Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  The guy is young & hot-blooded. Caroline feels good, relaxed, watches the countryside.

  They talk a little. He tries to con her. Leaps on her, one foot on the accelerator, arm stretched to the wheel, left arm pulled her toward him.

  What would you do if I kissed ya?

  Couldn’t do much but we wouldn’t get to Sydney.

  Ah, okay, I’ll forget it.

  Shit, Caroline thinks. Four hundred miles.

  She crochets, talks, watches the towns and creeks whiz by. It is good, warm and thundery from the motor, a good way to travel. She drops off, sleeps.

  And wakes sick.

  Vomits and dry-retches for the remainder of the journey. This driver is a saint. Five hours. They hit Sydney at 3.00 a.m. He takes her out of his way, drops her near Callan Park. Caroline walks up Darling Street.

  Home is cold and dark. It is a bit strange. She turns on the electric blanket, goes downstairs and makes coffee. Her throat is terribly sore. Caroline takes the mug upstairs. Her room and the warm blanket welcome her. She runs to the bathroom for a final voiding. She chucks into the basin, gargles water without swallowing it, goes to her bed and sleeps.

  In sunshine Caroline wakes and feels bad. But that sun is so good. She leaves the crumpled bed, walks outside feeling sad. Suddenly it is okay. She’s glad to be back, suffused in her own warmth and the joy of her home and the freedom she has.

  She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun and watches purple light on the inside of her warm eyes, and thinks of purple sheets in Melbourne with a warm body next to her in the Melbourne winter, and cups of milk coffee and long talks with no time limits while toes are roasted at the radiator and funny Joseph laughing at and with her while he tries to touch his roasting toes and her albatross dead wings outstretched tell Caroline in the silence of the dead that she can too fly.

  1970: writing science

  * * *

  CASH NEXUS

  a politico-duodenal beanspilling and last minute dash for August .26APA mailing by Brian Wagner (the singer, not the song). You know the rest.

  * * *

  Just under four months ago, a little after Easter, my friend Joseph Williams, B. Sc. (Hons) did a heinous thing. He gave me his job.

  That, at any rate, is his claim. Actually all Joe did was whisper in my receptive ear that he was giving up science journalism for the loftier pursuit of science itself. Given the pay rates that applied to his job (B-grade, negotiable downward) he pointed out that his boss was not likely to be trampled by maddened journos with higher degrees. As I lack even a lower degree, I saw at once that the job would surely be mine for the asking. I carried in a bundle of quipu to prove my prowess with concept, word and typer.

  Ah, Joe, Joe. One day I will find a suitable revenge. I think that it will call, in part, for the insertion of a trained maggot.

  Gentle readers of CASH NEXUS may judge me uncouth and ungrateful. Your opinion will alter when you learn to what pass this fiend Williams has brought me. Read on.

  It was not until he was safely in Armidale conducting preposterous experiments that Joe owned up to the details of his major role at Science Today Publications (a division of that wonderful oligopoly that brings us all the news that’s fit to read over the brekkie table). What was this august role? Typing envelopes. Ruling up sheets of paper. At a time when Poseidon mining shares were going through the ceiling only to collapse into catastrophic ruin, Joseph Williams was dithering his brain away. Now you see why he left this lucrative position.

  It’s funny, you know. I never asked why he was leaving. It must have been the money he dangled before me; it dazzled me, corrupted my otherwise infallible shit detector. If Joe said he was leaving to advance the cause of human wisdom, who was I to carp?

  Joe, Joe, my day will come.

  I shall tell you all about my day at work. Not some hypothetical average day. Were I to do that you might suppose I was stacking the cards (actually that is what I was doing, as you’ll see). No, I shall deal with the events of a particular day. Today, in fact.

  Like Joe, I spend much of my working hours typing envelopes and painting my nails. Unlike Joe, I do it on a C-grade salary (no degree, remember). But a new wrinkle has been invented.

