by A. S. Patric
BLACK
ROCK
WHITE
CITY
BLACK ROCK WHITE CITY
A. S. PATRIĆ
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au
Copyright © A.S. Patrić 2015
First Published 2015
Transit Lounge Publishing
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover image: Furious Angels by Smitty B from the series
“Failing the Rorscach Test”
Author image: kipscottphoto.com
Cover and book design: Peter Lo
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
ISBN: 978-1-921924-88-0
for Emily
my love
Wherever I look there are poems
—whatever I touch is pain.
Ivo Andrić
CHAPTER
ONE
Jovan pushes the switch. The windowless room shudders with white flashes. He holds the cleaning caddy tight and braces himself against the solid post of the door frame. The fluorescent tube in the ceiling flickers one last time, yet Jovan is still blinking. Long moments pass without movement. The fluorescent above emits a static hiss and the light strobes almost imperceptibly. He blinks once more and refocuses on the overhead light. He’ll have to replace the tube soon.
A minute before, in the darkness of the hospital exam-room, there were glowing red letters leering through three shattered skulls—the crash victims of a triple fatality. The plastic of the X-ray photos has been glued to the interior of the X-ray light boxes and it’s going to be very difficult to remove. He’ll need to soak the glass panes in a solution. The / Trojan / Flea. These are the words on the inside of the bank of three X-ray screens. Jovan wonders why the fluorescent tube had not been removed from the ceiling. The graffiti would have been made more effective if there was no other illumination. Perhaps the vandal hadn’t thought that far ahead.
Mr X-Ray walks into the room as Jovan begins removing the glass from the light boxes. The hospital director is with him this morning, so X-Ray doesn’t whistle or sing his usual song. The director talks to Jovan as if he’s never seen him before.
“Please do not, under any circumstance, damage that glass while you’re cleaning.”
“No problem,” says Jovan.
“Please, be careful not to chip the glass.”
“No problem.”
“Do not scratch the glass.”
“No problem.”
“Please,” he says again, and leaves.
Mr X-Ray mouths ‘please’ when the director is gone and scrunches his features in a full face wink. “Notice how ‘please’ can be used more offensively than any obscenity?” Mr X-Ray has a name though he prefers the comic book hero sound of calling himself Mr X-Ray. He comes up with these kinds of monikers for a lot of people in the hospital.
“Director is angry,” Jovan says, pouring hot water and detergent into a wide bucket. “Not for glass. He wants graffiti to stop and there is always new problem. Maybe I angry too.”
“You’re not angry.” Mr X-Ray walks to his desk and its computer, leans over into a hunch, and clicks the mouse. “At least, you don’t look angry,” he says, over his shoulder.
“It waste my time,” Jovan tells him.
“Mate, you look at the world a certain way, and all you’ll see is waste.” The printer begins to slide out paper. X-Ray walks over to the machine and picks up his pages—pictures he took of the light boxes yesterday when he found the vandalism. He puts them in a blue plastic envelope and walks to the door.
“Dovi gen ja, Joe,” he says before leaving.
“Dovidjenya,” Jovan says, and turns back to the white foam and the glass within. For a while he gets to think about nothing other than not scratching or chipping the panes.
If I was washed away, if I was faded by the sun until my text was as vague as the tracery of veins below your blushed skin, if I was breathed in and out and whisper gone, if I evaporated with the thought you have just forgotten, and weighed as much as the word love weighs on your tongue.
Jovan had been a poet in Yugoslavia when that was still a country. Two collections of his poetry had made it to the shelves of libraries and bookstores. He imagines that most of the paper printed with his poetry has burned. He’d never had a particularly good memory and hadn’t memorised any of those poems. In Australia he never commits a word to paper. He finds himself recalling phrases, some old, some new, playing them over and again in his mind.
Many of the hospital’s employees speak to Jovan as though his slow, thick words are a result of brain damage. When attempting to pronounce his name they become retarded themselves — ‘Jo … Ja … Joh-von. Ja-Va. Ah, fuck it, we’ll call you Joe.’
“What is hard to speak Yo-vahn? Jovan. The sounds all in English,” he says to the dentist he’s been fucking since the Christmas piss-up a month ago.
She says, “Whatever, Joe. Does it matter?”
“It matters. I hate the fucking ‘Joe’.”
“They call me Tammie. It’s a cat’s name for God’s sake. What are you complaining about?”
“Then there is Mister … the X-ray man. He always sings the song when he see me. The Jimi Hendrix. Hey Joe. Where are you go with the mop in you hand.” He waits. “And now you laughing.”
“Well, it’s funny,” she says.
“What’s funny?”
“You singing for one thing. And the mess you make with English. Where are you go …” She breaks up laughing again.
“He sings all the time. Can be funny hundred times?”
“We’ll see. Sing it once more for me.”
