by Krissy Kneen
‘Jack?’
And even her voice sounded breathless, as if she were moving up towards an altitude where the atmosphere was thinning.
She heard a shushing sound.
‘Stay sleeping, darling,’ and she let herself relax into her father’s arms as he carried her up the stairs.
Two things. Firstly there was a smell to him when he kissed her, picked up the sheet and settled it up under her chin, a riot of perfumes, sharp, cheap, sweet, the kind of perfume her mother would never wear. And below that, a deeper note, the smell of moss and freshly turned earth and dampness, a smell of caves and oceans and weed tossed up on the shore. When he moved away from her she reached out to clutch his lapel. The thick fabric of his suit jacket felt reassuring beneath her fingertips. He stepped away and the jacket slipped out of her grasp.
She heard the door shut behind him and she opened her eyes finally. There was something fine between her fingertips, a thread. She peered at it in the thin light from the moon. A hair, a long pale hair. Blonde. Her mother was dark. She measured the length of this hair between her hands. Long. It would stretch down past a woman’s shoulders, down even to her buttocks. A breeze from the open window plucked the hair out of her hand and hid it among the blankets, a badly kept secret. She searched but couldn’t find it again. Holly glanced towards the clock on the bedside table. 3:05.
It wasn’t Valentine’s Day anymore.
1991: A Book of Dreams
The orgone is strong tonight. It feels to Nick as if he has lowered himself into a jar of honey. His movements become slower, languid, the air is thick to the point where breathing is like swallowing.
Downstairs, down through the living room with its vast wooden cabinets to the basement. He is not allowed to go into this secret place, but the door was left so tantalisingly open. Walls thick as secrets, carpet spilled on the ground to soak up any fear. Even though he knows everyone is out, Nick looks around before he opens the heavy door to the dark wooden box.
The Accumulator. The good rays come in, purified through the thick coffin-shaped wood casing and the layers of fibreglass and steel wool. There is a jar of mung bean sprouts on the seat, an experiment. Nick is not a scientist yet, although one day he might become one. The mung beans are an experiment, behaving as you would expect, shooting up enthusiastically from the damp layer of cotton wool: supercharged by orgone. He can feel the orgone energy envelop him as he climbs up onto the hard seat of the Accumulator. There is a pillow and he pushes it behind his back and nestles, pulling the jar of sprouts into the cradle of his arms.
‘Safest place in the world,’ he whispers across the neck of the jar.
He breathes the orgone in through his mouth and releases it out of his nostrils, a circular breathing, a healing loop. He can feel the energy coursing through his body, purifying his blood before it settles in his lap, a solid throb of orgone. He is suddenly aware of the way his thighs are clamped together and when he looks down, setting the jar of sprouts aside for the moment, a pale blue glow is highlighting the little tent in his shorts. He closes his eyes and concentrates. Breath in, breath out.
There is a smell like smoke. Nick’s eyes are suddenly wide; he flinches and touches the sides of the accumulator. Something is on fire. Perhaps the EAs have landed and they are torching the place with their ray guns and he will burn to death…
But no, there is nothing but the comfort of darkness and the slight blue glow floating around his hips. He waves his hand through the glow but it doesn’t respond to the movements as smoke would. He tries to catch some in the palm of his hand but it is like trying to capture a spirit.
It is the orgone. Nick is sure that is what he is seeing here, the pure blue glow of the orgone energy that has been attracted by the accumulator and captured. Pure healing energy, and it is this same energy that is causing his penis to rise now.
He breathes in through his mouth, out through his nose. All he can do is sit and enjoy the tingling sensation. If only he had superpowers. He could catch the orgone and channel it like in the comic books. He could mould the orgone into a ball and hurl it at the enemies of pleasure. If Nick had superpowers he would gather the blue glow and make it sharp and pointed like a spear. He’d throw it straight at the EAs just like Dr Reich and his grandpopa used to do with their cloudbuster. His hands would be smoking and glowing blue like lightning. Nick presses his hands down into his lap where the blue glow is filling him with a nice tingling feeling, making his penis fierce and hard.
He presses his hands against his penis to hold onto the pleasure just a little longer. Somewhere, he is pretty sure, there is a superhero powered by orgone energy. His dad has told him it is possible and although he is not allowed to have faith without science he secretly, faithfully holds out hope.
Nick closes his eyes, presses his penis, concentrates. ‘I believe in you forever, Orgone Man,’ he whispers. ‘I promise I believe.’
Vox
by NICHOLSON BAKER
Holly was seriously overdressed for ENGL1500: Contemporary Literature. Her regular law subjects had not prepared her for this change of aesthetic and she was suddenly conscious of her flimsy summer dress. Her face felt masked by the makeup she was wearing; her lemon yellow heels were stared at by girls in Doc Martens and ugly black flats.
