He followed the path they had cleared for him.
LIGHT
Hot blood, running down stairs, nimble sneakers. Sunlight squint, out of the flats and into the street. Several breaths. Clear, fresh air, keep moving. There’s a van, the grip of the handle.
He slides into the passenger side, inhaling greedily. Paper shoved into the gap between dash and windscreen. ‘All good?’ asks the man beside him and they grin. He grins. ‘Two more before knock-off,’ he goes on and ‘You’re quick at this. In and out.’ They feel the pride rise up in him. They rise, joyful, alongside it.
Courier van, co-worker warmth, a laugh.
Did they do this? Go out and in? Did they just move?
A distant siren. A near miss. She’s not their problem now. She’s on her own. Survive, or don’t survive. It’s her life.
Clear the airways.
‘In and out,’ the youth mouths, voice rasped to nothing with nerves or hormones or whatever rasps. Itching for cigarettes, they recognise this now, even look forward to the rush – a treat, if they stay. They never used to smoke, but now they would enjoy it, if he does. Hum through a luxury of this body’s wants. Glory in the pleasure of turning to pick at something caught in the nose, at the resistance of the nostril hair, a tiny triumph, finally flicking it from the window. At the hot skim of fingernail on thumb. At the air coming in all cool around him as the van moves out. Then the driver hits the radio and – yes! – the body moves to a song. Fingers involuntary dancers against the cloth of
Life oh life ohohoh life
They understand the song. The words. They caught her cry of ‘Wait, I’m coming.’ And these two men, speaking together like it’s nothing. Language! The body thrills with a whole sudden layer of comprehension, a new signalling skin. He reaches for the volume, turns up the song. They were cut off before, illiterate, lost. Now they are born. He sings along, laughing.
Static, advertising, the feet stop beating. Parking, belt off, out again, he slides the satisfying door, lifts a box, flexes into it. Oh, muscle, wonderful. Glimpse of parcels arranged with their destinations. Addressed, assigned, clearly legible. They are strong. Determined. Enjoy the eagerness in him as he leaps up the steps and taps the bell with a knuckle. This present tense, it could be enough, legs springing, warm longing, a free safe body, living unhindered. They might never leave him. They will not go into this house. They hold still and focus. Hold this body, yes, mesh with its mess of senses known and unknown. Stay. Nobody answers the door, and they’re as pleased as if they’d managed it themselves. He ticks the slip and leans the parcel by the step, arranged so, the balance pleases him. He slips to the street and is back in his element. Slaps hot metal and slings his bum into the seat, limbs askew, knees spreading. Chill against the exposed crack, lifts his limbs to shift the shirt that’s rucked against the seat. Neck sore where something has damaged him. But so much comfort, energy. They enter the pleasure of feeling his hair shift between the vinyl and the skull. They float from lovely cramp to darling callus, could go on like this forever. Look at these dear brown hands, holding each other in his lap.
The driver slams the brakes, hard. Shoved forward, he braces himself with a wrist.
‘Fuck, man,’ he says. Spit on the beard.
‘Sorry,’ the driver says.
Accidents. Traffic. And now, as his heart rate elevates, they feel its flaw: a weak artery. There’ll be no warning, no slow soak time to flare and muscle out of him. He won’t know what hit him.
There’s always something.
They surprise themselves quiet.
The vehicle lurches on.
They slip out of him, leave him to it. Into the next body on a clumsy breath, and then the next. Hot car after hot car, running along the surface like goosebumps on their air-conditioned skin.
The people in the cars are full of panic, anger, anxieties, and other minor suffering. Impatience and alert limbs, aches worn in between shoulders. Little feelings overblown by stasis. They’re soon distracted by the pleasures. Languid arms leaned into the sun that slants on a window, burns the skin. Tumbling through, they gather fragments. Other lives possibly lived. This is what it would have felt like if they had learned to drive, speak what they think might be Farsi, whistle. Bodies that know what they know without thinking. Ankles that cross in pointed heels, pain with no suffering. The cool air against one exposed shoulder. Warm steam from some underground drain, the smell of rainwater hot against the asphalt. Sex in its echoes, and sex anticipated. Hunger, sugar. Collisions, encounters, remembered touch. Scent of another body on the hands, in the mouth. They want it all.
They remember her fury.
Wanting it is not enough. That struggle in the bath. The woman surfacing. And then they moved. What happened? Her body got out of their way. It understood them.
The feeling wasn’t hers alone. They recognised it; it was with them already, it has travelled with them all along. It was in their body, when they had one. In how they were named and seen, how they were sent and shown and expected to be, how they were watched and followed. How they lived. The violence they anticipated, the violence they remember. In what burst free.
Violence evicted them from their body. And they are not yet free.
They’re in the heel of a hand pressed against the horn of a car now. Traffic; no-one’s moving. Each little stopped capsule shuffles incrementally towards the end. And what for? Why caught in transport, this formless passenger passed from place to place? No choice. Never had it. Taken from them. Oh, they wanted life when they were living. But this is too much, and not enough. It was there in that last moment, in the street that night, four lights, one solitary cicada, the laughter running away into the distance. That was when they needed rage.
How dare they. Take what.
Is that why they are still here? This unspent fury?
But who took it, and where?
A blast of light.
The driver wrenches the wheel. He has drifted off course without thinking, and now he comes awake, flinches straight. ‘Steady on,’ the passenger beside him says, putting a hand to his arm. ‘You right?’
His wrist turns inward. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Don’t know what came over me.’ It’s hairy, the wrist, on the inside, beneath the shirt; they can feel the details prickling. The ink there slows the heartbeat. He shudders, and the voice goes soft. ‘Someone walked over my grave.’
They did that, didn’t they? In and out, and what came over me.
The passenger’s hand moves to hold the driver’s, then lets go. Desire, simplified.
What overcame him.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
The traffic begins to move, the men to relax. The passenger gazes at the driver, and they feel how it stimulates his body to be watched like that from beside, to be watched in trust. When their hands meet again it is to tangle, two-toned and tattooed, over the gearstick. One clicks his throat, one sighs. Both know the aftertaste of pleasure waking, separating, bittersweet.
Here’s fury too.
These bodies still connected to each other, buzzing softly in the aftermath of morning. They use that energy, hot and close. They go where heat has fused them. In the skin, and in the eye’s attention. Without effort, they pass between.
They get it now. How to go on unseen, untethered. A matter not of concentration but of distribution. They disperse into the next body, and the next. They are careful at first. Only those closest.
Then through glass and between traffic and across streets. Through the air. They practise their transitions. From adults to children, closed cars to the open footpath, out from under feet and into the arms of builders whistling, shifting steel mesh over a clay ditch. Spikes in the gaps where the cement will go. They are conducted, so.
He steps off his plank and runs up three steps. He pulls faces at himself in the flimsy mirror, pouting slightly, wat
ching the muscle in his neck flex. Stinks in here. Someone bangs on the door.
‘Mitchell you in there ya fag stop checking yerself out and get these footings poured.’ A cackle, a jeer. His shame flowering beneath his skin even as his shoulders round and freckle from the work. The sheer love in him, rising to take hold of his own orange eyelashes. The habits of beauty. He dabs a bit of dirt on his forehead as he pushes back a curl, gently replaces the beanie, flecked with cement. Plastic mirror warps. A sense of what’s precious nestled in the lips. When he steps out of the demountable they push off from the edge of him, and eddy out.
A young woman crosses the road, picks her way between the fences. Her shoulders sharp, the drab coat wrapped around her, chilled, skinny. Is it spring? The smell of flowers. Bright sunlight works its hands through her hair. One leg’s prosthetic, she hides the favour in the hip. Her body turns there too, away from the builders. She feels their eyes. Little cool fury held like the posture, a delicate arrangement all her own. She loves the glow her sunglasses confer, and the privacy.
Must have been all through their body, too. The love of its protection. Does anyone know what it is to live in their skin? No-one pays enough attention.
She shivers a little, looks at her reflection in a shop window. It’s a funeral director’s; the windows are black. And dark glasses. Safety measures. Eyes powerful, steady. Hard to tell if she likes herself or wants to break free. She hears a man’s laugh across the street, turns and quickens her pace. Makes it harder to keep an even step. They take pleasure in her, in the familiar anxiety, the careful balance, the strength.
It can’t last without some harm coming.
The woman goes into a shop, and they leave her. Slip out with a kid in a school uniform, mouth full of sugar, twisted into them in a known way. Hands fidget. Sweets dissolve. The sensitive age. Delicious.
They decide to be choosy.
The kid adjusts their tracksuit pants, trying to hide. Bruises all down the inside leg. Always filthy. Just a continuity of harm like water, running under the skin. Familiar, and a welcome host. They run themselves through this subcutaneous shame.
The kid sniffs. The eyes watchful, always checking the periphery. It’s this city that does it, a mirage over garbage. Heat and steam and currents soaked into the soft rock, the wash of bodies of water spread beneath. Unstable foundations. Uncertain boundaries. It’s too easy to dissolve, everything soaks through everything else.
What next? They might clear a path. Move with purpose. Go hunting. Track the sources of that shit, man, those laughs, the blow to the skull. If they could find them, they could settle the score. They might remember enough of those voices, their scents, to return their violence to them.
But when they consider the shape of vengeance, they find it ill-formed. It’s not clear, in these other bodies, what justice is or who it should be done to. It’s too late for the body, which is lost to them. They can never have it back; they can never go home again. And since they are here, persisting, they wonder too about what such an answer might mean. Would they take a life to pay for their own? And if they did, would that finish them? If this is the shape of justice, they’d rather survive.
They could find their family, but what for? Family had not been interested in them when they lived. Already haunted by the sense of having replaced some imagined, legitimate child. None of them would recognise this form they now inhabit.
Their mother knew what they were. Knew before they did, that’s why she sent them away. Their grandparents protected them, and left them unprepared. They will have grieved as neatly as they wished to live, relieved now of the element of risk, the threat of disorder. No, the past is no kind of destination. All that belonged to the body has gone. That old ground is burnt, its ashes scattered. There’s no going back. No circle closing.
Now they belong to the air.
And this one kid’s anxiety, which has its charms. And maybe the difficulty is the point. A body in the midst of figuring itself out, that’s a life. Not safe, perhaps, but interesting. Free.
They want the kid to realise this. Hard to say if there’s an effect. If they stand a little taller, fidget a little less. If they make a home in themselves for a moment, or if they look back again to see who’s about to attack. All these beings that lie beneath the surface of the body, weakly defended, waiting for their summer. And all those that do not make it out of the larval earth alive.
They curl into this body that is watched but never seen. They feel its vigilance, tight and familiar. They know who they are looking for. They have known it for some time, at least since they stopped for him. The ocean pounding at the stone to one side as if it would open. The cliff holding back the sky on the other. His gaze caught in the air between them, so close to seeing. To taking them in. They frightened him. He fled before they could make the leap.
They’ll find him again. Next time, they’ll be stronger.
SYDNEY
Adam knew he needed to move out. He knew it before the memorial was announced. Not a vigil this time but a gathering in a nearby park, organised with the consent of the family, who wouldn’t be there, wanted privacy, would make their own arrangements when the body was released. Their body, theirs to grieve neatly.
Yun lay stretched out without an animating breath, their body opened up, examined, pored over. They were under investigation, while whoever had done this to them went on taking oxygen out of the air. Adam was lost. He sat on the bottom step looking down the hall, unable to decide whether to go outside or to go upstairs and sleep, caught in the between-place where they had left him.
The door clicked and he sat up, alert. But it was only Marita. She swept into the house, releasing her curls from the collar of a white shirt, her round brown face much older in its furrowed seriousness. As she approached he saw her future, a lifetime away, a professional harried by two bright children who would want for nothing but from whom she would accept no nonsense.
She froze, a hand to her chest.
‘Adam. I didn’t see you there.’ She looked at him as if he was a houseguest who had overstayed his welcome. He saw that her eyes were red again, and swallowed a redundant apology. Instead he smiled thinly, raised a hand, plodded up the stairs to his room and closed the door. He could not engage with her, with any of it. In this house, he couldn’t think about anything else, he couldn’t sleep. He had to get out of there. He dug in a milk crate, found his sneakers, and left at a run.
He had walked the street in daylight, seeing its harmless features: a pink graffiti tag fading on a sawn-off tree stump, an empty packet of cigarettes decaying in the dirt, the falling leaves that filled the gutters until the storm took them. If their body left a mark it had been cleaned away. Unsure of the precise place, he avoided the footpath on that side and, after that, the whole street.
Now he went the long way around, turned and followed a route that rose against the cutting of Parramatta Road, past the disharmonious mashup of public housing, student dives and renovated terraces. His breath came sharp and short, and he had to slow to a walk before he reached the top of the hill. A stitch was forming under his rib cage. He looked out over the footbridge, gasping in fumes, then followed an angled street downhill at random.
He found it by accident, stopped across from it with a pain in his chest that sang through him with every inhalation. Later it would occur to him that he had been drawn there by his own subconscious, because he must have known it was there, walked past it before, but not really thought about the fact that the dilapidated dark brick building, with its strips of ventilation, its inconspicuous roller door, was the loading dock for the unresolved dead. Now he could hear its refrigerators humming, hear the cicadas in a panic overhead, and smell the thick eucalyptus that concealed them from sight.
He crossed and read the labels on the glass, like doctors’ offices, privacy-opaque. The air conditioners sounded rougher up close, cut with muffled bus
brakes from the road beyond. He had seen the coroner’s court often from that other side and found it miserable: the grimy, brutalist facade, the ominous concrete turret. For the first time he wondered what it was like inside. Cleaner, surely. He lingered until a man stepped out of one of the doors, lit a cigarette, and watched him a little too carefully.
Adam backed away, ashamed, irrationally afraid that he had been recognised. He returned to the house, taking another long way round to avoid the street again. His body fought him, drawing him towards the place. He knew that he would have to move, get away from this house, this blighted neighbourhood, its one eclipsing memory. Desire hadn’t left him; it would give no room to grief. He could not face his housemates, with their who would do this questions, their what kind of a person.
He wasn’t like that. He had nothing to be ashamed of.
Back in his room he rang his mother, listened to her tell him how terrible it was. He waited for her to ask him what she always asked when he was struggling at uni, or out of money.
‘Such a tragedy,’ she said instead. Her tone was bright; he wondered if she might be pleased. She knew exactly what to do with suffering. It was her area of expertise, a craft honed over exiled generations. As he waited for her to ask, he imagined the platter of fragrant rice on the counter waiting, a tray of chicken wings covered in foil, still warm. An untouched and perfectly arranged dish that she would refer to as leftovers. His sister, still living there but only by a thread, would be frowning into her phone at the counter. His hunger for his mother’s food both warmed and shamed him. He hadn’t eaten properly in days.
‘Why don’t you just come home,’ she said at last, and he found he could not answer. It was a safe place. He knew he had to leave their house, but he found himself hesitating. Did he want her to beg him?
The Airways Page 12