by Guran, Paula
“Get off the floor,” Sarah said. “You’re shivering.”
“I will soon.” He felt a deep sense of pure lethargy.
Cheryl helped him up onto the couch and brought him a cup of tea. “You’re too old to drink like that anymore.”
“Wasn’t the drink. Well, I did give it a bit of a hiding, but it was this guy. This long gray guy who gave me a bloody nose and then did something to me. I’m tired. I’m so tired. And cold.”
She brought him a fluffy pink blanket and covered his knees with it. “The TV producers sent over a copy of your interview. Sarah and I have already watched it twice! Want to have a look? You come across really well.”
She didn’t wait for his answer but played the DVD anyway.
He watched the interview over and over that day, wondering at the person talking. “Jeez, I’m a smart-arse, aren’t I?” he said, smiling at his Cheryl. She kissed his forehead.
“You always were.” The lightness of her tone warmed him slightly. She had suffered postnatal depression and he was terrified every day it would come on again. He saw it behind her eyes sometimes, in the droop of her mouth. A wash of sadness. Those were the times he tried harder lift her up. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a bug climbing the wall and he curled up, pulling his blanket up over his eyes. “We need to get the rent-a-kill guys in here. Get rid of the cockroaches,” he said.
She nodded. “Ants, too. All over the kitchen, rotten little things.” She sat beside him, laying her head on his shoulder. “I still can’t believe you’re back,” she said. His little bird, his sparrow, but a tower of strength at the same time.
Usually sitting beside her he felt something. Irritation, often, when she went on about small domestic details, none of which interested him. Boredom, talking about her family. Affection, when they sat together watching TV. Love, when they laughed together at a joke he’d made, when her eyes crinkled up and little tears formed. He loved those little tears.
She held his hand. He let it lie loose.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I just can’t really feel anything. It’s all gone numb.”
She stared at him. “We have to tell the doctor. Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t feel like that.”
“I don’t feel anything, love. That’s the thing. Nothing at all. Just cold. Like I’ve got an ice block inside my stomach.” He didn’t tell her he meant emotionally as well, that looking at her left him cold.
To cover it up, he kissed her. Usually they’d do this stuff at night, with the door closed, but he kissed her with passion and moved his hands around her body, touching all his favorite bits.
The weeks passed. He ate meals he had no real desire to eat, had conversations and many, many interviews. Sponsorships brought money in. Newspaper reports listed everything he’d eaten underground and those people approached him. It was Vegemite, Tip Top bread, Milo chocolate bars, apples (the local fruit shop took on that one), and the local butcher had a go, too. The watch company put him on TV, talking about how he’d never need another watch, that one was so good. So at least he didn’t have to work. People kept asking him if he was going back underground and he’d bluff at them, give them the real man answer, the hero stuff, but he wasn’t going back.
He spent a lot of time reading the paper. He started cutting out stories of other survivors, especially the ones who talked about the cold, about the deep bone chill they felt after a few days.
“Dad, let me hook you up with an online forum. You can meet other survivors. Talk to them. Most of them are probably feeling what you’re feeling,” Sarah said. He sat at the computer for a while but it only made sense when she talked him through it and he didn’t want her to know it all.
She asked him about the long man. “The one you said pinched your nose. We should try to track him down and make sure he doesn’t do it again. People can’t go round pinching my dad’s nose like that.”
“Willy nilly,” he said. It was an old joke. “I don’t know if we’ll find him. I don’t think he’s at the pub much, or if he’s got a job. I saw him when I was buried, you know. He sent his ghost in to find me.”
Others had talked about seeing visions. Buried in the snow, or caught in a car for two days on a country road. They said, more than one of them, that a long man had visited them. “It’s not just me,” he told Sarah. “No one knows why he doesn’t help. He just looks.”
“Did he pinch their noses? This is the stuff we can find online, Dad.”
“Yeah, maybe. Maybe. What about stuff about cockroaches? How to get rid of them? I saw a huge one in the bathroom. They say they’ll survive nuclear war. That’s what they reckon.” He shivered. “I hate them.”
He felt like a fraud. Life exhausted him, all the people wanting what he had. And Cheryl and Sarah got nothing but harassment. Lucky your dad’s alive, your husband, people said to them. Imagine what life would have been like without him, how sad, how hard. Making them think about it. All those people wanting to talk to him, but they paid him at least and it kept them in beer and roast beef. Always the same questions.
“What is it you think you were kept alive for?” they asked, putting the onus on him to make something of his life. As if he’d been given a second chance and he’d be a fool to waste it.
“Dunno what I was kept alive for, but mostly I’m enjoying every extra minute with my daughter and my wife,” was his stock answer.
But he no longer really cared.
They asked him, “Are you scared of anything? Seems like you’re not.” It was a stupid question, he thought. Who wasn’t scared?
“Cockroaches. I really hate cockroaches.” The interviewer sighed in agreement.
Another question they always asked him was, “Put in the same situation, would or could you do it again?”
“Well, I won’t mate, will I? Just not going to happen.”
They always ended with, “If only you could bottle it.” His standard joke was to hold out his wrists.
