After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  I wouldn’t know his name until the month ended, I couldn’t even get close enough to read his name tag. If I had it would have read his Buddhist name SHIH BEN, mine said BEN JENG. The meditation sessions, the orderly lines, the cafeteria seats were all segregated into men and women, so it was impossible to get close enough to smell him, or to hear him breathe while walking, or to attempt to swish the hem of my robe to touch the hem of his perhaps, though the entire retreat, the entire thirty days I thought of almost nothing but him. Naturally every evening when all the other monastics went to bed, and I had saved my daily shower and desire for the end of the day, I would masturbate in the showers, tongue kissing the tile walls and thinking of him under the robes, imagining the tall, strong, healthy muscular body beneath the swath of fabric, him grabbing at my thighs, him everything.

  When the month ended, the ninety-seven remaining monastics (fifty-three couldn’t make it all the way to the end) took a graduation photograph outside the Great Compassion Hall and then returned to our rooms to change into our own clothing, bundling our robes in the temple’s laundry sacks for the next exclusive group of hippies and yuppies. We all retrieved our personal belongings and left. I saw him in the car park, and he was the first person I spoke to. He walked up to me as I lingered at my car, waiting for the moment. Hi, we’d said, I’m Luke, I’m Lane; I think we shook hands. I remember him asking is this your car? I remember him placing the palm of his hand gently against the old Volvo, near the gas tank as if he were leading an old animal through a doorway. Yes, and that’s yours? I pointed to the white carpenter’s van. His swag was jockeyed to the roof’s grate. Yes. It was as if we had forgotten how to speak.

  I asked what he was doing for Christmas. He said he was driving south to the bush to stay at a friend’s farm, and asked if I would like to come? I remember what I said, just yes, that’s all I could say, a robotic yes. We spent a week sleeping in his tent, making love and swimming naked and eating bowls of rice, out of a monastic habit; slowly we unravelled our tongues and talked and fell in love hard like a brick to the guts. Then the bushfires came and he drove south to Adelaide, I drove north to Sydney, a few weeks later he transferred to my university. Then we graduated university, he got a job in computer something and I worked at the apartment on my paintings and did copy editing. We ate dinners, took photos of our trips, took photos of our dinners, of our feet sliding into white sand. We talked about Buddhism often, but we never revisited it. We grocery shopped together and budgeted, and attended people’s weddings, attended birthday lunches for twenty-nine-year-olds – and we were probably both thinking what right did a twenty-nine-year-old have to request that we get a gift and pay for this meal and sit at tables pretending we liked the person, but we had changed and we never said stuff like that to each other anymore, or if I hinted at it he would say I was a bitch, or nasty or mean-spirited and then we’d fight about how ruined I was as a person.

  Then I got a job in a gallery, which I thought I wanted but ended up loathing, and we both started to earn a weekly wage, I started buying my clothes at stores rather than rifling through second-hand racks, Luke bought his clothes from the stores too, he wore ironed shirts, and sometimes I would iron them for him. We measured everything in our lives by what we’d earned. We made plans for the seasons; we no longer took to the day’s weather with abandon. I began to love spending the money, and he began to need more money to buy more things too, and we took out a personal loan for a new TV and coffee machine in the house, and a wine fridge, and outdoor furniture that was featured on the front page of the holiday catalogue; and we argued about when to have a baby, and we sometimes drank too much wine and made love, the type where I could never orgasm and I would fake one just to make the sex stop because I had to work the next morning. We bought things to hang our keys on when we came home from work, a rack for the bills coming in, we bought fashionable rugs, and expensive candles, we bought a Wii Fit, and we stopped going hiking and we played indoors and we rarely saw our friends. We stopped having potluck dinners with our neighbours and we stopped reading novels in bed together and bought another smaller flat-screen TV for the bedroom. I packed my easel in the hall cupboard instead of having it and my canvas and paints in the living room. I was always tired, and Luke was always working more then, and it was hard to enjoy little victories. We got engaged and took out another personal loan for the party and thought we’d eventually buy a house or an apartment when we paid off our personal loans and had better jobs.

