100 Years of Vicissitude

by Andrez Bergen

  I stared at a younger me, standing on a landing near some stairs, painting pink a wooden bedroom door. Calm, patient, content. Happy.

  I loathed the fool.

  ‘Think again, Kohana, if this makes you conjure up some idealized childhood you never had, or never gave. There were times the stress of parenting became too much. Josephine and I constantly fought over petty differences and, frankly, I was over-absorbed in my job. Still, there were incredible times—till we turned the page.’

  The flow of snug, chipper memories ended. Everything changed in a wink.

  A dark shadow settled itself over the preceding colours. Hospital, again.

  Doctors. Machines. Fluorescent lighting. A sour smell, masked by something vaguely reminiscent of strawberries.

  We stood before a steel cot in which a five-year-old child lay unconscious, pinioned in the midst of wires and tubes.

  ‘She got sick,’ I said. Stating the obvious was somehow appealing.

  ‘What was wrong?’

  ‘Polio—it was polio. For God’s sake.’

  I leaned over to stroke the girl’s wet, troubled forehead. She mumbled in her sleep and the lids fluttered.

  ‘There, there,’ I cooed—and then I yanked my hand away. I took a long step back.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  It was my turn to ignore Kohana. Too many things battered me. I believed I’d put all this behind me—but I was in error.

  ‘At first, we thought Corinne had the flu, worrying enough at her age. Our GP told us so. When the symptoms persisted and in fact she got worse, the doctor struck me as panicky. He referred us to over-qualified “specialists”—that’s what the certificates proclaimed on their office walls. Specialists… hah! One by one, each was at a loss to explain the illness.’

  I was back to hovering, close by the little girl. I wanted to touch her hair, hold her hand, remember her warmth. More than anything, I wanted to help her through this confounded horror.

  Instead, I suffered the same debilitation I remembered from the first time round: I was powerless to do anything. I was useless. I could barely breathe.

  ‘Finally, one of the bastards did some proper research and found the truth. He told us it was a dead disease. Said they hadn’t come across a single case in years and that ninety percent of people who came in contact with the virus never suffered any symptoms. Of the unlucky ten percent that did react, a single percentage point had the virus enter their central nervous system, and only one in two hundred infections led to irreversible paralysis. The quack that stumbled across this pot of gold gave us the figures in a monotone speech, and handed me poorly photocopied notes straight after.’

  I shook my head; all the old frustrations, disbelief and anger running riot. I wanted to scream.

  ‘What the blazes was the point of the waffling? Our child knocked on death’s door—one percent, or one hundred, the numbers didn’t matter, not when they proved how absurdly unlucky we were. One in ten, or a hundred—what did this mean? The bogus sympathy, the hands thrown in the air in defeat… What kind of answers were these? I wanted to stuff the man’s paperwork down his half-witted throat.’

  ‘But… Aren’t children immunized against polio?’

  Even as I trampled atop the spiralling memories, and the doctors’ faces, I could not make out my companion. Vision had become hazy.

  ‘Corinne fell through some absurd gap. A medical bureaucrat must have neglected to add her name to a list, or clean forgot to add that vaccine to her inoculations. The doctors couldn’t explain it. I don’t want to try.’

  It was Kohana’s round to hold my arm. ‘I can’t imagine what you and your wife went through. I’m so sorry.’

  I pulled myself free of her. I wasn’t patrolling for sympathy. ‘Josephine wasn’t my wife. Not that it matters. Nothing matters.’

  ‘What happened from here? Your daughter recovered?’

  ‘Eventually, she was again able to walk, but with one leg significantly shorter and scrawnier than the other. She was lucky. The doctors made sure to let us know about another percentage—this time, ten—of the likelihood of her dying while she was at her worst.’

  I had been unconsciously pacing the room, chewing my lower lip, so I diverted myself back to the cot and leaned on the railing. I was cleft in two. Love and affection, anger and rejection. A fury was percolating deep inside my gut.

  ‘If I heard any more percentage possibilities, there was a ninety percent likelihood I’d sock someone in the jaw! All my life, I had this strange feeling that behind the medical profession lurked something sinister. This experience confirmed it. I mean, what do you think of doctors? You think they’re saints? Hah! They’re foxy beasts! They say, “We’ve got no medicine, we’ve no cure. We’ve got nothing!” But they have! They have everything! Dig under the floors! Or search the clinics! You’ll find plenty! …They pose as saints, but are full of lies! If they smell a battle, they hunt the defeated! They’re nothing but stingy, greedy, blubbering, foxy, and mean! Goddamn it all! But then who made them such beasts? We did!’

  ‘Wolram.’ I felt fingers on my cheek.

  ‘Take that away,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t need it.’

  I forced down my batty grievances, smothered the lot, and stretched out a tentative hand toward the fevered child—but the world flipped.

  Now, I was on a street. Walking with an absurd spring in my step.

  I turned into a small, overgrown front garden, hopped up to the solid front door of an old brick terrace house. I took a bronze key from my pocket, slid this into the lock, turned it, and entered the building.

  It was daylight outside, dim within. I switched on a light.

  Here was a long, high-ceilinged passageway, with stained wooden closets on the left, and to the right Victorian-style, William Morris-designed wallpaper, depicting white and purple lilacs. My ludicrous home improvements.

  ‘Kohana?’

  ‘Behind you,’ I heard.

  I wanted to check, but couldn’t control my movements. I bent over to pick up, then sort through, a wad of junk mail that had gained access via the slot in the door—assorted brochures courtesy of Zoroaster, Henkel and Ambroise, an electricity bill, and a catalogue from Trillian’s. An excessive waste of precious paper banned a decade before I died.

  The sorting done, I walked along the passage. At the end was a staircase; I paused momentarily, and then I started to go up.

  On the landing, I faced two doors, both closed.

  One, to my right, was a pink door that had a wooden picture of an angel done in a childish hand. The other door was a plain light green.

  ‘Take the door on the right,’ my head counselled, but I gravitated in the direction of the green one. No, I warned. Stop.

  I opened this door wide.

  On the other side of a sizeable master bedroom, on top of a queen-size bed, two people were caught in the middle of noisy coitus. Josephine, sweaty and raptured, and an athletic younger man with whom I’d never before had the pleasure.

  Bile ripped through my stomach and tore through my throat.

  I staggered from the room, howling, back down the way I’d come—past wallpaper decorated with marigolds, and furniture I no longer recognized. Just as I was about to spill my lack of lunch, I recovered myself.

  I was back in Kohana’s shack, on the sofa, with my head between my knees.

  I knew this because I recognized the rice straw that surrounded my feet. I was too ashamed to look up—blubbering is rarely a pretty sight.

  ‘Twenty-two years her senior,’ I choked. ‘Stupid, stupid old man. How could I have expected her to remain faithful to an ancient fool? I should have known there was a reason she refused to marry me.’

  I beat the sides of my head with fists, watched the mucus from my nose dangle and jiggle just above the tatami matting.

  ‘I think I’m going to despoil your floor,’ I muttered.

  ‘Who decided on the paternity test?’

  Ah.

>   I haltingly raised my head, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and peered at Kohana.

  She was seated on the floor next to the couch, looking my way. While I found concern aplenty, there was a serenity there I appreciated. I couldn’t have stood more sympathy.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I had to know.’ I breathed out loudly, and my body shuddered. ‘Judy, my secretary, put the notion into my head—she made the suggestion as she passed me my morning tea, like it was just part of our day-to-day business routine, but once there inside my head, the thing sprouted. I had to know.’

  ‘And the child wasn’t yours.’

  It took a while for me to answer the question.

  ‘No.’ I cleared my throat, and then coughed several times. ‘So I’d lost her. But I couldn’t let her go.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Six when this happened. Until that time, Corinne was my entire world, through good times and bad, everything to me. Everything. Afterward, she became my ball and chain. The more her mother begged and pleaded for me to give Corinne up, the more I dug in my heels. There was a principle to uphold.’

  ‘Your revenge?’

  ‘Something along those lines.’

  ‘I now understand why you prefer Shakespeare.’

  ‘I couldn’t—couldn’t—let her go.’

  ‘That’s just sad, Wolram.’

  I again wiped my leathery old face, and scrutinized the collection of shiny moisture and other stains on the sleeve. It really did need a hearty cleaning.

  ‘You know, it could be found amusing.’

  ‘What could?’

  ‘The hospital room number, 42. It’s the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything else.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book I cherished in my university days.’

  ‘So you did read, then.’

  I almost smiled. The expression withered.

  ‘When Corinne was born, I deluded myself that having a child was the meaning of everything—her arrival, in a room numbered 42, added to this certainty. In my middle age, I was a born-again Walter Mitty. Even her illness made no dent in the fool’s paradise.’

  I rolled up my sleeve to examine the sagging, discoloured skin on the inside of my elbow. How many doctors’ needles had been carelessly poked there?

  ‘This brainless theory was culled once I saw the result of the paternity test, and—after the anger and the humiliation and the madness and the despair had settled—I had an epiphany, of sorts. It dawned on me that something was fundamentally wrong with society. It was a botched bauble that needed repair work.’

  I glanced at Kohana to see if she was listening. She nodded.

  ‘At the self-same time, I could cast a spotlight on the medical profession for the inhumane, distorted, quack organization it truly was.’

  ‘In other words, you took revenge against the entire world? The insult that made a man out of Mac?’

  ‘Something of the sort.’

  ‘Tell me, are you proud of what you did thereafter?’

  ‘No. No. I was never proud. Obsessed, with a fiercely blinkered vision I honed over two decades, fighting for something. But what was it?—pride didn’t figure into it. I thought I was right. I was convinced I was right. Everything I did was done for the greater good. The “greater good”—listen to me preach. Yes, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. The insult didn’t make a man out of me. It made a monster.’

  I coughed a little more, and rubbed my eyes. Everything ached.

  ‘Ultimate answer, my arse—and, quite bluntly, I never thought I’d end up beating about in Arthur Dent’s pyjamas.’

  35 | 三十五

  We were in a crowded bar I’d never seen before, yet I knew it was my Melbourne, the city I lorded it over when I died.

