by Rodney Hall
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Dr Samuel Johnson, 1775. How did he dare?—whoever this Johnson fellow was. What about service? Service when your orders are clear? Cautious progress on foot. Moving into action. When the skills kick in. Watch out! On patrol, gatecrashing a mosque. The airy blue ceiling speaks of tranquillity, so the boys lower their weapons and talk in whispers. The mystery of shaped space. Rooms are imprinted since infancy, we do not have to think—we know what internal proportions are. A door being a door. And a roof a roof. Whipcrack and lullaby. The dome is absolute.
Centred on Iraq as his point of departure Adam delves into Wikipedia. He discovers Abraham was born there. Also Noah. He’s amused by the thought that some state spook, right now checking out these internet searches of his, might flag Abraham for further investigation. He knows about the hunter and hunted. It stimulates him.
What’s new is that neither time nor distance is an obstacle in the virgin realm of ideas. The abstract and the substantial, being freely interchangeable to the lens of the inner eye, the sky by day and by night wheels toward some apparently inevitable collision. Tides turn. Fascinating endangered species avenge themselves on humankind. A new apartment block springs up unnoticed. Guilty secrets swarm beneath the chainmail certainty of rivers. Priceless shrines are smashed in the name of high-mindedness. Each its own history. Plump soft dirigibles (now it seems to be a 1917 movie) drop bombs on London, propellers stirring the pea-souper as they loom in sight and the torn edges of earthbound cloud disclose the pinnacles of Westminster. War in the air began as a fantasy. What it became we know all too well: the sound barrier cracking the sky open for jet fighters to streak low above bare sandy hills and hidden gulches, where tanks rise up shedding cascades of dust, and bombs and shells explode in a synchronized attack.
With high clear mind Adam consults a schedule of reports. He examines unauthorized photographs and watches YouTube clips . . . amongst other things US Major Doug Rokke’s report on 3,000 tonnes of depleted uranium dust released into the atmosphere by the armour-piercing missiles used against Saddam’s tanks (the missile that hit Adam’s own vehicle no doubt made its small contribution), dust with a toxic life that defies the bounds of the imaginable future. Did the strategists know about this and ignore it? Yes, according to Major Rokke, they did. We did.
How to get your head around a number like 7,000 years. Then there’s at least another 14,000 years of half-life.
Defiantly intent on locating himself at the centre of a web of surveillance, he can actually feel the expanding power of his conscience like a new bud on the brain. The most essential questions remain unanswered. People are fobbed off by their governments. Witness Donald Rumsfeld, no less: ‘As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ No shit?
Adam laughs a few painful chunks of scorn.
Well, his own best example of the unknown unknown is the lover Bridget confessed to having slept with . . . because she stopped short of including a name in her email. Though she can scarcely be accused of cheating—he had already left her by then. He begins to see his behaviour as others must have seen it. The more he thinks about Bridget (and he thinks of her all the time) the more he falls in love with her.
When next he glances up, the naked shoulder of day blocks the window. He conducts himself to the open door and looks out. Yao has long gone. Nowhere to be seen. Formwork having been stacked ready for removal, the finished ramp is swept clean. Everything in order and empty.
The afternoon has fully escaped by the time she comes home.
Has something gone wrong between us, my darling, beyond the obvious? I worry because I should be the one to set you free. And I will . . . even if it means sticking myself in a hospice for incurables. So be it, I’ll survive. Anyhow it might be fun to organize an open rebellion of inmates. Because if they throw me out I can escape by swallowing a month’s supply of meds. You know what? The longer I hang in here the more respect I feel for those suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots who choose their death.
He sleeps as a shadow and wakes as a spook.
