It was as hot as it had ever been. The boy knew it, but it had been hot the previous day too. When he had set out that morning he knew it would be hot, but still he hadn’t prepared. Although he was just a kid, he could regret things in his way.
The boy wore his shirt like a cape, with only the second-top button buttoned. It flapped out, even at his regular at-the-single pace, and the flapping of the cloth over his back felt almost like a breeze.
He picked up a small stone and thought to hurl it at a tree, which the stone’s sharp edge might hit and chip the tree’s bark. Instead, he threw it into the forest, where he could not see what it hit. He returned to watching the rhythm of his boots: he might have been walking for hours in those terrible old grey boots. Or brown. Or they might have been black once, if polished up in the quick-march-hut-two kind of way. He couldn’t tell what colour they used to be or were meant to be.
It was so frigging hot. It had been hot all morning, all yesterday morning, all the mornings and afternoons which filled his kid-memory, hot for one day short of as long as the boy could remember, and even in the endless unforeseeable heat on top of the remembered and unremembered heat, he had no intention of stopping. He had walked further from the hut than he had ever ventured before and he was clear in his mind that he would never go back. If he was to be hot and dusty, let him be hot and dusty far from the hut. Once the old man realised the boots were gone, well, there would be another reason not to return, the thought of the old man’s anger. Perhaps the old man already knew. Boots were rare. They were hard to find. Once upon a time the old man had promised the boy boots, but the promise had been for an almost unimaginable time far into the future, and the promise had not been mentioned since the dry times began soon after the beginning of the boy’s memory.
As to what was out there, far ahead and with no prospect of return, the boy had decided not to believe the old man’s stories. Beyond the edge of what they knew were toxic men who turned children into slaves. The stories told of vicious-fanged creatures of all sizes and of places where anything of beauty only served to hide ugliness. In other places, there was no true humanity. People who seemed sweet were always heartless and unreadable in the end. The boy had outgrown the moral of the old man’s stories, which was always the same: However bad it is here, out there is worse.
Several hours passed. With each hour, the prospect of the old man tracking him down diminished. If only the boy could walk for seven or eight hours in that ridiculous footwear he would be free, at least free from the hut and the old man. How far would he travel? Ten kilometres? Twenty? That was a long way. What was the old man’s range? Surely the old man had never been beyond four or five. In the good times a few kilometres was far enough. You could find what you needed. Why else condemn the world, unless you had everything already? Why would you condemn places you knew nothing about other than that they could have been the same as everywhere and the same as home?
In this heat, who had the strength to go further, who but the boy? As to whether he would find a way to survive, that would depend. He had only wanted to move from where he had been. To that extent, he had already succeeded. Now, though, the boy was very hungry and very, very thirsty. If only he had been older and had planned. If only he’d taken food and drink and something to shelter under. If only he knew where to go to seek help. If only he had been no longer a child.
He followed the track down a gentle slope. It swerved left around a corner ahead of him, and as the boy approached the bend he could sense coolness flowing towards him, sweeping between the trees to embrace him. A feeling from before, from some time before the time he could remember, came rushing up at him along with the drop in temperature. That sensation lifted his eyes from the path and the rhythmic kicking forward of the toes of his boots along it and he saw it all at once.
It took him five seconds to strip down to his shorts: cap off, boots off, shirt-cape off. He jumped in. Water. Fresh water. He sank into it and drank and played and swam and was overtaken.
Frogspeak
There is no point jumping in front of a roaring yellow bulldozer. It won’t stop. It keeps vomiting diesel smoke and moving in whichever direction it was moving before your attempted intervention. It screams like a hundred thousand egrets crying ‘frog, frog, frog’ and then you don’t exist anymore. You’re dead like my mother. The volume drops, perceptibly. No space for amphibian sentiment, I can tell you.
If I eat every day, I will continue to live. That is my theory. See a bug, nab it, swallow it up. It feels so solid moving across the gullet, so substantial. I could eat all night except I fall asleep and I wake up having forgotten the last meal and my childhood.
