This was, he said, to him, now standing at the dirty window and looking out at the unpruned rose bushes, self-evident. As it should be. But, he continued, maybe it was precisely this seeming self-evidence that allowed us to be governed by what he liked to call The Great Delusion. Calling something white, he said, when it is quite clearly black or day when it is obviously night, trusting outward appearances and believing what you’re told. Look at you, he said, turning to me: a nationalistic victory spun from abject defeat. There is always a certain amount of self-deceit necessary for the healthy maintenance of a society hell-bent on proving the sun shines out of its arse.
But, he continued, getting back into bed and pulling a blanket up to his chin, this growing awareness of The Great Delusion and the way it controls our lives was still a barely detectable light from a distant star when the newly married young man from the city settled down with his wife in their cottage in town. Then one day he took a letter from the box: they were closing down the school and terminating his position. The soon-to-be-ex-schoolteacher protested to the department and pleaded on behalf of his pupils, who would now have to travel half a day every day to get an education. Surely it was a bureaucratic error? He rallied the kids and their parents, raided the art-materials cupboard to make colourful placards and spent as many school hours as was practicable setting up photo opportunities for the local press and anyone else with a camera, including on one memorable occasion a photographer from a major metropolitan daily. After a week or so of this, some of the parents made arrangements for car-sharing to and from the larger school in the faraway town, some opted to school their children at home, the rest for anything other than a continued association with the former teacher who in their admittedly non-professional opinion was beginning to lose his marbles.
The ex-teacher kept vigil outside the school for months: a sign was hung along the fence, there was a fold-up table with a petition on it, a fire to keep him warm. The occasional passing tourist slowed down to look but, for the townspeople, the whole thing had become a huge embarrassment. He next tried a fundraising walk, had a slogan printed on a coloured singlet, put flyers in shop windows and harangued passers-by: fifty cents a kilometre, with all money raised going to a fund to reopen the school and ensure tenure of a qualified teacher. He became a familiar sight on the back roads of the region in his singlet, shorts and running shoes, walking all day and each night sleeping in a swag by the side of the road. His pace never slackened, slow and steady, nor his demeanour: his chest puffed out, his head held high, his forearms working like pistons. He lasted a couple of weeks; he had made almost nothing. He returned home in a dreadful state to his cottage and his wife but she didn’t want to be his wife anymore. She stood in the doorway and wouldn’t let him in. Further inside stood her father who the forlorn-looking amateur athlete now realised was behind her in a graver sense too. As a local MP his father-in-law could ill afford to have a lunatic son-in-law prone to public displays of his affliction, particularly if he was to advance his parliamentary prospects, as he wished to do. The ex-teacher’s weeks out on the road had given the father the opportunity to speak to his daughter and help her see that her husband was a city boy who did not understand country ways. The daughter didn’t need much convincing. By the time her soon-to-be-ex-husband returned she had already packed his suitcase—the suitcase he had brought all his hopes from the city in—and handed it to him around the flywire door.
The ex-teacher and now ex-husband maintained his vigil outside the school every day after that, including weekends. The grounds had become overgrown with weeds and vandals (his ex-students) had smashed all the windows and burned down the outside toilets. Then the weather turned. He shivered in front of a smoky fire and slept in the shelter of the portico wrapped in a blanket. He came down with a fever but would still not let go. What was he holding on to?
The father-in-law came around to present the divorce papers and the ex-teacher took them numbly from him. The father-in-law suggested he go back to the city, reestablish old contacts—but the ex-teacher wasn’t listening. He began to really lose his mind, if he had not already lost it. With a belt he tied to his head a pillow that a kindly townsperson had given him, and at regular intervals banged it against a nearby lamppost, an act he insisted was symbolic but which was lost on a town unused to calling a spade anything but a spade. One night while he slept a group of ex-students—among them a kid called Rowan, whom the ex-teacher had worked hard on and held such high hopes for—dowsed him in petrol and set him alight. They let him writhe and roll before the leader unzipped his fly and pissed long enough to put him out.
