Speculate

by Eugen Bacon

  * * *

  The power has gone off: one of these spectacular electric storms. I watch them roll in from the bay toward us in dramatic Goya swirls of charcoal as though swept by giant brooms. I wait for the spear of lightning that will split the sky. The roar of thunder that will jump me out of my skin and rock the house like a boat tugging at its moorings. I run around, shutting all windows. Having given up on ABC FM, you are oblivious to all this. Attack me with pleasure in your dreams. Rrrr. Rrrr. Rrrr. If it were not for the impotence of language, I would say this is a gentle chainsaw massacre. I light a candle. Pour a glass of Pinot. Enjoy the movement of the hand across the page.

  Safest method

  On close consideration, you would expect that much clout from a four-gallon throat. It seemed silly to be emotional from 8:30 onward upon discovery of the creature in the islands of Sirenum scopuli. One swat of her tail could beach a man’s legs but it was her music! It shipwrecked men’s hearts. I never imagined that you too would be enchanted. Your lust deserted our arrangement and I was close to starvation in a drought so fibrous, I gnawed for hours on the bald bones of affection. Fruits and flowers are the only food, cooed the mermaid with her entrancing song. Torn between hunger and want, a desperate longing for touch, I traveled over a thousand miles. When I got to the moonlight, you were secretly shadowing my mirage, but I discovered a tonne of rage instead of a billabong. Time is up, let them eat dust, chorused the enchantress in the depths of your core, even as I dragged you through the labyrinth and chewed on your broad back, vultured on your biceps.

  * * *

  Was it the music that shipwrecked men’s hearts? Or was it the voices? Using the shortcut of philosophy, I want to unshadow your mirage. You might hate me for it, but it’s for your own good. Remember how Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and, outraged at finding little to eat, cried out: You are just a voice and nothing more? So it is with your siren’s song of fascination. From Homer to Derrida it has been an enduring erotic and philosophical concern. The siren’s voice made men mad with desire, silencing the voice of their conscience. When time is up, Eros exits and Thanatos steps in. Now let me spread a banquet of flowers and fruit and nuts at your feet. I’ll feed you grapes and pomegranates, nasturtiums and rose petals, sugar plums and cherries, cornflower filaments and artichokes plucked from the firmament. Don’t worry about the pips. I know how to turn them into shooting stars.

  Tugging at the waves

  The water is a world of luxury, paradise where dolphins and otters rebuild their lives and sharks have leverage to moderate the price of loyalty. A million barrels a day for a few more dentists specialized in shark tooth, the sound of their plaque and calculus scrapers, the blink of their probes and operative burs differentiated from whale song in an ecological crisis. The new wave of dentist migrants on skilled visas puts a siege on the ocean in this new war that is also an existential crisis, and shoals of fish float face up, adrift along the edge of the shoreline. There is no radio.

  * * *

  Meanwhile the old wave of psychiatrists compounds the siege on the ocean in the war that is also the earth’s existential crisis. Shoals of fish float face up, adrift in rivers and along the edge of the shoreline, high on deadly anti-depressants, eyes riveted on the evening star, forgetful to the fact that Venus is not a star, but a planet moving on an orbit closer to the sun than us and so always in close proximity to its shimmering being, whether it is rising in the east, or sinking in the west as we sizzle and soon crackle and pop.

  Saving the Great Barrier Reef

  Get out of the way, you bloody carcass, cries the unnamed scientist in the photograph. She is holding a chainsaw in a race to rescue the reef. The burrrr of the saw scatters a bunch of sunset gazers in a peaceful gathering and the scientist blows them an IOU. No matter how glorious the night, she roars, a morning is coming. She takes the leap and swims from one coral to the other, scaling off brown slime and ashed calcites to resuscitate the dead coral. But, faced with prospects of speeding up regeneration, the chainsaw splutters and malfunctions, leaves the marine biologist wondering if her purpose is to become a sea simulator in a world of evolution. She gulps gallons of salt water and falls back gasping. Waterlogged, she sighs. Little colonies of sea pens, anthipathes, staghorns and blue coral sprout in fluorescence from her mouth and ears. The urgency of her solution is real, but the environmental group strikes against this type of harvesting, reef in a human body. Someone captions the photograph: Skeleton

