She smiled. ‘I can tell, mate. I really can.’
I found myself going over and over all the material we were supposed to know. All this covert stuff about getting secrets that never should have been secret anyway across to the other side. The plot was usually generic: ‘I met Roschinksy at the Hotel Nord at 7.00 p.m., and he handed me the sheaf with the antidote formula. Glancing at it, I immediately knew it was false. There was no nausea suppressant anywhere in the list of ingredients. Earlier, in Berlin, 1965, we found the Russians had blocked up the pinhole for our probe microphone.’
The old surgeons thought the comprehensive approach was wonderful, so different from what they went through, and especially the cameras and fucking condenser mikes all over theatre. They loved it: they thought it was real C21 spy tech. Every senior doctor in the place had anecdoted me about the mnemonics she or he devised to remember the musculature of the hand for final exams, and how much more profound the new system was, with its literary allusions and stories about leeches and barber-surgeons who made genuine advances despite adversity and near-total lack of hygiene.
Still, I was in no position to feel superior to them: I spent some nights in the monitor room, fell asleep with the headphones humming the dark surgeries into my head. I dreamed all these lines of coloured lights, patterns blinking, and in these dreams I understood what the patterns were saying. We were having a conversation, the patterns and I.
What did this mean I wanted? I couldn’t figure it. Someone wrote – I must have read it as an epigraph somewhere – ‘A compulsive thought is really a compulsive deed and the surrogate for an action.’
What was most bizarre was what the patients must have made of hospitalisation, surgery, ritual care: all the bindings-in, probes and pick-ups taped all over their bodies like sacramental medallions. They were lying there, absolutely loaded with IV morphine, sliding along hundreds of metres of Arctic White corridors. They must have been flipping out, running imaginary movies in their heads, as in: ‘The wind picked up, flicking droplets of rain, sweat, oil through the wire mesh, I walked up Death Row for the last time, turned into the execution chamber, and was strapped into the Chair by two guards I had never seen before.’
Next second, the patients were out to it, but the brain activity continued. We were sitting there in the fucking monitor room, and the little screen kept flickering. We could see someone was in there, blood laced with all these demi-poisons, and they were still producing millions of brainwaves. We were supposed to keep an eye on it, and we did, but what can anyone really know? All these squiggly lines on the monitor had to correspond to something going on inside those brains: ‘Thousands of years pass on Tharda. Forces of change conspire against the planet’s rocky surface, cracking and grinding mountains to boulders, boulders to sand.’
If only those probes were a little more sensitive. This was how to see the world without leaving Australia … at the early opener, guitars strumming away in the background, the station logos beckoningly personal. No wonder Leibniz was so confident. He must have had it right (quoting Ovid): Omnia jam fient; fieri quae posse negabam. Everything will now happen which I declared to be impossible.
Short Twos
Two Dismissals
Elizabeth Lee’s former optometrist counselled her, ‘Your expectations of sight are too high.’
Cut
Dr Cohen wasn’t looking where he was going, stepped around the corner and almost ran into two young men, not looking where they were going either. Esprit de temps. The apologetic-looking one opened his mouth to say something and Dr Cohen prepared himself to wave off the apology – but instead the man said, ‘Get fucked,’ and the two were laughing as they carried on.
Dr Cohen called after them, ‘That wasn’t polite,’ though he thought it was funny too, but they had already gone.
Repetition
‘Don’t make me tell you again,’ said another father. This made no sense to the boy, who was not making anybody do anything.
Margins
At the furthest point of my house, the eastern balcony, where the goats dwell – we’ve got a herd of goats on the balcony, but it’s not cruel, they like it, what with the view and the good company – I was sharing a newspaper article about a disturbance at the heliopause, which is the boundary of the solar system. ‘Postcards from the edge’, it was headlined, echoing the title of some old book in the way that newspapers do, when they wish to induce a sense of familiarity.
The goats generally respect me. So far as staying up to date with happenings throughout the universe, not to mention the local paper, I am at the cutting edge.
But why was this news? asked one of the goats (the intelligent, dappled one who is secretly my favourite). Surely there are immeasurably frequent off-Earth disturbances at all times.
Apparently, it was news because the disturbance had been observed by a couple of Earth-sent spaceships. Everything has to be about us. And until this disturbance occurred, no one knew where the boundary was. As I admitted to the goats, I didn’t even know there was a boundary, and am disappointed that there is, that we float around in a different kind of space to ‘out there’, that we are able to call ourselves central again. Accompanying the article, there was even a dinky little diagram of the solar system, with a couple of arrows to represent the paths of the spacecraft that had observed the newly observable.
I folded the newspaper and placed it near a few strands of straw. I was telling this goat that, some time ago, I had lost track of what the people I know were doing. There were simply too many people accumulated over too many years to remember. I began to forget names, though the faces remained familiar. Sad, sad, the puzzled faces which asked me why I was so distant. The goat nodded sagely. It’s not as if we can send little inner-spacecraft out there into the world to monitor our relationships, to report back about disturbances at the edge. We’re supposed to intuit these sorts of things. At least the goat understood why I’ve been so on edge, despite remaining on Earth.
Ah, the goat tried to reassure me, but it’s the margins which define the centre, or the centre defines itself in relation to the margins, so really the margins are just as central as the centre and we’re all the same and the world’s a paradise just in need of a little fine-tuning.
Sure, I responded (also trying to reassure myself), and the other thing one might say is that it’s all a matter of scale: the universe, this solar system, an atom of hydrogen. A flea, according to John Donne, contained all anyone needed to know about love. Observe the behaviour of a hive of bees over several lifetimes and you will understand human or goat society. In ‘Chaconne for a Solipsist’, the poet Michael Dransfield wrote that for some there are no margins, there is only the self, that nothing else exists outside the room (or, implicitly, the balcony) in which a human (or a goat) occupies the moment and also that everything is incredibly trippy – but not in terms of an actual journey where we might be confronted with our essential smallness.
My goat, who’s a sort of expression theory poetry critic, thought that I was trying to tell it something gently, what with the poem containing a reference to a glittering exit held in its speaker’s hand. I assured the goat that no such fate was in store for either of us, and, anyway, the reference wasn’t to a knife. We will all remain central, our solar system making the front pages of all known newspapers. The goat was very satisfied with this. So please: don’t ever let anything change.
A Thousand Plateaus
Where I come from, there’s reason to fear the vegetation. Where I come from, the grains of pollen are the size of peas. I’m talking leaves the size of the Pacific plate. I’m talking flowers the size of continents. I’m talking big enough to do whatever they want to do. Where I come from, the plants are a law unto themselves.
Walter Badheim, the cherry tree, doesn’t pay me any attention today. It is irritated that I have tethered it to the water tank rather than letting it wander off among the go
ats. I absolutely drown its roots in fertiliser but nothing will please it. My heart is breaking. It drinks nothing.
Drink, please drink, I plead. But as I said, Walter is ignoring me. Other plants lean towards me as I pass, as though full of Walter’s malign intent. I can explain, I tell them. That hissing sound, perhaps I am imagining it.
This town is a satellite. When a town is a satellite, it is not a satellite like the moon. It has no phases. It never moves a muscle. It sits quietly in the middle distance, having its air interfered with by the bigger city in the foreground. Sometimes I dream of shifting into the foreground city, as if by moving I would become closer to myself. But I have read there are too few plants in that place, and to move from a town to that city would not be so simple – what with centrifugal force and the great dome of foliage which is part of the sky.
So here I am cooped up in a satellite town with weak air and a whole battalion of plants threatening to overthrow me. Nevertheless, the town is resilient as hell and like hell it never stops burning. Things are looking, as we say here in crisis times, badly distinctive.
Out the window you can see it is getting dark. Dark as anything. This is not due to the onset of night, nor to Walter having broken free from its bonds – the cherry tree remains where tethered. Darkness is occasioned by seed clouds flying towards the sun. Darkness is a sign of our decaying morals and standards and failing discipline and our growing willingness to allow the wandering of unethical and poorly behaved plants among the goats. (Increasingly, all their floral thoughts are pernicious.) Darkness is also due to the approach of the evening meal and of its bringer. The azaleas, the only angiosperms not holding out for better conditions, join us at table and receive blood and bone. My landlord carves his beef with relish.
‘Any work today?’ he enquires with a sneer. I thank Feronia, Roman goddess of spring flowers and vegetation, that I have only one landlord to hinder my every step.
(Silently:) May his wishes turn to spinifex.
We eat well. The scab azaleas burp appreciation. My landlord leaves without so much as a swinging left. A better breeze is blowing.
I am the only living thing remaining in the kitchen. I withdraw a family-size apple pie from the freezer and microwave it until it’s too hot to eat. I watch it cool – eventually steam settles around its plate like an evening mist – and spoon it bit by bit into my mouth. I finish the whole pie. This will be the lot of any plant which does not bow to my rule. I walk across the garden and trip over the Moreton Bay fig.
(Silent, pursed lips:) You’re barking up the wrong shins.
I kneel before Walter. Please. I untie it. I offer one of the goats before it, but Walter does not respond, so the goat is spared for now. Please.
At midnight I go to the top of the hill and look out over the geology humans have wrought. I can see the city in the distance. It has been neatly pruned to provide a hedge for the ocean. On this side is the land. At night the trees are all but silent in their conspiracy. I can understand only an occasional word. The word is ‘rise’. Tomorrow I must no longer compromise.
Art Life
Hey, this is cool. The woman in the window seat whose face is almost totally hidden by her long hair except that her nose and mouth protrude, exact profile – you know, 180 degrees – plus there’s the backlit window silhouette thing going on, plus she’s really still, really concentrating on listening, she’s wearing earphone things, and after a while the chorus must come on, the rest of her totally unmoving, she’s mouthing silently, and it becomes clear what she’s listening to, when the chorus is happening, her entire person totally still except for her lips moving, yeah, making the shapes of the chorus of ‘Beat It’. It’s very funny. Like, she could be talking to me.
