After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  We may take a drive up the coast at Anniversary Weekend, and cool our wine in the rock pools of Pukerua Bay, then zoom around the backroads all night with the windows down. We may find ourselves at dawn, watching the tribe of wildcats in their nests of grass above the tip, all sitting still, eyes closed and faces turned to the sun, ignoring us as though we don’t exist; absorbed and self-sufficient. We and the cats are all there to see the men arrived to burn a truckload of last season’s unsold high fashion from the shops in town, colourful, unworn clothes, destroyed so next year’s styles will sell for the right price.

  We may assert ourselves by walking out on a prejudiced lecturer into the six o’clock Thursday night darkness, all stopping at the jutting elbow of the Student Union balcony to argue about what pub to go to. While, down in the city, in the layers of little worlds in high-rise offices, we can see the tired cleaners—women, Polynesian, middle-aged, with their kids doing the cooking at home (if they’re lucky) while they perform the nightly drudgery for white bread and butter, two kilos of mince, cigarettes, and a new pair of sneakers for one of the kids. Drugged by tiredness, pushing their industrial Telluses under the bright, grilling lights. While, over all, the Westpac sign smoulders like Blake’s sick rose.

  We may have sat in front of the TV in our living room at the flat—Sue squatting on the floor pinning a shirt pattern to silky purple cloth, Michael with his fingers linked behind his head, buried in his hair, so it wouldn’t dry flat at the back, Andrea writing out a fair copy of a final essay from its third draft (her favourite course, but she didn’t hand it in, so failed)—all listening to one of President Reagan’s hero speeches. Listening to him lying in a resolute manner, with all the proper pauses between his weighty clauses, about how America is making the world safe (for capitalism, starvation and war)—unable to answer back.

  We may feel dishonoured by the things we have no choice but to tolerate, like the decisions of the world’s owners: faraway, lying, mean, monied, loveless—who can change everything here, in our world, the world outside the television: my hand, the cup in my hand, the taste of the coffee, every object in the room, the grass in the garden, the colour of the clouds—so great is their power. They are the walls of the room, its doors and windows; they are all its mirrors. What we think we are, and think we want, they show to us. We are commodities and consumers; our work in the credit column, our needs in the debit. But it’s their ledger, and all of us are born into perpetual debt. Our lives are postponed, we’re told ‘all in good time’ (whenever good time is). We are to work, and secure security, while all around us so many things signal, with increasing urgency: ‘Death will surely come.’ Noun, verb, adverb, intransitive verb.

  Until, one night I’m woken by the sound of a jet engine, magnified, echoing off the cloud cover. The sound is a premonition that both beckons and warns: Come here and keep your distance. I throw off the covers, and go to my window. In the moment before the wind comes the whole city hunkers up and fills the window; all its intersections open, doors locked, cranes poised, with all its businesses, hotels, houses, streets—and, at its heart, the Carillon; floodlit, glowing and melting, slick like ice cream. Then the city erodes from a freckle of fire, like a film jammed in a projector. My room falls end over end, intact—my body and the furniture caught for a moment in a thickening resin of compressed air, about to be shredded and dissolved in fire. But, the instant they appear, I tear the flames away from my body like rags and, displacing myself through time, sit up in bed with the jet’s roar fading, tree shadows like smoke against the window, and my own face—by the green glow of the clock’s digits—reflected in the glass, unfocused and defenseless.

  Death will surely come.

  Yet the sitcoms tell us that by application, personality (and good looks if female) we can all succeed (and no longer have to cut the bits off the onions and potatoes where the rats have chewed them). And the ads tell us that if we drink the right coffee we’ll become successful professionals or happy labourers.

