Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  Outside the room Johnny said, quietly, ‘She’s so thirsty. This is barbaric.’

  ‘It’s how it works, Johnno,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry it’s like this. But you have to know—this happens all the time. I know it’s hard to see, but I promise this is all normal.’

  Nina emerged from the room. She had the baby on her hip. Her daughter, the older kid, hung in the doorway.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Nina said. ‘That was incredible. I’m glad she saw you both.’

  ‘She would have wanted in-home care,’ Johnny said in a low voice.

  Nina nodded. ‘Well, thank you for being here when I had to make that decision. Thank you very fucking much for making yourself available.’ She looked down at her children, as though she were surprised to find them there.

  Johnny and I didn’t speak until we were in the parking lot. Then he said, Thank you. He said, You are a very good little actress.

  We got home and began to fuck like it was nothing at all.

  Our bodies were confused. It was like coming home.

  ‘I miss this,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t. You don’t.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  We were in the guest room. We were lying on its bedspread, duck-egg blue. I wasn’t certain I could fall asleep beside him, but every other room seemed a strange choice.

  ‘Do you think we could have ever made it work?’ he asked.

  I sat up. I fished around for my sweatshirt. ‘No, Johnny.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I love you like I love myself.’

  ‘You hate yourself.’

  ‘I don’t hate myself. Sometimes I just kind of—can’t bear it. You know what I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘God, Abby, you’re being a real cunt. You’re being so hard.’

  ‘I’m a cunt,’ I said. ‘Your sister is a cunt.’

  ‘Well, don’t talk to me like I’m a stranger.’

  ‘I don’t know how to play this,’ I said helplessly. ‘You can tell your mom whatever you want but we’re acting. That was a past life.’

  His face scrunched up in an ugly way. He was crying.

  I got up and closed all the windows. I ran a shower. When I went back to the guest room he’d fallen asleep on top of the covers. I went to his sister’s room, and dragged her duvet to the couch.

  In the morning I heard him talking to the woman next door. I looked out the window at him. He was wearing a sweatshirt that must have belonged to Nina once. Dartmouth, its crest, white on pine green, the motto: VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO.

  We drove back to the hospital. The traffic made me hostile. I said, ‘I hate this city.’

  ‘You wouldn’t if you’d grown up here.’

  We were on the freeway. I was feeling like I’d rather get out and walk.

  ‘I hate Wichita,’ I said. ‘I grew up there.’

  ‘Wichita is the butthole of the earth.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it like that.’

  ‘See,’ he said. ‘You don’t hate Wichita. Anyway, there are nice parts of LA.’

  ‘Like what.’

  ‘The dog park up on Mulholland.’

  ‘The dog park.’ I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I didn’t care if he’d been serious or not. He was laughing, too, both of us weak and sobbing with it, there, not halfway to the hospital. We just could not stop.

  Cathy passed away before noon. Johnny was with her. I was downstairs on the street, walking around in the sun, on the phone to my own mom. As soon as I set foot back in the room, I knew what had happened. Johnny was sitting on the rubber mattress on the floor, his legs spilling onto the linoleum.

  Nina was already on her way in. It didn’t seem fair that she hadn’t been there, with all the vigils she’d kept. She arrived with her husband. She touched Cathy’s hands, folded; then her cheek, then her hair. She looked from Johnny’s face to mine.

  ‘You can stop now,’ she said.

  But we sat there for a few hours more. None of us was in any hurry. Cathy looked younger than she had in years. All the pain had gone from her face. She was newborn.

  In the family house that night I fixed us a lazy supper. We watched the evening news. There had been a mudslide in Washington. Two boys were still missing. Their father hoped they might be alive; trapped, somehow, in a pocket of air in the mud. After we ate Johnny went down to the cellar and came back with a bottle of Bryant Family Cabernet. He said, ‘I’m an orphan now. We might as well.’

  We sat out in the yard to drink, on the heavy lawn furniture. I smoked and he did, too. The phone kept ringing inside. After the fourth call he disconnected it. I was very tired. The garden was cool and closed in with pines and oleanders and other things I didn’t know the names of.

