The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  ‘You talk as if it’s childish,’ chided the Wandering Jew. Not that he cared. Technological progress was here to stay. He thought in these terms, as if progress were an edifice men had decided to construct.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that only Puroil is puerile: I mean the whole vast undirected effort. A means of making an internal combustion engine is found, so one is made. This is ridiculous. Where is the thought of what will happen when it is made? This thing is fitted to a body with wheels and there are no laws that say it can’t be given to a private citizen. So it is given. Fantastic. We change ourselves with every change in our technology. A way is found to make any number of unrelated things—so they are made. Crazy. Automation will help us, they say. But who is us? These poor devils? You and me? Or a few people who are only too keen to get rid of human components? We are allowing these random things, these inventions springing up like mushrooms in a night, to dictate the course of our own history, when we have the means to direct it now to any ends we wish. If we can think of any. We sit back as if all this were the will of God and nothing could be done. As if everything new were a gift from a spirit world. Superstition. My quarrel is that because a thing is discovered, use is made of it. I know that in the course of using the artefacts, new artefacts are made or needed or hinted at, but why allow this random, mushrooming growth to dictate the movement of history? Methods of invention have been invented. You can slow the machine down or speed it up, give us longer or shorter lives, make us different people from the genes up, but not just allow everything to happen by chance. Chance isn’t the only sort of god. We can build the sort of world we want, and if we make mistakes, start again. Climates can be altered, new rivers gouged out. We could act like gods, get into history and make it for ourselves rather than watch and wait in fear and trembling. We’re in the game, we’re no longer spectators. The future cannot only be made and predicted, it can be planned. Totalitarian? Perhaps. But at least a dictatorship by people: what we have now is dictatorship by blind events.’

  ARE YOU ONE? From these promising beginnings might have come a few words which in the hands of some young pampered genius might have been fashioned into a key to unlock the secrets of the future, or an ignition key to start the rusting, neglected engine of hope, but unfortunately for these vagrant, irresponsible, unsubsidized wishes and unfortunately for the peace and goodwill of the establishment, one of the less civilized of the drinkers chose that moment to rush up to the Wandering Jew and yell at him, ‘We’re not inside the barbed wire now, you’re just crap out here!’

  The Great White Father didn’t demand an apology from the Outside Fisherman for this breach of etiquette, for he believed men say exactly what they mean even if they mean different things at different times, and he encouraged them to stand by what they said, no matter how stupid it was.

  ‘Take it easy, Fisho,’ he said. ‘If he’s crap outside the gates, what are we?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ the Wandering Jew assured his host. ‘I am not affected by either tact or brutality.’ He said this so grandly that the Great White Father looked at his glass. Empty again. He signalled to the Ant for a fresh jug. The Outside Fisherman, not yet startled by his audacity in yelling at the Manager, had staggered away to bury his teeth in the Sandpiper’s neck. It was years since his own wife had an unwrinkled neck, it was such a belly-warming pleasure to mouth a young girl.

  Out of the blue, Ambrose said in a loud voice to the Wandering Jew, ‘We’re all against homosexuals here.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Ambrose?’ asked the Great White Father.

  ‘This nice chap is one,’ he declared flatly. His beer rocked in a sort of counter rhythm to the motion of his body.

  ‘Attention, everyone,’ yelled the Sandpiper. ‘We’ve found one!’ Movement stopped. The Humdinger took the Wandering Jew by the shirt-front and glared into his glassed eyes.

  ‘Are you one?’ he roared.

  ‘No!’ shouted the Wanderer.

  ‘He’s not one,’ said the Humdinger and released him. Everyone was relieved. The party flowed again. Ambrose wasn’t satisfied, but the Wandering Jew lurched a few steps to the north-west and Ambrose lost sight of him, for he could only see straight ahead.

  SELF-PITY The Two Pot Screamer, referred to earlier by the Great White Father as a stealer of men’s lives and lies, had taken a few notes, but alcohol had overtaken his writing-hand. His body was propped by one wall of the bed hut, notebook clutched weakly in his left hand. He had sense enough to put it into his inside pocket, but not enough to catch sight of a sheet of paper that dropped from it.