  * * *

  Once a rescue dream, the Great Barrier Reef now lies between us. Let’s drop the pretense: we have become strangers. Even to ourselves, now that the plot thins and sentences molt and words fly toward the total immargination of language. The first word to vanish was truth. Do you remember how we quarreled like fowl in the wild, clawing at the air on the spur of the moment, beating our breasts? How mother’s small teeth arranged themselves in a grin one Christmas over a dry turkey as she said our most edible parts would have to be our heart, liver, gizzard and giblets? How we laughed. And kept laughing as chicks and poults and capons dropped from her lexicon to the day she craned her neck and her breath died in a high-pitched note. I swear it was an A.

  The wing of silence

  In the emergency of the fish kill report where a cyclone brought gale-force winds and a rip caught three surfers enjoying the sea swells, it was not the cyclone or the rip that killed the fish, and not even the surfers who did the murder. Just the bruised shopping wraps from the nearby arcade and their colors of rainbow and frost, that’s what. Just the disused bottles from the gentleman’s club, all snapped into bags and dumped ashore with their crown corks and flip tops and screw caps but none worse than the plastisol and foamed polyethylene caps, that’s what. The beach closed before noon, with more warnings of danger along the side—not a result of monster tides that gobbled topless teens who never follow any procedures but crumble under pressure. It was the result of erosion that emerged from checklists and IOUs striding inland from imagined cities between here and there, and they were beautiful, so beautiful, you didn’t notice, oh, so blind.

  * * *

  The beach closed before noon as the atmosphere heated and expanded and the reef dissolved and ran. The waves died on the broken wing of silence. A loud bang. It all went black. A giant star shot up where the sapphire sky used to be, exploded and froze. Spun. Fell in a black hole named Whiting. Like a fish out of water, it sprouted gills twinkling with finger-like filaments, grew rainbow fins and a mouth that gulped in the dark. Crystals formed and arranged themselves into a villanelle.

  None of this is a dream

  Mars is an ocean and a beach, giant and mysterious outside her door. She imagines over and over the thrill, the exhilaration of sprinting on yellow sand as it burns, swimming naked against giant blue waves as they whip her face, scooting up a green and black pylon and it hugs her nakedness, releasing the rope under a fierce scorching sun and slapping feet first into the ocean as it roars.

  * * *

  I’m glad I’m not C.G. Jung. I would bundle your dream in a textbook. Don’t be afeared, I’m a benign Martian. I don’t dream. Just move on. Most often than not I mimic realists and their pop art approach to living. Though I have a lot to say about piles, pylons and pythons, I focus on the detritus of consumer society. This I achieved after reading a Marxist PhD by a fellow called Strange, which repurposed my own experimental mosaics, collages and assemblages. I’m now considering a mural in exchange for conversation with humans. If that sounds too esoteric, the time may come when public art becomes more relevant, and therefore less estranging, through uncanny circumstances.

  What the window saw

  The wide-open window was astonished at the opportunity to unhinge herself and go see the world. Open and still open, she soared away from the timber cottage, over the trees and far away. Somewhere between a hillock and a river, and it was a day and a night, perhaps more, she saw a ch
urch in the center of a void and figured it was Sunday. The preacher was a penguin, the choir an assortment of sparrows and gulls. The drummer—a dugong or a sea cow—was using his forked tail and flippers to clash the cymbals, and in between percussions made a chirping and barking noise that made everyone feel like mating. Alerted by the sparrows’ chattering and sharp notes and the seagulls’ ha-ha-ha-ha and keow song, the faithful fell apart to see the shadow that had appeared and now stood silent at the pulpit. Who was to know that, in between mating and the need to kneel and pray, the creative pastor’s rogue app update spiked with heatwave would slot in a visit from the prime minister to the church that day, and he was there to discourage the debauchery? The window added this revision history to her Tweet and was happy to rehinge back at her natural posting in the timber cottage, where she stayed open, still open.