  He slept in his childhood room and I went to the guest room. In the carpeted hall that led from one to the other, we stood opposite each other, and he kissed me with his devastated, expensive wine mouth. He held my face in his hands. He said: ‘You were great.’

  HUNGRY FOR GOD

  This was the part of the memory she didn’t tell anyone: him standing in the drive, ready to burn. The silence after she cut the engine. The country darkness was a heavy clean black, the stars sharp, but he was washed in light from the porch and her car. When she got closer she saw he was trembling, shivering, crying; wild hair and eyes, jerry can in his hands.

  They were young then. Twenty, twenty-one.

  He did burn down a house eventually, and that was where their friendship ended; there, or after the terrible six months they spent living together in the apartment in Griffith; or when he dropped out of school and disappeared; or when he came back and took to her car with a tyre iron—but all that came later. This was when they were new, still learning each other’s ciphers.

  They were both scholarship students and they liked to joke about it sometimes. She was the only brown girl in their residential college, he was the only poor kid. July, after exams, they left Canberra for the holidays. Nisha to the Melbourne suburbs where her family lived, Callan to his mother’s house in Jerilderie. They sent letters. This was 1993. She wrote him eight pages about her cousin’s wedding, a drily funny account of the day, each new paragraph neatly indented. The legal pad paper was thin, like the pages of a bible. Her looping script darkened when he held it up to the window. He wrote to her once the first week—It’s sort of maddening now that I’m here—and twice the second. He phoned one evening in the third week. Her mother answered.

  ‘It’s one of your university friends,’ she told Nisha, her palm over the receiver.

  Nisha had few friends in Canberra. Still, she was surprised when it was his voice.

  ‘It’s really bad,’ he said. She heard him breaking.

  She told her parents the truth: her friend was sick and she needed to go help him. He lived in the country. His home was not an easy one.

  ‘You can’t leave now,’ her father said, but she did. They could see she was worried. They didn’t fight her. She threw books and bags and shoes hurriedly into the boot of her old Corolla, and her father re-packed it all into tidy mountains. He tucked twenty dollars for petrol into her hand. Her mother gave her food in plastic containers, a thermos of tea. It was only when she was an hour up the Hume that she felt a spasm of sorrow at leaving them.

  She did not stop except to call him once from a servo payphone, scribbling his directions on the inside of her wrist. She hadn’t thought about what would happen when she arrived.

  The night was so black, the road to his house unmade. She drove slowly and still stones rained against the car. The house dawned on her suddenly, and him, too: he was barefoot, wearing only a singlet and boxer briefs. He was thin-limbed, streaked with dirt, shivering. The jerry can trembled in his arms.

  She got out of the car. The fog moved in the headlights.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. She kept her distance, as if from a feral animal. ‘I’m going to take you back to coll
ege. I need you to put down the petrol.’

  He nodded, and dropped the jerry can at his feet. He looked relieved, like he’d only been waiting for her permission not to set the world on fire. There was snot on his face.

  ‘Is anyone in the house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. We’re going to go inside, pack your stuff, and go. All right?’

  He nodded. Her fingers buzzed with the memory of the steering wheel. The road was still vibrating in her bones.

  In his childhood bedroom she helped him pack clothes and books into an Ansett duffel bag. She folded his T-shirts like a mother, like a housekeeper, only permitting herself to look around when he left the room. It was cold and spare. A peeling poster of the solar system on the wall. Cheap desk in pale pine; grime and scuff marks on the skirting board; plastic venetian blinds blown out. His height from age eight was marked on the doorway. She watched him grow in increments to her eye level, then taller.

  He threw his toothbrush and razor into the bag, yanked at the zip.

  ‘Ready?’ she said.

  He lurched at her. She almost reeled backwards before she realised he was reaching for her. She touched his hair, his neck. She smelled petrol and sweat.