  Another man did, who had slyly taken care not to drink too fast. He picked up the paper, unfolded it and read:

  THE TWO POT SCREAMER IN CASUALTY

  They bring him in after a shanty fight

  His one enormous bottle wound still bleeds

  A nurse’s voice complains beside the light

  His dying peace disturbed by natural needs.

  His mother bled once, from her pain he came

  Beautiful as life. I ask you how

  He came to be abandoned in the rain

  Wrinkled, fragile, incontinent as now.

  His mother knew no love before he came

  She probably conceived against a fence

  Did some weak human love grow just the same

  In him whose life was caused for fifty cents?

  To this man dead for fifty years I wish

  Forgetfulness of every lifelong fear

  It was a kind of love formed him from flesh

  Best we pretend that he was never here.

  He looked at the poet’s drunken face, puzzled. Two Pot never talked about himself. It was a queer feeling to read a man’s private thoughts. This effort wouldn’t get published, either. Didn’t he mind? What made him keep applying his pen to bits of paper? He was about to put it back in the Screamer’s pocket, but had a second thought and put it in his own.

  DISNEYLAND USES HYPNOSIS ‘What about a demo from Disneyland?’ called the Humdinger.

  ‘Yeah!’ chorused several urgers.

  ‘Come on, Disneyland. Pull ’em down and let’s see you give the girls a bang. Hey, Sandpiper!’

  But his plans foundered. Disneyland wouldn’t take them off. They were all at him, but couldn’t separate him from his pants.

  ‘I don’t think he knows about girls,’ said the Sandpiper. He wasn’t insulted.

  ‘I know about girls. You kiss ’em and marry ’em,’ he said. ‘I seen it all at the movies.’ The Great White Father questioned him and found that all he knew about sex was what he’d seen at the movies. What they didn’t show he didn’t know.

  ‘Never mind. I taught him hypnosis, didn’t I, Disneyland?’ said the Humdinger.

  ‘Show us the old hypnosis, Disneyland,’ echoed the urgers.

  Disneyland stumbled forward into an open space and discarded his glass, looking for a victim. The Wandering Jew backed into view.

  ‘Hey,’ said Disneyland, spinning him round by the shoulder. ‘I’ll hypnotize you!’ He fastened onto the Jew backwards and tightened his thick young arms round the Manager’s chest.

  ‘Breathe,’ he blasted into the Wandering Jew’s ear. ‘Breathe in and out as fast as you like!’ There was nothing the Wandering Jew would rather do, since Disneyland’s grip had nearly collapsed his chest which was quite unused to the tight clasp of his fellow man. He breathed in convulsively; Disneyland’s grip pushed the breath out; he breathed again and so on, in and out, the process was in motion as taught to Disneyland by the Humdinger. Presently the Wandering Jew blacked out, falling like a sack of wet grain at the feet of Disneyland. The party roared and cheered.

  ‘You forgot to hold him up, you nong,’ said the Humdinger. But he beamed with pleasure.

  A sack of wet grain? That was a second thought. Actually the Wandering Jew fell like a sackful of dead cats and this was the original phrase, but there was something there that troubled me—what was it? Perhaps it was th
e feeling of rigidity about sacks of wet grain, or the lack of dignity in sacks full of drowned cats, or the disgrace for the local manager of a vast foreign industrial enterprise in being compared to either.

  DO NOT BEND, FOLD OR MUTILATE The Wandering Jew came round and resumed his vertical position. He tried to get back into the conversation, but couldn’t quite remember where he’d left it.

  ‘Do you believe in destiny?’ he asked diffidently.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Great White Father firmly.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The destiny of a slotted, punched card that one day suddenly finds itself alone—and important—traversing the labyrinth—’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The guts of the processing machine, to pop out at last—the card of destiny. The card the machine was set for.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘Sure enough. But don’t forget the word destiny applies just as well to the Glass Canoe or poor Blue Hills as it does to the Wandering Jew.’

  ‘Is that really what they call me?’

  ‘It’s a kind of immortality.’

