by Luke Davies
One of the last clear things Tom reads before he books his ticket for Hawaii is the thing that helps to make his mind up. ‘The planet Earth is essentially a slow-moving glob of liquid iron surrounded by a slightly faster-flowing layer of liquid rock on which floats a thin crust. On the margins of the ocean floor, some of that crust is being sucked into the cauldron beneath, while above, crustal plates grind into each other, spawning volcano eruptions and earthquakes: fractal and chaotic signs of the immense dynamism of the living place we inhabit. Since everywhere on Earth’s thin crust the natural landscape is being hewn by chaos into shapes with branches, folds and fractures, and detail inside detail, the immense intermeshing of dynamical forces constitutes the eternal, ever changing dissonance and harmony of nature…’
He had copied the passage into the notebook he kept, a manic scrawled diary of those last weeks and days that was found in his hotel room in Waimea. A lot of it is illegible. There are long conversations with what he calls angels, and at other times, demons. These are the voices that hounded him away from the daylight world.
A lot of the rest I must piece together—though some of it is made up of facts—from onlookers and hotel staff or from Tess, and later, from the newspaper reports and from the last family to see him alive.
‘I need a break,’ he says to Tess. This is how it starts. ‘Maybe the beach, the sun, will make a difference. You’re right: all these closed curtains don’t help. I have to make an effort. Nothing ambitious, nothing to worry about. I’ll go to Hawaii, I’ll find a hotel, find a beach, keep taking my pills, take it easy. Go for walks, a little bit of swimming. Maybe things will change soon.’ He is crying now. The tears flow easily these days. ‘Because this can’t go on forever.’
‘Oh, Tommy,’ says Tess. She sits down on the arm of the chair and strokes his grey hair.
‘Look at me,’ he says, his eyes pleading. ‘What’s happened to me? What am I?’
‘You’re still my Ginger Meggs,’ she says. ‘It’s a bad patch, that’s all.’
‘It’s ten years, darl. It’s more than a patch.’
She thinks of Dan, of betrayal, of prisons, and there is nothing to say to this man she loves, or loved, so much. She pulls his head to her chest and rubs the back of his neck. In the musk of her pullover it must feel to my father that toxins are flowing from his spine into his skull. He reaches his arms around her and squeezes her back. He feels nothing. Feels that he has never felt anything, and even the pain of goodbye is made small by the approach of his death. He yearns for peace.
He reads books on Mt St Helens in Washington state, on Pompeii, on Krakatau. They are spread over his desk, annotated, pored over, and remain there for weeks after his death, like a mad frieze, until Tess and I clear them away. ‘You didn’t see them here?’ I ask her. ‘They seem like such an obvious sign.’
‘I haven’t been in here for years,’ she says. ‘It was his private room. He made that clear.’
‘Oh come on, Mum. What about cleaning? What, you just never came in here?’
‘I never looked at his books, did I. He read all sorts of things. It was mumbo jumbo.’
‘What about this?’ I point to the books on the desk. ‘Look at all this stuff! Look—volcanoes. Volcanoes. Look— Kilauea. Look—he’s drawn arrows on this photo! How could you be so blind?’
‘He could have been drawing arrows on the fucking moon, Isabelle!’ Tess stands still, puffing, aggressive. ‘He was going mad. Everything was a sign. Which signs are the important ones? You’d go mad yourself trying to keep up with that.’ Crying now, bewildered, she continues to stare at me. Her shoulders heave.
‘Mum—’ I try to touch her. She stiffens.
‘What would you have done?’
‘What?’
‘If you’d seen the photos? The books here. Which you couldn’t have seen from Paris.’
‘That’s not fair, Mum. Paris was—’
‘—I’m sorry’.
‘I had every right to be in Paris!’
‘And I didn’t? Like waiting on a ghost all those years was fun? He left me years ago, you know.’
‘You left him first. He wasn’t my husband. I never betrayed him.’
It’s like a slap. And then she ignores it. She lunges for the desk and rips out the page with the arrows drawn on the Kilauea photo. ‘What would you have done?’ She thrusts it in my face. It is all so absurd, as if my father were a famous explorer and these his final preparations. I look at the path of descent, black biro, dotted lines, arrows.
