by Luke Davies
On the ABC I watch a documentary about trout. I’m sure the trout, both species and individual, must be happy, but not in any way we can imagine.
I am trying to claw my way back into the world, though probably a little handicapped by Louise’s hydroponic homegrown crop. We deal with things as best we can. When I’m not watching TV I’m devouring books. And they all seem to be about Death. Of course, I want to be in tune with the greater universe.
In the strange moments before sleep, where all control is illusion, I see flickering images of a world of men with elongated foreheads: not the evolutionary result of the brain growing ever larger and more complex, but bony protrusions for headbutting during the rutting season. I see women with transparent skin and veins that flush different colours to give different signals.
The hydroponics bends me a little. Alone, ABC again, I watch cuttlefish mate on another documentary. Where do all the fish come from? Television loves them. At the moment when the male deposits sperm into the body of the female, his tentacles wrap around hers. In the split second of coupling, his body changes colour from white or grey to a vivid pulsing crimson. The narrator tells us that this is so other males know what is taking place and keep away.
In the violent flush of colour down the body of the cuttlefish, in that radical seizure of reddening, I see a parallel and know that I have had in my own life moments of such primary singularity. When will they come again? I know a moment approaching orgasm when thought and emotion are stripped of all structure and form in a change as pervasive as the chromatic thermonuclear pulse of a cuttlefish coupling. I know that the mind enters a state as primal as a blind fish fucking on the ocean’s crowded floor.
At other moments a lightness has filled my body until it seems to have no mass. My consciousness is nothing but equations. I hurtle through graphs in four dimensions; an exquisite wind careens through my head, until at last I feel all my being contracted into a weightless point somewhere deep in the pit of my gut. And in such a state of abstraction I feel connected for an instant to the world. Where in fact, I try to remind myself, I live. And yet all I miss is Matt: something as simple as his boiling the jug for the tea.
At any rate, despite how good documentaries can be, TV is hit or miss, not such a good thing when you’re feeling depressed. It is the comedy section of VideoPlus, far more even than Louise’s giggly dope, that helps sees me through the worst of the treacle time. And all those thoughts of sex? For four months, maybe five, I remain absolutely alone. It would be impossible to see someone else.
One day an insurance company tracks me down: they have a juicy cheque for me, Matt’s life insurance. He had named me as the sole beneficiary. I had no idea he’d even taken a policy out. I am frightened—it is as if I have received a gift from the dead—but at the same time I take it as a sign from the heavens to move a little faster into my future. I stop smoking the hydro. I start to think about travel. I figure if I go back to the lab, increase my shifts, work hard for a few months, save all my money and put it together with the cheque, I might last a year or more overseas. Try to put Matt behind me, move on. Everything about falling in love with Matt reminds me of the ocean. I decide I must go far away from the ocean for a while. But it must be to a beautiful place. I have always dreamt of Paris. Well, we’ve all seen the photos.
I work like a maniac; the money begins to build up. I go to French classes three nights a week. Some of the high-school basics come back to me.
In the meantime I go back at last to clubs and pubs to see bands with Louise and our friends. There are times I nurse my sorrow as if it were a polished stone that I finger deep in my pocket. But on loud nights of raw thrash and guitar fuzz, there are times I forget myself again, as I did when I was nineteen and my father went to prison.
On such a night of lightness and buoyancy I meet Baxter at a club. We dance and go back to my place. He is tall and gangly with dredlocks beginning to sprout in his hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses like some intellectual DJ. We roll together lazily on my bed. It’s been easy to drink too much vodka on such a warm night. We waver on the fine line between falling asleep and fucking, but begin to head towards the latter.
It’s late in the night and a light rain falls. We kiss. I suck his fingers. The smell of my own mid-cycle coupled with the newness of the Baxter smell makes me so horny my toes are tingling and the smell of summer rain on the asphalt outside makes me feel that I live once again, or at least for these moments, in a benign universe. Baxter seems to know approximately what to do with his tongue. I am exactly where I was always meant to be, in the right place and at the right time.
We make love in the missionary position. Baxter takes his weight off me and raises himself up with his arms, supporting himself on his knees. He moves in and out of me slowly. It’s really very nice and I moan a little. He takes my hand and guides it down my belly. I start to rub my clitoris lightly and gradually my hand moves faster.
As I continue to rub myself I begin to notice that the knuckle at the base of my middle finger is grazing Baxter’s pelvic bone. At first this seems only to be part of the incidental body contact of sex. But gradually I become more and more aware of the tiny circle of delicate repetitive pressure I make on his skin, and my mind begins to focus in on it and nothing else. It is good to be alive, knuckle bone and pelvic plate tapping at each other like that.
At 4 a.m. the rain lets loose in deafening torrents. Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.
Things begin to flow from one boy to another. I am full of nervous tension. What am I grasping at here? Well, it is all such a blur, so hard to describe. Like nothing I have known before or since. It might be six months or more but it seems only like several weeks.
Very quickly I begin to understand the selfishness of my love, the inappropriateness of my relationships, when I realise that every time I fuck it feels as if I am wrestling with demons.
My series of transient lovers feel this too. They develop a compelling curiosity about my plight, and each hangs around for a couple of weeks. Sooner rather than later they sense the inviolability of the wall that surrounds me. Then they leave. If they don’t jump I push them. I am trying to get from one place to another: start here, go through this, get there, put Matt to rest. Will it ever work? At any rate, for a while they are fascinated to be the medium through which some demented struggle takes place.
In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.
We writhe together as if in liquid. We are vaguely humanoid. Thunder explodes in the ears and then thought is not possible.
A while later the body returns.
Coming out of that state, I carry with me the distant memory of a metamorphic experience. A vague sense of some fundamental molecular change infuses my lovers too, but this sense never solidifies into concrete thought for them. With sex, most men are going through the motions. They are not in tune with the poetry or the physics of the thing. They feel my frantic grasping, my thrusting against them, as a physical action in time and space. Meanwhile I am aware only of electrical fields and gigantic solar flares in front of my eyes. Even with my eyes open, in the middle of making love, the solar flares pulse so that I might be blind, engulfed in all light.
And afterwards, sadness. I can hardly share it with these men; I was taught by wonderful parents that cruelty is inexcusable. I do not understand what force spreads my mind so thinly through each pore of my body. I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.
One day all this takes place at dusk. His name is Jimmy but I call him, inside my head, Baxter Two. I seem to be settling into type. The sky is humid, the afternoon sticky. Ba
xter Two’s tumbledown house in the back of Erskineville perches amidst the renovated weatherboard cottages like a hamburger at a Chinese feast. All summer it feels as if it will rain soon. All summer the strange feeling, ‘something will break’.
We’ve been seeing each other, on and off, for a month or so. I guess we like each other about the same. Moderate interest. I met him at a party and we got on fine. For a while the absolute focus and meditative calm with which he tinkers with the various cars that appear, as if from nowhere, in his driveway seems to me the sexiest thing I can imagine. But soon enough that fantasy fades and Baxter Two becomes just another nice boy, slightly distracted, smoking his bongs. I am keen to see him whenever he turns up but I lack any specific concept of our place in the scheme of things. He looks enough like an outsider, someone to assuage the pain. But I talk about calling it quits. ‘Let’s wrap things up before they begin,’ I say. It’s been pleasant enough; the truth is, I don’t seem just now to be able to engage my emotions into a gear.
Later Baxter Two says, ‘I’ll remember little things.’
‘Little things,’ I say. ‘That’s what the world’s made up of.’
‘If this is going to end,’ continues Baxter Two, ‘I won’t want to see you at all. You’re beautiful, but you’re somewhere else. That’s okay. I can handle that. But we won’t continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.’
‘I understand that,’ I say.
At the door, leaving, I say, ‘Well…’
Baxter Two says, ‘Well…see you.’
I walk to my car feeling light-headed. It’s still humid at midnight. Bats fly overhead.
Three days later I bump into him again, on the crowded street in sweltering Newtown. His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language. But we talk for a couple of minutes and then go off in different directions.
I want the light I feel for him—for any boy, perhaps—to glow white hot. It’s a light inside my head. And yet I know clearly, somehow, that when the time is not right there is nothing in the world I can do to push things; there is nothing for it but to sit through all the discomfort, obeying a timetable not my own. These boys are like some giant distraction. And then it strikes me that patience is the most difficult thing in the world.
All that matters is memory, and all I have is a rose-tinted Matt of motorbikes and loud thrash bands, summers of sex, warm winters, something that felt like direction. And now, with Baxter One, or Two, whoever, an endless and intense energy directed at nothing. Something to pass the time. Matt’s death represents very little that could be construed as being positive. But out of it comes, for this brief and troubling time, the liberty with which I can selfishly and without guilt explore that strange thing (sex, desire, the intermeshment of it all) that burns inside me. And even that doesn’t work. Why am I jumping out of my skin like this?
I know I know nothing of the future. I know I know nothing of hope. When I look at the present I see it is only my body that is hot. The faint embers of warmth in my desperate couplings are enough, almost, to ward off the cold tang of the weeks and the months.
And then I know it’s time to leave, bang, just like that. My money is itching to go. What else is it for, I think, if not to liquefy our most frozen yearnings? Money: congealed energy. It is time to stop with the dance of replaceable boys. Time to get rid of all traces of the life I’d planned, in order to make room for the life that might be waiting for me. I think more and more now of elsewheres. At last I board the plane that will take me a hemisphere away from the past.
If it’s true that time can heal, as it slowly does, then geography might speed things up even more. I fly north around the globe, to Paris, which for everyone other than Parisians is the city of all myth: Paris, where the particles of light that cling to travellers the world over come to rest, come to earth, and settle into the very contours of the footpaths.
Birds That Are Fish of the Sky
I TRY TO READ PARIS AS A POEM, SINCE POSSIBLY ONLY poetry can redeem us from decay. Loss and decay: I’d become familiar with these things. In Paris I am cut so far adrift from everything I’ve ever known that I feel, deep in the part of the brain that controls balance, nearly imperceptible shifts in the ground beneath my feet, so that the city becomes an enormous ship lumbering stately and serene through an ocean vast beyond imagining.
In Paris I begin to walk. There is so much tension that death puts in our shoulders. With walking comes breathing. As I sigh the whole of Paris sighs. The city, in fact, is nothing but a series of emanations, exhalations softer than dawn, which drape themselves over the skin and sink into its pores like the faintest of dews.
I develop an ‘algorithm of wandering’: a simple system that gives structure to the days. I walk along a given street or boulevard; after a while the thought might enter my head to change direction. At the very next intersection I must head left, or right, or continue straight ahead, according to where the most light comes from. I walk the streets for hours, whole mornings, whole afternoons.
I feel that a great unknownness has descended all around me. The ship called Paris in a sea of unfathomable beauty. I begin to feel through all the sadness a gratitude for being alive that is like a small child constantly tugging at my sleeve. Possibly it can lead me to the places of its desire. Gratitude. I have no desires of my own.
I arrive in early spring—nearly a year since Matt died— when the city has barely begun to wake from the winter freeze. I wear a scarf wherever I go. After a couple of false starts I find a furnished bedsit to rent, off Rue St Jacques, up on the south edge of the Latin Quarter, and I settle in. I have a bed and a desk, a lion-foot bath, a basic kitchen. It is a den, a cocoon from which to explore, to which I can retreat.
I discover the river Seine at dusk. I had thought that pleasure was accidental and not something that can be located in the same place every day.
For some weeks I walk to the river every evening, timing my strolls to arrive about half an hour before sunset. I walk down Rue St Jacques to arrive at the Petit Pont across the square from Notre Dame. From there I walk west along the river towards the setting sun. From this point in the journey there are eleven bridges to explore before I arrive, within an hour, at the Eiffel Tower. By then it is generally dark. Should I begin the journey earlier, and continue past the Eiffel Tower, there are another four bridges before the Boulevard Périphérique crosses the river near the heliport at the bottom of the Sixteenth arrondissement.
These last four bridges include the Pont Mirabeau, which the poet Apollinaire immortalised. Matt had loved Apollinaire. Standing on the bridge one time, looking down at the water, I begin to cry. I remember how I’d been so surprised to meet a deckhand who liked poetry. When the sun has dipped over the horizon I ask a man crossing the bridge to take my photo. I have been looking at this photo, pinned to the wall in front of me, the whole time I have been writing this story, my story. I am wrapped up warm and cosy on the right-hand side of the photo, that weak, shy smile brought on by the self-consciousness of smiling at a stranger on a bridge as the traffic of Paris flows by. The bright orange sky seeming to envelop me. Beside this photo, another one: Matt, on Terry Breen’s boat, off the Western Australian coast, the sun in his eyes.
As my French gets better I try to translate Apollinaire’s poem into prose that makes some basic sense to me. Matt had once given me a slim volume by Wallace Stevens, explaining that reading poetry—reading Stevens in particular —was good for dislodging ‘the stuck bits in the brain’. I hadn’t read Stevens at that time, so there’s yet another thing to thank Matt for eternally. Maybe translating poetry, more so than reading it, could do some similar act of dislodging. Those stuck bits in the spirit too.
I decide to attempt the translation to honour the memory of the Matt I loved, who is fading. The Seine flows under the Mirabeau Bridge, as does our love. Why does it hav
e to remind me of that? Joy always came after pain. May the night arrive. May the hour strike. The days go by. I remain standing here. Hands in hands, let us stay face to face, while eternal glances pass under the bridge made by our arms. The little waves so weary. May the night arrive. May the hour strike. The days go by. I remain standing here. Love slides past like this flowing water. Love goes away. But oh how slow is life and how violent is hope. May the night arrive. May the hour strike. The days go by. I remain standing here. The days pass and the weeks pass. But neither the past nor all that was our love can come back. The Seine flows under the Mirabeau Bridge. May the night arrive. May the hour strike. The days go by. I remain standing here.
Poetry and photography: I have entered the noble causes. One is immeasurably old, the deepest magic, the other so new it is still a transparent magic. Everywhere I go I take photos. It’s not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought. Eventually I will come back to Sydney with more than a thousand photos, of which less than fifty will resemble anything like tourist snaps. The others are all doorways, the grains of woods, the green foundry-work of old lampposts, edges of zebra crossings on cobblestones, lace metalwork of the grilles surrounding trees in parks, pebbles on the paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, rainbows trapped in the breezes from fountains, stone walls. Marblings and grains, ruffles and whorls in the make-up of things, the unseen lineaments of daydream. The lintels of windows, where one might see, forgotten by time, forgotten by the city, in a shaft of sunlight, there where the wood has weathered and cracked and the paint flaked away, the delicate fuzz of a spider’s web in the corner. Eventually the best couple of hundred of these photos will go into a book I make, an album really, limited edition of one copy, called The Textures of Paris by Isabelle Airly. It will be Louise’s thirtieth birthday present, and she will hug me and kiss me for it.