Adam swivelled gently and began an inventory. His pulse seemed normal enough, but his throat ached. There was sweat in the armpits of his shirt from the subway, a sting in his eyes from the air. It was only half past eight, could be an hour until Manu came in, plenty of time. He could finish the media release for the design festival, then see. He reached for his laptop but did not open it, just let his hand rest against its warmth. He put down his phone and let his other hand fall against his leg. He closed his eyes.
Perhaps a minute passed in which he did not think at all.
When he opened his eyes, he felt slightly better. The office was purposeful. Time was flatter here than it was at home, it could be rolled out and sliced. Anyway he wasn’t sick, he was just tired, or fighting something off. One of those waves of vagueness, the strange corporeal exhaustion that sometimes overtook him. Manu might send him home, he thought, but even so it was better to be seen trying first.
He stood at his desk, shrugged off the jacket, opened his laptop, waited as it woke. He cleared his throat and heard the sound repeating in the ceiling. The open space had strange acoustics; everything reverberated. He glanced around the room, feeling watched, then foolish. He folded the jacket over the back of his chair and sat again, keeping his back straight. If he sat there for long enough he would focus, he would get something done. After a minute, the screen saver began its abstract dance. He hadn’t bothered to change it from the default.
He watched the colours shift for a while, then found the jacket irritated. He got up, bundled it onto the chair, and went to the kitchen. Adam opened the small glass-fronted fridge and extracted a bottle of iced tea, lemon flavour. He drank the sweet cool liquid, let the sensation clear his thoughts. He felt the drink fall coldly against the inside of his rib cage, the sweat respond in the soft place inside his upper arm. The ducts thrummed overhead. He wondered now if he had turned on the air conditioning or if it had been running when he got here. He couldn’t remember. The fridge beeped impatiently at him, so he pushed its door shut with one knee. He would finish the draft and send it through to the venue, take some initiative. He was sure he had its name card in his desk drawer.
He paused at the entrance to Manu’s office, looked through the glass that protected him. There were no photos on the desk. The only personal trinket was a black plastic figurine he recognised as Miyazaki, though he could not place the film. A tiny red light indicated a machine on standby. Manu’s leather chair, like a raised baseball glove, waited for the shape of his body. It was worn at the arm where he had touched it.
He had a feeling that he could not quite name. A sense he had forgotten something, left a transaction incomplete. He looked at the drink in his hand, the bottle empty. The only thing waiting was the text on his laptop. No-one else was in the room with him, no-one watching. He leaned one temple against the glass, and closed his eyes.
BLOOD
They slip into warm places. Pulled by the heat. Are moved into lungs, into fluids. Pieces, particles, slow to disperse. Fingers, wrists, a sensory universe. A drift of dust. They settle, or are floated, into the spine. Along the nerves. They form order from details, take shape at scale. Nutrients in a root system, or poison. They enter the blood.
Little continuities begin to gather.
In the skull, at the back of the skull. Here, where the burst burst forth, where something struck them. Not this body. Home. Violence continuous. Memory ghosts. A body hurts.
They shudder loose. The eyes blink, sweat on the lids. A gloved hand wipes at them, inhales chemicals, detergents and surfactants, which gather to make headache. They are in the air and the head and the ache. A foreign body. In the fluid in this eye, they see what it sees: the slab, the hand that holds the cloth that cleans the clean steel. The empty steel. The body has left no mark on the surface. All the fluids drained away. This living hand wipes at nothing.
Home, the cold earth, gone.
They grieve, but without their body to grieve with, it is a frail feeling. Strange, bereft fluttering threads through this hairy wrist and upwards to the arm, the heart, the skull. He might feel something, an itch, because he puts one warm hand against his chilled brow and probes beneath the paper hat’s elastic. They want to be that itch, to move that hand. It doesn’t move for them. But they can feel the rubber texture at his fingers, the cold sweat that rises, wanting to be pain. The blood in his head throbs hard and dark. He thumbs his temples, shuts his eyes. In his skull, an ache like mourning.