The television offers its continuum of unwanted news. Refugees from civil war. Victims of exploitation. Glimpses into the lives of the vast spectrum of people forced to live in misery. And already some sort of disaster-hungry eye progresses along a road with wide sandy shoulders where little heaps of junk and truck tyres smoulder. Guys of the usual kind come stamping their boots and banging dust from fatigues. Armoured vehicles swoop over a ridge to crash through the village. Women clutch at the flying ends of headscarfs to cover their mouths while the mud-built hovel behind them is atomized to a puff of dust. The death squad has been sent to flush Saddam out of his bolthole. Silent leaping figures, armed and coordinated, successfully bludgeon the dictator, who is only human after all. Adam can hardly breathe. The squalor of that murder sets a fast spool spinning in his head. Power to the powerless. And if Saddam was a monster—he was their monster. What did he ever do to us? The unwanted baggage of memory calls to mind little Ratso, too, and Ratso’s miserable death. Because, come to think of it, at some stage Ratso had the guts to take the plunge and join up. Maybe driven by the desperate hope of finding the man in himself. Poor bastard. That must have taken some doing. Well, being one among the sacrificed is no news to Adam, though he’s only beginning to get an inkling of how this might be exploited to unsettle the KFC-munching, VB-swilling public with its collective finger on the remote.
Now what surprises him is a flood of grief for the full life he’d always taken so lightly, sometimes in a borrowed ute, easy behind the wheel—dangling his arm out of the open window—poking along a bush track leading nowhere in particular, then rock climbing, his strong fingers seeking cracks in the granite and afterwards—at the top—the shared joy of being up there, limitless air filling his lungs, master of a landscape laid bare all the way to South Australia, his blood a hymn of achievement, just in time to watch the marvel of two eagles—claws locked in combat—tumbling out of the sky, like himself when he fell in love without knowing what it was, bursting so full of it he had to run the whole way home, jumping and crowing and punching the air, and boiling with his secret all through an interminable dinner during which he could not tell anyone.
But of course, he stands corrected, suicide bombers value death above life.
Out in the dark night Bridget gropes for the forbidden latch. Cold and damp to the touch. Easing the neighbour’s gate open—to enter her own fairytale—she trespasses on prohibited ground. Grass gives underfoot, heavy, wet and fragrant. Squelch. Trees murmurously drip reminders of recent rain. In through the wire archway, long since overgrown by wistaria, she tramples among flowerbeds—not caring if a trail of crushed weeds may constitute evidence by the light of day—to reach the place where she stood once before with such success. Baptised by flowering pittosporums her guilty skin senses his touch. The masculine dark.
The silent house, lightless and blank, gives nothing away. Faced with failure, she listens to stealthy insects among unfurling leaves. The mulch creeps with life. She breathes floral invitations. Her heels sink. She has taken the risk and drawn a blank. The possibility that she might be irrelevant to Yao’s happiness sends a shaft of alarm flickering like lightning through her nerves from fingertips to toes.
The jutting polyhedron of his roof blocks out a rift of stars.
She accuses him, this enigmatic neighbour, of setting himself too much apart. Why can’t he have regular habits like anybody else? He ought to practise tai chi every night or not at all. Without his body there to watch she loses purpose. She is little better than a stalker. Even so, she cannot bring herself to leave. Failure allows her to extract some mitigation of her crime. At least, this time, she cannot steal his privacy. Less honourably she
imagines him practising the same routines in the dark. Why in the dark? Obviously because he suspects her of watching. The blank window becomes a shield of suggestive opaqueness.
What’s more she senses Adam, too, sending his suspicions to seek her out. Ghosting after her to sniff at her heels. She dreads the power and possibility of telepathy. And right now, no doubt, she is broadcasting her guilt. She knows in her bones how justified his accusations are. Who can blame him, condemned as he is to his eternal Contraption, checking the hallway for evidence, snapping switches on, quite willing to blind himself with light rather than remain marooned in doubt?
So she thinks of him: Adam. And oddly, as wreckage, he interests her more and more.
The least expected thing shocks her back to the present. Her treacherous mobile rings—lifeline to the world—funky aggressive ringtone making matters worse. Why hadn’t she thought to switch it to silent? Her hand closes on the offender and slips it out of her pocket. Fighting for breath she taps the screen alive. Dazzled by brightness. Fingers desperate. Technology puts her through the processes of selection and confirmation. Heart leaping hurdles, she watches for the symbol of the cancelled loudspeaker. Relief. But too late, surely? Did anyone in Yao’s house hear? There is no way of knowing. She shuts her eyes, the vivid imprint still there, a rectangle fading against her lids. She wants to run, but dares not move. The body readapts to the dark with agonizing slowness. Houses on all sides cohere as tyrant silhouettes, witnesses for the prosecution, cabinets of accusation, torture chambers of the everyday, blacker on blackness, a block of four (hers among them) higher than the others and ready to swing open on damning evidence. Bridget admits blame for the blunder. Lurking as . . . a sneak . . . a thief.
Something begins to crawl up her leg. Afraid of spiders, she brushes it off violently.
She understands risk because she needs it. Risk is the thing most often missing from her life, the ungoverned impulse to break boundaries, to intrude, overpower and corrupt . . . vital, destructive, sharp, exciting. She is afraid of living humbly. Maybe this was why—when they carried Adam from the plane and steered him her way on that stretcher—she’d stepped up with only a flicker of hesitation the moment she set eyes on him. Sobbing, she’d brought her face close enough to his to feel the anxiety he gave off. Her fear of the mutilated strangeness of his constructed cheeks, faultlines showing through the bristles, she now explains as doubt. Was it really him, that human wreck? At the time she’d said, ‘Oh, look at you. Your poor face, sweetheart.’ So the tears began. Publicly Bridget wept and privately Bridget wept. She wept with pity but also with shame. And so she weeps still.
The tentacles of night tighten. Yao’s house gives nothing away. Insects creep among furled leaves. Her heels sink. Failure gags her. She has drawn a blank.
My bones ache so bad they warp worse than split wood. Like my flesh is someone else’s, a kind of envelope that I’m in, all rotten and rosy and softer than soft. But it makes no difference in the end. Not to the hopelessness. When I say you should take a lover (provided you tell me) please believe I mean it. Jealousy, at least, is not neutral. Nor neutered. Being jealous proves I can.
He watches her bring his supper tray. With no idea where she has been, nor even how long she was away, he looks up from his research. Her eyes, as they meet his, are large and full of tenderness. For the sake of simplicity he speaks first.
‘Crap as I feel. Bridge. I. Promise this’ll get. Better.’
The steady lamps glow. The world outside balances on a cusp as she herself turns, offering only the back of her head. Now she walks across to the window.
‘Why not. Look for some guy. One. Ar. Not shot up. In a senseless. War.’
‘You can say that.’
The full moon, symbol of solitude, stands on its lone path thrown across the dull mirroring bitumen—her possible escape route.
‘Because I. Mean it.’
‘And for you?’
‘My life’s an. Epic cock-up.’ On impulse he offers her her justification by coming clean. ‘Truth is that. When I left you. My plan was . . .’ At last he can confess. ‘My plan was. Never to come home. Lousy. Ar. Animal that I am.’ His misery is complete. ‘I went absent. To stay.’
Bridget wakes in the early hours. For whatever reason she begins unpacking her bags.
The irreversible surprise of a new day. The unfolding. He feels things improve. As he ghosts around the sunbright room (and he might as well be dragging his flesh-packed carcase across a thousand splinters) insistent optimism prevails. Yesterday it seemed all too possible that his father’s bloodline faced extinction—guttering, gasping, twisted and feeble—ready at any moment to collapse unnoticed . . . gone in the twinkling of an eye, at the last whatever. Big deal. But now with the return of life, who knows, the Griffithses may not die out altogether. Sap still green in one branch of the family tree at least. It strikes him as funny.
Someone has been here and tidied up: evidence that time still ticks over.
His desperately irritated skin swarms with invisible ants. Help. But the only relief on offer is a shower. He can at least try to do this by himself. Useful as a test, besides. No need to call Bridget to come down. It will do him good to be independent. Lofty in the Contraption he lurches from desk to bathroom. He grasps the rail and negotiates propping himself on the non-slip mat. From here his weight can be cantilevered in position and deposited—a test of willpower—on the specially designed shelf. Next he extracts his arms from the stale gown. One task at a time. Patience a virtue. Ready at last, naked and safely seated, he negotiates the tap levers. Water, blessed water, describes the comic grotesque he has become, streaming over the lumps and overhangs of his swollen body. Even seated he has difficulty balancing. The tricky soap escapes to skid across the tiles. He leaves it there. He couldn’t pick it up if he tried. That will be a job for Bridget with her supple swoop and helpfulness.
Faintly heard through the hiss of water, a voice drifts indoors from the street. Unmistakeable. Zac: here again and on his way up. Not one to forgo any attention due to him, a visit is unavoidable. At any moment he’ll barge right in. Adam listens as Bridget supplies a short answer from the window above. Meanwhile he contrives to rebalance, while turning his back, and urgently swathes as much as possible of his botched body in a bath towel.
‘Help!’ he says but there’s no strength in his voice. He begins to tackle the task of fitting the Contraption round him so he can raise his elbow to flip the shower off, though he has not yet had enough.
Zac doesn’t bother knocking.
‘There you are,’ he observes, coming straight to the point. ‘Can I come in?’
Adam remains calm. Stranded in the puddled shower recess, towel around him, sad wet ankles revealed and one bent wet arm raised, his half-turned back displaying the partly dismembered eagle tattoo.
‘No.’
‘Always the joker.’
‘Maybe he’s serious this time,’ Bridget chaffs him, stepping down barefoot while twisting her long hair into a knot. She reaches for a second bath towel from the shelf and shakes the folds loose before deftly slipping it between the ribs of the Contraption and Adam’s chest.
‘Well, mate, you seem to be making progress.’
‘Progress. Ar. Doesn’t mean. A thing in. My situation.’ The bracketed exo-skeleton clicks and takes his weight. ‘A pain in the. Arse is never. Going to be less. Ar. Than a pain. In the arse.’
Zac knows his duty and the pressure of his importance is too much to allow time for small talk.
‘I watched you on television.’
‘And?’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing, mate. The War on Terror’s no great mystery: the twin towers, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and now this new ISIS mob threatening America. Why ask? Everybody knows.’
‘You believe that. Crap! Why not ask about. American oil interests? Or the
Russian pipeline. Being built right now through. Iran?’
‘Say what you like, if we didn’t stop them over there we’d be dealing with them here. There’s Mr Howard to thank for this,’ Zac explains irritably because the conversation is already out of hand. He braces himself. ‘Anyway I don’t have time to argue. I came over to drop off a basket of fruit. My secretary’s idea—now I have a secretary. Here you are.’
And there it is, the basket, piled with glossy oranges, a yellow yellow pawpaw, poison-green grapes, a stiff hand of bananas and two bulbous custard apples already bursting their knobbly skin.
‘Give me a. Break,’ Adam barks. ‘Terror is nothing more. Than a state of mind. A scam. Effective because there’s. No fixed enemy. I’ve been thinking a lot. About terror.’
‘Do you hear that, Bridget!’
‘I certainly do.’
Adam gestures toward the gift fruit and succeeds in detaching a grape. Next thing it explodes in his mouth.
‘We should have. Known we were in. Deep shit.’ The voice grows stronger. ‘When you and. Your kind. Ar. Began talking about. Bombing raids as. Affordable Precision. And you do.’
Zac boggles. Oh! who can be bothered arguing with an invalid too helpless to wash himself without flooding half the house! Nevertheless he owes it to his new celebrity to try. ‘No doubt, while we’re at it, we should welcome the Muslims and an end to Christianity.’
‘Help me out of. Here, love,’ Adam pleads, his feet squelching in their brackets. ‘Give us space, mate. I’m a machine that. Needs to keep moving. Or bits. Fall off.’
Despite his best intentions, Zac’s heart is seized by pity and revulsion. He stands aside to make room. ‘It’s me that’s looking out for your interests,’ he whines. ‘The government isn’t too happy with you. Seeing they supplied this expensive kit and all. Best to back off. Politics is politics and they’ve got a lot at stake. Keep out of their hair.’