He was taken to the hospital in a critical condition and, once out of danger, transferred from the intensive-care unit to a four-bed ward in the south-west wing. There was only one other patient there, an elderly man who spent most of the time sleeping. The nurses were certainly kinder than anyone else had been over the previous months and it would be no exaggeration to say that in their care in this quiet room of the hospital, with only a sleeping geriatric to unsettle his privacy, the ex-teacher found some personal happiness. No-one came to visit him: he didn’t expect them to. This gave him a great sense of freedom in relation to his recent past; he may be a madman, he said, but at least he was a madman with a room, a bed and a retinue of helpers. In short, he felt well—but this did not prepare him for the shock of them telling him he was. Well enough, they said, to be discharged and to return once a week as an outpatient only. He followed the nurse down the corridor to the outside world but only a short way down the road he took out the secreted bottle of cleaning fluid, unscrewed the cap and drank.
He went straight back into intensive care, and then back to the south-west ward (his elderly room-mate hadn’t noticed his absence). When he was discharged the next time he used a glass shard to slash his wrists, the next to drink the cleaning fluid that had served him so well the first. Now, when he was better in body, they concluded that he was not well in mind and put him in the new psychiatric ward (like the other wards but with a lockable door), which the patient was bold enough to assume had been built especially for him.
If he was happy in the other ward he was very happy here. He had his own television, his own around-the-clock nurse, and was allowed, accompanied by her, to take relaxing walks in the grounds. There was something very comforting knowing that people who thought you were crazy could treat you as such in an institution purpose-built for it. A whole section of a ward in a relatively small country hospital had been set aside to keep the ex-teacher off the street, a gesture he acknowledged with a good deal of humility. He gave the nurses no trouble, did as he was told and lived quietly within the routine they had laid out for him. It struck him that for all his previous bitterness towards the evils of free-market economics, government indifference and a perennially languid electorate, here was an instance of compassion at work. It might even have cured him, had the news not then filtered through the locked door of the psychiatric ward that permanent closure of the hospital was imminent. Apparently not so many people were getting sick and those who were might be better cared for in a large hospital a half-day’s drive away.
The district hospital would be demolished and a new service station and roadhouse built in its place. No-one mentioned the well-regarded rumours that the ex-teacher’s ex-father-in-law was the man behind this scheme. Files were packed, inventories made, patients forewarned. Some were transferred, while those unlikely to die in the immediate future were sent home to be cared for by family and once a week by a visiting nurse. As for the single patient luxuriating in the psychiatric ward, a quick appraisal by a consultant psychiatrist appointed by the hospital’s advisory board deemed it in his best interests to return to society and be allowed to make an active contribution to it. An outpatient counselling service would be provided (weekly visits to the home of a local woman who had completed a social-work course by correspondence), to be supplemented by the bag full of pills and repeat prescriptions they gave him on dis
charge. The hospital was locked and barred, a wire-mesh fence was put up around it and guard dogs hired to roam the corridors at night.
When the first lot of dogs died no-one seemed particularly concerned, except the owner of the security firm who provided them. Perhaps they’d simply eaten something they shouldn’t? But when their replacements fell over frothing too, people suspected foul play. The security firm pushed for compensation and, when it was not forthcoming, tried to pursue the still-mysterious owners of the hospital site through the courts. A new security firm was hired, a new set of dogs fell over dead, and when their replacements met the same fate a new court battle ensued. It was becoming clear that the decision to close the hospital and sell the land to a consortium, which may or may not be traced back to the ex-teacher’s ex-father-in-law, had left a paper trail so labyrinthine that no small-security-firm lawyer, let alone the great Theseus, could find a way through it.