Holly had been hiding books all her life. It wasn’t as if they were banned; no one had explicitly told her not to read. But she knew that bookish girls were different somehow: not to be trusted. Their skin dry and crisp like paper spilling from the press, their eyes squinting behind the thick glass of their spectacles. And they didn’t waste time on grooming, electing presumably to finish a chapter when they might have been getting their eyeliner just right. Magazines were more useful to her group of friends. Magazines kept you in touch with fashion, taught you how to apply rouge or how to avoid cellulite.
Holly nonetheless liked books. Sometimes she hid one behind the pages of the latest Vogue or Marie Claire. She left the television on in her room, relying on the characters and plot of her current paperback to drown out the incessant noise, the relentless colour and movement on the screen. Reading was Holly’s secret guilty pleasure.
The course title had leaped out at her from the list of unit choices. A class devoted to her secret passion. Her friends wouldn’t get it at all. She wouldn’t be mocked, exactly, or ostracised; but there would be raised eyebrows. There would be gossip behind her back. What had possessed her to tick that box?
There was only one free seat left and she moved quickly towards it. The boy beside her shifted a little to make room. He stared at Holly, pushing his wire-framed glasses further up his nose. It wasn’t a menacing stare but there was no warmth in it either. The glasses were held together by gaffer tape, the black edge stuck against the side of the lens. Holly thought that the impediment to his vision would bother him but he seemed not to notice. His hoodie was loose but too short, the sleeves riding up to expose lightly furred wrists. His eyebrows met in the middle and she felt an urge to take her tweezers to them. She stared back; there was nothing else to do. He smiled as if an unblinking stare in this world was equivalent to a friendly wave.
She had seen bookish types at high school—they sat in the front row in class and gathered under the jacaranda at lunchtime—but she h
ad never really interacted with any of them. She had certainly never sat among them, the only girl of her own tribe thrust into the habitat of these furiously intelligent, belligerently unstylish aliens.
Holly smoothed out the reading list on her desk and comforted herself with the words there. McEwan, Coetzee, Adamson. She had read some of the set texts already, secretly, under the cover of MTV. They felt a little like friends she would soon be revisiting.
She put an asterisk next to the Adamson, which she didn’t know. She would have to track it down. The boy with the monobrow watched as she did it, staring intently at her pen as if she were writing the original commandments. He watched her underline the title. He shuffled awkwardly through the books and papers heaped in an untidy mess on the desk in front of him, and pulled a book from the pile. The Clean Dark by Robert Adamson.
‘You can have it,’ he whispered.
‘I can’t take your copy.’
‘It’s OK. I’ve got the e-book on my iPad.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
He must have seen the disappointment on her face when she opened it to find it filled with neat stanzas. He shrugged. ‘Poetry is good for you. It teaches you about language.’
‘OK,’ she said, slipping the book into her bag.
‘I understand,’ he said, reaching across to pat the cover of Atonement as if it were her hand. ‘I was disappointed too when I saw there was no Patrick White on the list.’
Holly nodded as if she was equally disappointed, and they settled back to listen to their lecturer, a thin pale man with the same thick-rimmed glasses that half the group were wearing. The uniform seemed to be ill-fitting hoodie and skinny jeans, and not just for the boys either.
When she’d signed up for the course, Holly thought she might struggle with the content but it seemed simple enough. He read a passage from the book and they discussed it. When the hour was over he made them write some page numbers in a book. Holly gathered her papers.
‘I’m Rodney,’ the boy with the wild eyebrows said. His hand was damp and it trembled slightly.
‘Holly.’
‘A bunch of us are meeting this afternoon to discuss the Stella Prize. You want to join us?’
Holly glanced nervously around the room. One girl had her hair so short she had assumed from behind it was a boy, another wore hers in tight plaits that pulled her scalp. Holly thought they must have hurt just a little.
‘I have to catch up with my boyfriend this afternoon.’
‘Oh,’ he said and she was flattered by the disappointment in his voice.
‘But if you guys are doing anything another time it might be fun to tag along.’
He was zipping up his backpack and he paused as if unsure about the contents. He stared intently into the dark interior, scanning the huge pile of books inside. So many books. No wonder he was so hunched; she worried briefly about the curvature of his spine. He straightened, and zipped the bag up decisively.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Actually you could come to our book club.’
‘Like for the reading list?’
‘No. Not at all. Nothing to do with uni. This is a special book club, a secret book club, and you can come, but only because I said you could.’
He was beaming as if he had just handed her a pile of jewels.
‘I’ve never been in a book club,’ she told him. There was something adventurous about the idea of a group of people meeting to discuss a book. It was something she could never expect her own friends to participate in. She smiled, shyly. ‘Are you sure it would be OK for me to join? I mean if it’s so secret…’
‘That’s OK. I asked you to come so they’ll let you.’
