Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  O G R E O G R E O G R E

  C O G I T O E R G O S U M N O N

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  The optometrist doesn’t make a fuss about the replacement charts. She asks Jovan to get rid of them. Specifically, she asks for the pile of them to be incinerated. He nods, says ‘no problem’.

  The optometrist is a woman getting old quietly as much as gracefully. She doesn’t colour the silver streaks through her black, shoulder-length hair. There is a drift to the way she moves around her self-contained office. A delicate and precise focus about how she puts her hands to the equipment within it. Her patients come and go without disturbing anything. Without the usual troubles that they carry with them into the rest of the hospital.

  It isn’t the kind of work a dentist does, which is all gums and pain, clamps and drills, blood and spit. The only thing that ever needs to touch a person is the bridge piece of the Optical Refractor, the immense apparatus she swings around her calmly seated patients. She asks a gentle question with the slightest click of her gears and dials. ‘Worse or better?’ are words she uses hundreds of times every week, and she enjoys their simplicity. The basic, clear improvement of someone’s vision. ‘Sharper or fuzzier?’

  The Cogito eye charts have no place in her world.

  They are almost identical to the actual eye charts and striking from a technical point of view. The numbers along the sides the optometrist uses to gauge visual acuity, the card that it is printed on, rather than thin paper. Even the made in USA at the bottom. It doesn’t matter because she knows they are wrong instantly. Every single random letter on each eye chart she can recite by heart. Has been doing so for thirty years already.

  Her name is Miss Richards. She is known as such by everyone from Jovan to the Chief of Medicine. Miss Richards smiles at most of the hospital staff when she passes them in the halls, and mostly they smile back. She doesn’t think about who it might have been, of these people passing her daily—one of them going to such an effort to create fake eye charts. Miss Richards knows it isn’t a message for her. She thinks it’s more or less random.

  There’s a large bin outside her office and it’s emptied every day. Jovan wonders why Miss Richards didn’t dispose of the charts herself, as he takes them away. Instead, she uses the word ‘incinerate’ twice as though it’s not enough that they be thrown away. They had to be incinerated.

  Jovan puts up one of the modified eye charts on the inside of his locker door and stares at it as he changes into his overalls. He understands the Latin, it takes him a while longer to work out the anagrams in plain English. For one thing he’d never heard of an ogre (the OED tells him it is a man-eating giant) and didn’t know what gore meant initially, though he’d seen enough to know the difference between it and a bloody wound.

  Another janitor, called Bill, tells him he’s the only man he’s ever seen study for an eye test and then laughs as if that’s about the best joke he’s heard all year. He repeats it every time he comes into the change rooms and guffaws. Elaborates by asking Jovan if he also studies for breath tests when he’s driving home. And he must be studied up by now for a blood test. Or has he prepared sufficiently to go into the staff cafeteria today and see if the new lunch menu passes the taste test? Does he think that if he goes to the MCG to watch Australia play South Africa in the cricket that he’ll pass that test? Jovan isn’t sure what he’s talking about. It’s getting more and more absurd. Jovan doesn’t take the eye chart down from his locker door.

  The rest of the eye charts are at the bottom of his locker, beneath his runners and civvies. Almost all the eye charts are the same. There is one that wasn’t the Cogito. It repeated itself a number of different ways, reading in disorientating upside-down letters with this message:

  Do You know Me

  Do You know

  Do You

  Do

  I

  Jovan closes his locker. There’s a space in his life these messages fill. It isn’t that he thinks they’re profound. He finds them interesting. It’s a shame they have been made by a mad man, because that worries Jovan—having these insane messages floating around in his head.

  The right thing to do is what the optometrist has done. Ignore these messages as though they are the million and one words leaping out at everyone, from every angle, countless times every day. The advertising, graffiti, brand names of clothes, newspaper headlines, all the bare-knuckled words that keep hitting with as much force as can be mustered by the cunning of their multitudinous authors.

  Jovan isn’t doing that. He’s wondering why a man would say that he thinks and therefore he knows he’s not alive. When the graffitist wrote I Go Cog, was he saying that any kind of thought made him a gear in the greater machinery of language, that he himself didn’t own? Within the apparatus of the Optical Refractor itself, unable to simply be, because he can’t see without the words that had been flooding through his mind from numberless sources, since before he’d even conceived of a self who might express being as idea.