This time the dogs were not replaced, the perimeter fence was packed away and the building left to languish. Vandals (the ex-teacher’s ex-students, again) had some fun for a while but it wasn’t long before they outgrew their delinquency and left town for the big city lights. The ex-teacher came in out of the cold and returned to the room which held so many happy memories for him: the flowering gum outside the window, the way the sunlight fell across his bed in the morning, the way the twilight coloured the walls. He liked the sounds: the currawongs in the trees, the distant noise of cars and trucks gearing down through town. The rooms and corridors were now his own, as were the grounds where he could wander for hours. He stored up packaged food from his brief trips to town and what he didn’t need he went without.
The room had darkened; already it was late afternoon. Listening to the man’s story it did strike me for a moment that someone who could so eloquently describe the reasons for his derangement might not be so deranged after all. But one glance gave the lie to that. He’d been talking too fast, in a kind of jabber, and had spat all over his beard which was now wet from the lower lip to below the chin. His eyes were white opals, glaring out from under a furrowed brow. His face was red, almost purple.
So, what now? I asked. I’ll need to go to the cupboard, he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. But surely you can’t stay here forever? I said. He assured me that, while forever was a long time, he would certainly be staying indefinitely. It was now common knowledge that his ex-father-in-law, the MP, had lobbied for closure of the school and the hospital and bought both properties via a network of offshore shelf companies and that until the courts untangled this deceitful web and the ongoing parliamentary inquiry was completed the building was the ex-teacher’s to roam in as he wished.
He threw the blankets back and got out of bed. Aside from a thick hooded jacket all he had on were unsightly yellow walking shorts and a dirty pair of socks. So you see how my story fits, he said, into the story of The Great Delusion? Of how someone who believed in Universal Ideals was left standing in The Slough of Despond? I am the sickness and you are the cure, he said. I nodded. So, said the strange and hirsute gentleman: what cure will you use?
Now I saw where the conversation had been heading and where by the long road it had taken us. I explained how I had left Fowlers’ stable twenty-six days ago, had been waylaid by a number of complicated healings since and was now being waylaid again; that my powers had been fading fast these past few years and that unless I found the water and filled the vial (I took it out of my shirt to show him) it would be all over with this myth, and so far as I could tell there was no other worthy waiting in the wings; that I feared the public trust in me was waning; that my donkey, faithful companion of this life and the previous, had become pneumonic and would be lucky to last another month, and that given the public’s long-standing faith in us as a double act I could hardly go on without him; that I already had a patient in the other wing who was, so to speak, ahead of him in the queue and who, besides, had barely responded to my ministrations so far. In short, I said, to the ex-teacher standing by the bed with an air of knowing superiority, I am not the intercessor I once was. The ex-teacher smiled a madman’s smile: Well then, he said, come with me.
He led me to a wing I’d not yet explored, down a short corridor to a door at the end. He opened it, reached around inside and took out a candle which he lit with a match from a box in his jacket pocket. By the light of this candle we entered what had once been a storeroom; there were rows of grey metal shelves along the wall, all empty, some open cupboards, and here and there piles of flattened cardboard boxes on the floor. The ex-teacher led me further inside, to a cupboard at the far end. It had a warning sign on it. The ex-teacher yanked open its doors. This is the ward I used to be in, he said, and this is the cupboard they forgot to empty. Anamorph, Aropax, Biodone, Capadex, Largactil, Lithicarb, Luvox, Melleril, Paxil, Prozac, Serenace, Seroquel, Zoloft, Zydol. While he recited this fourteen-footed pharmaceutical litany, with his free hand he selected several packets and gave them to me. This is what we use now, he said.
I walked back down the corridor towards the sunny wing, the pills rattling in my pockets like matches in the hands of a pyromaniac. Laura was awake, sitting up on her makeshift bed staring at the wall; Murphy was standing asleep by the window in a posture of complete resignation. He had soiled the floor beneath him and the air was thick with the smell. I don’t think Laura had even noticed me gone. Listen, I said, it’s true: I am a quack. Whatever powers I once had have faded, I can do nothing for you; I have failed you, we have failed you; soon we make our last push inland to execute more majorum our ridiculous yet heroic death, and this we must do alone. I cannot take you with me. Here. I sorted through the pills, gave her some of the green and white ones and some water to wash them down. For myself I took a handful of every colour, so as to leave no stone unturned.
I sat cross-legged in the corner watching the light in the windows change. The room darkened, or the universe lightened, one can never be sure. Murphy became a shadow of himself or he the simulacrum of his shadow. It went on like this well into the evening. I felt a great burden fall from me. I began to rock like a baby and there was the sound of sloshing water in my head. At some point, on a line that I clearly saw extended into eternity, my eyes closed and behind them my indivisible mind drifted in a sea of black.
7
THE DESERT AND THE END
I was unhinged for a week and suffered the most bewildering hallucinations. I was Asclepius, then Hippocrates; a witch doctor, then a voodoo priest; my healer’s staff became a jester’s bauble in the court of an ailing king. Not since I first smoked opium in Egypt have I experienced such intoxication. At one point I was overcome by a bright cyan light. Through this light and out the other side I found myself on the steps of a temple riding a donkey that was not Murphy but at the same time somehow was, while at the top of these steps a priest in robes of green and gold beckoned me forward. I dismounted the animal, mounted the steps and followed this priest through the corridors and rooms until we reached an inner chamber where the walls were hung with tapestries of gold, studded with emerald and jade. On a throne at the far end of this room sat the High Priest, a green cape on his shoulders and a gold crown on his head. He reminded me of a cricketer I had once seen. Where are you going? he asked. To the future, I said. How long have you been travelling? Nearly a hundred years, I said. A piss in a bucket, said the High Priest. He summoned my guide forward and handed him a scroll, and the guide handed it to me. A map to the future, said the High Priest. He dismissed me and I followed the other priest back to my donkey, which had transformed into a lamb. I could not ride it, it was too small and weak, but this ewe-lamb then revealed itself to be possessed of human speech and willing to carry me. Jump on, it said. With the High Priest’s map for guidance the lamb and I set off, but a hot wind blew and picked me up and raced me back across the desert and dumped me in the hospital room where I found myself sitting cross-legged in the corner again.
The sun sliced its way down the wa
ll each day, crossed the floor and slid away into night. I didn’t move, nor did Laura or Murphy, a mountain of manure beneath him. I worked my way alphabetically through the pills then, delirious and barely able to walk, went back to see my supplier for more. But my supplier was gone. I went to the cupboard in the storeroom but aside from a packet of Panadol and a couple of ampoules of morphine he had taken the lot. I drank a little morphine and let it take hold. I got Laura up and helped her wash. We’re off, I said, as if it were a Boxing Day down the beach. I whistled Murphy up and an eyeball moved: through his mottled coat you could see the rib cage, there were tracks of dried snot from his nostrils, blowflies had made camp in the hive of his rear. When he finally found me within the range of his vision and got his rheumy eyes to focus it was a forlorn and defeated look he gave. But what could I do? He is my beast of burden, that is his purpose on this earth. I held a bent ear straight and whispered in it: We have not finished our business, mule, until the holy water is in the stoup.
I lifted Laura onto his back (his knees shivered), drank some brandy for strength, said goodbye to our hospital home and this time set off in an arc north-east. We went to the soldier on the plinth at Watchem, to the gates at Curyo, to the memorial in the main street of Rainbow: nothing, nothing, nothing. We turned south, closing a circle that had taken weeks to describe and which now brought us almost back where we started. We shuffled our way down the Avenue of Honour into Jeparit to try the Lone Pine there. But as soon as I started digging I knew it had been dug. I drank the last ampoule of morphine. Have I done all I can? Did I leave some small thread hanging? What will be the final account?
Simpson Returns Page 8