  She drove for hours. He slept beside her like a man anaesthetised. A boy. His face turned young when the vigilance left it. Later, this was how she liked to remember him. And yet: so much of his beauty was the mania that crackled around him like static. He was never more alive than at 3 a.m., the morning of the exam, pacing around her room as he recited the required knowledge of reflexes and homeostatic control; or performing a hot-shoe shuffle in the common room, kebab in hand, after a night out; or jogging beside her in the grey, frigid mornings, arguing about entropy. The damp Canberra cold got into her lungs and burned her sinuses, but he was never out of breath.

  She let herself feel pleased, in a narrow way, that he’d trusted her enough to call. She wanted to keep him. Not in the sense of possession—just to contain him somehow, somewhere safe. Her car shuddered in the wake of the road trains that passed in the other direction, lights ablaze.

  Once she stopped to piss by the side of the highway. She was squatted and shivering, one palm to the hood of the car for the warmth, when she heard a keening. She knew it was a fox, but it sounded just like a baby. She pulled up her jeans in a hurry.

  He was still asleep, slack-mouthed, when she pulled into a roadhouse not far from the city. Neon steam rose from a neon coffee cup hanging in the window. A sign above the petrol prices promised HOT CHIPS AND CAPUCCINOS. She felt dazed. She went around to the passenger side and opened the door. He did not stir.

  ‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘Callan. We’re going to get breakfast.’

  ‘Breakfast?’ he said.

  ‘How long since you’ve eaten?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘I said—’

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. His head fell against her. She felt the warmth and weight of it on her sternum. She cradled him. She touched his lank hair, stroked his cheek.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  He followed her across the car park, dutiful as an old dog. She’d never met someone less interested in food. He ate only when he remembered to, and because his body demanded it. He’d once told her that growing up, his mother had made tomato soup by diluting tomato sauce in a cup of boiling water.

  They sat by a window. Their own faces shone back at them. It was still dark out. There was a sliver of silver-blue at the horizon. The floor was crunchy underfoot; the table smeared with dishcloth streaks. Nisha scraped her hair into a stumpy ponytail and watched him squint at the laminated menu. He still hadn’t decided when the waitress came back for the second time. Nisha ordered him coffee and an omelette.

  ‘You were sleeping like the dead,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. You must have needed it.’

  He put a hand across his eyes. ‘I haven’t slept in nine days,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ she said.

  She washed her hands and face, scrubbed the biro from her wrist. She felt jetlagged. She looked at her watch. It was not even twelve hours since he’d phoned. For a brief moment she imagined her body, another one, still reading on the f loral couch at her parents’ house in Mulgrave. Her father would be getting up to go to work soon. What are you doing on the couch? Turn on the light. You’ll strain your eyes.

  She sat opposite him again.

  ‘Did you notice anything? When you went to the bathroom?’ he asked.

  ‘What? Have I got something in my teeth?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no. Look at my face. Can you hear anything?’

  His voice was conspiratorial. One knee jiggled up and down beneath the table. Nisha felt unease rising in her.

  He leaned over the tabletop and gripped her chin so she couldn’t turn her head. Their faces were very close.

  ‘It’s not a trick,’ he said. ‘What do you hear?’

  ‘Just normal kitchen noises,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know. Highway sounds. People’s conversations.’

  ‘Huh!’ he said triumphantly. He released her jaw. She looked around gingerly. It dawned on her as he spoke.

  ‘There is not another table here,’ he said, very quietly, ‘with more than one person sitting at it. Every single person in this place is talking to themselves.’

  The waitress brought their food. They ate in silence, struggling to hold in laughter. They tried to tune in to the frequency of the chatter around them, but the words overlapped and hummed and tripped. It was hard to make out whole sentences. Once, though, the man at the table closest to them put his head in his hands and cried Oh, I am hungry for God! with such ardour and desolation that the scene stopped being funny. Callan trowelled forkfuls of oily yellow egg into his mouth until his plate was clean, then laid his head on his arms. He looked up at her and gave a sleepy smile. She could picture him as a baby.

  ‘You look all right now,’ she said.

  ‘There are craters in the moon we need telescopes to see, bud,’ he said in an American man’s voice, and if he was quoting a film she didn’t know it, but she smiled at the table.

  She pulled her toast into strips.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said at last.

  Canberra was blue at dawn. The college was empty. His room looked unlived in, though he’d been there only a few weeks ago. Nisha thought of his childhood bedroom. What evidence there was of him on this earth was very little.

  He dropped his duffel bag on the floor. ‘Will you stay?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just down the hall,’ she said. He lay on the single bed in his clothes and blinked at her.

  She fell back on the couch across from him.

  ‘Get a blanket,’ he said.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She planned to leave once he was asleep, but she dropped off, too. When she woke it was after two in the afternoon and her neck was stiff. Her hand grazed the cinderblock wall. The room was fusty with their unshowered bodies, unbrushed teeth. She rolled over and looked up through the window. The sky was bloodshot with blossoms.

  Later he’d tell the story; they both would, and in the same way, although they had not seen each other in more than twenty years. They both redacted the beginning and end. The roadhouse restaurant full of loonies was the difficult punchline. There was no reason offered for the night spent driving from Jerilderie to Canberra; it was just a long-ago thing that happened at university. Each of them shed their name to become a friend, clean and vacant and anonymous.

  Callan remembered other things about her that never fit into the retelling. Her child-sized hands. Her spasms of laughter, which were so rare, so unexpected, that they tore through him like a forest fire, too. A few years later, in medical school, they’d learned to suture on pig trotters. Hers were spectacularly neat. Everything was so easy for her. She had two cassette tapes in her car when she came to get him—Baby Ani
mals and L7. She wore ratty flannel shirts that slid off her shoulders. The terrible time, when they were twenty-three, when he’d betrayed her in front of her parents—longing, suddenly, to hurt her and her kind, tight-knit family—and it started the argument that ended their friendship.

  He remembered himself at that time, too, so full of hunger. Too ravenous to ever sleep. The books he’d read, at first to keep up, then to tread water, then to know things for his own pleasure. How happy he’d been! He wanted to have long hair so he could wear it the way girls did in winter, tucked into the collars of their jumpers and coats.

  He saw her on television once. Just a flash, a fragment. It was in the years when he had a night job cleaning aeroplanes. Walking through the empty terminals, he saw the same news clips play over and over from wall-mounted televisions. And there she was, older but unmistakable. Children are remarkably resilient, she’d said, and some other things. She was talking about a toddler who had survived a horrific house fire. Her name and position at the Royal Children’s Hospital floated on a banner beneath her face, but he recognised her before that. Was it strange they’d wound up living in the same city? Perhaps not. Her face still filled him with a fearful love. The terminal was as silent as a mausoleum. He stood beneath the screen.

  PRESSURE OKAY

  He heard that the MTC was putting on Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. He remembered studying it, and he remembered Kirsten studying it thirty years later. He phoned her and asked if she’d like to go. Or it could have been her idea. Maybe she’d sent him one of her text messages. A photo of the advertisement on the side of a tram and a stream of question marks, like one of those puzzles in the paper where you had to make meaning from two oblique images. He didn’t remember precisely what the play was about. Something about men attracted to strong light, the way the sugarcane grew straight, yearly pilgrimages. He bought the tickets, anyhow.

  His daughter worked at the university. She was interested in everything to do with women being included, or not included, in revolutions, from the French one through to the Arab Spring. She taught classes on subjects Wes couldn’t altogether believe existed. On occasion he’d gone to visit her, or meet her for lunch. Even though he recognised her office as meagre, he was frightened of the sandstone it lurked within. The sight of the academics moving across the courtyards with their blue lanyards; the students with their friends and mobile phones and impossibly young faces; the cordoned-off smoking areas all made his guts heave. He felt sure someone would recognise him as an impostor and drag him out at once, away from this place where his daughter was so at ease, and back to the funeral home where he worked. She knew the names of the staff serving coffee from what seemed, to Wes, to be a shipping container planted on one of the pale brick paths.