Thought Crimes

by Tim Richards

  When I joked that it was a pity someone couldn’t scrub clean their guests’ imaginations, the young redhead flushed with embarrassment, and the chaperone fired off a rebuke.

  ‘Our people never have any trouble with their imaginations. And we regard it as good manners to think well of our guests. We prefer to believe that nothing from an outsider’s imagination could possibly contaminate the thoughts of someone who respects the imagination’s potency. And we can hope that because we know our tunnels are clean.’

  For the next hour the compartment was silent. Finally, a guard opened the door to advise the three women that they would soon arrive at a junction where they would be required to change trains. This news elevated their mood sufficiently for me to forget my faux pas and ask if they could show me on the map where their tunnel-cleaning activities would take place.

  The chaperone withdrew a State Rail map from her shoulder bag and pointed to a division of lines at the north-eastern extreme of the dividing range. This confused me. I was certain that we were then travelling on the north-western side of the dividing range, from whence we would begin the slow descent into the capital. Producing a map that I had photocopied from an international guide book, I asked the chaperone to indicate our current position.

  ‘But this isn’t a map of our country.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I told her, pointing to the title at the top of the map, the name of the capital, and several other territories.

  ‘Where is the ocean?’

  I pointed to the coast, but this didn’t satisfy her. On her own map she indicated a large inland sea, and a very differently shaped southern coastline. Her map situated the capital two hundred kilometres to the west of where it appeared on mine. Other than four or five placenames, there were no points of exact correspondence.

  ‘May I have this?’ she asked. ‘I’d like to show it to my friends at the ministry.’

  ‘Without it, I won’t know where I am.’

  ‘You don’t know where you are anyway,’ she said, pressing her map into my hand. As the train slowed on its approach to the junction, she slipped my map into her shoulder bag, and pulled her suitcase down from the rack. Then each of the young women kissed me on the cheek and wished me a happy journey. I told them not to get hoarse from too much singing.

  Mention of singing spread broad smiles across the young faces. The redhead said that it was a pity she couldn’t sing for me because the tunnel-cleaning songs are the most poignant and melodic songs in the world, but it is forbidden to sing songs of the tunnel to guests.

  As they left the compartment, the chaperone told me, ‘You’ll love the capital. Once you’ve experienced the capital, you’ll never need to travel again.’

  According to guide books, the most luxurious hotel in the capital is the Railway Grand. This is also the only hotel that caters to outsiders. Situated on platform 4 of Grand Central Station, the Railway Grand is comprised of twenty-two expertly renovated railway carriages once privately owned by an aristocrat in the years before the revolution. Lavishly appointed, it is the hotel favoured by wealthy locals when celebrating their honeymoons.

  Although praised by guide books, the food is, to foreign tastes, bland. Yet the Railway Grand’s cuisine is a source of pride to the locals. Even those who have never dined there praise the freshness of the produce and the cleanliness of the kitchen. Visitors from the provinces who cannot afford the Railway Grand’s steep tariff are encouraged to take guided tours of the hotel’s kitchen. For newlyweds, the photograph of a kiss reflected in the giant saucepan has become a cliché that signifies future prosperity.

  You might imagine that fatigued travellers would prefer not to sleep close to revelling honeymooners. But here the honeymoon is a solemn occasion where a couple spends more time pledging fidelity and responsibility than physically engaged.

  A waiter told me that it was customary for experiments in sexual intercourse to begin at puberty. By the time a couple elects to marry in their late twenties, they will have satisfied their curiosity in a variety of styles with a broad array of partners. Most likely, the girls I’d met en route to tunnel-cleaning were also approaching their sexual initiation. Yet marital infidelity is almost unknown here. A convicted adulterer faces imprisonment, and repeat offenders can expect the death sentence.

  Little wonder that the newly married couples in the dining room quietly held hands and sipped wine as they contemplated a life of resisted temptations.

  On the first evening of my stay, I was joined by a handsome couple whose broad accents indicated that they had travelled some distance from the south-western province, a scenic, largely rural part of the country where the man taught history in a college, and his partner hoped to join her father in medical practice once she had completed her studies in surgery.

  While happy to speak of their lives and hopes, they were reluctant to engage in discussion of broader social or political matters. Such discussion is regarded as the height of bad manners.

  Locals argue that it is necessary to believe things are already as good as they might be in order to focus upon, or amplify, that goodness. And my companions demonstrated a typical uninterest in events, persons or cultures outside their nation. Any attempt to bring my personal history into the conversation was met with interruption or glazed indifference. Even when I told a favourite anecdote about how my mother was assaulted by a polar bear that escaped its enclosure in Melbourne Zoo, the young doctor cut across me, saying quite dismissively, ‘I know, something similar happened to my mother. Now we find that we have no need of zoos.’

  Perhaps guests satisfy the locals’ need for zoos. Although they are welcomed, guests are too foreign to be understood. If locals are flattered by our curiosity about them, they never feel inclined to reciprocate. They contend that no amount of information would enable a guest to reach a true understanding of what it is to live here. An eminent travel writer calls it ‘psychical apartheid’, an embrace that refuses to accept foreign ways of seeing. The local instinct is one for intimate deflection.