When he is ready to leave her office she tells him it will have to be the last time she sees him. She has said that every single time since they started what she would never call an affair. A fling maybe. No, not even that. It’s barely a thing. She’s married to a lawyer who is always working, even when ostensibly home alone with her. The law is his religion, she has elaborated. And this faith keeps him chaste when he’s home with Tammie.
It doesn’t matter, because Jovan is married to Suzana. His wife can’t have sex with him anymore. Suzana wants him to find this necessary release. That’s what she calls it. Perhaps she thinks of it as a bit of biology, another basic procedure performed at his hospital. Her proviso is that a lover needs to be married. Less chance of losing her husband. Jovan, on the other hand, knows he’s already lost his wife, though that has nothing to do with Tammie.
Jovan tells the Australian his tooth is still hurting, and maybe she can do him a favour, since she’s a dentist? She laughs because she thinks he’s joking. He’s been feeling pain in his jaw since Serbian Christmas. He tells her every time he sees her and he doesn’t know why he can’t make her believe him.
There was a startling white winter in your blood, and there was all our springs and autumns and children in long laughing summers that will never end, though now, when we close our eyes, we see a blank expanse and it gets harder to hear through the clatter, the din of our disused, unoiled, derelict hearts.
Jovan cleans graffiti off a wall in the cold hospital stairwell. His thoughts never register on his face. Looking at him you would think there’s nothing more to him than the effort to dislodge ink from a concrete wall. Maybe that’s why Tammie doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t see the pain when he tells her it’s in hi
s teeth.
Jovan is six-foot-four and broad, thick boned with hands that can wrap halfway around a basketball. He still looks fit enough to play. Years ago he even had unrealistic yet delightful dreams of a professional career running up and down the glossy blond wood, propelling himself up and finding drift in the air.
The stairwell is lit by a fluorescent tube from the floor below, and some sunlight struggling down through a door held open with a mop bucket, three flights above. Jovan wears a mask because the cleaning chemicals are toxic. A mask is good for about an hour before it’s useless, he’s been told by a workplace safety officer, and even that hour has a question mark hanging over it.
The graffiti says:
I am so full of your death I can now only breathe your rot.
The cleaning chemicals don’t work today. A different kind of paint. Oil based and applied thickly in layers. After scrubbing for half an hour and hardly affecting it, he steps back and looks at it again. It’s not worth cleaning off words written on a darkened concrete wall, within a stairwell that almost no one uses. It’s not offensive or crude. Doesn’t even make sense. The hospital administration, however, are adamant about graffiti. About this graffiti especially.
A few weeks ago, on the walls of an operating room, the words, I am a god of small knives … I am a devil of deep cuts … The punctuation points were a different colour to the black of the words. The dots were a brownish red, and were meant to imply blood. They’d been applied wet with a thick brush and had dripped down in streaks of red. It was discovered they were blood, in fact—the doctors weren’t sure whose. They all assumed it was blood from their own surgery fridges. Every drop was recorded in precise measurements and none was missing when they checked.
Admin called in Jovan as if it was another vomit spill. But they were beginning to panic. Fear in doctors involved talking in low voices, standing wordlessly in silent examination, staring at the graffiti in the operating room as if it was a brain scan of newly discovered tumours in their own heads.
The graffiti kept coming, and after long discussions in hospital halls and offices the police were called in. Bored constables wrote down indecipherable jottings that would never go anywhere. Detectives arrived with no preparation to pursue this kind of vandal, doing their duty with a disinterest they didn’t disguise. It was graffiti that, no matter the highfaluting language, was the petulance of a medical school brat. In another few days the wanker would certainly be caught in the act.
The hospital can’t believe it is one of their own doctors. They need it to be someone like Jovan though his English is a square block for a round hole. Further afield they simply can’t attribute this kind of articulate existential suffering to someone who wears overalls every day.
It hasn’t been voiced once by anyone, yet what disturbs people in the hospital, Jovan thinks, is the idea that the ellipses were the graffitist’s own blood. Enough of a bloodletting to have required opening a vein. The problem is that if it is a doctor writing the graffiti, then the same hand writes prescriptions, it orders procedures and it presses a scalpel into the soft flesh of another human being.
If I was the dream of water, you’d insist on the desert in your mouth, only because you never remember the rolling blue kisses of waves come the cold light of day.
The lines of poetry are tracks he can run his mind along, again and again. There’s less chance of finding the kind of crash he’d seen in Mr X-Ray’s office—skulls caved in with garish red lettering.
Today he’s thinking about Suzana. Her pale white skin, the colour of milk, or rather, as if she’s full of milk beyond the pink partition of flesh. Some white substance that fills her soul like black does for the stars and the distances between them. He seeks ways to describe her skin, contrasted against his own darker body.
Jovan has inherited the genes of a Turk somewhere along the line. The colour of his skin mystifies Anglo-Australians. Prompts them to ask, is he Greek, Italian, Jewish, knowing that he isn’t any of those before they ask. Tammie, loving his skin this Australian summer, telling him if he could bottle it, he’d be a billionaire by autumn. That, and his yellow eyes.