  It has been said that too much knowledge engenders faithlessness. Yes. I have heard the voices at the sidelines of protest marches: ‘Dumb Cunts, Wankers, Bloody Queers, Bull Dyke Bitches, dreeeeeeeamers!’ I have heard the reports on radio, and TV. I’ve read newspapers and supercilious magazine articles: ‘—cultural manifestations of public feeling are not very hard to read, but people are a lot more complicated than the things they produce to represent them. No film, book, play or game ever tells how seriously we take even our own ideas. It is possible that many of these works merely indicate how the public believes it ought to feel, or are part of the eschatological tendencies of any age—’ The proponents of ‘reason’, suggesting their reasons.

  While society sits getting senile playing Patience with money. While meaning yields and yields as if we are all falling through the clouds, fumbling for the ripcord. Till we know there is no faith, none to have or keep. So we don’t get on with our lives because there is a monster waiting for us, around the next corner. And we can’t know what we want, because we don’t dare want. We are smothered by huge, nebulous enemies: expedience, indifference, waste. Injured and incomplete.

  That was what I wanted to say. I’m not hungry, uncomfortable or ill. I’m not imprisoned, crippled or homeless. But it is night already, and our house did fall down.

  I opened my eyes briefly and saw the raindrops trembling on the glass. The bus was moving. A bar of sunlight slowly scanned my body. Above, the hills swung into sight, dark, but for one ridge veiled in a golden gauze of mist.

  The others were near me, talking with the lazy gaiety of people who have been in danger and now are safe. It was out of their hands, and they had only to sit in the bus and wait to arrive. Their voices, despite everything, still full of colour and energy.

  Mark

  I woke in the night struggling to draw breath, the fire still burning brightly in a vacuum—laughing as I lay gasping, unable to call out. There was no sign of dawn. It may still have been before midnight. Perhaps Emma was still awake.

  I fumbled for the small brass bell on the dresser, and as I moved hands seemed to catch at me from behind and pull me back onto the pillow; a cruel, powerful grip on my neck and shoulders.

  My own hands were numb at the end of my arms. For all my effort to breathe, only small scraps of air teased the top of my lungs. I struggled silently, my body becoming rigid, tangled and interred in the sheets. Red curtains closed around the chamber of my sight—their own colour cancelled with the light.

  Though the room was gone I could still hear the fire—a wet log burning, hissing sap, fluttering tiny concussions of flame—ravenously singing through my insensibility.

  Air set stiff in my throat, my mouth, like an inflexible mask over my face.

  Far away and muffled my world went on ringing, like a bell beneath the ground.

  Part Three

  Jill

  When the power failed I was reading. It was late evening and I had switched the television on for company, its volume turned down so low I could barely hear the murmur of accented voices. I was rereading one of the Georgette Heyer books I’d enjoyed so much in my teens—a well-worn copy from the rental section of the local library. The house seemed circled in a ring of silence, there was no wind, and only a light drizzle, glittering on the windowpane through a gap in the curtains. The trees were still, the road empty, and my nearest neighbours a kilometre away.

  Then, for no apparent reason, the lights flickered and failed and the picture on the TV screen shrank and was shut out by a valve of darkness.

  I found some candles in the pantry and fastened two to saucers in pools of their own melted wax. Back in the lounge I placed the candles at either end of the coffee table and, sitting cross-legged on the sheepskin rug, I continued to read.

  After half an hour the warmth had begun to leak out of the room—my small capsule of comfort punctured and deflating. I’d reached a point in the novel where its story couldn’t take me in and contain me. The
cold, quiet, and darkness seemed to suck both the heat out of my body and the patience out of my mind. I laid the book face down on the floor, looked around the room for something with which to occupy myself, and settled on cleaning out the two document drawers in the sideboard. I slid them out and sat back on the rug, sorting through their contents: old letters, guarantees, raffle tickets from raffles long since drawn, receipts for paid bills, empty chequebooks, bank statements, instruction booklets for cassette players, juice-makers and calculators, stationery, packets of shoelaces, hat-elastic, and many crumpled sheets of paper, miscellaneous notes, all of which I carefully unfolded and read.

