by Tim Richards
‘I prefer doctors who remember the basics,’ Melissa countered.
‘Sure. But we make the mistake of thinking that memory is intrinsically valuable – the more stuff you remember, the better off you are. And forgetting is meant to represent some sort of failure. But communal life is forgetting. To have a language with nouns and generalisations, to have numbers … All that means overlooking the uniqueness of things. Tailoring facts, obliterating small distinctions. We humans didn’t become the ascendant species on the planet by learning to remember. We learnt what to forget. Now we forget without being aware that we’re forgetting. But it’s forgetting that allows us to rule the earth. Forgetting allows us to distort our true place in the scheme of things.’
Melissa was angered by this gush of well-rehearsed abstraction. The man was forgetting her unique presence in his house.
‘So what is it that’s so unforgettable about being an astronaut, Jim?’
‘Come here,’ he said, coaxing her through the door into a windowless room. When he flicked on the light, Melissa found herself inside a private shrine. She’d entered Jim Mathers’ personal space.
On the wall nearest the light switch was a framed group photograph of astronauts involved in the Gemini and Apollo space missions. Of these, Melissa recognised Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. Jim pointed out Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Stafford and James Lovell, along with the three astronauts who died in the launchpad fire: Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. Standing in the back row, younger, with a crew-cut, but the same earnest expression, was James Mathers.
Across from that was a photograph of Jim with Frank Borman, and a blown-up Life magazine image of Jim, clichéd as they come, standing helmet over heart beside the nose cone of his fighter jet. Inside a large glass cabinet was Jim’s spacesuit from one of the later Gemini missions. And taking up most of one wall was a massive framed photograph of Jim shaking hands with President Johnson.
Melissa’s bluff had been called. As she moved around the room, Jim stood motionless in front of the group photograph.
‘Do you ever see these people?’
‘You’d be surprised how few of them drive along the Western Australian coast.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘What happened?’
‘What happened was that I spent fifteen years training for the summit of human ambition, and right at the threshold, my body betrayed me. At the launch, it was like someone pulled the plug out. I kept throwing up. And shitting myself in a continuous stream. Through the testing, they’d slung us, and spun us, and rolled us all day. I had a constitution of steel. But the moment we left the launchpad, there was nothing I could hold back … We thought it would settle, but it got worse. I couldn’t rehydrate. We were supposed to be up there five days, do hundreds of orbits. I was going to walk in space, work with new tools and take photographs. I was too sick to move.’
Melissa saw Jim still there in the capsule, reliving his shame.
‘I could hear Ruskies cheering the story of the American astronaut who couldn’t stop shitting.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Think how much courage it took.’
‘“The world was his oyster, and space was his bathroom.”’
‘They didn’t!’
‘You have to understand the States. People don’t shit there. In the States, you can call the president a motherfucker, and the president can call whoever he likes a motherfucker … But try calling a washroom a toilet. See how that impresses people. Americans don’t shit. Shitting’s an unAmerican act.’
By this time, Melissa was feeling soiled herself, as if the plumbing had backed up into Jim’s shrine.
‘We had to abort the external experiments. NASA made excuses. To cut the mission short, they said an oxygen cylinder malfunctioned. It was a nightmare. I mean, Pete and Gene, they were OK about it. They were worried for me. I lost thirty pounds in four days. Nothing was said officially, but everyone knew. People with no connection to NASA, they’d see you and be consoling. “I hear it was hard for you up there, Jim.” And you just knew they’d been joking about it with their friends over a Bud … I really thought that one day I’d kick moondust.’
‘What did the doctors say?’
‘They said it was some kind of panic reaction. But my breathing was fine. I saw a dozen shrinks. The whole story was so tainted with shame you couldn’t wade through the shit to see what brought it on in the first place. It might have been a virus. Some inner ear thing they hadn’t seen. But NASA had to account for the failure of their simulators. The doctors wanted to spend a year experimenting on me. They planned to recreate those four days of crapping and chucking so they’d have a name for it if they saw it again … That telescope on the back porch might be the only optical instrument that hasn’t been used to look up my ass.’
Jim’s mood had shifted. He was beginning to float, as Bowie said of Major Tom, in a most peculiar way.
‘Does it do you good to keep these souvenirs?’
‘You have to carry stuff with you in order to leave it behind.’
‘NASA let you take your space suit?’
‘I stole it. I went AWOL. I wasn’t going to become NASA’s motion-sickness experiment. They wanted to torture me for wasting their money.’
Melissa was trying to piece things together, puzzling how someone could be so conspicuously on the run without being caught and extradited. Jim said two presidents had wanted to grant a pardon, but NASA opposed pardon on the grounds that publicising Jim’s story would diminish the mystique of astronauts and drain public support for the Space Program. Although NASA had no immediate interest in bringing proceedings against Jim, they liked to know where he was, and the CIA sent along the occasional old couple with a trailer to make sure that he wasn’t acting against the interests of the United States.
‘But it’s been thirty years. What if you never go home?’
‘I prefer being at a distance from things. I tried living in the Greek islands. I lived in India. I don’t remember how I found my way here, but it suits me. I don’t depend on anyone.’
And she saw that this was true. Jim was self-absorbed as he was self-reliant. He hadn’t asked Melissa about herself, or what a young woman was doing travelling the west coast on her own. He hadn’t bothered to ask her name. However uncomfortable he was in space, Jim still liked the sense of being orbited, of having primary importance.
Yet Jim was more important than she would ever be. She felt a different sort of sexual curiosity then. Not the lust that attended their enigmatic first meeting, but the desire to hear his story told unambiguously. She wanted the man to reveal himself in a way that only sex allows.
There were no clocks in the astronaut’s house. It might have been ten in the evening, or four in the morning.
‘Are you going to show me where the bedroom is,’ Melissa asked, ‘or do I have to find it myself ?’
‘Young lady, I’m not sure that I know your name,’ he said, faking gentility.
When the astronaut caressed her flesh, he did so like someone inspecting his first naked woman. Yet he knew enough about exploration to find the terrains in most urgent need of reconnaissance.
There was an agelessness about him. Melissa hadn’t been with a man this much older than her, but it wouldn’t have made sense to focus on the age difference. Jim wasn’t subject to normal laws and forces. Even his dick seemed to defy Newtonian physics.
Midway through their union, when he was sliding in and out of her with vigour and expertise, Jim said, ‘No matter how well we fuck, I can’t plant the seed of Jesus Christ inside you. Only God can plant Christ inside a woman.’
Melissa waited for a punchline, but Jim only continued to move pleasurably inside her. She felt properly warned not to confuse Jim with a deity. When she hinted at this episode later, he denied having said anything of the sort.
The astronaut fell asleep not long after his second encore, but Melissa chewed over events and impre
ssions for some time.
She never slept well when travelling. In her travelling dreams, tragedy always befell loved ones, and there was no way of contacting her. She’d be bodysurfing while a parent was being laid to rest. Frivolous and irresponsible. Sometimes, she’d dream of returning home to find Rob with one of her friends, his face nuzzling Kelly or Tara’s underside. The travelling Melissa often woke up in tears.
Now she woke to the most terrible howling. She felt sure there must be an intruder, someone standing above them with a weapon, but her astronaut was in the throes of a nightmare. Minutes passed before Melissa’s stroking began to settle him. Jim’s eyes were wide open, full of panic, and only gradually did he arrive at waking consciousness.
‘It’s all right,’ she told him, but the phrase ‘just a dream’ stuck in her throat. Who could imagine the dreams that plague banished angels?
They were eating breakfast on a balcony overlooking the ocean when Jim tried to explain. By then, the man was so removed from the terror she’d witnessed he might have been describing a movie.
‘It isn’t so much a recurring dream as an image that returns in different contexts. I’m unprepared. An analyst would say that’s what the dream is about, being unprepared.’
‘What happens?’
‘After leaving Greece, I went to India. I was looking for distance, spirituality, I don’t know. Never had time to dip my toes. They followed me everywhere. The Company was worried I’d give information to the Chinese. It wasn’t a very spiritual time. The Indians wanted to obliterate Pakistan, and cholera was everywhere, killing thousands.
‘I lived in a house on stilts at the fringe of a jungle. Life was primitive. And I never really got the hang of things, just waiting to get sick, or whacked by the CIA. If they’d poisoned my food, no one would have known. When the monsoon hit, it rained like Noah never saw rain. The creek at the bottom of my path became this massive river tugging at the stilts. No way to escape. I just sat out on the verandah, figuring that sooner or later the house would collapse. You’d see bodies floating past, or people drowning. If they’d been closer, I could have thrown out a rope or something. Whole houses. The rain never let up, and the river was this big brown tide of refuse.
‘Then one morning, I saw something gold in the distance, rolling through the brown water. As it came closer I saw it was a tiger that had been swept out of the jungle. Awesome, the size of two men stretched out, turning and bucking. Every now and then, a leg would kick just to kid you that it might still be alive. I’d lose it under the water for a minute, then it would rise, getting bigger as it got closer. And this tiger was huge. You couldn’t imagine that a tide of water could defeat it. And finally, just for a moment, it caught against the stilts. My private tiger. A tiger washed up on my doorstep. Then it rolled, and when the head turned I saw a gaping red socket-hole where its eye should have been. Terrible fucking thing, that gash on something so perfect. Rolling away on the flood. And after that, I could only see the wound. As if that wound devoured the tiger whole … I’d seen maimed children, dead children, but the tiger with the missing eye was like nothing on God’s earth.’
Now Jim was stuck with it. Twenty-five years later, he’d dream that he was talking to someone, or fucking someone, and their eyes would pop out. He’d be shaving, and suddenly he’d have no eyes, just bleeding sockets. Always when he was least prepared for it.
Melissa looked down at her untouched fried egg. Her head was churning with tigers, and shit-tides, and Jesus-seed, and if Jim Mathers had told her that the CIA had spread something on her toast to make her credit the incredible, she would have believed him without question.
