrived somewhere. Each day, the bus to uni stopped at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. Once or twice a week, I pressed the red button to visit Tim.
I didn’t realise the hotly contested nature of his convalescence. Last November, doctors had been prepared to write him off, because his bed could be dedicated to someone with better recovery prospects. Tim’s family fought to gain him a place in the rehabilitation unit.
Now he was starting to repay their hope with slow improvements. He still couldn’t walk or talk, but was able to write profane messages on a speech board – such as PUCK YOU, LECH, a reference to Summer Heights High.
This was unfathomable to me: Tim could type my name, but not say it. So many broken dreams were left unspoken. Yet there was no vocabulary to acknowledge what he’d lost without diminishing his continuing existence.
‘Puck you too,’ I replied.
We spent the majority of the visits playing Connect 4. I planned to make the games competitive before letting Tim win, until I realised that I had no say in the matter.
‘I’ll come back soon,’ I promised, but I never came back soon enough to alleviate the guilt that I felt after passing the hospital without pressing the red button.
I began to suffer recurring dreams about Tim. The year before, we had co-captained our house to victory at the swimming carnival, held at an aquatic centre called Milne Bay. Tim was a gifted swimmer. I wasn’t. He secured crucial points in the pool while I led chants in the grandstand. After we raised the trophy, he tackled me, fully clothed, into the deep end. Lungfuls of laughter released a jet stream of bubbles through the chlorine.
In the nightmares, Tim sat beside the outside lane in a wheelchair. He begged me to dump him in the deep end. The grandstand cheered wildly. So I did it. Tim plunged to the bottom of the pool. The crowd went silent. The only person who could save his life was me. But I was paralysed by my survival instincts.
I woke up choking for breath and drenched in sweat, like I’d been bench-pressing the weight of the world with my skull. There was no going back to bed with a dread that heavy, so I scrolled aimlessly through Facebook until daybreak. I carried these dead-weight dreams just beneath my suntanned skin throughout the first, fragile months of my DIY reinvention.
On weekends, I got blackout drunk at parties with outrageous themes. The next day, I spent hours adjusting the contrast of the photos to show myself in the happiest light. I monitored my iPhone for notifications, acutely addicted to the red flares of involuntary approval.
‘Are you feeling alright?’ asked Hannah.
‘Never felt better,’ I said.
The one-year anniversary of the car crash caught me by surprise. I didn’t have 2 May circled in my diary or set as a reminder on my iPhone. It was on the Sunday of that ominous Labour Day long weekend. I knew, dimly, about memorial events planned in Toowoomba. I cited assignment deadlines and unmissable shifts.
On Saturday night, the steep streets were darkened by over-hanging fruit trees. On evenings like this, I bitterly contemplated sleep – not as a genuine prospect, but more like an unfeasible overseas holiday.
The only way to untwist my corkscrew thoughts was to keep accelerating. Alongside the river, I hit a peak in the bend at high speed. Headlights ignited across the unlit bitumen. I didn’t collide with the vehicle opposite, but I couldn’t say with conviction that was a positive thing.
The narrator provided directions to the next address.
AT THE ROUNDABOUT, TAKE THE SECOND EXIT.
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION.
The place had a rendered fence and sensor lights, and an intercom with a little camera. The customer answered the door as if he wasn’t expecting me. Polo shirt and cologne. Fifties by the fistful.
‘Hey, champ,’ he said. ‘Busy night or what?’
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Makes the time go quicker.’
‘That’s the spirit. What’s the damage?’
My dissociation had found a potential benefactor. I recited his order with premeditated glee. He grimaced. ‘I tell ya what, you don’t bloody miss. Do ya?’
I grinned at him. The man gave me two fifties. Then he handed back a twenty from the change. ‘Buy yourself a six-pack.’
‘Thanks, mate,’ I said. ‘Have a good one!’
The hardest part of the shift was finishing. There was nowhere left to go except an empty apartment, because my sister and her boyfriend were back in Toowoomba for the long weekend, along with most of my friends.