  ‘But why a Jew?’

  ‘A Jew is anyone on good terms with money.’

  ‘Who are those other men you mentioned?’

  ‘Punched cards that went astray. Replaceable. Not to worry.’

  FEED MY LAMBS Perhaps it was due to the presence of an unusual bacteria in the air or to the strange feeling of freedom involved in gulping beer in a swamp that was neighbour to rich industrial land containing or capable of producing the technological marvels that are a matter of daily boredom to our sophisticated publics; perhaps it was because he felt he was losing the faculty of distinctively human speech—whatever it was, the Wandering Jew found himself walking silently among the party members with beer in one hand and biscuits in the other. The beer for himself, the biscuits for the Great White Father’s flock.

  He smiled weakly, half-drunk. No drought here, yet the flock was being hand-fed. A stray pellet of sentiment—who fired it?—struck him. Was this all he could do for his fellow man? His own defences mobilized and rushed to his aid, like antibodies roused from their kennels by the sound of strangers at the gate. Why do anything? He smiled again and those he served gave him, entirely free, curious looks.

  As he passed among the multitude he committed certain errors of judgement, ever and anon dropping biscuits or the crumbs and poorer relations of biscuits into the beer of his fellow man. Many disciples cursed him, but the glow of perfect charity that filled him made the sounding brass and tinkling symbols of their complaints seem as nothing. Had he not heeded the command of the Father when he said, ‘Feed my fish?’ He peered into their glasses, dropped crumbs into the depths, and half expected to see mouths devour them. Conveniently equipped with tails, of course.

  One man was prone. Face up, mouth open. A fly fished tentatively from his lower teeth, apparently unaware that closing jaws could place him in jeopardy.

  As the natural current of air drew him down, he gripped the teeth with suckered feet and wrapped his wings close about him. As the air blew out, his wings flattened of their own accord in the draught and he had to hang on even more grimly. Getting a meal was difficult under these conditions, but not impossible.

  With care and compassion, the Wandering Jew—representative in New South Wales of the wealth and might of overseas controllers and in the Home Beautiful a feeder of the Great White Father’s flock or school, of lambs or fish—the Wandering Jew aimed a goodly crumb, taking care, as Galileo did in his celebrated experiment, but for a different reason, to select a crumb that would not allow the factor of air resistance or wind direction to deflect it from its proper path—into this open mouth with the dual desire of delivering the man from the attentions of the fly and of giving nourishment.

  He parted his fingers, the crumb descended. Earth’s gravitational properties normal. The fly saw it coming and took to the air, then returned undaunted to the pickings. But crumb descended past teeth, past tongue, into the gullet and tipped the uvula in passing. Things happened quickly. Breath was sucked in sharply, fly was inhaled and portcullis of teeth shut with a snap, chipping a tiny piece of enamel from a bicuspid incisor.

  Crumb, breath, fly, enamel—all were trapped. Not for ever. With the casual air of a doctor treating someone else’s ailments, the Wandering Jew waited for the mouth to reopen, and when it did, poured in beer. From his own glass. Greater love hath no man.

  Motives and aim were good. Beer followed crumb past teeth and tongue and swamped the uvula. But he reckoned without the stomach, which did not need beer.

  In the twinkling of an eye (that space of time, we are still assured, which will be occupied in resurrecting and assembling the dead of the past million or so years, depending on whether we date the emergence of man from the time he or it first stood erect, first used words, first used weapons or first killed for fun. Any of the typically human actions. Although if the agent of this miracle of synthesis is in any doubt on this point, the time may be exceeded. But this is enough of that. Our Maker, Killer and eventual Re-maker must not be thought of as being in doubt. The question: Why, if we are to be resurrected, kill us at all? occurs naturally, but to presume such a Person capable of doubt, this is blasphemy)—in the twinkling of an eye, the Wandering Jew was privileged to see the first recorded vertical vomit.

  Geyser. Gusher. Blowout. Words rushed to his aid, waiting obediently to be said. Another instance of Australia’s riches in natural gas.