  In doing so I found a story of Nicky’s—written on a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, covered in close printing on either side. It was entitled Going to Heaven.

  Mandy waited nervously at Limbo for them to decide whether she should go to heaven or hell. She could still remember how that ladys car had shot around the corner in the wrong lane but not what happened next. ‘I suppose there was a crash’ she thought. ‘I wonder if the ladys here.’ She looked up from the book she was pretending to read the room was dark outside. The block printing on the electric lights which stood on the platform said LIMBO. ‘Modern station’ she thought ‘but heaven and hell arnt modern the station master said.’

  She walked out to the place where the line to hell went a few feet along the ground then shot into a dark smelly tunnel. The one to heaven went up into the sky bordered by stars to show the way and disappeared into a dark raincloud.

  The clock on the shelf inside the station said ten oclock and the timetable said the trains would leave at midnight. Mandy had been told all about the trains by the station master. The devil drove the hell bound one and the boiler had blood in it instead of water and two black cats sat on top of the train and white ones on the heaven bound one. ‘Of course’ thought Mandy ‘thats unfair. Why do the black ones have to be the ones that ride the hell bound train. Black cats are just as nice as white cats. But of course these arnt just cats. There arnt cats that are eva all good or all bad.’ There were cats at Limbo too just nice normal cats a grey and white striped one that belonged to the stationmaster and a ginger one that stayed around to get fed by the angle who drove the heaven bound train. There was a dog too.

  Mandy couldn’t see any signs of life anywhere. Minutes ticked by like hours. ‘I wish there was someone else here’ she thought—

  Shackleton came in, chirruping, and trotted towards me, his feet sinking into the lambswool rug, clean lances of candle flame reflected in his eyes. I put out my hand, cupped, and he tilted his head into it. His fur was coarse and cold with rainwater. I continued to read.

  She didnt know how the time past but it did. Then with a toot both trains arrived. The hell bound one was black and scary. Its joints were not oiled but smeared with blood and it squeaked all the same. The carriages stunk of dead things and it wasnt lighted. The heaven bound one was the colour of the night sky with lighted windows and a rather nice smell hung about it.

  The moment the trains came people who Mandy hadnt seen before started rushing around doing things. Some laughing some crying. Some shouting instructions and some just watching like Mandy. Plus one eating. The ginger cat—

  I rummaged through the drawers looking for the remainder of the story. It wasn’t in either. I got up and continued to search through all the shelves and drawers in the lounge, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms—even going so far as shaking pieces of paper out from between the leaves of books.

  As I went into each of the dark rooms I touched, forgetfully, all the light switches, so when the power came back on every bulb in the house lit up and the television flowered sound and image—the twelve-fifteen closedown, ‘Hine E Hine’. Shackleton, sitting between the paled candles, cocked one ear back in disapproval, startled by the sudden brightness.

  If the story had been intact I would have read it through a few times, missing Nicky, probably cried a little, then put it away in my bag so that I could make copies of it next time I went to the library—not so much to have something I could read to remember her by, but because even a child should have her small achievements secured against ruin.

  Without its end, the story gained dimensions of meaning which, finished, it would never have had. A narrative left in Limbo, whose setting was Limbo, an after-death story by a dead child. A story which, like the railroad to Heaven, vanished into a dark cloud.

  After my first visit to Dan at Hanmer Springs in May, his mother and I had lunch at one of the local restaurants. She organised me into the meal, selected a table by the window, and told me what I should order. She had already sampled the menu, having visited Dan twice before.

  While Dora fussed over me, demonstrating her propriety, efficiency and concern, I sat staring out the window at the white wooden frontage of the sanatorium. Dan had looked unwell, yet assured me he was better. He wasn’t telling the truth, but was being dishonest in a polite way as if his obvious evasiveness should not upset me. He seemed more distant than when he was drunk and abusive. Though I could, at a stretch, imagine him well and whole again, I was having great difficulty visualising how he and I could ever live together comfortably or productively—as a childless couple—which we had never been.