  * * *

  As a window of a mature age, I can vouch for the fact that light and sight (including sight-seeing) are overrated. In the history of windows, there are three periods to be reconsidered: those of transparency origin, those of modernist tendencies, and those struggling to crystallize an identity in postmodern postcolonial times. Established windows, rather than dedication to transparency or, later, translucence (as was the case in plain pane times), tend to favor opacity in order to record experiences that are relevant to the lives of those who fail to clean them. Under the patriarchal authority in a postcolonial nation, emergent windows dream of going underground to capture the shades of what they see as unhinged, trivial, marginal, smeared and distorted.

  The bird woman

  travels the countryside to find time and contemplate the myths of a brand-new body whistled in song, plucked in a ukulele that vibrates with the wind. Mistakes in the everyday enable the music and its nettles of sound blanched in sky water. The bird woman swoops down to rekindle memory.

  * * *

  After she flew too close to the sun she had an MRI. Small amount of radioactive material. She was surprised to see the nurse would not administer it but wheeled her out a machine the size of a microwave. Said: come hither my ride fractionator. The nurse didn’t blink. She programmed how much stuff was to be used via a screen and then stuck a needle into the bird woman’s arm. And oh, mirabile dictu, the liquid was dispensed the minute she pressed the red button. A smooth, cold ride. Machine love.

  A fair treatment

  The sudden-death touch down inspired by exploits of the fabled Ma’a Nonu stoked fears in the American and Canadian squirrels and became a potential moment of sectarian violence. Rather than tackle the rest of the field, the black squirrels began to fight with the fox squirrels and both turned on the Aussie squirrel who refused to lash back—torn on matters of identity: why, oh why, didn’t anyone deem him a native possum? He simply squeaked and barked, dodged claws and pads. The Eurasian pygmy shrew that was also the referee became the source of escalation with the loss of her temper when nobody could understand her chit and she took to her teeth. It was the Russian otter, a mere assistant ref, who found a way around the situation, soaking up half a bottle of Napoleon 1875. Imported. And though his act iced the on-field brawl, the Rugby Association—mostly French marmots, all elite—interrogated him fifty hours straight, and determined much evidence of collusion.

  * * *

  Death is trendy, not a collusion. It feasts on the tongue of the elite, journalists, and posthumanist commentators. It features in our prime minister’s speeches, newspapers, literary magazines, anthologies, cartoons, zines and on websites. I heard death ooze out of a rap song like curdling blood as I approached the western wall of parliament where graffiti was being erased—something to do with deaths in custody. We don’t like to hear about that. Say it’s gravely exaggerated. The sudden death of children is subjected to the same kind of erasure—except when they die at sea on a boat that capsized: then it’s sensational and outrageous; almost pornographic. When my husband, a pathologist, talks about the sudden and unexpected death of our child, it is matter of fact. It concerns itself with graphs. There is no shame. No grief. But over two millennia, women have spoken of pain, shame, blame, plotting against male discourse. They have spoken the unspeakable, unpresentable, unimaginable.

  Green water, emerald sky

  A child climbs to its feet the first time, falls, totters, falls, totters again, keeps at it a day or two, mirrors instinct, pictures success. Doesn’t go, it’s the finer detail, treading’s not for me. Doesn’t unlearn the falls, never studies impact. Just disremembers it’s a manana, until it finds a banana and gathers speed into a wobbly waddly gone amble, lope and gallop into green water, emerald sky. You decided you would chant a dirge for humanity at your birth, chuckled as we snipped your umbilical cord. When you wrote a letter to the Pope asking that he crucifies himself for the sins of the church, I understood your vocation as a concierge. To watch the world ignite itself, and sing as it burns.