  The flow subsided, there was no need to cap this well. The man was still unconscious and the fly dead. And there, all over the shoes of the Wandering Jew and the bottoms of his trousers, which he should have worn rolled, was the material that had given this man his name. The Wandering Jew had met Big Bits.

  THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE Beer had been flowing into the drinkers and, after processing, out again into the surrounding swamp; frogs, in their mucky pools, barked less often and were limp.

  Ambrose came slowly back into circulation.

  ‘If he’s not one, is he married?’ he demanded of everyone he bumped. ‘Is he? I’m married. I’m not one.’

  He was persistent, so the Great White Father got him off the Wandering Jew’s back.

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Soon,’ replied the man born to be Branch Manager, and to silence Ambrose the Great White Father stood on the step of one of the bed huts and addressed the multitude on the sanctity of marriage.

  ‘Marriage is rightly regarded as sacred. Marriage sanctifies the single-bed sinner, it puts on the straight path the dodgy lodger and blesses the union of those who tire of the back seat of the car, the fence behind the picture show, the bottom of a boat, the beach at night, golf course, office carpet. Marriage loosens the nuts and tightens the bankroll, it conjures storms from a clear sky and children from careless conversations. It is a gift from heaven that must be paid for in instalments, of which each day is one and yet not one, for the balance owing never diminishes, only cancels very suddenly. With a word. Or the lack of a smile. It is a bonus from life in which two can be a world, and that world coloured with the beauty of gods and ringing with the music of distant galaxies—or the voice of prisoners bickering in a cell.’

  He hadn’t meant it to sound serious, but he caught his conscience inadvertently on a little snag left in his memory by the rupture of his own marriage.

  WELCOME, STRANGER Some strangers called in late that afternoon, men who wandered along the river bank and were fascinated by the game of tree cricket they saw. The cricketers kept their alcohol level up by frequent trips back to the keg, but always returned to their game. The strangers wandered up the path to the source of this refreshment, which they could smell at a distance, and mentioned a drink.

  ‘What about it?’ called Canada Dry, who stood up, all seventy-seven inches of him, ready to repel the invader.

  ‘Let ’em drink.’ The great man gave the nod.

  ‘Who pays for this bounty?�
�� slurred the Wandering Jew, and the great man answered quietly, for his ears only.

  ‘They all chip in. I foot the bill for the extras. I’d rather give the beer away than sell it, and these are strangers. We’ll fill them up so they don’t remember a thing and Volga will transport them downstream under the bridge where they can sleep it off.’

  The Wandering Jew started to wander off innocently away from the main party, but everywhere he strayed he stumbled over bodies in pairs on the naked ground. Far into the mangroves there were the unmistakeable flutters and grunts, thumps and slaps of love. Man pressed woman back into the earth everywhere, compelling her to the horizontal of sickness, sleep, death, love.

  Did he envy them? Would he have shared their poverty just to have these working wives on the floor of a swamp? Not likely. The suave daughters of the better classes had been available to him ever since he was released from a highly private Public School in Melbourne. There was nothing to envy and nothing to fear: these people thought only of their bellies and what depended from them.

  Perhaps it was good they had this man to look to, whose words some took for saint’s words, who probably kept his dirty fingernail clippings and jars of his bottled breath.

  By five o’clock another keg was running dry and the trusty ones were off to get another. This time the keg went slower, for many were indisposed. The Wandering Jew insisted he had to go, otherwise there would be search parties out for him—which wasn’t strictly true—so they reluctantly agreed.

  ‘Don’t go yet. We’re just beginning to like you,’ protested the Humdinger, but the words had a sound of good-bye. The Great White Father knew that the Wanderer wouldn’t stay the night, so he was blindfolded again and the Volga Boatman took him round a little farther than Clearwater wharf and led him off through thick rushes to the back of the saltwater pumphouse and so to the cooling water tower, where the Mercedes was parked. The blindfold was removed and Volga waited till the Mercedes made a few kangaroo starts then lurched off up the road before he went back to the boat. The Wandering Jew said to himself over and over in the car, ‘He uses his own money. His own money. On those dregs. His own money.’ He couldn’t get over it.