‘I guess… I guess nothing. I would have let him go. I wouldn’t have believed he’d kill himself like that.’ With this I’m crying too, and we are holding tight to each other.
‘I did betray him,’ she says through her tears. ‘And I wish I could have it all back. I’d go down a different path. Maybe I killed him, Isabelle.’
‘Mum, you didn’t kill him.’
‘Maybe I killed him.’
We pack the books away. I hold on to the notebook, which the Hawaiian police had sent back to us.
In the week before he left, a murder had made the headlines. It’s the fifth of the ‘spinster killings’: five women, all older than sixty, all living alone, all living within ten kilometres of each other in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, all dead in the last nineteen months, all hacked to death with a blunt machete, and in such a fashion—the police will not divulge details—that it is without doubt the work of one person, a serial killer, a psychopath.
Several pages of the notebook are devoted to the murders. Tom writes that he watches a feature story on TV about the hunt for the killer. The report shows file footage from the previous year, images of crime scenes sealed off with police tape, maps of the eastern suburbs spotted with arrows, police spokesmen. A British forensic psychologist, an expert in serial killings, is interviewed. ‘A psychopath,’ the psychologist says, ‘is simply this: someone who is so wrapped up in their own pain that they are incapable of feeling, or even of being aware of, anyone else’s feelings.’
I see him reaching for the remote and switching off the TV. He reaches for his pills and drinks a couple down. Then I’m no different from a murderer, he writes in his notebook. And my very presence here is a stain on the bright world.
The notebook tells me that in the toilets at Sydney Airport he throws the last of the Melleril away: new approaches for new journeys. In Hawaii he begins to drink. He embarks with glad heart on a drinking binge, one of only two or three he’s ever experienced, which lasts for days. It becomes a world inverted. The notebook becomes more frenzied. There is too much light, and the journey to darkness and peace must begin. First, after a day of serious drinking, most of it on the terrace of his hotel room overlooking Waimea Bay, the angels start to arrive. They are not the familiar messengers of air and light. Rather, Tom senses them as forms, half-mongoloid, pure of intention, rising and sinking through the surface of the earth, which has become sponge-like, an intermediate zone between atmosphere and molten rock, a porous mattress of superheated moss. The walls of his hotel room throb with their presence. For a page and a half his writing is an impenetrable mass of hieroglyphics.
I imagine that the more he drinks the more the angels beckon. It is midday; too bright out there for humans with sense. Thank God for the canopy. I imagine that he is so drunk he can barely move from his chair. Fuck wha? Chair. Feel good. His legs spread out before him in a V that defines the panorama of beach. His feet push comfortably against the balcony railing so that he feels safely anchored. I picture on the black glass table beside him a bucket of ice, a can of Budweiser, a bottle of vodka three-quarters empty, a bottle of tonic water, a bowl of limes, a serrated knife. His hands are sticky with lime juice from his muddled, laughing efforts at mixing drinks. He goes inside to the shade of the room. I’ve led a good life I’ve led a good life. Have I not? he asks.
‘You have,’ the angels answer, their sweet innocent voices caressing his ears like a breeze in a field of lilies.
‘Yes. Have done good things.’
‘I have done nothing wrong.’
‘If you say so.’
‘No. That’s not true. It’s wrong, all wrong. Half of life is wrong.’
They do not reply; the room is filled with buzzing.
Tom continues. ‘Wrong to allow things to keep going like that all those years. But I felt so small. Your own brother. What would you have done? I did nothing. Wrong to suppose it could not be possible. Wrong to trust, and wrong to welcome the blindness I put on.’
‘It was never blindness,’ an angel says. ‘You knew everything, always. It’s hard to admit. You are only human.’ ‘Everything? No, not everything. There was a time when I knew nothing, nothing about it.’
‘Never a time like that,’ the chorus whispers, ‘not so far as we know. And we’d know.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ pleads Tom. ‘That’s just not right. I didn’t know. You live in good faith. You hope for the best. You see the best in things. Assume the best. Give the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Yes, when in doubt, give the benefit of the doubt.’