“Ya wanna take a liter or two? Go for it! I can spare it!”
It was all an act and he was good at it.
He was waiting in the queue to buy fish and chips (“Aren’t you that guy? That miner guy?”) when he smelt sour cherries. It took him straight back to the cave and the smell of the long man. He felt cold through his layers of clothing and did not want to turn around. He felt someone behind him, close, but people did that. They seemed to think if they got physically close to him they could absorb some of him, that they could be like him.
He took his package of food and left the shop, eyes down. Climbed into the car some sponsor had given him, sat there to eat it.
The long man opened the passenger door and climbed in.
Stuart dropped the food on his lap where it sat, greasy and hot. He barely felt it. He scrabbled for the door handle but the long man took his wrist. Pressed hard and Stuart couldn’t move. Just like last time.
“You seem to be enjoying that fish, Stuart. You know what that tells me? That I didn’t take it all. The fact that you want to eat tells me that.”
Stuart tried to shake his head, to say, “I’m faking it, it’s all fake, I can’t feel a fucking thing,” but the cockroaches were out, skittering and sucking and if he thought he was cold before, that was nothing. His eyelids felt frozen open, his nostrils frozen shut, breathing was so painful he wanted to stop doing it.
“That’s it now,” the long man said, picking cockroach feelers out of his teeth. “You’re done.”
Stuart sat slumped in the seat for a while, then started the car. A tape was playing; one of his interviews. He liked listening to himself, hearing his own voice.
“I’ll do anything to stay alive, anything to keep my family alive,” he heard himself say. “You know I got stuck in a pipe once when I was a kid. Fat kid, I was. I sang songs from TV shows to keep me occupied.” Listening from his car, chilled to the bone and tired, Stuart wondered if he’d seen the long man then. If the long man had wai
ted, and waited, until he was good and strong.
He pulled out of the car park. It was only his sense of duty making him do it, long-instilled. He had to go to a school visit someone had organized for him. Some school where there was a survivor kid, a young girl recently rescued. It took him a while to get there; wrong turns, bad traffic. Angry traffic. He thought there was more road rage than usual but then wondered if it was his driving? If all that stuff about driving carefully did make sense, because he didn’t care now, didn’t care how he drove or what he hit.
“We’d like to welcome Stuart Parker to the school. He’s taken time out of his busy day to talk to us and to talk to Claire, our own hero.”
The children clapped quietly. Stuart guessed they were tired of hearing about Claire.
She’d been trapped in the basement of a building. A game of hide and seek gone wrong; no one knew she was playing. No one knew where she was. It took six days for them to find her.
“Tell us how you coped, Claire,” the teacher said.
“I pretended I was at school doing boring work and that’s why it was so boring. Sometimes I thought about this nice man from the mine. He said he kept thinking of nice things and that’s what I did too.”
The children shuffled, started to talk, bored. Claire looked at them wide-eyed. “I ate bugs. Lots of bugs. Like he did. And I had some chips I took from the cupboard but I didn’t want to tell Mum and Dad cos I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
She had their attention, but not completely. “And then there was the creepy guy.”
“You were alone in the basement, Claire, weren’t you?” the teacher said, passive-aggressive. “No one there.”
“Who did you see?” Stuart said. He hadn’t had a chance to speak before then. “What did he look like?”
The audience were rapt. They didn’t often get to see adults this way, all het up and loud.
“I was all by myself but then this creepy long guy was there. I never seen him before but I thought he might help me to get out. But he didn’t, he just stared at me. I told him he should go away but the only thing I think he said was, ‘See you soon, Claire.’ That’s why I’m scared. I really don’t want to see him again.”
Stuart wanted to care. He wanted to save her but there was nothing left in him. Only the memory of the man who would have killed to save that girl. Would have ripped the arms off any man who tried to hurt her.
Just a memory though.
“Stuart, we haven’t heard from you. What can you tell the children?”
“That there is no purpose in life. We all die and rot and none of it is worth anything. You’re only taking up space. And that the long man is real. You need to keep her safe from him because he’ll destroy her.”
The principal, stunned and speechless, took a moment to answer. The children were silent and he wondered if he’d laid seeds of sadness and emptiness in them all. He didn’t mean to. But he was too tired and cold to lie anymore.
“But . . . but Mr. Parker, you’re a role model. We asked you here to lift the children. Inspire them.”
“I’m nothing. Nothing at all,” he said.
Claire. Claire was in the news and so was he, with his awful statements, his cruelty to the children. He had the media at his door again but they hated him now for turning on the children, you don’t do that to the kiddies, do you? He watched Claire; she didn’t look chilled to the bone, so he thought perhaps the long man hadn’t come to her yet.
His house was full of his sponsors’ food and friends came over to eat it because he wouldn’t. Some of the rescuers too, looking at him as if they’d wasted their time. Sitting there in front of the television, warm rug, warm slippers, all skinny and pale.
He couldn’t even fake a smile anymore. His famous watch had slipped off his wrist and sat in the dust under the couch.
“We shoulda bottled it. We could give him a taste of his own self,” one of the rescuers said. He knew they were disappointed in him, that he wasn’t doing what they wanted him to do.
“Three days of my life, I gave to save him,” he heard one say in the kitchen. ”Now look at him.”
They left him alone.
And he didn’t care.
Is it possible that we are haunted in dreams by our beloved dead, not just in metaphor but in actual fact? If so, is it impossible to imagine a plane or space where they might commune?
Mysteries of the Old Quarter
Paul Park
(Newly excerpted and translated from the journals and correspondence of Dr. Philippe Delorme, among other sources)
1. “The rain against the casement . . . ”
. . . I write this from my hotel room, which constitutes the majority of what I have seen so far, here in what was once the greatest city of New France. Outside, the narrow road is full of water, fog, and sodden filth. I have heard rumors of another, more modern metropolis on the other side of Canal Street, broad boulevards and large houses that contain actual Americans in their natural surroundings, as well as poorer but more vibrant neighborhoods of Germans and Italians. Though I could walk to that metropolis in half an hour, I gather that would be to break some sort of secret code. The indigenous culture of the city has curled in upon itself because it knows it is dying, even though it is in itself quite new, by European standards. But these sequences run quicker here, partly because of a mania for destroying and rebuilding, and partly because the land itself, a bend of miasmic and mephitic swamp between the river and the lake, appears to me a sink of dissolution, which has accelerated all natural processes of corruption and decay.
So far I have kept this opinion to myself. At least I am attempting to do so. But perhaps some of my prejudices have already leaked out. This evening, for example, I addressed a local scientific society on the subject of an experiment into the nature of electricity, and in particular the electrical impulses in the brains of rats and monkeys. Afterwards I answered questions from the audience. It is an infuriating and pervasive characteristic of this tour that these questions by no means have confined themselves to the subject of my demonstrations. A few days ago, a gentleman in Chicago asked me my opinion of the weather in the coming week—I might have predicted it would rain forever! And tonight I answered several questions about the theories of Mr. Charles Darwin.
The religiousness of these people does not cease to astound. After my second attempt at reconciling what cannot, after all, be reconciled, I allowed myself a joke, although I did not smile. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it was our simian ancestors that inhabited the Garden of Eden, as none of the activities described as taking place there would have required a brain much larger than an ordinary potato. It was in the land of Canaan, surely, that we began our inexorable descent, guided by the process of natural selection.” The most foolish beasts, I meant to imply, have the wit to copulate, and our development as a species, and as individual moral beings, could only commence at the moment we had turned our back on God.
I was speaking in response to an enquiry about “reverse evolution,” an absurd and backward theory that has nevertheless found nourishment here in the superstitions of the inhabitants. During the ensuing silence I was tempted to mention your own observation that since God is reputed to have created man in his own image, then perhaps the early migration of Africans to Europe is evidence of man’s fall. Contrasting your and my complexions, you once observed how Lucifer’s supposed “brightness” might be more properly translated to emphasize the pallor of his skin, at least in comparison with God himself. But that would be a joke too painful to express in this crude nation. As you know, I am sometimes irritated by how the Continental newspapers can scarcely mention my work without including a line or phrase that concerns my “Moorish grandmother,” a lady whom I never had the privilege to meet. In Paris, a small amount of African or even Hebrew blood is considered a mark of distinction, perhaps of genius, at least in intellectual or artistic circles. That is not so here. If my history were well-known, my lectures would attract a diff
erent audience entirely, such as might buy tickets to observe a chimpanzee solve quadratic equations in the zoo.
Ah, my love, the hour is late. The rain against the casement rattles like escaping steam. Soon I will close the humid curtains, climb onto the lumpy bed. If you were here in my exile I would embrace you, and you would no longer complain that I was diffident or shy. I would run my fingers down the buttons of your back, and lower still. Doubtless we would converse, if at all, in the language of the angels in paradise, at least if our current scientific thinking is correct . . .
(Addressed to Mme. Solange Baziat, May 23, 1888—unsent)
2. Later that Night: “I do not dwell upon my failures . . . ”
. . . Why do I persist in seeking some relief in these attempts at correspondence? Why do I expect to find comfort in the act of sharing my thoughts and actions with my friends, with you, for instance? No, it is more pertinent to ask why I am so often disappointed, why at these moments of attempted intimacy my loneliness attacks me with renewed ferociousness. I know already the attempt at connection will be in vain. And yet it is natural to try again and again. Surely this is the foundation of the sexual urge. And surely this is part of the religious urge as well, the faith that at one time we understood each other, and the hope that after death we will again, once we have lost the illusion of our separateness.
My friend, I have already abandoned my first letter of the evening. It was to a woman of our mutual acquaintance. Always with her I am obliged to hide something of myself, in order to preserve her good opinion. In this case there was a name I must not mention for the sake of her jealousy—I understand that. But even so the details and events that I described—some trivial, some essential—had split so sharply from reality by the end of the first page, that I threw down my pen. And then no sooner did I lie down in darkness than I found myself fumbling for the lamp, gasping for breath, with an elevated heart rate. There is no sleep for me tonight.
Now I will try again. Perhaps what I am about to say, I can share with none but you.