Tonight, the eve of the anniversary, Facebook filled with people confessing to deep grief over the loss of Will, Hamish and Henry. Rest in peace, they wrote. I thumbed through the condolences and the cheerful photos of the grievers who posted them. Their secret was the same as mine. A subterranean pain lurked below our curated profiles.
When I ran out of mourners to stalk, I moved on to the mourned. Unlike in a cemetery, I could see the bodies of the dead and spot new pictures they were missing from.
I searched my name on Google and consumed the old newspaper articles, fingering through the outrage and conspiracy theories in the comments. I studied the bloody images unproductively. I pressed my fingers against the pixels and kept scrolling and staring and scrolling.
Will, Hamish and Henry were dead. I felt like a psychopath, ashamed that I could eat breakfast, brush my teeth and smile at strangers on public transport. Meanwhile, my friends were gone, their families broken.
How was I capable of thinking about anything else?
It was 4.00 am. I slid the door open to the balcony. Finance had colonised the skyline. Banks paid vast sums to plaster the city with elegant logos so that we’d dream about their life insurance plans. A survivor was stuck outside of time, always plummeting back towards the lone event that mattered, the only fuck worth giving.
Guilt about happiness. Guilt about sadness. Guilt about feeling guilt. Guilt about not feeling guilt. There was never any happy or unhappy medium. I either felt too messed up or not messed up enough.
The rest of May never happened to me. I was fading away, finally, my brain and body forfeiting to the patient onslaught of trauma. Wide, low tides of irritation. Slow, scathing thoughts.
Staying in bed would betray a troubled state of mind to my sister, so I wasted entire days staging fruitless visits to university. The handsome campus ignited a fretting sense of decay. I did laps of the lake, head brimming with grim spirits, dodging bush turkeys and bin chickens, battered by the soundtrack of birdcalls and iPhone notifications.
I ignored the please explain emails from teachers and flaked on social activities. Classes and parties were light years away from the skin-and-bone debates of my inner monologue. How was I supposed to write 3000-word essays on the theoretical underpinnings of global diplomacy, or go to bars dressed in a toga?
Late afternoons, I caught the bus without pressing the red button. The number of days between my visits to Tim accrued to weeks, before I went the entire month of May without a pit stop at the hospital.
In my dreams, I went to parties with Will, Hamish and Henry, laughing serenely, only to be reminded midway through the apparitions that they were dead. I heaved with gut-wrenching grief, unsure if I was awake or weeping in my sleep, but knowing that the revenants would disappear, and I wouldn’t be going with them.
Waking up, I was crippled by episodes of sleep paralysis that left me mute and rigid. I was suffocated by the most excruciating weight, a swooning sense of ruination. Teeth clenched. Head revving like a V8 engine.
After finally breaking free, I vibrated with the colliding urges of survivor guilt: relieved to be awake, but ashamed – and afraid – to be alive one day longer.
This is how insomnia begins to seem like the lesser of two evils. My sleep disorder became an art form. Three hours had been shaved close to zero. I ignored emails from Kevin Rudd’s office asking about my no-shows, and flunked all of my mid-semester assessments.
It
would’ve only taken a few emails to explain the situation and gain extensions. I never considered my anguish as a condition, or my eroding sanity as something that needed urgent sandbagging. No, I believed that I was the only person who could see the elusive truth behind the glee on social media. We were all sleepwalking towards a steep cliff. I misconstrued the chemical imbalance in my brain as existential X-ray vision, a kind of enlightenment.
Ironically, the only activity that I remained capable of was driving at high speeds delivering pizzas to stockbrokers and doctors. On the road, I reached a state of flow that had been lost from my slow, sad days.
‘You have arrived at the destination,’ said the sat nav.
On my fifth night of no sleep, I rose from bed and packed light for a long drive. It was 3.00 am on Saturday, and Vincent had asked me to give a speech at his eighteenth birthday party that night back in Toowoomba.
The elevator slipped me into the concrete garage. My car exited through the gates. Saint Lucia’s footpaths were unpopulated. Coronation Drive was lifeless. Sporadic taxis delivered partygoers to sleep. Even the most devout drinkers couldn’t outlast me.
On the motorway, I steadied the red needle at 130 kilometres per hour. I slowed for the speed cameras – at the same spot everyone did – before flooring it, targeting adrenaline and receiving the shyest flutter of excitement.
At what velocity does grief disappear? In that haywire frame of mind, there was no difference between now and then, the past and the future, speeding and dreaming. I felt intensely connected to every memory, including ones I hadn’t made yet, the perfect lives of my fantasies and all of the emergency-exit urges.
Evangelical churches spread the Gospel of Jesus to the wicked motorists of the Warrego Highway. Billboards delivered anti-abortion scriptures alongside directions to adult superstores. After religion, the most popular subject was car crashes.
STOP REVIVE SURVIVE
IF YOU DRINK DRIVE, YOU’RE A BLOODY IDIOT
HIGH CRASH ZONE. SLOW DOWN.
EVERY K OVER IS A KILLER
Daylight seeped across the vegetable farms. Kangaroos were silhouetted on road signs. The Great Dividing Range was tapering shades of green and black and grey on the horizon. The peaks looked way too faded, like an oil painting finished in crayon.
The car slid into a tsunami of trees. Mist spread across the windscreen. I snuck into Toowoomba, sharing the road with semitrailers.
I hadn’t been back to Mum’s since moving out. Mazda licked at my feet. The clothesline was bare – my mother didn’t have anyone left to do laundry for. A foster carer without kids was like a pianist with missing fingers.
Still the same early riser, she sat on the patio in a purple night-gown, cigarette burning in the groove of a plastic ashtray. ‘My baby boy!’ she said, eyes lighting up with surprise. She hugged me eagerly and asked questions about my life in Brisbane that I could barely answer, because I had no idea what I’d been doing.
‘I’ve been really busy,’ I said.
‘I know. Of course you have.’
‘What brings you home?’
‘I’ve got an eighteenth tonight. And I’ve missed you.’
Mum laughed. ‘Now I know you’re telling porky pies!’
I didn’t know why I went there instead of somewhere else, except that everywhere else made me uncomfortable. Trauma was a paradoxical combination of homesickness and homelessness.
Mum said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah. I’m just tired from the drive.’
I wasn’t lying this time. I was profoundly exhausted, so drained that I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
Mum led me inside. I couldn’t decipher what she was saying, but it sounded agreeable, so I nodded. I glided to the lounge room, where my mother had spent a thousand nights. She laid a quilt over my shattered body.
I woke up eight hours later. The country-music channel blared from a plastic stereo. I could hear Mum tapping at the keyboard. She tracked the lives of her absent children. In the comment threads of news articles, she argued in favour of legalising gay marriage and eradicating local outbreaks of stray cats.
Mum saw me stirring in the black mirror of the TV. ‘Good afternoon, sleeping beauty,’ she said. ‘Coffee?’
‘Please,’ I said.
‘Are you sure everything is okay?’
‘Yeah. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘No reason.’
Human beings find creative ways not to speak about the pains that plague us. So many skeletons. Where did I start? Our lives as we knew them were over: her marriage, my youth. We hadn’t found convincing enough illusions to replace the old ones, or a vocabulary to convey the loneliness of losing those illusions.
In the late afternoon, before Vincent’s party, I had a shower and shaved the glint of insomnia from my skin. Objectively, I’d never been more physically attractive.
Mum kissed me. ‘I hope you have the best time.’
At Vincent’s mansion, I parked my car between gum trees. Inside was a gathering of the close friends I’d been skilfully avoiding since the start of a nervous breakdown.
‘Surprise!’ I said.
I reciprocated handshakes and hugs. Everyone kept saying my full name: LECH BLAINE. The girls kissed my cheeks with real feeling. The guys cloaked their care with macho jokes.
‘What rock have you been hiding under?’
‘Who is this guy? I don’t recognise him …’
‘When was the last time you had a feed?’
‘It’s from all the rooting he’s been doing.’