  Jovan knows he’s overthinking it. Who knows what goes through a madman’s head? Who’d want to? Jovan knows about Gore and about the Ogre. He also understands that when it comes to being alive, to feeling it, thinking doesn’t mean shit.

  He yearns to be the same as Miss Richards, with her headphones plugged into her ears, her book before her eyes, ignoring as much of the clamouring world as she possibly can. He contemplates the image of her doing that, swaying in the rapidly moving train, as it shudders through graffiti-ridden tunnels and overpasses, splashed-out images from billboards and signs, swaying her head ever so slightly as the bodies in motion and voices in chattering profusion pass over the clear reflective surfaces of her indifference.

  He sees her doing that in the cafeteria often enough, sitting over her meal, placidly munching away on the wholesome home-cooked food she always brings along with her, plugged into her music, and her own chosen words screening her face, and she seems so self-contained and unstained. Until he realises that he himself has been that way long enough. That he’s his own version of a sealed jar, and that maybe this is the first time in years he has felt himself being twisted open.

  Jovan knows that the optometrist might be nothing as he imagines. She rarely speaks, so he finds himself looking for clues. Dr Graffito is nothing but clues and yet Jovan can’t imagine him walking around the hospital, caring for patients.

  As he lifts a mop off its hook on the wall and rinses out a filthy bucket, he wonders if people might be little more than products of their professions. Mr X-Ray drives home and feels the crush in the screech of brakes a hundred metres away and lives with the intimacy of loved ones being smashed and broken. The optometrist’s world gets dimmer and darker, filled with more and more of the indecipherable all around her. For Jovan, now and until death, a janitor (a ‘cleaner’ as they say in this country) there will be nothing other than deepening waste and grime. Perhaps that’s the reason he never puts his thoughts down on paper anymore. And yet what kind of person burns words into plates, cuts letters into cadavers, paints messages in stairwells almost no one uses, carefully creates eye charts? Dr. Graffito passes people in the corridors, smiling and saying hello.

  Jovan walks down to the delivery room. Pushes his mop and bucket along, leaving the sharp smell of cleaning product along the halls of the hospital. The grid pattern on the plastic floors are three tones of a comforting grey. He’s already been warned what’s awaiting him in the birthing room. It seems a kind of medieval event, yet some women still die in childbirth, bleeding out through a birthing wound. He dwells on the grid pattern of broad, grey rectangular shapes. Squares also cut into the ceiling. Pictures along the walls. Photographs of the many happy mothers who have come through these same corridors. Their offspring as well, not even babies yet. That could hardly be called infants. Exorcised embryos. New, trembling, half-blown balloons of life.

  A gory entry to the world for someone, whatever you wanted to call it, in the birthing
room. Blood and faecal matter on the floor below the table. A silver bucket kicked over in the desperate panic of a dying mother. This is what Dr Graffito means by gore. Many of the clean soft white towels and sheets not now clean or white. Bundles of paper towelling scattered across the ground in wet, brown-red splotches.

  A devastated nurse bustles past Jovan, leaving the room with an air of evacuation and disaster. It’s odd to see a professional nurse so affected that she’s scrambling to get somewhere quick, some place to release her sobs into weeping. It reminds him of the time he saw a policeman crying. A world-weary cop, with perhaps twenty years of investigating theft, murder and rape—in uniform and standing on a busy street—crying. Tears and an open mouth. Outside a newsstand in Sarajevo with the headline in his hands declaring war.

  Two clocks on the wall. One the time in the outside world beyond this windowless room and the other the time in this room. Stopped at sixteen hours and twenty minutes. A long fight, particularly if you weighed each of those minutes for what they were. Not at all the same kinds of minutes as those that passed when waiting for a train at a station. Not those passing through the night as you slept.

  There’s an armchair beside the birthing bed and its pillows. The space about the distance of two hands reaching out to grip and grapple. There’s blood on that chair too. It would need to be cleaned after the floor was done. It has the kind of heavy-wearing material made to deal with human blood and other stains.

  Jovan raises and releases the mop, watching for the right amount of steam and foam. He places his foot on the pedal to squeeze out the water he doesn’t need. Brings out the mop and pushes it through the mess of this birth.

  There is an entry. There is an exit. There is the escape of cold pierced skin. There is the seal of flushed flesh. Never to remember that first crowning coming into light. Never to know that last drawing away. There is the long loving sigh of the in-between …

  “What are you thinking?” the dentist asks him, closing the door behind her. Locking it. The blood on the floor has gone a bright red again, mixing with his foamy water. It is diffused and easily ignored.

  “You’d have to call that a profound light in your eye,” Tammie Ashford says with a mocking tone, that doesn’t quite mock. As though she’s willing to accept that he’s capable of deep thought, if she was able to acknowledge that he had any thoughts at all. She often speaks to him as to her own imagination—a tool for her sexual fantasies. She leaves her heels at the door and walks to him barefooted across the wet floor.

  “There’s something about you with that mop in your hands, the way you wield it like a weapon, the blood at your feet.” She stands before him. Close. Doesn’t touch. “We’ve got to get you out of those overalls. These mundane overalls.” She tugs at his shoulder strap. She perches on the birthing bed. Pulls back her skirt.

  She’s a pretty woman. It surprises Jovan that she acts this way. Beauty doesn’t need to behave like this. And yet it was because of it. Her bare feet had been placed in the watery blood, and now her heels drip with it. Jovan gets a towel to clean her feet and wishes he could leave it at that. That he could close her legs and plant a chaste kiss on her misguided forehead.

  He could imagine how all this mixed in the hungry imagination of Tammie Ashford and worked closer to the bone, tearing open her anaesthetised layers of mind to get to a core of pulsing life, where she could feel something primal and actual. Her lips pull away from her bright white teeth.

  He asks, “This word. Ogre? Do you know what means?”

  “What?” She really doesn’t hear him, but the heavy words spoken with his crude accent struggle through. “A monster, I suppose,” she says, watching his immense hands clean her small feet, the pulse at her throat beginning to visibly beat. She places both hands around his neck, his head, her fingers through his hair. Tries to pull his head down. He won’t bend. Won’t do that; not for her. She grits her teeth and feels an impulse to tear out his eyes, to reach into his mouth and pull his tongue out—some impossible act of destruction.

  “Monster yes. What kind?” he asks.

  Again the words are slow and heavy. Her blood is so loud. Her heart is so fucking desperate. She has to watch his lips move to hear him.

  “I don’t know. Some type of monster.” Opens herself up to grind naked and raw against the hard fabric of his dark blue work clothes.

  “He is the giant. Eating human meat. You did not know this?”

  “All monsters eat people. Wouldn’t be much of a monster if it didn’t.” Wanting more of his stupid words to fill her mouth, his brutal rock-crushing hands to reach inside her and ease her heart out for a bite from his crooked teeth, yellow in a slight diastema. She leans her head back, becoming breathless. “You should know, some of us taste good.”

  Jovan looks down, standing in the blood he’s supposed to be cleaning, and feels revolted—impelled by his body. He allows her hands to pop open the front of his overalls, button by button. Her hungry mouth reaches up for his neck. Her teeth, perfect and white. Breath beginning to rush and moan. There’s anger in the hand that takes hold of the back of her hair and pulls her head away, and hunger in the mouth that comes down on that clean smooth pale skin rushing through with moaning blood.

  She pushes him away as he gets close, and drops her feet to the floor, turns around and has him enter her another way. A different kind of revulsion now, blistering with heat breaking through them both, rippling fevers of violent energy. Leaving them barely able to stand. Out of breath. Out of thoughts or words. Out of everything and now just dead for a few seconds.

  One of the two clocks ticks out into the room. They begin to move in silence and then to the sound of their recovered breathing. Jovan doesn’t know why but he tells her the word Vampire originally came from the Serbs. It’s true, yet she looks at him as if she should have been gone five minutes ago and this little bit of trivia is more than a waste of time.

  “Why do you always feel compelled to talk after fucking?” He doesn’t respond. “Isn’t fucking enough for you?” He shrugs into his overalls. She refastens her bra. She fixes her hair. She straightens her shirt. Flattens her dress. She says, “He came from Transylvania, didn’t he?”

  Jovan has finished dressing. Moves towards his mop again. “Dracula is not same thing. This is one story by the Irish man.” She gives him a shake of the head that should vaporise him and all his words as sudden sunlight for the damned in this windowless room. Leaves without saying another word. Light and ready to live again.