I wish we weren’t shifting to cement ponds. Why are we moving? I wish I could remember things: was the food always like this? Did insect larvae always have that slight metallic taste? Is it my imagination? I have no idea what’s to happen next.
In the old days, so the choruses go, there was plenty of food. There were millions of mosquitoes which would sing a little ‘eat me eat me’ tune so we could find them hovering above the marsh, and they never diminished in number and they were always tasty and full of blood. Frogs grew to fifty times as big and when we hopped across the Earth, we left deep indents. One frog was larger than the others and when it rained this frog’s footprint filled with water and became the bay.
That’s the history in the frogcalls. My ten thousand cousins chant about the time before predators, the time when the world was only for us. They sing of the arrival of the birds, in a flock which darkened the sky and wiped out my forebears’ cousins. These amphibians are gone and will not return. The wise frogs hid under rocks and took on the characteristics of aquatic plants and sang like the wind instead of like frogs and only sang at night and hid and hid and hid for epochs until the birds starved and only a few remained with probing beaks to torture my surviving ancestors.
New insects flew past, or tried to, but my ancestors leapt and caught them, tasted their slightly varied taste, their infinitesimal textural differences. There were new birds to dodge, birds with longer beaks or curved beaks or beaks which moved too swiftly to see. But always there were survivors, as proved by my presence. We are known as tenacious, and why shouldn’t we be?
My parents lived on garbage juice, sipping at the metallic river, skipping from brick to sludge-coated brick or slipping into the thick green puddles, and always there was sufficient and they were neither happy nor unhappy, calling out to each other and all the others at night, the song being ‘here, here, here, here’.
There is a little slipway from the brickpit through to other ponds. The further I swim the thinner the water, until I have almost forgotten viscosity, can kick freely. The creek is new, the water always changing and no longer stinking of rotting chicken and rancid cauliflower but of sweet sand and river grasses. I am of course suspicious. Utopia is a place which is also no-place.
I suspect everything. I suspect the pure water and the glistening insects. I suspect the neat placement of convenient rocks on which to rest. I suspect the new songs, which despite retaining identical vigour to the old songs have absence at their heart. The frogs sing ‘here, here, here’ but I discern the lyric as ‘here? here? here?’
I do not understand the new mountains which all but cover the stench of lettuce and beef kidneys. Not having seen the trees uproot before, I do not understand the migrating dance of the giant Moreton Bay fig trees. I cannot comprehend the diesel singing of the yellow metal aliens, the rise of perfectly smooth, perfectly hollow arenas in which the humans run in neat arcs. I suspect that this world is not the world into which I hatched and grew. I suspect that my cousins are not my cousins but transformed demi-frogs without history or stories. I suspect the perfect birds which never find my hiding place are false birds and the tasty flies are stuffed with alien pollen. I have no sense of place but only of emplacement. I suspect I too am dead.
The Monitors
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‘I give warning that I shall not here give the essence of every perception … I shall confine myself … to the character of fictitious, false, and doubtful perception, and the means of freeing ourselves therefrom.’
Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding
We stood around the microtome, which had broken down halfway through sectioning a batch of onion-skin-thin liver tissue for mounting. I believed the fault was in the belt mechanism, but Colin thought the blade had come loose. Eric informed us that the last person to know everything was the philosopher Leibniz, and he had died in 1716. The surface of the only cover-slipped slide seemed to be painted in brilliant, fluorodescent hues of green-yellow and red. The tissue resembled a compound of hornet, grasshopper and shrimp cells, magnified enormously. Not good. Dye extrusion fault?
‘Put out a press release headed “New Species: Techo’s Chance Discovery”, and send it over to Bacteriology,’ Colin suggested.
Too late. I’d discarded the slide and started systematically working back along the conveyor. One-two-three, perfectly trained. I did not respond to Colin but told Eric, ‘You mean western knowledge.’