Not mourning, not really. A frail feeling running through a body. Why mourn that corpse? It was just a phase. No going back. They are still here, or something of them. Untethered. Unseen.
Transforming.
BEIJING
‘Hey, man! Why are you standing in the dark?’
Adam lifted his head at the voice. His skin detached from a surface. Warm glass. The lights flickered and in the sudden brightness he saw Manu at the entrance. Adam smiled, stepped towards the desk where he should have been sitting. The shearling jacket lay crumpled on the chair, an ugly thing. Manu’s gaze seemed vaguely troubled. Adam moved to meet him, putting the jacket and chair behind him. Was that sadness or concern or something worse in his expression? The trimmed eyebrows moved, and Adam’s stomach tightened.
‘Just got here,’ he said, much too slowly.
Manu’s face was kind as always. Adam followed him to the kitchen, watched him switch on the coffee machine, pour in the beans. When the coffee was set up, he turned, leaned a hip against the bench and grinned deliberately. ‘You look a bit grey, man. Big night last night?’
Adam shook his head, put a hand on the counter to steady himself. There was no trouble; he had imagined it. ‘I think I might be coming down with something,’ he said, and his skin flushed in response. His hand still clutched an empty plastic bottle.
‘It’s a sticky time of year,’ Manu said, eyes roving his face without judgement. He reached across the counter, his forearm almost brushing Adam’s hip. Manu picked up the remote for the air conditioning, pressed a switch. A tiny bip sounded somewhere, but nothing changed.
His lovely face had returned to its ordered geometry. Sticky was a word Adam would have used for summer, not this shortened autumn, but he saw now that it was perfect; the smog had left a grainy film on his skin, the air adhered to him.
Manu was frowning up at the vents. ‘We’re meant to be getting it serviced today, if they show up. Better leave it off for now. The filters are probably full of junk.’ With that, the air went quiet. Adam hadn’t realised it was so loud.
Junk, also, a perfectly evocative word. Tiny whitegoods and long-dead, microscopic Ikea fold-out sofas clinging among the grey fluff that jammed their supply. He tossed the bottle into the bin, a minor success that went uncelebrated. Manu was busy in the ritual of the machine. He raised a questioning cup to Adam, who grimaced, shook his head.
‘Something you ate?’ Manu said, retreating almost undetectably along the bench. Actually, it was hard to be sure which of them was moving; Adam thought that he might be leaning back. He straightened.
‘I’ve just about finished that design-fest copy,’ he said. ‘I was about to email it through to them. Unless you want to see it first?’ The rattle of the grinder overwhelmed him. He’d heard an irritating whine in his voice and resolved to control it. In truth he wasn’t as certain of his work now as he had been moments ago. He was ill, he thought, his eyes smarting, his own voice strange in his mouth. A relief, to name this vagueness. Was Manu speaking? He could not hear him over the coffee machine.
When the grinder stopped, Manu made a noncommittal sound. His dark eyes were soft with concern. ‘Just leave it for now,’ he said. ‘It’s not that urgent.’ He twisted the handle into place, pressed the button. They both watched coffee appear. Its aroma was overwhelming. Adam had an urge to lie down, but the floor was too far away.
A tingling rushed through his limbs and settl
ed in his left hand. He looked at the hand, which appeared unchanged, and wondered if he was going to collapse. He had never fainted in his life. He remembered the dizzy spell on the train, the pulse of darkness that passed through him.
‘I think I picked something up on the subway,’ he said. Manu was nodding. He would have to get home again, go back down. Or take a taxi, a taxi would be better. Stay above ground. He tried to remember what the traffic had been like that morning, but couldn’t picture it. Only the train’s long interior unfurling into the distance. The city was still there, he could hear it now, car horns and truck engines and what might be music, a bird, or a tool xylophoning at a wall. These sounds had been there all along, below the air.