  We only momentarily got caught by the rush of the highway, but we remembered the freedom of it, and I think the impossibility of staying captivated had turned us bitter. I started to take lots of photos of our life, of our fitness binges, or our new furniture, the places we went to, anytime we ate something photogenic. I posted them on Instagram and blogged about a fictional life we had, fake adventures, the one smiling photo out of a hundred smiling photos that was correct. I sought out advertisers, I thought I could quit the gallery and paint more and post things for mortgage money. We had a nice corner in the living room that reflected afternoon light off the wall and I tried to photograph everything there. I began to create elaborate dinners and birthdays for friends we never really saw in real life anymore, all in order just to get a good photograph. Luke said it was dangerous, that I went to the local coffee shop and took photos of my coffee and tagged a map to the cafe. He said anyone could follow me there or, worse, break into our apartment when they knew I’d be getting a coffee. Besides, he said, we couldn’t really afford all these store-bought coffees and that’s why we bought the coffee machine to begin with. He said we couldn’t afford the sushi restaurant I liked to go to, and the fresh flowers I liked to buy and the new accessories for the light-filled corner of our apartment. I tried to hide the purchases. I’d still buy new throw pillows and things with typography and I’d lie and say it was a gift and I’d take more photos and edit them and post them online and I would sit there for ten minutes watching the screen, waiting, and if I didn’t get one hundred likes in ten minutes I’d know the photograph wasn’t very good and I’d delete it and the next day put another up. Every day when something happened I had ideas for captions to the photographs – I had edits of captions going around in my mind all the time, even at the edge of sleeping. I realise now I thought that I was significant. The truth is, I was just lost. I deleted all that stuff, just email is left, only emails to myself to tell myself of all the things that are real and that aren’t. I don’t want to feel like my insides are being dished out with a slotted spoon, like I have the never-hungry-always-hungry aches in the guts. I want to orientate myself in a world I used to know, when I didn’t need all the things, and all the praise and all the imagined glory. I want to pick flowers again without carefully arranging secateurs beside the vase.

  Lane looked up from the unfinished email and outside the Meat House, onto the corner of the street. It began to rain: an orange blinker light flashed through the downpour; market men, and smoking men standing at pavements in pleated trousers, dashed from the sudden inconvenience and gathered, as if in prior agreement, under the wide awning of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  The rain began to pour and stampede the street; the noise, she thought, was like a million quaking hearts, a frenzy of drumbeats signalling something else approaching. Lane drank the remainder of the wine from the glass, dipped her forefinger and thumb into the olive oil gathered around the eggplant. She massaged her finger and slid off the ring.

  It’s Too Difficult to Explain

  Vincent lay in the light. It fell across the trundle bed in shards the colour of brittle toffee, coming in early and sickly sweet. A complimentary bed has its aftertaste, depending on the severity of the need. He could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty years old now; that decade can be either kind or brutal to the face. The muscles had gone at the shoulders, where they’d once met a thick neck, flush with the oxygenated skin that only athletes acquire. Temporary shelter was gettin
g the better of him.

  There was not enough space to do lunges. When he attempted pushups, the wood floor laboured, and he knew that the lodger in the room below would be angry. After riding out another week of his training schedule and then scrapping it altogether, he began instead to print flyers for the Millionaire’s Club pyramid scheme in order to raise enough money to rent his own place. He needed fifty recruits, at a guess.

  *

  When a sprinter wins, the victory can usually be attributed to some combination of the following things: position, balance, acceleration, projection of angles of flight, maintenance of speed, and ground-contact time. Vincent always thought about this last point. Ground-contact time – this is what had given him leverage, that he’d never really touched the earth for long.

  ‘Run to the shop and get some bread, Vinnie.’

  ‘Run along, Vinnie, and make yourself busy.’

  ‘If he should come back, you just take your sister and run, Vinnie.’

  ‘Vinnie, I’ve got to go now. You run the house and take care of your sister, alright?’

  His mother had been single – the warm-skinned father had fled fast and never returned. Vinnie was a gentle baby, quiet for many years. He’d hardly spoken a word by age five, though he wasn’t seen by a physician to find out if that meant anything. He was fed, bathed, and put to bed on time mostly. Every so often he caught a wary glance from his mother, whom he only slightly resembled; she was the type of mother to only lip-smile at him. In his early teens he’d felt sad that he couldn’t see more of himself in her, or her in him, and that no-one else was there to compare himself to. His heart-shaped face, his green eyes, his colouring. Perhaps the reminder of someone else was the reason his mother glanced at him that way. She could not hold his gaze.

  Because of this doubt about where he was meant to be, he fit in nowhere in particular. He didn’t know where he began with his mother, his sister; everything seemed to go in different directions too early. His mother came and went, seeking jobs or men further and further away, for longer stretches, drawing out alternate lives. When she left for the last time, he chose the name Vincent instead of his birth-certified one, Vinnie Jr. He was fostered into one kind family and then another, and they too called him Vincent. For some years his life was good and he felt that people cared.

  Point-zero-five seconds separated him from everything he thought he’d been. It made sense to him only later, in the dark cavern of a lone night – everything measured in a series of part-seconds and impulses. He had known all the things he’d done to get there. Each could be bottled into a single quick choice: mostly the choice to go.

  He’d been running straight lines for nearly ten years. His first girlfriend had brought him along to her squad training when she was fourteen; up in the viewing stalls, watching those sturdy bodies bolting to a seemingly irrelevant end, he’d known at once that he could do what they were doing.

  He’d been her first questionable boyfriend, smoking his foster mother’s secret kitchen-cabinet cigarettes. She had been a pretty girl, forever with the tight ponytailed hair smoothed into a thick, perfect cascade. He’d been the first boyfriend to draw out that elastic band.

  He was nineteen when he clocked his best hundred metres, a 10.07. It granted him the title of the country’s fastest man and raised enough attention to put him on the front pages, as well as offering him a shot at the Olympic trials and sponsorship money that he used to purchase things he would never otherwise have considered. Relatives got in touch; classmates reminded him of their apparent friendship. He ate his meals at tableclothed restaurants. Still, he couldn’t unbind himself from his first small newspaper interview – the one that revealed that his coffee-coloured skin and atypically thin calf muscles were the genetic inheritance of a runaway father, and that by the time he’d turned fourteen his mother had left, too. Later he would trawl through years of minor internet articles to recall the things that defined him. He did this when he became lonely and his life prematurely quiet.

  The more he succeeded, the more he wanted something. New girlfriend, new coach, new sponsor – none of it seemed to suffice. Nothing could take away the feeling that he might yet return to what he was from, no matter how fancy the parties he attended, or how interesting and educated the people he befriended. He was still the point from which he moved.

  *

  His coach was a healthy-looking strawberry-blond man, newly fifty, a scrawny-legged thick-chested former runner. He was the best coach in the state, and widely liked for being kind but tough.

  ‘Newton said, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”, Vincent.’ Coach quoted only philosophers, scientists and difficult poets. He repeated anecdotes that Vincent often didn’t understand.

  ‘You know how a surgeon can cut carefully enough, precisely enough, to remove a tumour from the brain? Train like that.’

  Vincent’s time had stopped getting faster. The less his body performed, the more Coach would offer trite encouragements. ‘Good, good, go again.’ He smiled less. It had been a long time since Vincent had reached anywhere near his personal best. He was twenty-three now, and his hundred-metre sat at 10.10, 10.13. He didn’t win anymore, and even though he still held the record, it was no longer a news item. As he felt himself stagnating, he bound himself up in new people who seemed blind to what he lacked – people who could see only greatness, not knowing it was already gone.

  He took up with another girlfriend. They’d met at a cafe, where he’d been eating ice-cream for breakfast. She’d leant over and asked, ‘Is that the child’s affogato? I think I’ll have one too.’ Her name was Chloe, and she would become over the next few months the first person in his life he’d felt something warm and inexpressible toward. She was too good for him, too beautiful, too elegant, with white skin and high arching eyebrows that said Look at my blue eyes. Her parents were European, rich, the elite of the city. He was happy to have a new woman in his life, one he hadn’t wronged yet.

  ‘What took you so long at the shops, Vinnie?’

  ‘Your sister’s hungry, Vinnie.’

  ‘Sound the words out, Vinnie. Read it properly.’

  ‘Vinnie, you can’t be a boy anymore. Try harder to be a man.’

  In the dig phase, down at the knees, a sprinter will free-fall for a fraction of a second before a tucked leg plunges downward and hits red rubber. The pressure to trust the fall can be too much; the run can be lost before it’s begun. The intention must be perfect.

  Chloe would come to Vincent’s training each morning, watch and smile and wave from the stretching bars, happy to hang upside down in her tight yoga pants, arms dangling, fingers stretched out. She was thin and nimble and joked charmingly with the female runners in the squad about running them down. Her movements were purposeful and confident, each step owning the space just around it. She spoke in a similar way. If she said something like ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ someone overhearing it might mistake her observation for the quiet imparting of some deep secret. Around her Vincent became thoughtful. He would reach out for her gently, not like he had with others. Those other girls who laughed with their mouths wide.

  They spent their time talking about everything that they wanted to do. He said his dream was to go to the Olympics and win, but the words sounded wounded to him, unreal. Chloe was in graduate school, studying music. She said she wanted to be a concert pianist, but lamented that she was probably too old.

  Those first months, with Chloe, he existed in a time of perfection. She believed he was fine, more than fine, even though he was expired.

  He was distracted soon enough. He began to fear the end of something. He didn’t trust the first leg, the one that rose and fell. The part before, the push away, he could do with ease. But now he knew she was there, and that she could go.

  Vincent and Chloe went to dinner at her parents’ home for the first time after six months of
dating. He was told it would be only her siblings and her mother; her father was away on business. The house was symmetrical and built from white stone, three wide storeys with windows set in a high, sloping rooftop – like the family homes in American films, he thought. It was hung with Christmas-icicle lighting and had a low iron gate that separated it from a quiet, narrow street. The view fell onto the park that housed the national museum. He knew he could speak with people from different walks of life – he could have lunch with a sponsor, or a fellow athlete, or a flashy sports manager – but he had never been to a home like this. This was not right.

  He began to taunt himself as they walked up the path, panic growing from his chest and flashing heat up his neck to the top of his head. His heart panged. You are going down, he told himself over and over, you are going down and this is the moment you taste the mud instead of just wading in it. It is not okay for you to be here. You are trespassing, no-one has invited you here and you must go.

  ‘Come in, come in!’

  A woman, Chloe’s mother, had opened the door as they ascended the stone stairs. She leant into the space of the doorway just as he’d seen similar women do in those American films. She was smiling, purposefully making her eyes squint, as if she were a kind and elderly librarian. The house was lit honey yellow, like a dream. Vincent was introduced to Chloe’s siblings and their partners, young professionals from the best schools. The conversation dipped in and out of previously rendered stories, swaggering tales of how Chloe’s family took diplomatic residence behind some gates in Copenhagen, or a lengthy explanation on the ‘de’ part of her brother’s girlfriend’s French last name. The wine was complimented at length. The wine, Vincent thought, was his only hope. He tried to keep his fork in his mouth or the wineglass at his lips at all times – tried to make sure that the area was too busy to be part of a conversation he couldn’t have.