And then, from the other side of the hotel room, another angel, this one more sombre-voiced: ‘But you were never in doubt.’
I picture my father swinging around. He is sweating a thin film of fear. He feels some disdain. ‘Doubt? Doubt was all I ever knew.’ He takes a long draw from the bottle of vodka. It seems to slow his heart. Then a swig of whisky: this for the hands. The angels crowd the room. ‘But not doubt about that. My wife fucking my brother! Jesus…’ There is a long pause. Tom hears his breathing.
‘We can only repeat that you knew everything, always. Everybody always does.’
‘What the fuck would you know about it? You know everything, maybe. Not me. Walk a mile in my shoes, you fuckers. Since when’ve you known what it is to be a human? I was busy trying to run my life. It’s hectic, you know, doing that. I had a doctor’s surgery. Sixty, seventy-hour weeks.’
‘Oh, we know all about the surgery.’
Tom’s head drops and he listens to their tittering. ‘What’s the point of this conversation, please?’
‘No point. We’re here for other reasons.’
‘Right. Of course. You’re here because I’m going to die. Is that it?’
‘Precisely. We’re here because you called upon us. We’ve always been here. But you called us into being. By the way, we’re very appreciative of that. We don’t usually get called into form. But a volcano! Such style. Sublime, in fact.’
‘You’re here to take me there?’
‘No, you help yourself.’
‘To help me do it?’
‘You don’t need any help.’
‘You have no opinion on my death?’
‘Now that would be truly absurd.’
‘Can you offer me comfort? I’m a little drunk, I think.’
‘What do you think this is, salvation? Let’s strip away all mystery here. Basalt. Andesite. Dacite. Rhyolite. Silica content. Viscosity. Hard light of day. Eruptions of ash-flow plateaus. Magmatic gas. What would you prefer? Death by drowning? We could try to give you the details but it’s not our particular field of expertise. Everyone knows everything, always. Everyone should stick to what they know. The mobility of the surface masks the convection currents of the deep mantle. Hot-spot volcanoes form this way. You are about to die in one. You’re sitting above a deep mantle current that’s three thousand miles thick and it’s been circulating slowly for eighty million years. The buoyant rise of magma. Heat flux. Magma shattered by explosive boiling into lava fountains, pyroclastic fragments. Such contact with the air! What did you write on the Customs and Immigration declaration card, where it said “Purpose of Visit to the United States”? We ourselves have rejoiced at the break to routine. Your fluidised slurry awaits you, sir. Gases boiling out of the gas-rich magma. In the plate is your solace and in the mantle is your solitude. Uprush, uprush. Ah, but you want to descend. To that calm place where the blood slows down to dream. Your dreams will be ours. Tom, you won’t remember yourself. Oh it is joy, joy, a day of joy. Downwind and upwind all the birds will have fled. That telltale bulge that grows along the cone slopes for weeks and months on end before the caldera collapses, before catastrophe: all this has been done for you, long ago. Earthquake swarms and flutters are absent. Magnitude 0.2. It is a peaceful day for death to come. You’re in Hawaii on holidays: don’t stray from your purpose. For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the God of Hosts is his name. When the groundwater heats above its subsurface boiling point it flashes into steam. Elsewhere the intruding magma is injected into the fissure. But for you we have prepared a bed of honey, since—did you read it in the brochure yet, Tom?—erupting lava has the same viscosity as honey at room temperature. The earth was incandescent four and a half billion years ago. Incandescent. Sufficiently cooled now, of course, for you to be able to decide to end it all. The slow movements in the mantle are due to the plasticity of the rock. You’ll be gathered into the quicksand, beyond the hummocky deposit and the lobe that sweeps down to Spirit Lake. What is your life reduced to now but these fluidised emulsions? Nothing to be ashamed of, Thomas. We all reduce to something. On the summit the day will turn black with the ash of your weight. Then puff!, you are gone, the lightest of birds, so insubstantial now that your wing cannot singe even cumulus clouds. The mobile mantle rises and partially melts. In the sulphide-rich torpor we sleep. Therefore the flight shall perish from the swift and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty deliver himself. The excess heat of the magma can partially melt the host rock through which it ascends. He that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself; neither shall he that rideth the horse deliver himself. Heat lowers the density of the rocks and therefore the speed of the seismic waves that travel through them. But he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day. And the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. All this will be yours. For an instant.’