  That revulsion grows stronger in Jovan after Tammie is gone. So much of what happens shouldn’t happen. There is a kind of helplessness that we learn, he thinks. A helplessness that is bred into us from the very earliest moments of our lives and the world goes on happening in ways that it should or shouldn’t. There is an illusion of a clean bright room where it is all laid out for us and we get to make our choices, say ‘yes, this will be good’, or say ‘no, I do not want to do that’. The room these choices present themselves in is windowless; airless and without light. With more than one clock on the wall—the one for the outside world hardly matters. The other clicks on beyond twenty-four hours into calculations that can’t be understood anymore. The tick, part of a cacophony of clicking, as though this room is full of watches and timepieces and grandfather clocks with swinging metal pendulums and cuckoo-clocks with opening doors and a helpless little yellow bird, popping out and announcing, ‘do this’ and ‘do that’.

  He pushes his mop. He picks up his bucket. He lets the water run down a sink. Washes down the foam. Thinks about the pain in his jaw. Locates the fear somewhere in his stomach, almost nothing at all now. He knows that’s not true. It wants to rise and fill his chest with black feathers, desperate to lift the top of his head off with screeching released in full-throated screams.

  Clean virginal snow, a disguise for the Blue Sky, in love with its floating White Angels, draped over the everything below of Shambling Feet, burying all in the heavy Broken
Beneath.

  He has been overcome before. No matter how much time passes he knows it is there, that it will descend and lay a heavy blanket of suffocation over him again. He has tried to think his way out. He has tried to allow it to wash away; ease it through to nothing. It persists, perches on a cornice of his brain, glaring down on his mind like a gargoyle. A different kind of monster. Not a flesh-eater at least. This one, a devourer of peace and soul, memories, sleep and dreams.

  There was another time he saw blood on the floor. He saw it cleaned away with mops. Something else to be washed away. He’d watched the way it was done with a clear simple expression that looked at it all and understood it and cleaned it away, as if what needed to be done could be accepted and it could be carried without crushing the soul or mutilating the mind.

  The same eyes that came to his low metal cot and the same hands that removed his pyjamas and cleaned the bloody diarrhoea from his helpless legs and trembling spine, and smiled at him afterwards as if there was nothing in the world to be ashamed of in any of this.

  A nurse with a name: Dragana Mihailovich. A mother of three dead boys. One daughter, alive and safely in London, who sent her letters every day. Which Dragana couldn’t get because they went to her address in Sarajevo. They were waiting for her, those messages. She knew that. A Muslim neighbour collected her mail, and when it was possible would send another parcel of messages on to Dragana, at the ever moving camp. There were pictures in those letters, of her grandchildren, and there were those delightful, painful glimpses, resemblances to her brave, lost sons.

  A human being is made. Made by the world. And made to go on, even after these kinds of losses. She must have been speaking more for herself than for Jovan, drifting as he was, closer to death by the hour. He can’t remember her voice anymore. He remembers her form, the permanent hunch in her shoulders like she wanted to be closer to the ground. As though there was nothing in the world above the shoulders she could possibly be interested in. Huge breasts as if she could have breastfed grown men. The way she wore black instead of nurse-white, saying white was a luxury this part of the world couldn’t afford. She always carried a whiff of bleach. She talked as she cleaned him. Basic words that were anything but simple. Saying that the course of human evolution was a blind walk, through a long, long cave, littered with human bones that we stumbled across; that we kept walking over, thinking that we would reach the end of the long tunnel—eventually we will all sit. ‘Don’t worry my darling’, she said. We will rest and let ourselves part at the ribs, unfold our vertebrae and let our skulls roll along at the feet of those continuing to move along to the end of the tunnel. He can’t remember what she said and he knows these weren’t her words. Only that refrain, ‘don’t worry my darling’ remained distinct. Something she must have said to her sons countless times as she raised them from their cradles, and went on saying until all meaning had been exhausted and the words barely meant anything and she could say them to the sick and wounded she cared for without payment or thanks—to Jovan and the rest of the patients she didn’t need names for. ‘Don’t worry my darling,’ she murmured, as she adjusted Jovan’s limbs from contorted positions and lifted his blanket to his chin when he shivered. A hand on his forehead. Even the end of the world was a part of human evolution, ‘Don’t worry my darling.’