  The more accustomed you become to these tendencies, the less you resist. You coddle your hosts by asking them to flesh out their observations and reminiscences. Fortunately, the local wine obscures the sterility of these one-sided conversations.

  After dinner, the teacher began to tell me very personal details about his sexual relationships prior to meeting his new wife. Neither of them was nearly so embarrassed as they would have been had the conversation been about economics, politics or educational philosophy. At the school they both attended, teachers allowed young couples to leave the classroom in order to fornicate, believing that releasing sexual tension frees students from distraction in class.

  I found these lurid stories less engaging than the bride’s tales of her childhood fear of school. She used to fake illness to persuade her mother to keep her at home. There, she spent the day reading, or playing complicated number games, an experience that was uncannily similar to my own.

  ‘I used to double,’ she told me. ‘You know: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two … I could double to figures of more than twenty digits in a few minutes.’

  ‘The same with me! I was obsessed with doubling. I’d stay at home in a bed made up on the couch in the lounge, and I’d double during the ad breaks on television.’

  Naturally, the couple disregarded my outburst. A guest’s only role in conversation is to be a catalyst, to invite locals to recall or elaborate details from their own experience.

  Shortly after this, the young doctor told me that she had once begun training as a secondary teacher, having wished to teach literature, but she abandoned teaching when a student she’d taught on her practice rounds shot dead eight strangers as they drove home along a major highway.

  By that stage, I was shaking. This young woman’s memories were mine. The same thing happened when I trained to be a teacher. Though I tried to tell them that these coincidences were astonishing, the notion of coincidence meant nothing to them.


  Their word for coincidence is the same as their word for exchange, or transact. I found it impossible to persuade my hosts of the distinction between these concepts. They have no word for the unique, or discrete. I argued that without the notion of pure separateness, of parallels that don’t merge or intersect, rail travel would be impossible. In their eyes, I was a madman. The teacher insisted that intersection, collision and conjunction are the cornerstones of nature, human association and intelligence.

  At that point, the honeymooners chose to call it a night. The next morning they were making a long journey to visit the bride’s sister in the interior, and I imagined that they still had serious undertakings to make in their bridal compartment.

  I wished them a long and happy life together, to which the young doctor replied, ‘The life we have will be the intersection of all possible lives, and the happiness we know will be the happiness we create.’

  I knew then that there could be nothing more disturbing than to be penetrated by someone you couldn’t feel, to be transparent and insubstantial as a ghost.

  The trip to the border takes just ninety minutes, with the train reaching high speeds as it powers across flat, unpopulated territories. I counted no more than seven stations, and the train stopped at just three. In my compartment, there were two guests who may have been Middle-Eastern or North African. They spoke a language I didn’t recognise, and never failed to point out a tree when one was spotted across the plain.

  We were accompanied by a local woman, a diplomat returning to her posting in Thailand. She hoped to persuade foreign governments and firms to invest in new rail lines that were being built into the interior. This project would involve the construction of tunnels, bridges and viaducts, and the laying of thousands of kilometres of track.

  It seemed to me that this extended rail network was conceived with a total disregard for economic viability.

  ‘Sometimes you need to disregard economic viability,’ the diplomat told me. ‘This is a dream we share. You’ll never determine the value of a dream if you are too timid to realise its potential.’

  The local notion of a shared dream, of sharing, of sharing in, is very different from the idea of sharing with. The diplomat told me that they had no single word for what we would understand as generosity, just a curious aphorism, ‘The true gift doesn’t know its shadow.’ She said that I couldn’t be expected to understand.

  The train made a prolonged stop at the last station before the border, providing the sellers of trinkets and souvenirs a chance to move through the carriages. My two fellow guests bought a bottle of steam produced by the old locomotives that carry goods into the interior. Needing to dispose of local currency, I bought a porcelain model of a young State Rail volunteer, a tunnel-detailer who resembled one of the girls I’d met earlier on the trip.

  I had mixed feelings about my departure. Although I’d never left the safety of the railway carriage, I felt that I was leaving something crucial behind. I felt that if I returned to this land, nothing would be the same. Or everything would be exactly the same.

  At the passport control, when removing the detachable portion of my exit visa, the officer asked not whether I had enjoyed my visit, but whether the visit had lived up to my expectations.

  When I said that it had, her face made an odd expression, ironic perhaps, a look that I probably mistook for sympathy.

  Then, for no apparent reason, she launched into an anecdote. She told me that only three weeks earlier, an archaeologist working in the border regions had chanced upon prehistoric cave-paintings. The images were unusually sophisticated, and featured cave-dwellers in the act of making cave-paintings.

  Forgetting myself, I opined that the cave artists must have been the forbears of the tunnel-detailers.

  The official couldn’t have looked more affronted if I’d tried to corrupt her. When I attempted to correct her misunderstanding, she wouldn’t listen. She hammered my passport with a stamp and waved me on. A few moments later, however, she left her post and ran after me. I thought that I was about to be arrested, but she grabbed my shoulder to berate me in a loud whisper, ‘None of our forbears lived in caves!’