“Is that a Serbian feature?” Tammie asks, on the next time that she said was never going to happen.
“There is no Serbian feature,” he answers, feeling a distaste for the question. “I have brown eyes.”
“In the light through the window they’re yellow. It’s nice. And just an observation. You look as if someone asked to borrow a kidney.”
“You think ‘feature’ of the Serbs?”
“Whatever Joe. Make sure that door is locked.”
“What is—The Trojan Fleas?” He asks her as he moves towards her, unbuckling his belt. “Is that expression in English?”
“Why do you ask?”
“More graffiti. I had to clean this words other day.”
“Ever think about what kind of a maniac needs to write on walls?” She opens her eyes a millimetre wider. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.” She props herself on the edge of her desk and opens her legs, bare feet beside her arse, already without underwear.
“It makes me think …”
“Don’t think too much Joe. You’re here to do something very easy; very clear and pleasurable.”
Jovan isn’t used to women who love fucking as much as Tammie does. He doesn’t believe the elaborate moaning with her head thrown back or the whispering through clenched teeth.
He looks out the window while he delays his own gratification, watching people wait to park their cars when others vacate spots. Hot enough outside for a heat shimmer off the concrete and wilting people to hurry from cars to shade. Thinks about the pain in his tooth. Her nails begin to dig into his back. He tells Tammie no scratches, and then speaks in Serbian, calling her a fucken stray cat on heat. She places her ankles on his shoulders and lifts her arse off the table, holding herself up. Loud enough to be heard from behind the locked door, in the dental surgery, and maybe beyond to the waiting room. He still finds it hard to believe her when she shudders to climax, and allows himself—lets himself fall into the rushed air of their breathing. Blood on his lip from a bite she gives him, makes him think about Suzana. The excuse she’ll never ask him for.
Tammie puts on her white coat, the name Samantha Ashford sewn into the pocket. He points to it, “How is this Tammie?”
“Samantha. Sam. Sammy. Tammie. Like Teddy from Edward.”
“I have a friend, Slavoljub. Slavko, we call him. Australian call him Sam.”
She looks at him for a second, apologising with an expression on her face, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “I’ve got a root canal in a few minutes.”
“What do you call this?” He leans over her face, breathing across it as though to blow away a frosting.
“Freckles,” she says as she opens her eyes. They don’t speak for a moment. They are close enough to kiss.
“Is this feature for the Aussie?” he asks.
She looks at the door and then back to his face. “You have to go.”
Words are spray-painted over the wall of an empty hospital room for children. In thick black over the pictures of fluffy dogs, cats and ponies, and across crayon drawings some of the children had made of themselves and their families. Jovan has to throw all those away and decides to give the whole wall a fresh coat of paint. A vivid colour he thinks, which he could bring from home tomorrow. A bright warm orange. The hospital only pays for drab colours.
The message this time reads:
The dead will not bother you. The dead have left you a world. The dead will welcome you. The dead have slept here. The dead have been born here. The dead look like you. The dead have the same names. The dead already own your father. The dead have already fucked your mother.
All of these phrases are jumbled. There is no order to them. Some are repeated many times and some written once. The final line is written over the top of everything as though the doctor found the courage to use the word fuck, and then
became braver and more insistent in its use. The words that might have been carefully placed initially, turned into a wild crescendo that reached a climax in this children’s room last night.
Jovan steps out into the afternoon light. Or is it evening light? Strange, living so close to the South Pole. It’s past eight and there’s still sunlight in the sky. A fingernail moon is pushing through the indigo curtain rising from the suburban Sandringham houses. He walks out into the warm air, exhaled now from the ground, heavy on the skin, light in the lungs.
He leans over the top of his first Australian car, feeling the heat of the roof radiating through his arms, and drifts into poetry.
The air that breathes me, the air that moves my life, that evaporates my soul, the air that kisses me and kisses me, the air breathing in the bliss of my longest exhalation …
He doesn’t own this tranquillity. Moments like these are rare gifts that come his way accidentally, wrapped and intended for others. He can hold them, briefly as he does now, pausing beside his rust-spotted white Ford panel van. Soon he’ll have to surrender them.
He opens his chest and takes a few more lungfuls of air and thinks of Suzana again. She will be at home, somewhere in that empty Frankston house. A rental that still feels like a rental after three years. He unlocks his car door. He pulls it open and doesn’t wait for the heat to leave the cabin before he gets in.
There’s a long drive home to Frankston. The brakes are spongy. He will have to fix them this weekend. And it has to be this weekend. He bought the brake pads a month ago. He doesn’t leave important things—at least, he never used to. His brakes have been bad since winter. As he waits for a space in an endless stream of traffic on Bluff Road he remembers he’s signed himself up to help Slavko paint a house in Toorak, both Saturday and Sunday.
The hospital discovers a body on a trolley in the lobby on the weekend. Cut into the flesh with a scalpel, from throat to navel, is the word: