by A. S. Patric
“I’m sorry?” He says, smiling good-naturedly at Jovan, and half-apologetically at Suzana.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not asking you to learn a new language. Learn how to say our names. That is if you want to talk to me. Go your own way if you don’t.”
The smile murdered on his face, he leans forward, “Sorry. Did I say something to offend you?”
She chews before answering. Places her fork into another piece of meat. Suzana says, “Take a moment. Think about what I said.”
“Alright. And how should I pronounce your name?”
“Does it matter? I ask you, because I suspect that as soon as I tell you, it will slip away from your memory, with about as much importance as the name of that dog outside. You do remember his name don’t you?”
“Yes.” He’s been holding his cutlery, halfway through his meal. He glances at Jovan, who looks back at him as if he’s simply interested in this new direction in their conversation.
“And what is the dog’s name?” She asks, chewing slowly. He puts down his cutlery and it’s clear he wants to simply rise and leave.
“Isn’t it Charlemagne?” He tries a smile. Suzana with the fork in her hand. She doesn’t move it to her mouth.
“And since you remember how to correctly pronounce that dog’s name, tell me, what is my husband’s name?”
He pronounces it carefully, “Jovan.”
“OK.” She smiles at him. David Dickens looks relieved.
She picks up his question, “Yes I read. I have read in the past and I will continue to read in the future. Who do you enjoy reading, David?” He picks up his cutlery and they continue to talk. He doesn’t return to his exclusive conversation with Jovan again. David Dickens is also careful to compliment the food and the wine.
When they finish their late dinner, Suzana asks them, “Both of you talk about that graffiti as if it was something more than scribbles on the wall. I mean, it’s just more graffiti. What do you think it is, that it deserves this kind of continued examination?”
“If it’s just the graffiti then it’s how he does it. It’s pretty amazing that he’s getting away with it for as long as he has. If it’s a message, we’re interested in what he’s trying to say. Because if we look at his Dog Eat Dog statement, there is the text, which isn’t all that remarkable, telling us little more than a certain disenchantment with the world. The shortcomings of Consumerist-Capitalism are fairly cliché. Then there’s an overlaying of this text on a Rorschach test image, which is also contextualised within the framework of a hospital newsletter. The meta-narrative of all such messages already presented and various methods of presentation in all of them. There’s also the aesthetic success of the particular message, which might strike some as somewhat superficial, yet there’s a feeling of artistry in all we’ve seen him do. His ‘Installation’, we might call it, Origin of the Species, gets a front page of the local newspaper because there’s something about the seemingly innocuous water cooler that fascinates the eye. And the mind, of course. A water cooler full of human fat. The juxtaposition astounds the imagination. We must then ask what do we think of when we think of the water cooler? It’s the pseudo-mythical place for gossip, and if not secret talk, then privileged conversations among the general people of a workplace. We’re very far from the origin of the species and yet we have gone on with this kind of monkey chatter from the beginning. Is the substance itself the origin of the species? What’s compelling is how all of these works do seem to connect and change meanings and interpretation. His Rorschach image was displayed in the paper and has been circulating on the Internet. They’re becoming immensely popular. People want to see these images. So they are things in themselves. There’s also the effect of these displays, which is an interesting phenomenon. I am one, I mean, me being here at all, to discuss it. More significantly there’s the suicide of a respected woman to consider. Certainly this could not be attributed solely to the graffiti, though clearly it was significant. There’s what he might choose to say next, if it is a ‘He’. Because what interests me in particular is that we have yet to glimpse the person behind these outbursts. I simply see no psychological profile. There’s no thumbprint in any of the paint, so to speak.” Dickens stops, blinks and asks, “I mean, who is this person?” He blinks again. “Jovan probably talks with Dr. Graffito every day.”
Jovan brushes his teeth in the bathroom. Charlemagne barks at a possum somewhere out beyond the fence. With the bedroom door open, Suzana can hear the fridge go silent. She hadn’t heard the buzzing while it was going. Only the silent contrast. Now Jovan washes his mouth out with water, seven, eight, nine times. It seems excessive. She hears him switch off the light, and she hadn’t noticed how much light had reached down the hall and through their bedroom door until it was off. The heavy sound of his footfalls. As though he’s twice the size he is, and he’s already such an oaf of a man.
She’s lying in bed. Too warm for sheets. Boxers for Jovan, and Suzana in knickers. The silent K in that word. He looms above the bed. Perhaps he pauses above her body. Perhaps not. Always the feeling of abeyance with him now. How much of it comes from him and how much from her? If he were to decide he wanted her, desperately came to her, maybe she’d feel his passion come and sweep her away as it did in the past. It wouldn’t be the heavy flesh impact of skin covered bones. It wouldn’t feel like a collision.
“What’s that woman’s name?” she asks Jovan, after having not wanted to ask that very question for hours. After driving it from her mind. Almost fooling herself into believing she’d succeeded. The familiarity of the perfume, (the Chanel—Marilyn Monroes’s No.5) has also been caught in Jovan’s overalls. Makes it unavoidable now; something she can’t help but see even if the agreement is for closed eyes.
“I thought you were sleeping,” he says, head falling onto his pillow. The whole bed moves, the word elephant warbling in her head, settling after a moment. She spells the word in English to calm herself. She remembers Ph instead of F.
“You should know better,” she says.
“Maybe I don’t. Who am I to question the rules of the game?”
“What game?”
“The game you play when you’re not playing a game.”
“What does that mean?” She hears the fridge click back on, and thinks about whether it’s better to be bothered by that noise and have the air circulating through the open door.
“I’m not keeping secrets. I’m just surprised by the question.”
“I don’t know what you’re keeping. Do you?”
Jovan says, “Her name is Tammie Ashford. She’s a dentist at the hospital. She’s married to a lawyer. I’ve heard they’ve got some political future together.”
“You might want to draw a boundary for Tammie Ashford,” she suggests.
“Some people drive right into walls for the fun of it.” He shifts onto his side to face Suzana.
“Do they?” She turns her head on the pillow toward him and opens her eyes. “They drive into walls?”
“Maybe because their heads are full of those monkeys, blind, deaf and dumb, not sure what they’re hearing or seeing in the commotion of the cage.” Tapping his skull. “Is there a point in putting a sign on the wall?”
“I’m telling you to put a sign on it. Hang a light up. Paint the road in yellow warning stripes. Put up a fucking barricade a hundred metres down the road.” She turns her head back and closes her eyes again. Her hands neat, beside her hips. Breasts exposed. He rolls back. She listens to his heavy breathing. Knows he’s lying there, his eyelids blinking. Outside that damned dog starts up barking again.
“Do you hear me?” Suzana asks.
“I don’t need to hear you. Wasn’t I thinking the same thing myself?” They don’t speak again. She listens as his breath gets deeper and slower. As he moves into sleep and leaves her behind on the warm bed to trickle sweat down her ribs. To listen to her own eyelids shutting and opening.
“I saw you smile at her Jovan.” She says
it quietly.
It isn’t that uncommon, is it? Glen Coultas has underwear that often shows evidence of another woman. Even having hushed conversations, while Rae dozes in her medicated sleep. His own wife incapacitated by something called symphysis pubis dysfunction, and her depression making things worse. So he goes out to a prostitute called Isabelle. Whispering that name into the phone. Yet then he takes his son out to water the grass and talks about the world and the wisdom that can be found living in it with open eyes. Glen then comes back inside to wake his wife with kisses, and a love that seems sincere in every way that matters. Rae’s grateful for it, because her depression is an affliction that has fallen on her as though from the sky. Not making her bitter, but apologetic and grateful for every sign of his enduring love for her, cripple that she is, with a womb that doesn’t work properly. Keeping her in bed for six months of a pregnancy that should have been easy after going through it all once already, and happy that he doesn’t chuck her in as a defective.