‘Yeah. Stuff going around.’ Manu held the coffee to his lip, inhaled, then lowered it without drinking. ‘Take off home, man. Get some sleep. We’ll manage without you.’
There was something he wasn’t saying. The eyes were evasive. Adam noticed tiny crow’s feet decorating their corners. Premature, perhaps, but they suited him. The princely face deserved experience.
‘Thanks.’ Adam took his bag when Manu held it out. He hadn’t seen him retrieve it from the desk. It felt light in his hands, but when he checked his laptop was inside, its tiny light still beating. His phone was nestled into the pocket beside it. He smiled again and began to make his way across to the elevator, conscious of his body wading through the air. Of Manu watching. Under his eyes the atmosphere thickened.
‘Adam!’ Manu’s voice called after him. And he turned, expecting something terrible, something he had done or failed to do that could not be forgiven. But his boss, his friend, was only standing at his workstation, holding up the jacket. He had left it on the chair.
‘Are you sure you’re okay to get home, man? You can take my driver,’ he said, walking to meet him.
Adam shook his head and tugged the jacket to him. His arms fought the work. Manu let go, then wiped his hand against a trouser leg.
‘How’s it going with Natasha? I’ve been meaning to ask . . .’ He hesitated, his voice soft. ‘I heard you guys had a fight?’
‘What? No. She went to see her family.’
He looked down at Adam and, after a moment’s examination, sighed gently.
‘Fluids,’ he said, and pointed a finger, then let the hand fall.
‘Huh?’ The room, the space, was tilting gently. Its corners smoothed away.
‘Drink plenty of fluids,’ Manu said. His voice sad, as if he had lost something dear to him.
Adam nodded. An ache was forming in his skull. With an effort, he turned towards the exit.
HEAT
From her eyes they watch for pollen bursts, for the light in smoke rising. But they only see bodies, empty bodies and these living ones that tend them. This one, strong slender arms, warm with the work, carries them from place to place with patience. She speaks to the living and the dead. She speaks, and they feel the soft words vibrate in her mouth. A comfort song for others, or for herself? They hear the sound but can’t make sense of it.
She lifts a hand. The hand grips frizz and forces it into elastic, then dabs at the sweat on her lip. Refrigeration tickles it. They are in the fingers, in the lip, in the itch at the neck where a curl bursts free. The hand moves to tuck the curl, and they want to be there, in the decisions of fingers. They feel the body’s work, and wonder at it.
Wonder, too, at this persistence. Are they, after all, material? Microbes, maybe, or bacteria. Tiny beings in the gut, the skin, the warm crevices of the body. Guests, tourists, passing through without acknowledgement, never noticed unless they cause trouble. She breathes through her mask, breathes deeply. It’s a theory. There’s enough left of them to have a theory. Well, microbes might have minds of their own, observant, emergent intellects.
She reaches out to turn a tap, push back at a dispenser. Water and soap (the sharp medicated smell, the chill gel on the skin) are as obedient as hand, wrist, finger. When she starts to wash the hands they panic. Frantic not to gurgle into water. But they’re not on the surface, and are not dislodged.
Interesting.
A lung, inflamed and phlegmy, coughs in spasms over paperwork. They disperse through it and into muscle. Breath sterilised, then rich. He rises, pushes doors, paces corridors. A sudden brightness, and the damp eucalyptus air.
Clear heat against the skin invokes an urgent desire. He unbuttons his shirt and lets its light climb in at the neck. They feel it touch him. When he coughs again, they stick in his throat, crackling between breaths. He lights a cigarette. A terrible and lovely heat. The moist air is cut with smoke and other poisons. He darkens, glares at a figure across the road, a half-familiar ghost.
Do they recognise him, the young man in the check shirt who turns away? His presence disturbs them. The man doesn’t glare for long enough to find out. Sight scalded by the bright day, he closes his eyes, flushes with the pleasure of smoke, and the image fades on his eyelids. When he opens them again, the man – if he was ever there – has gone.
They can see, at least, from other eyes. And now they have come outside. The open air risks possibilities, evaporations.
He extinguishes the cigarette, and coughs. Briefly airborne, soon forgotten.
A thigh presses the polyester fur of a seat, between the skirt’s taut edges, in the sweat between limbs where it slips. Here, in hot hands burdened with each other, the lumps of fingers strained. They hold on, are in with, and it swims up: a longing like homesickness. Exiled from the specifics of their own body, travelling away from its last known address. It’s lost now, that sensory extravagance, a once-glimpsed universe, infinitely complex, lost. They weren’t ready to go. They didn’t want to leave it, but leave they did, in a burst.
They miss it, even knowing it’s gone cold.
This is a body, though. For now, she carries them. They can’t be just residual. They think of parasites, of paratenic hosts. Maybe she’s only a form of transportation, a way on to the next stage. Something vehicular in which they move as passenger. To what end? Further dispersal? Another form? They can cohere enough to speculate, but they still can’t make themselves out. Seeming to be both nowhere and inside, immaterial and enclosed by flesh. They are airs, currents, frequencies. Location services. She stands and they slip through her, sink down inside these limbs. It’s a warm body, and it’s here. And maybe it’s more than that. A carriage, a casing, a chrysalis. A seed.
The warm is nice, anyway. Even if they don’t belong to blood and muscle, they feel it. They float through her sensations, so near to what they have lost. And then the heart won’t shove the blood, the blood won’t bring them. The world is lurching. They are gone.
Daylight, and moving faster. The muscles resist, rebalance the tilt. Another passenger. The bodies jostle. Outside this skin there’s a crowd. And steel and linoleum and carpet, and outside the carpet, frame; outside the frame, a road. Traffic. A crowded bus hurtling down a road too fast to make out anything it’s passing.
But it all feels familiar. Like they know where they are.
Or maybe the body knows. They notice where its knowing’s felt. Heat, sensations, the way the muscles hold steady in anticipation of corners, brakes. The base satisfactions of predictability. They are almost awake now. The tongue worries at a patch of caramel behind a tooth. There are all these signals floating inside and around them. The body tells so little of what it knows. A memory of a road just off this one, streetlights extinguished. A white moment. A blur of fury, just out of reach.
To be dispersed like this. It isn’t nothing. This body with its hot aches, tight places, its zinging limbs. It isn’t theirs, but it isn’t nothing.
As if a light has been left on for them, a door propped open. What if any body is the body now. What if this
He sniffs, and tastes something familiar. The old diesel smell of Parramatta Road mixed up in his mouth. The man outside the morg
ue, who had been watching them. What did he want with them? On the back of the tongue, the bitter feeling, vigilant. Almost a memory. Something unfinished. He swallows, and it dissolves.
SYDNEY
When he came down to the kitchen two of his housemates were already there, perched on stools at the small bar in their tracksuit pants and t-shirts. Not Yun, who would still be asleep, who loved to sleep and was impossible to wake. Adam swallowed his discomfort without letting it take shape as thought. Slowly, he became aware of the quiet. Marita had been telling Kate a story, but had fallen silent as he entered.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ he said. He dug around in the drying rack for a favoured bowl, poured cereal, milk.
They leaned their heads nearer like horses. Still nobody spoke. He opened the cutlery drawer to rummage and they both looked up, just briefly, assessing him.
‘When was this?’ Kate asked, turning back to face Marita. He had passed the test, or failed it. He thumbed the hem of his t-shirt and cleaned the spoon with it.
‘My first year out of home,’ Marita said. ‘In the granny flat behind my sister’s place.’
‘It’s so fucked up,’ said Kate. ‘I mean, who does that?’
They sat back on their stools. The conversation was not taking resuscitation well. Adam began to press the cornflakes with the back of his spoon. He liked to soak them for a minute so they softened, but without turning to mush.
‘Does what,’ he said finally. Marita turned to him.
The Airways Page 4