Angel
The teenager (angelic like all teens) says, ‘You used to sound like yourself but now you sound like your whole family talking at once.’
The parent, likely thrice the years of protag number one, has no clue what the referent is, so says, ‘A propos of something mysterious.’
‘Yes, Latin for no real response,’ says the teenager. ‘Let’s get a move on.’
The parent is ascending the incline as fast as parently possible and the teenager knows it and/or is universally sceptical of all parental claims, including those as to maximum velocities.
‘You can go ahead if you like,’ says the parent.
‘No, because you’ll give me shit about it later,’ says the teenager.
‘No I won’t.’
‘Yes. You always do.’
Always, thinks the parent, means once and in very narrow circumstances, but no communicational purpose in trying to say anything about anything when they’re in the moods they’re in, the parent thinks – and by they the parent means the teenager.
Although the parent experiences the hill as steep, the perceived rate of acclivity varies from day to day for the teenager. On this particular afternoon marked by middle-aged gravity, the incline measures hardly a nudge above flat to the teen, who has compromised impatience with sighing virtue by walking a few steps ahead. What’s with that? the parent wonders, or if wonders is too soft a word, judges.
The parent has sought advice about the varied slopes of their relationship and is, perhaps, a little deluded about the subject requiring such healing. The psychologist knows exactly, and has advised the parent to apologise to the teenager wherever possible. Apparently this costs nothing and may help. If so, the parent thinks, why does it feel so fucking difficult? The parent will raise this again in the square, tear-stained room, intermittently looking across at the practitioner of the art of controlled eye contact (expensively taciturn). That’s in the foreseeable future. Now the parent calls out, ‘Sorry, I’m so slow.’
The parent calls out, ‘Are you hungry?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Getting hungry.’
Sometimes the parent feels hollowed out, as though only an exuvia remains, clinging to a vertical surface as the wind picks up. Is this visible to others? The teenager is more like overflowing, too much inside and too much outside, and no borders between the two so that everything out gets in and it’s actually wrong to hold anything for long because there’s too much.
They reach the crest, almost together.
Attributed to Jeremiah
If I told you half the things I know, you’d bawl your eyes out and if I told you the other half, you’d laugh your fucking head off. English is a dismemberingly cruel idiom, and it fits this world too well.
From fence to fence the suburb is uneven. A wall of brick and one of stone, a row of three with almost matching renders, the high sheen on the central span produced, perhaps, by a single over-zealous polisher; here is a gap and there impermeable, sealed off by a button and a lens. Nature derides these efforts. Ivy trains itself away from the windows, drags down garage doors to reveal half-restored sports cars or heaped tea chests garlanded with dust. Some unnameable subgeologic force heaves at the footpath till it breaks up into a confusion of creeping asphalt capillaries. And so on. (Look at it yourself.)
From behind the fences you hear love and violence, constrained or released, verbalised or silent, roaring or drip-fed, unceasing or stuttering, dreamed of or realised, proclaimed or secret.
Messengers (self-proclaimed) are all demeanour, no content, again and again. Look at me: I’m beyond categories.
The lonely walk among many and they walk alone. You are exiled from those, and those places, with whom, and where, you deserve to dwell and love. Your lovers or companions or children fail to visit because they will not or cannot or are no longer. No one goes where they ought to go and the innumerable trespass where they ought not. Those you admire go unrewarded and impostors recline like fallen trees at the table’s head.
This and that for the righteous and the wicked. Thus sayeth those who sayeth these sorts of things.
(Focus.) The honourable appear d
runkenly like buffoons; the gutters overflow in our sacred places; these places become like drains. Those you detest have laid their hands on your treasures, devaluing them forever. Their touching breaks all the laws of heaven and the laws you wished to make and live by on earth. There is no longer anything retaining value, not from horizon to horizon, not the nation, not the city, nor these people with their accumulations.
Your city shrieks like a princess, like a widow, like a wound.
The neighbours’ voices produce the occasional word, hers hectoring, constant and angry; his is almost inaudible, but goading nonetheless. Then there’s the usual afternoon cicada silence; you can’t tell if they’re in love again or if they’ve gone out. Later, they’re at it again. Across the road, fourteen pairs of white underpants are neatly spaced along the clothesline, symmetrical as a joke. Two weeks bleached out in half an hour. And there is no third way, no middle path, no prospect of compromise between the two aesthetics of behaviour, incessancy and sparsity.
No one’s laughing now, but it’s a funny world when bananas have to be marked ‘organic’. It’s like the menace in the smile of a stranger, and as impure as taxonomies of anger. The streets cannot be seen through this furious mist, though they can be felt shaking with love and with violence and with mongrel blends of the two. We are all mourning and we have all earned the right. Passers-by bestow upon us their diminishing half-smiles or avert eyes for the embarrassment. They are like nothing, like tourists, and they witness nothing real. Without any memories they cannot distinguish this blank poverty from our former brilliance. The suburb is dressed in rags of mourning and the signs of mourning are as pervasive as its sighs.
When I Saw the Animal Page 17