  THE FUTURE PERFECT

  Wherever they go, they meet a different version of the same conversation. No sooner are kids sent from the room to watch Futurama or The Simpsons than one parent leans in to speak confidentially. ‘I’d never say this in front of them – they’ll find out soon enough – but we’re fucked.’

  Their hosts have been reading the papers, following the dismal analyses and forecasts. ‘Things are already worse than previous worst-case predictions. In Africa, people are dying of thirst and disease in huge numbers. It’s only a matter of time before nations start warring over water, fish or fuel. They already are. The next wars will be endless … Entropy’s gone past the point where it can be reversed.’

  For one host, the best thing would be for humans to be wiped out by a rogue asteroid. At least that would be fast and impartial. There’s another nod in the direction of the living room, where the kids are siding with Homer against Burns. ‘If it wasn’t for them, we’d party it up, then pass around the Kool Aid.’

  Later, when strolling home along the beach path, Kaz is ropeable. ‘Luke and Annie never cared about endangered frogs, or the toxic contamination of remote beaches. The same week water restrictions went to Stage 3, they put in a pool. They’re only desperate because lifestyle supplements call despair the new black. They wouldn’t know what despair was. Wouldn’t have a fuckin’ clue.’

  That’s true. In her terms, they were fly-by-nights. Kaz has been threatening to commit suicide for as long as Thompson’s known her. So help me, I’ll cut my throat if things don’t improve / if the phone doesn’t ring / if someone doesn’t shoot that man. Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t just take the kids and …

  But for the fact that they don’t have kids, her suggestions have merit. Some friends ask how he puts up with this – doesn’t he find her darkness and negativity impossible to deal with? – and Thompson’s not sure they believe him when he says that life with Kaz has always been great fun.

  ‘What was Annie saying about having the cats put down?’

  ‘Penguins are starving because pilchards have been fished-out for cat food.’

  ‘Spray-on doom. Those frauds don’t deserve asteroids. You’ve gotta pay your dues before you get the cheap trip home.’

  Thompson won’t disagree. Having devoted his life to suicidal thoughts, he too resents the fact that so many prosperous, ostensibly happy people were crashing his party. It was like seeing a band that only you and your dog love suddenly become hugely popular.

  ‘Annie and Luke, Wendy and Steve … They should all be shipped to an Indian slum to learn about dealing with nil returns and being happy while you’re at it.’

  Kaz doesn’t answer. Her silences generally mean stewing, which tends to herald a slump, but now a huge grin spreads across her face, one of those pulsating smiles that she reserves for special occasions.

  ‘But it would be worth seeing. Annie and her mates gulping Kool Aid. All thinking that life’s pointless without a new gizmo each month. That’s worth hanging around to see.’

  Much as Thompson might like to deny it, it was a happy thought. This Great Catastrophe would be worth enduring if only to farewell those who couldn’t stand a little despair every now and then. If these frauds didn’t have the grace to leave suicide to the experts, they’d have to learn the hard way.

  At a clearing, they pause to watch a beige moon-sliver tease the motionless bay, and Kaz pulls Thompson close.

  ‘We could stay here for a bit.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘You don’t need a panel van to go parking.’

  Something had freed within them. Never faddish, they’d stuck true. To Sisyphus. To Godot. And now they’d be rewarded. By the hunger in their kissing, and by a steadfast belief in that hunger. And by an orange glow in the depthless sk
y that would grow strident by the time it finally caught their attention.

  ‘We’re so fucked.’

  ‘Mmm. Totally.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Significant portions of this book were written with the assistance of an Established Writers Grant from the Australia Council, and a fellowship at Varuna, the Writers’ House. My sincere thanks to both those organisations.

  The following stories have been previously published: ‘The Enemies of Happiness’, ‘People Whose Names Bob Dylan Ought to Know’, ‘V2’, ‘The Darkest Heart’, ‘Astronauts’ and ‘The True Nation’ first appeared in Meanjin. ‘Club Selection’ and ‘Dog’s Life’ first appeared in Overland, while ‘On the Make’ appeared in overlandexpress. ‘The Futures Market’ first appeared in Heat. ‘Magnetic’ first appeared in Going Down Swinging. ‘Intermittent Red Flashes’ first appeared in The Sleepers Almanac No. 5. ‘Queue Jumping’ first appeared in Forever Shores, edited by Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch (Wakefield Press, 2003). My heartfelt thanks to all the editors, interns and fiction consultants who worked on these stories. Particular thanks to Ivor Indyk at Heat for his extensive notes on ‘The Darkest Heart’.

  So many friends have helped with the production of these stories over so many years that I couldn’t possibly thank them all individually here. Crazy-headed fictions such as these couldn’t have been written without a huge amount of support and forbearance, and I have been incredibly fortunate to have received that.

  Many thanks to Caitlin Yates, Denise O’Dea, Elisabeth Young, Elke Power, Thomas Deverall and all at Black Inc. I am deeply indebted to Donica Bettanin at Jenny Darling and Associates for her faith, kindness and guidance.

  My parents and family have always been unstinting in their love and support, and I could not thank them enough. I hope that they will forgive the (slightly) dark imaginings contained herein.