After recounting his tiger story, the storekeeper wasn’t so talkative. It was nearly eight, and he had to open up. There was no question of Melissa staying, or Jim asking her to. The sun was rising fiery hot behind them, and she wanted to be away from his house, to be swallowed by the surf. She couldn’t remember whether Jim actually said goodbye, wished her well, or asked her to convey his regards to the US government. One minute, he was tall and still, mid-frame in her rear-vision mirror; the next there was a cloud of dust as her car moved off, and then Jim Mathers vanished.
Melissa would never understand why she chose to betray Jim when recounting her adventures. Maybe she lost confidence in her ability to do Jim justice, to bring narrative coherence to the man’s zero-gravity life. Maybe she knew that Jim’s story would end up swamping her own tales of space travel.
As her friends sat drinking in a beer garden, she told them about the three tyres that needed to be changed in a fifty-kilometre stretch just out of Alice. She told them of the unexpected trip on a pearling boat off Broome where she’d been proposed to by a fifty-year-old half-Chinese, half-Tiwi pearler.
When it came to the story they were most eager to hear, the story of a torrid, Rob-erasing sexual tryst, she told them that she’d met an American who owned a store on the coast, a few hundred kilometres from Perth.
The American took her back to his house, and they fucked like there was no tomorrow. This bloke Jim was thirty-five, maybe forty. Intense. Paranoid. Melissa told her friends that Jim was a photographer who specialised in digital collage. He could place himself inside any event in history and make the images utterly convincing.
The story took on its own reality as Melissa told it. Jim had done a series of prints where he superimposed himself into the US Space Program so that you couldn’t tell he hadn’t been there with John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. The problem was, Jim forgot he wasn’t there. The collages were so compelling Jim managed to convince himself that he’d been an astronaut. But it wasn’t for her to audit the truth. She was just floating by. Testing the limits of adventure. Who was she to bruise a fellow traveller?
THE TRUE NATION
The first thing that strikes you is the cleanliness. Their trains are remarkably clean. They are not new trains, nor is it a wealthy society – by the standards we use to define wealth it’s a poor nation – but the people are proud. It’s there in the way they carry themselves, and the way they celebrate the volunteer. On weekends, you see ordinary people – schoolchildren, doctors, the elderly … You see them in the railyards scrubbing the trains, cleaning seats, making them spotless.
You couldn’t fail to be impressed. I’ve travelled on trains in many countries and these are by far the cleanest. When looking out the window, you see things that would have eluded you if someone hadn’t taken pride in the clarity of the glass. The locals are proud of their rail system, and they care about the impression their trains make upon foreign visitors, or guests as they prefer to call us.
How many nations are there where the people just don’t care? Toilets never cleaned until the train arrives at its destination. Why bother when they already have your money? And what little you can see is a form of visual pollution. Refuse. Or an endless sequence of lingerie billboards, Amazonian women in transparent black garments. No modesty. And that’s exactly what you notice about these people: modesty, a lack of cynicism, pride.
The language reflects their passions. I’ve made note of thirty- seven different phrases to describe states of cleanliness. Where we might speak of purity, snow-whiteness, of the pristine or the unadulterated, here they have thirty-seven carefully delineated terms, and just as many to describe uncleanliness.
A critically disposed person might argue that their pride is preconditioned, that this modesty is culturally predetermined by linguistic parameters. But these forces are not sufficient to explain their delight in voluntary labour, or their determination to go beyond the call of duty. There is a saying here, ‘The true nation abhors contamination.’
Although many visitors complain about the refusal to allow guests to leave the trains, arguing that one can’t hope to experience the country from the inside of a railway carriage, I believe that to appreciate a foreign culture, you have to accept it in good faith. You need to embrace its very foreignness. I don’t see these restrictions on movement as an att
empt to conceal or deceive. If there is deception here, then it is a self-deception attached to the erroneous belief that one could step out of a railway carriage and merge with the local scene, that a tourist could in some way enter the local culture without disrupting it.
Many tourists travel with too much baggage. They find it difficult to come to terms with a society such as this. A society that prizes dispossession and service.
Late one evening, travelling through the mountains that divide the coast from the capital, the train stopped at a small platform to pick up three passengers. The little group shuffled through two carriages before arriving at my compartment, where their seats were reserved.
A pair of intensely pretty girls, each wearing State Rail uniforms, were accompanied by an elegant older woman, a government-appointed chaperone. The girls could scarcely contain their excitement as they told me that they had been chosen from several thousand applicants in their province to take part in a tunnel-cleaning detail. After travelling two hundred kilometres to a State Rail camp, they would spend four weeks cleaning tunnels with one hundred successful applicants railed in from all across the nation. At the camp, they would receive tuition in engineering, cartography and the use of explosives. But the bulk of their time would be spent scrubbing the inside of tunnels and singing the songs traditionally sung by tunnel-detailers.
I couldn’t resist asking what the point was in scrubbing the inside of tunnels, since the filth or cleanliness of a tunnel couldn’t be discerned by those passing through. For a moment the chaperone seemed likely to intercept my question, but the smaller of the two girls, with a delightful smile and a mop of carrot-red hair, told me it was vital that guests should be able to imagine that their tunnels are pristine.
This girl told me that tunnel-cleaning details are intended to teach the young to respect the potency of the imagination.