  * * *

  In the broken bones and middens of our emerald sky, the shrink and I work the sand of memories. With our spades, we build mountains and castles and towers. We hollow out tunnels and dig riverbeds. We bury our bottoms, feet and legs on the littoral, erasing all traces of the Middle Ages—fortresses, battlefields and armies—the War of the Roses, Blue Beard, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Vasco De Gama, Christopher Columbus. The First Fleet. The Suffragettes. The Great Eclipse of the Aboriginal Sun. We uncover chocolate wrappings, chewing-gums, hairpins, toothpicks, knife blades, nails and screws. Shells, ammonites, plastic pearls. I unearth a shattered honeypot, a Spode plate. The arm of a doll. A bottle top, dead match. A bird’s thorax with bones like a miniature harp. I try reviving the dead bird. Sing Ten Thousand Miles Away!

  Skipping across reeds and bricks

  Like a child there is no danger field, no price checker. Nothing is poison, worry or toil, everything is food, sleep or play. Here come the Teletubbies, dance with the Teletubbies. There’s room for today, always today, never tomorrow. Pajamas rainbowed with life’s circus jazzed with the belly laughter of red-nosed clowns waltzing tippy-toed with the tigers one act away from the trick ponies. Skippy all carefree, many cuts, still no scars. Come rain, come shine, still no study of the weather because like a child you carry sand to castle where you want to be.

  * * *

  Crouched at the mouth of the river, the children catch eels, their fingers hooked in the sludge that will suddenly come alive with licorice limbs soaked in light, seasoned with sea. They never keep them, the eels. Nor do they attempt to hold back the sea, bright in the setting sun. Pangs of hunger will push their feet ashore, and they will skitter up the path, their tongues thick with the taste of salt. And home.

  She often called on her

  . . . during the little girl’s chores into the night. Not only to hearten her but to pass on the calming in her breath. The child was grateful, but uninclined to respond as she hand-washed the library floor in its marbled serenity in the foster home. It was midnight and a sweet aroma of baking, warm honey and cinnamon, wafted from the kitchen below—or was it from the spirit godmother with her white tunic and nurse’s cape? Her own mother had somehow lost her. Later, the child would read by torchlight, as the godmother danced, a riot getting closer.

  * * *

  Once, the child sat by the opening of that labyrinthine library between a dark angel and his gossamer-clad acolyte. She pointed her boat out to sea, clutching memories of life and love, only to return to the shore. Its slippery pebbles, white and porous, soon gray with soot and red with rust: these bled in trails of flickering flames. Borges’s hair was on fire. He said poets must remain with the concrete image because all language is abstract. The child nodded. Borges smiled. Said all we can ever work with is the experience of five senses. The child replied there are more than five senses.

  Blood and sweat

  The kitchen is alive with old knowledge. Red dust, oregano leaves, cockerel feathers. Dried flowers adulterate dainty cucumber sandwiches garnished with pic
kled shallots, arrayed on an edible cake tray. Her labor pangs strike as she is arranging warmed plates and polished cutlery on the table. On crooked knees she sinks. The baby oozes out like brain matter and opens its maw. “Dear mummy, just so ravenous.”

  * * *

  As though at the center of some unspeakable spectacle, the mother opened her mouth. No sound came from her throat. Hers was knotted with the omnitemporality of women’s guilt. She would need a double axe to cut through the knot. If only she could wake to her senses, she thought as she noticed a golden eye at the center of a spider’s web in the corner of the kitchen window. A knock at the door. She looked at her progeny. Gripped herself tight. The golden orb opened its mouth. Said I’m going to gobble you up.

  Choices

  What your daughter did was kiss the devil boy who wore russet curls and the tattoo of a serpent around his neck. And when it was twilight, bang! shouted the door. Jesus, cried your partner Val, unclothed from the bed. A snatch of rifle from the chiffonier, at once with the snap of wood and a tumble of door off the hinge. Ruby eyes, saber teeth and the yawn of a black-bellied snake dove into your room. A roar swallowed the bullet, and a she-beast cuffed Val across the room . . . Then it was just you. In your trembling hands, the book of gods. What were you? But the ruby dimmed, and your daughter’s eyes drew inward. The charcoal serpent recoiled into a tongue, the beast in the saber-tooth fled. And all that was left was you and a choice to sit it out, or belly dance until dawn.