Eric retorted, ‘Is there any other kind?’
Colin started listing, naming Caribbean and Pacific islands or Asian nations after each piece of information.
‘Right-o. Enough,’ snapped Eric.
‘You would say that, anyway,’ Colin told him, shirtily.
‘Big deal,’ said Eric, exaggerating his slight French-Belgian accent to quote the relevant European thinker: ‘“A body without soul is a body assisted by technical prostheses.”’
‘Yeah,’ said Colin. ‘Right.’
Eric’s lips drew into a slow-mo sneer as he readied himself to continue, but an alarm signal from 2B terminated the conversation. Eric and I rushed out; Colin followed with the toolbox.
Later, at the pub, Colin commented, ‘I bet that Leibniz guy didn’t know many folk songs.’
I wasn’t yet too drunk and was trying to balance loyalties. I said, ‘He spoke ninety-four European languages.’
‘Sure he did. You wouldn’t know a dialect from a vernacular. Anyway, listen to this—’ he pulled a dog-eared volume from his coat pocket, pretending he’d just thought of it: ‘“The water that beats down with the persistence of a metronome and makes dough of the houses is like the daily paper, it’s a sodden idea that our minds can be purged of prejudices.” Nino Majellaro. Italian.’
I could hardly drag my eyes from the pub screen, where impressionistic dogs charged around a pixelated track.
‘Sodden?’ I said.
Next night, observing the operation from Monitor Room One, the pub TV scene repeated.
‘This signal must have gone through a blender,’ Eric complained.
‘Press RGB. That’ll clarify it,’ I suggested.
‘Watch it on the small monitor, for Chrissake,’ Colin mumbled, but tried to fix it anyway.
‘Can we have some volume? The sound. No, a little more, not yet.’
‘Yeah, that’s it for sound.’
‘It’s not real clear, is it?’ Colin backed away for a better view. ‘Can hardly make out a goddamn thing, not that I can see past the end of my nose in the first place.’
The surgeon had turned entirely blue: clothes, skin, hair. In fact, everything was blue and no one else seemed to notice, or it didn’t bother them if they had. I was imagining some old-time supervisor growling, ‘My boy, this would irritate the crap out of you if you were competent.’
But there was no supervisor. We were responsible for ourselves. (First-year training manual, Introduction.) Soon, Colin found us some colour, but the red had come apart from the green.
‘How many lines per inch are you supposed to get on this fucking thing?’ Eric griped. ‘Can’t you adjust it, like move the screen forward or something? It’s really hard to see. Flip to the other circuit, maybe.’
‘What channel are you on, mate? You ought to relax.’ This from the orderly, who shouldn’t even have been there. ‘Or are you right off the air?’
Colin came close to losing it. He was concentrating on the wiring, as he always did when the signal fell apart. He was holding four or five different screws between his lips, and loops of wire were hooked around his neck. He glared at the orderly, who couldn’t have had any idea of what was involved, but didn’t speak to him. Finally the picture was good enough: the whirr of surgical hands across the patient’s chest.
I was filling in time with self-accusations and self-confessions. Work was damaging. The constant pauses provided too much space for abstractions: ‘I acknowledge a great fear of anything that will distract me from my studies or interfere with my habits. I am overcome by spasms of depth/shallowness, by the constant recession of the mutaplying image, by smoke and the stink of beer. I am lost in the invisibility of that big, falling-apart screen.’
The whole surgical-video thing washed over me in giant waves of fatigue. Our beery, bleary eyes unconsciously decoded the red/green and assembled an entire … oh, who knows what we saw. The orderly tried to be funny, but he wasn’t. It was pretty straightforward this operation, not much more than an exploratory. The orderly, in a nasal whine, took up the call: ‘And there she is, her offsider is hosing the mud off, she’s ready for it again and the barracker beside me really believes this is competitive sport, he really believes observing this is analogous to watching the operation of class society, he really hopes the snobby bitch pins her.’