  Probably, the people with cosmetic enhancements were the giveaway, along with a predilection of the ladies for little black dresses.

  It would be raining outside. Of course.

  I recognized a young man waltzing through the crowd, past the vulgar-looking barman, whom he gifted with a thumbs-up on his way to the toilet.

  Straight away, I knew what I had to do.

  After waiting about half a minute, I followed the fellow in.

  Where Kohana had got to, I didn’t care. Better she wasn’t here. My first impression, upon entering the bathroom, was that no one was present, and the aroma distracted me: a heady combination of vomit, sweat and excretion. I expected to find a rotting carcass, and I have to say I almost gagged.

  Pulling my senses together, I saw the door to one of the cubicles was shut.

  I fished in my pocket for the Webley-Fosbery.

  Kohana hadn’t allowed me to get any practice up to this point, and I’d never before used a pistol, but it was deceptively simple to work out. I’d seen enough films in my time to comprehend the basics.

  I cocked the gun, with a click.

  That was when I spied my man through a narrow gap in the doorframe, could see the misery and anguish inscribed across his harried face. Not all, it would seem, was caused by the bathroom stench.

  ‘Do you think this is the answer?’ Curse her—she was here, after all.

  ‘It’s answer enough, my girl, to see him in more pain after I insert a bullet into his stomach.’

  ‘I don’t think this is the point of our being here.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Looks fine to me.’

  ‘Wolram, stop.’

  ‘Again?’ I glared at her over my shoulder. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re angry. And this isn’t why we’re here.’

  ‘Then what is the point?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You got the fun of reliving your pointless murders. Let me have mine.’

  ‘Those were memories. They happened. This didn’t.’

  ‘So I’m improvising.’

  ‘Will it make everything rosy again?’

  I breathed out loudly. ‘Damn you, Kohana. Leave me be. I need to do this. Now.’ I raised the gun and poked it through the small gap in the doorway.

  ‘The man is already tormented—don’t you agree?’

  ‘So am I, Kohana. He’s the one who murdered my daughter, then killed me.’

  ‘Also, the one whose wife you killed first.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with that!’

  ‘You still believe the lie?’

  The gun lowered of its own compulsion. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘After everything you’ve experienced since you fell from the perch, can you honestly say you think the world would be a better place if you knocked off your own assassin?’

  ‘A degree of retaliation never, ever went astray.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

  ‘I seem to remember you indulging yourself on a number of occasions.’

  ‘I did some terrible things. I was wrong.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know why we’re here.’

  ‘I said I wasn’t sure. That doesn’t stop me taking pot shots, and possibly coming to grips with a minuscule amount of it. You’ve done the same, and I’m grateful.’

  ‘Am I ever going to get to fire this gun? I’m sick of carrying it around.’

  ‘There’s a rubbish bin right there.’

  ‘Convenient.’

  I lobbed the firearm into a plastic bin pressed against the wall. It had a faded Hylax H-in-a-circle logo on it. Fitting. After that, I rinsed my hands in the grubby-looking sink. The woman was busy looking at herself in the mirror.

  ‘So, you are here to play Jacob Marley’s ghost, and rattle some chains.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kohana mused. ‘But I am surprised to learn you remember the name of a supporting character from Dickens.’

  ‘Whatever. Can we go now? Someone might get the impression I like to lurk in men’s toilets and forgive people I loathe.’

  T
he lights went out. Visions stretched before me, lopsided and ethereal—the first one of my mother crooning ‘It’s Raining, It’s Pouring’ as I, aged four, huddled (afraid) in the house and the rain hailed mightily without. The last was a recountal of my father, sitting on the sand at the beach, relaxed, jobless, strumming ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on his guitar.

  I awoke spread out, on top of a bed rather than the shore.

  Kohana was perched close by, mopping my brow with that damned Scottish tartan tea towel.

  ‘What was that about?’ I asked, trying to rise.

  ‘Stay put.’ Kohana pushed me back.

  ‘Not my memory or one of yours. Was I dreaming? Since when do dreams involve such abominable smells?’

  ‘I’m not sure—if you were dreaming, I got to freeload. Are you feeling all right? You passed out on me.’

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘I carried you. You’re not exactly a heavyweight, Wolram.’

  I noticed I wasn’t wearing my robe or shirt, so I pulled up the quilt around my neck. I didn’t feel comfortable having this woman view my seasoned flesh.

  Then an idea came to me.

  ‘Could you please hand me the smoking jacket?’

  Kohana stood up, leaned over to a dresser, scooped something up, and laid the robe before me. I poked one arm from under the covers and checked the pocket.

  ‘As I suspected—the gun is gone.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Kohana said.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Interesting?’ She shrugged.

  ‘You didn’t remove it?’

  ‘Why would I?’ She looked around her hovel. ‘I hate guns, and I have enough baggage here to dust.’

  ‘But how is it possible for me to physically leave something lying about, like the gun in the rubbish bin? If I leave a glass slipper behind, will some prince come buzzing after me?’

  ‘P’raps it depends on the time of night.’

  36 | 三十六

  We took our constitutional through a large nineteenth-century park—Fitzroy Gardens in East Melbourne.