  Dora was saying, ‘You look thinner, dear. You should take better care of yourself.’ She tapped the table by my plate, telling me to turn my attention to the food, then asked, anxiously and persuasively, ‘Hasn’t Dan improved? Don’t you think he looks better?’

  I was incredulous. ‘You’re forgetting that I haven’t seen him since March.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ She was embarrassed and taken aback, but not distressed.

  I dropped the fork back onto my plate. It lay, handle wedged into a sculpted dab of browned mashed potato. ‘Last time I saw Dan he was half-dead, for Christ’s sake.’ I glared out at the swimming sun and shadows under the grove of trees along the centre of the square. ‘Don’t you know that he wouldn’t let me visit till today—’

  ‘I’m sure he had his reasons.’

  I looked back at Dora. Her lowered eyelids, beneath the arched, hollow brow bones of old age, made her face seem contemptuous and secretive.

  I retrieved the fork and wiped its handle on my serviette. ‘Dora, can’t you see how changed he is?’

  ‘Nicola’s death.’ She glanced up, her eyes filling, and picked up her napkin to dab at the reddening end of her nose.

  To her it was always only Nicky’s death, never his drinking, that changed Dan. Yet there had been times when I couldn’t bear to look at him, afraid to see how he had altered. Those times, when he was drinking, but before he was drunk, and he might be making what, in content, was ordinary conversation, except his voice would have that particular tone—bravado and aggression—and I would not look at him, afraid the strange shadows had come down over his face. How could I explain to his mother, his champion, that when eight months after he started drinking heavily he shaved off the beard he’d worn for the past two years, his face, beneath it, had changed so dramatically that it was as though something had been substituted for my husband—an adult changeling.

  I caught her gaze. ‘I wish you would tell me whether he still blames me.’

  ‘Blames you, Jill?’

  ‘He said to me, more than once, that he blamed me for Nicky’s death. That if I—’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’ She attempted to catch and curtail my anger.

  ‘He mightn’t have meant to say it, but I believe he thinks it’s my fault. Sometimes I feel it is my fault. He said, “If you had been watching the child more closely when it happened.” Well, when it happened I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to see how I could change my hairstyle with styling gel. I never told Dan that, because I felt so bad about it—Nicky was in trouble and I was experimenting with hairstyles. But I don’t suppose it would have made any difference if I was watching TV or vacuuming the floor.’

&nb
sp; ‘Jill—’ she began, firmly.

  ‘He said to me, “I suppose you were shut up in your studio, painting.”’

  ‘He’d probably been drinking, dear. He’s had a nervous breakdown, you know that. You can’t blame him.’

  ‘I do blame him. I blame him for what he chose to say. Since I’ve begun to get over the—battle fatigue—I’ve got furious remembering things he said.’

  ‘He’s ill, dear!’ Dora chided. The ‘dear’ pure reflex. She added, ‘I think your bitterness is a little unbecoming.’ She lapsed into an angry silence and began searching for a handkerchief in her bag.

  ‘It’s the way I feel. But I know the Morgans think my feelings can wait their turn and only enter at the appropriate moment in a “becoming” fashion—no, you listen to me—’

  With a sound of indignation she had got up to leave. I caught her by the hem of her jacket.

  ‘I don’t have to listen to you insult my family—’

  ‘Your family? Anyone would think I was an alien in your country, a bloody refugee behind the wire with my bowl held out! My marriage into your family has taken six years of my life.’

  She was turning this way and that to escape my grip—as discreetly as possible. I raised my voice. ‘Sit down, Dora, please.’ A scene entailing vehemence was one thing, volume was quite another. She sat down.

  But when I had her attention I realised there was very little I really wanted to say to her. Her furious, reproachful gaze made me feel awkward and uncivilised. I turned my eyes down to my uneaten food, then, for good measure, shut them.