‘For Chrissake,’ said Colin.
‘On that size monitor,’ said the orderly, ‘you could miss the whole pointillism.’
Meanwhile, I had learned to see the actual flesh on the actual screen and could not stop interpreting those pictures. Would Sir Thomas More have picked up the idea as quickly as I had – I mean once he got over the shock of being transported through time and all that? Did an Ancient Egyptian see the paintings around Luxor as likenesses? Or some other form of representation? If a machine was programmed to print ‘I am in state A’ when in state A, how did this differ from (a posited) Jones saying, ‘I am in pain’ (or something as automatic) when in pain? I was too caught up in the patients’ feelings, said the counsellor at debriefing. I was supposed to chant something like, ‘I want none of this involvement.’ I ought to have wanted to watch the procedure, for it to be over with, and to have returned to the cedar-veneer saloon bar for the salt on the peanuts, the satyriasic cartoon kick-boxers, and the young man in front of me in the betting queue, who rasped, ‘My lover doesn’t love me’ to the betting shop attendant, watching the attendant’s eyes as she handed over the last blue ticket of this day’s losing streak, and her fingers briefly touched his palm.
Work, as with human relations, rarely turned out to be simple. I hardly ever left on time. The building, despite its apparent solidity, merely masked the circuitry: it was a proto-hospital of copper wiring and optical fibres. We moved from filament to filament, checking that an invisible non-substance functioned even while the false, voluminous hospital smothered patients and their visitors with the architecture of reassurance. Every procedure was driven by finely calculated allowances for mechanical failure and the infinite gradations of human error, so that whether the scalpel entered at one particular site, or at another site a micron further over, the patient would live. Signal fibres passed between the walls through narrow, temperature-stabilised tubes. Wires staple-gunned above the ceiling led to green, whirring fluorescent tubes. Finer filaments, stretched out below our feet as we half-ran between monitor rooms, sent tiny, green wave patterns across little green monitors. This sense of hospital absolutely cancelled out the masonry for me. It was a predatory logic which once acknowledged could not be set aside. My job became holding up the building, divining every hint of potential metal fatigue. Any screen flicker might have been significant. My shift would finish, but work went on and on.
I got his voice distorting back at me through the headphones like a radio just off the station. White gowns converged on the torso, obscuring my view of the prone figure. Only its feet in their absurd green plastic slippers stuck out between two surgical gowns. Not that it mattered: I had other things to keep an eye on. They were swinging arms, pumping, counting out loud, flipping electrodes to On. At four-second intervals, someone shouted, ‘Now!’ The volume of that was way outside my headphones’ capability. It was all attack.
I was trying to shake the noise out of my ears without removing the headphones when a row of minuscule, yellow glass hemispheres lit up in front of me.
‘Yellow’s on,’ I proclaimed.
‘Gotcha,’ said Eric, who thought that a better thing to say than ‘thanks’. But he didn’t do anything until he saw it on his own screen. When it was okay, he pressed that green button again and said, ‘That channel’s firing. Repeat. Channel three’s happening just fine.’
‘Good,’ said someone.
There were no other disturbances the rest of that shift. I believe the figure through the glass survived.
At the pub, Colin was explaining the ontological distinction between broadcast TV and cable. The pub screen was behind him. On it, spotty anglers reeled in spotty fish with grotesque jaws; interspersed were close-ups of lures and thirty-second lessons in attaching hooks to lines. I was filling the space between beer-swallows, saying ‘Mm, mm’ to Colin whenever he said, ‘Y’know?’ and going to the bar every other time we drained our glasses. I couldn’t stand watching these people fishing, but I had no concentration left to listen to Colin. I begged the bartender to change channels and she said, ‘Yeah, just a minute,’ but did nothing because she had decided I would soon be too drunk to care. I was trying to argue with her. I was saying, ‘I always care. Always.’
When I Saw the Animal Page 16