‘They?’
‘Mandy, mainly, but the rest of them too.’ He opened the bag again and pulled out his own copy of Atonement. She noticed the pages with their turned-down edges and, when he opened it, some words scribbled in a margin. Rodney ripped the title page. Holly held out her hand to stop him but it was too late. She heard the blunt tear of the paper, saw the damage there. He wrote on the page and handed it to her. An address. Not far from her house, in fact.
‘Is this someone’s place?’
‘It’s the bookshop.’
‘I’ve never seen a bookshop anywhere near there.’
He grinned. ‘You probably need to go there this week to get the reading done. Book club is next Wednesday. First Wednesday of every month.’ He took back the title page and wrote Rodney Timms on it and handed it back to her. ‘You’ll need to say my name to get in, or I’ll come with you if you like? Now, maybe? Or tomorrow?’
‘No, it’s OK. I can go by there on the way home.’
He grinned even wider. She hadn’t thought it was possible for him to stretch his lips out any further but somehow he managed it. It seemed he was made of smile. ‘Book club is going to blow your mind.’
Nadja
by ANDRÉ BRETON
She passed the place twice before realising her mistake. She was expecting a shop like the one at the university or the other, grander bookshops in town. Something with a big shop window, maybe two. Books laid out on small tables at the front of the store, posters for one blockbuster or another artfully arranged above a stack of the blockbuster itself. At the very least she had expected a house, something with walls and a roof and perhaps a garden.
This block was vacant, or it seemed so at first.
She checked the paper: Atonement Ian McEwan and then, below, the address. She looked to one side of the block and then the other. She glanced across the street to the building opposite, a warehouse, its windows shuttered. It seemed abandoned or perhaps temporarily closed. There were signs for Salmon beside the locked door and a security company warning fixed to the gate. This property is protected; 196…so 197 would be here across the road, right where she was standing next to the telephone box.
She heard the clap of a door opening and closing again, the scuffling sound of a slight struggle. A coat caught in the closing of the telephone-booth door. Holly turned and stared. A tall man was stepping out of the booth. There was a book-shaped paper packet in his hand and she watched as he lifted his coat onto his shoulders and slipped the parcel into the pocket at his hip. The door to the booth closed completely behind him and he walked away.
Holly stared at the telephone booth. When had she last seen one of them? It was lit from within and around it the daylight was bleeding out. The darker the sky became, the starker the booth seemed. It was a warm evening and Holly thought about the man with the coat who had disappeared around a corner. She felt uncomfortably hot.
The vacant lot was filled with weeds, or at least that was what she thought at first glance. She stepped closer to the spill of foliage and realised she was looking at wild lavender, rosemary in flower, the sudden shoots of rocket gone to seed, waving tendrils of petals that looked as if pale moths had lighted on them. She recognised sorrel and dill.
The block of land was a herb garden, but not one that had been tended. It was as if someone had gathered open seed packets and dumped all the contents without any care. The leaves competed for space, flowers spilled across each other. When a gentle bre
eze passed over, the place smelled vaguely like a delicatessen.
Holly walked towards the telephone booth and pressed her hand to the glass. She could see her reflection in the door and for a moment she thought she was looking at herself having already stepped inside. There was an old black bakelite phone there, but you would not be able to use it. There was nowhere to stand. The floor of the phone both dropped away into a plummet of wooden steps. She pulled the door open, noting its rusty complaint, and stepped onto the first stair.
She thought of Alice in Wonderland. When she was a child she’d wanted to be Alice, a pretty girl who seemed to tumble—literally—into adventures without ruffling her bow. Holly, still in her short summer dress, felt the hem catch an updraft and smoothed it down. The yellow high-heeled sandals clacked loudly on the wooden stairs.
The stairs fell at an alarmingly steep angle and Holly clutched the copper banister as tightly as she could. Then she was in a narrow corridor with a dark green door. She pushed her dress straight against her legs and stepped up to the door. The handle was cold to the touch and when she opened it there was a cough of Antarctic air. She felt her arms prickle with goosebumps.
The silence of the room underscored the tutting of the second hand on a clock suspended above the counter. Books lined every wall, carpeted the floor, piled to the ceiling. The thick spines seemed to eat up the sound of her footsteps. Holly looked down to see a slightly stained, thick red carpet at her feet. Everything about this place was blanketed, even the counter was shrouded in a drape of felt. She walked towards the counter—not felt, but a thick cotton sheet with the image of a woman on it. Holly looked closer. The woman was reclining on the fabric, her breasts exposed, her naked legs parted. Her body was a silhouette marked up in chalk but she could see a needle pricking one nipple like a piercing, the embroidery thread still trailing behind it, looping to underline the swell of a breast.