Tom starts to laugh. Then the laughter turns to tears. On his knees he bends to the carpet, covers his face and weeps into his cupped hands. ‘I’ve led a good life.’
‘You’ve led a life.’
‘There was Isabelle.’
‘Indeed. Your great creation.’
‘Oh Bella.’
‘She’ll die too, Tom. You’re getting off the point here.’
‘The point, then. We’ll stick to the point. Having said my goodbyes in my head.’ He tilts the vodka bottle to his mouth and empties it. ‘I got out of prison, and the architecture remained. Those ugly high walls. I remained awash in my greed.’ He rolls onto his back and passes out.
Have I imagined all of this? I entered into his notebook. For a moment I reclaimed him as his mind splintered apart.
He wakes a long while later. His first thought is that his body will dry up and he fears that he will die of thirst. He staggers to the bathroom and, cupping his hands, takes a long drink of water. He pisses and then steps into the shower. I picture him sitting beneath the jet of water for half an hour, holding his head.
In the bedroom the thought occurs to him that he does not know how long he’s been asleep. He picks up the phone, rings the front desk—this much we have from the hotel records—and gets straight to the point. ‘What day is it, please?’
‘It’s Friday, sir.’
‘Friday. And what time is it?’
‘It’s 9:15 a.m., sir.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Thank you. Have a nice day, sir.’
He’s lost a whole day. As sick as he feels, he laughs. It just isn’t important, he realises, losing a day at this end of a life. I too am struck by the astonishing fact that every day we stay alive, the odds increase of our dying. There are many r
easons for going on, but you could certainly be excused for not doing so.
He could continue drinking but he’s been going strong now for three or four days, and there just isn’t any point. He wants the Melleril, as much as possible, to be out of his system. He knows that this morning might be a small moment of clarity, might be the time to get things happening. I imagine he knows that without the Melleril, without the brakes, things might well explode, and he may never make it out of the hotel except in a hospital van.
On hotel stationery he writes a very basic will. ‘Since I don’t know who I love the more, I leave fifty per cent of all my possessions to my wife Tess and fifty per cent to my daughter Isabelle. To my brother Dan I leave all the forgiveness I can muster.’
He signs it and dates it. He folds it neatly and slips it inside his passport, which he places on the pillow. He writes a letter:
Isabelle, Tess.
There is no point explaining. That would be dumb. I’m dropping downwards to the centre of things. We will meet again, in one form or another.
Your loving (and slightly crazy) husband and father,
Tom
This, too, he folds and slides inside the passport.
At the carpark beneath Mount Kilauea, where the tourists’ viewing trail begins, he leaves his photo-licence propped up on the dashboard of his rental car. He scrawls a final note, to make things more obvious, and places it beside the licence. ‘Passport and relevant information back at Orbis Hotel, room 314.’ He locks the car and walks through the lush rainforest as the trail begins to wind its way up to the viewing area. He overtakes an American family, the children dressed in identical parkas, the father slightly overdone in shorts and long white socks and hiking boots. When later we contact them, they send us the photo they took of Tom, and an extra holiday snap of the smiling family taken halfway up the trail, Kilauea looming in the background.
Tom strides ahead. The rainforest begins to thin out and the view opens onto a barren moonscape, surreal undulations of lava spreading in all directions over acres and acres, gradually rising towards the high point a mile or so distant, from the lower southern edge of which billows smoke, lazily, as if from a country chimney. Tess and I went there five months after he died. It did not feel like a holiday. It’s a brown wasteland of cracked, sere rock, the rough, broken surfaces of lava baking into basalt crinkles under the tropical sun as it inches forward year after year over the smooth, ropey surfaces of the pahoehoe flows. Almost home, thinks Tom. His feet are moving him forward, one in front of the other. He notes with curiosity the rhythm of their movement.