Suzana doesn’t feel that way about Jovan. She is aware of how much she means to him, and she wonders if it’s this that so often makes her feel sick around him. Or angry, and a kind of seething hatred when he comes close; when he’s physically near. Twisting everything inside-out in her mind, because seeing his overalls hang on a hook in the garage, a half-deflated balloon (in the shape of his body), just seeing it, can make her cry. An empty glass he’s drunk from, bearing the marks of his lips. Muddy boots sitting on the back step, laces hastily undone and the tongue lolling half out in the rush to get into the house without tracking in mud. A half-read book, laid down in a collapsed tent to keep his place, glasses perched atop. Any of these things have put needles through her chest. And the same now, when she can take deep breaths from his body, and fill herself with his smell.
Suzana gets out of bed. She walks to the fridge and opens the door. The weak illumination of the fridge light offers her some comfort. There’s the mundane quality it has, the frosted pearl illumination, making its way past milk, bread and cheese. Another instant in the immense dark of the evening. Another night in this house that she and Jovan are living in. They don’t own the building though they own this fridge. That’s nothing different. They hadn’t owned a house back in Bosnia either. They’d been talking to their landlord about buying their rental in Sarajevo. It had gone from cordial discussions about the paperwork to coming home to the locks changed and what they owned in boxes and piles by the gate outside, much of it already stolen or damaged from being dropped. Their books heaped along with crockery and cutlery, summer dresses and underwear, and their children’s toys. Possessions like their fridge, bed, couch, washing machine, these stayed in the house—the mundane spoils of war. She leans into the fridge to feel the cool air waft out. Imagines all those black balloons escaping. A rushing mob of them pushing past her and milling up on the ceiling of the kitchen. Bobbing up there and gathering, accumulating and coming down lower until she was down on the cold tiles, taking shallow breaths of refrigerated air. She shakes off the image and closes the fridge.
She gets a glass of water. She notices the water beading inside the glass after she finishes, she thinks about the glasses Glen Coultas was wearing in Black Rock. Standing in the mist of rain as he watched her drive away. Those glowing street lights looking so lonely and abandoned amid the swaying trees. The fear she’d had in her stomach that what he wanted was something else. That he’d make the same demands Vladimir Mitrovich made back at the university in Belgrade. Worried that she was as crass as to be a potential fuck for Coultas. She feels that ease away as she realises that the man is grateful. It’s as simple as genuine gratitude. Almost a kind of divine favour that someone could come down and look after his desperate wife, crippled as she was by a body barely able to take their precious unborn child to a sustainable threshold; poisoned as she was by a depression that ate her—a cancer of the soul. Grateful to Suzana for holding her when she cried, for long rocking sections of time, and then simply opening her windows to a new day afterwards. All those suicide balloons allowed to escape into the clear blue skies outside. Glen Coultas was grateful even as he saw a prostitute with the warm-whispered name of Isabelle, wringing Suzana’s heart when he bent down to kiss the emerging bump of life on his wife’s belly. Despite Suzana being in the room, (and everything else about this couple and their family existing under layers of reservation and polite do’s and don’ts) putting his lips to that mound—a lustful penitent finding God’s grace for the first time returned to him in a kiss.
Suzana washes out the glass with a swish of hot water and then lets it drip from the dish rack. She returns to bed and Jovan. Lies close to him. Her face very near his.
let me go
drifting
on the waters
above the stars
let me go
adrift
Poetry Jovan had beside a bed he slept in long ago. It had been printed onto red paper. The antique strokes of a typewriter. Blu-Tacked to the wall in the one-room boarding house near the University he’d begun teaching at. It was faded though, so it had been with him longer than he’d been staying in that room. And she hadn’t thought about it much and had always assumed it was something he’d picked up from a book somewhere. Maybe a lyric from a song. Something fairly anaemic and not worth considering. As it emerges from her memory right now, she knows it’s something he’d come up with himself and put there, and that what it meant for him then and means to her now are very different, and very much the same.
She brings her face close to his massive, bearlike head, so that their noses are almost touching. Love for those breaths. Love for that life moving with such gentle, steady heaves, so intense in her, that it makes her choke. Love for those closed eyes. Hatred still so very close. Just below. For those eyes. For the man lost in sleep somewhere. Maybe it comes from him forgiving her so easily for murdering their children. His simple ability to see it as a blind act of fate that has nothing to do with her deciding to give her dinner to their hungry children. Believing in her act of sacrifice and that it simply turned out bad. What he never takes into account is instinct, and the feeling that somehow she knew the food was poisoned, that as death’s shadow came close, she was able to pass it across to her children, and give them the food that was meant for her.
He breathes on her face slowly and deeply as if she isn’t the woman who put poison into the mouths of his children.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Jovan unrolls onto the long chair, almost horizontal, drifting towards sleep quickly in the minute-long wait. He’s wearing the sunglasses they gave him and he opens his mouth when they say good morning. His jaw is forced to its limit. The needle that pierces his gums sends numbness up the side of his head and does nothing for the teeth themselves, now shooting bolts of pain straight to the centre of his brain. The second injection doesn’t take either. It only makes his cheek feel warm and it’s back to drilling and suction and his heart goes into palpitations, sweat popping out over his face. His body becomes rigid, as if it’s being executed in an electric chair, cell by cell.
He apologises to the dentist. To the assistant. ‘I must be stress,’ he tries to explain around the fat white pellets in his mouth. He unravels words in his mind to calm himself as the other side of his jaw begins to scream white hot shock. Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum. He thinks about the Glass House Mountains, and the stars out there at night, between those compass points in paradise.
The sunglasses in this room are for the overhead lights above his face. Jovan keeps his eyes closed and thinks about the way the hills rise just beyond the beach, a clear Noosa green in the sparkling Australian light. Going below the buoyant blue, crystal clarity in every drop of water dripping from him when he rises again. Suzana on the sand, napping in the sun. For the first time in years sleeping naturally. Without the pills; letting the various prescriptions lapse in Queensland. Jovan walks through the waves, across the long stretch of damp sand and
up onto the hot sand to her, the seawater from his body waking her before his body weight.
“What a strange dream that was,” Suzana says after she’s pushed him away.
They talk about other things and he never finds out what dreams she had that woke her up smiling like a girl. An inversion now, his dentist and the assistant looking down at Jovan, as though desperately worried he might fall asleep again. Using torture to keep him awake. “What a strange dream,” he intones with tongue and throat, when they pause in their work for the suction hose to stop him from drowning in his own saliva. They understand as few of his words as before when he attempted to mumble around the cotton pellets.
The dentist told Jovan a story while they waited for the second needle to take effect. “I had a patient once who refused the anaesthetic. It was a root canal, and I told him I didn’t think I could do it—cause that much pain without giving him at least something. The man must have been a believer in meditation. I’ve heard experts in that kind of thing can walk over hot coals and hang with hooks through their flesh.”
Jovan has his own mantra yet now he’s thinking about that man who refused anaesthetic for a root canal and he decides his dentist is probably wrong. It’s not likely that the patient was a master of mind control. It was more believable that he was a recovering addict; that the fear of physical pain was secondary to the fear of succumbing again to addiction and disintegration.
Jovan finds those words again, silently chanting them: Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum.
Afterwards Jovan is told to floss every day. He says, ‘No problem.’ He’s never been one for flossing and, despite the dental torture, he’s not sure he’ll be able to commit to cleaning his teeth that thoroughly. They pencil him in for another appointment in six months and he nods again, feeling the pain still ringing through his mouth and his head, thinking about when and how he and Suzana might get back up to the Sunshine Coast, whether they’ll have time, and how they can afford that kind of trip, especially with these dentistry bills.