I grinned convincingly. When the falsehoods came, I didn’t recognise the confidence in my own voice. ‘I’ve been great! Heaps on my plate. Hitting the books. Hitting the gym.’
I was cursed to spend my life pretending to be okay for an audience whose adoration I found confusing. They loved me unconditionally for the same reason I couldn’t live with myself: I survived. Now I wanted to give back the winning raffle ticket.
The next five hours disappeared. I made a well-received speech before I became too incoherent. Vincent hugged me. ‘Thanks for coming, mate,’ he said. I drank at the same speed as high school, double-pumping beers and dropping Jägerbombs, but I was fifteen kilograms lighter now, a featherweight climbing into the wrong boxing ring.
I entertained the crowd in Frida’s vicinity, taking satisfaction from the glances I attracted. But by the time I was confident enough to approach her, I was so drunk that I could barely string a sentence together.
‘You should slow down,’ she said.
‘Are you playing hard to get?’
‘I’m not a fan of Lech Blaine these days,’ she said, reminding me of Nick’s accusation that I had changed.
Her lips pursed sympathetically. My sense of rejection registered twice: at high speed, and in slow motion.
‘I’ve gotta take a piss,’ I said.
I walked around the side of the house. The music and carefree conversations filtered away. I pickpocketed the car keys from my own pants, outwitting any final moments of self-restraint.
I did a lap of the floodlit flag at Picnic Point and skidded downhill towards the city. Hidden by tinted windows, I emerged onto the main strip. Five sets of traffic lights rose in a narrow triangle. The road twinkled red and green like a Christmas tree.
A drunken mob swamped the pedestrian crossing alongside the Strand Cinema, where I had taken Frida to see Disgrace. I stopped at a pedestrian crossing. Men twitched with testosterone. Women gawked at them, lips round and red like laughing clowns.
I drove over the railway line. Grand Central Shopping Centre rose immense and empty on my left. A big yellow M glowed on my right. I pulled a swift U-turn and bounced over three speedbumps.
‘Welcome to McDonald’s!’
I requested a Double Quarter Pounder, a Big Mac and a Filet-o-Fish with large fries. The teenage employee smiled at me with a transactional happiness. I waited five minutes for him to carry over a full paper bag.
‘Thanks, mate,’ I mumbled. ‘Have a good one.’
I hoped that I’d never quite arrive at my mother’s house, that the journey would become permanent, a bubble I could drive inside forever. I took a detour through the one-way car park of an elite girls’ school, weaving around speedbumps. A glow-in-the-dark sign showed a red cross stencilled over a right turn. Headlights approached on the left. They were far enough away for me to safely complete the illegal manoeuvre.
Sirens exploded in the rear-view mirror. I nearly shat myself. A bad bad bad adrenaline rush. I swerved into the first driveway and yanked the seat adjuster so that my body was flush below the line of the window.
The sirens stopped. My motor kept running. Footsteps thudded on the concrete. A torch beam scanned across my shut eyelids. Knuckles rapped against the glass. I opened my eyes slowly. The shadowy face of a police officer stared through the window, which I wound down.
‘Have you had anything to drink tonight?’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been sleeping.’
‘How long have you been asleep?’
‘All afternoon. Six hours, maybe. I was tired.’
‘I saw you make an illegal turn. Were you asleep then?’
‘That wasn’t me.’
‘I can smell alcohol on your breath.’
‘I had a few before I went to bed.’
A middle-aged woman in a nightgown flew from a nearby front door. ‘I’ve been sleeping,’ I said. ‘Tell him. Tell him!’
The police officer told the frightened woman that everything was under control. He directed me to step from the vehicle, and said it didn’t matter whether I’d been sleeping or not – the keys were in the ignition, so legally speaking I was in control of the vehicle.
I, the drunk insomniac, was outraged. ‘You can’t arrest people for sleeping!’
‘I’m not arresting you. Yet.’
The officer pulled a breathalyser from his belt and unwrapped a mouthpiece from plastic. ‘Keep blowing until I tell you to stop,’ he said.
The machine sucked up my rank breath. One long hum was followed by a beep that sounded unpromising.