  This time last year, Science Today Publications launched an enterprise. You must understand that we like one-offs here. Annuals are okay, and much of my envelope-typing has to do with posting questionnaires to people who are requested to provide update info on technical details from last year’s issue of, as it might be, 1001 Uses for a B-47Q Thermionic Valve or The Interocitor Yearbook. But these all began as one-offs, and it’s essential to keep stirring the pot. Like the immune system: you must maintain a supply of mutated antigens on hand for use when the next flu plague gets here from Hong Kong. (This insight into the nature of flu epidemics is my sole Science item for the issue. Go and talk to Joe if that’s the sort of thing you crave.)

  The new enterprise that my predecessor had been involved with, and which I helped see through the birth process, was a little bouncing gem called HEARING AID. I instantly suspected Joseph of slipping a quipu title onto some grave and weighty periodical, but no, this was his (and now my) boss’s witty means of alerting news agency browsers to the existence of a specialist guide to Hi Fiequipment. (Joe’s rejected suggestion, I report, was SOUNDS GOOD TO ME, almost as lame.)

  Bound within HEARING AID was a clever innovation, one of the prime selling points of this journal. A tear-out free-post card invited readers to enquire for further information about any of the sound systems they fancied in its pages.

  These cards have been inundating the place in their thousands. We humble staff have the joyous task of recording names, addresses and species of hi fiequipment so that this data may be dispatched to the various manufacturers.

  In essence, it’s the self-same high level vocation as typing envelopes, except that sorting is also required. The boss has invented a way of typing these things directly onto an unending roll of paper, which at least obviates the dismal business of shoving new sheets in all the time. Ironically, since he is faster at it than me, he’s decided to do most of the typing himself (an effective use of a Super-A salary, Meyer). So I have the rather easier task of sorting the cards into jolly little piles. It pleased me to hear him groan at the horror of typing such nonsense all day. I doubt, though, if he appreciates that this is exactly what I have been agonizing through for some months.

  Joseph, Joseph. I shall begin by rasping the nerves of your teeth.

  After luncheon at my club, then, this afternoon, as I sat sorting these incredible HEARING AID cards, I was washed in despair beyond the power of reason at the thought that if I was going to be a thorough-going tool of the devil anyway, then why wasn’t I in an advertising agency earning twice the salary?

  In this mood, I stumbled on a card inscribed with a bitter little note from a purchaser. Here is what it told me:

  “This magazine is an outright fraud. All the ‘articles’ evaluating the equipment described are nothing more than advertisements.” And so on.

  Now this of course is the exact truth. Science RipOffs, Inc. put the book together by inviting all the industry manufacturers and importers to supply their own self-praising copy & pix, if possible made-up according to standard style (a convenient saving in overheads, especially with our art department slashed), then printed the collation and charged the supplying companies fifty bucks or so per page, THEN put the fucking thing on sale for a dollar a throw to the gullible public.

  When some hi-fi-loving jerk sees this wretched document on his friendly neighborhood news agency rack, he naturally assumes that it is full of hard-hitting objective scrutiny (well, at least no less so than your average tabloid test-drive, and I agree that’s not saying a big mouthful.)

  So I sat at my desk, a stone’s short lob from my superior’s own, and I read this item of mail aloud.

  For a moment there was no response. A slight stiffening of shoulders indicated
perhaps that he thought I was offering an observation from my own deepest convictions. At length, though, he spun his chair. “Say that again, Brian?”

  “First rational reader I’ve come across so far.” I read it out in full, and he asked for the card.

  A full minute later, mottled with quiet passion and grief, the Boss said, “I shall write that gentleman a letter.”

  I worked at my sorting.

  “He has no right to say that. He can have his money back if that’s the way he feels.”

  The AID book, you see, was Howard’s very own brain-child.

  “At no time,” he explained to me, turning up the volume and boosting the bass, “do we ever state, anywhere, on the cover or within its 128 pages, that this is not a book of collected advertisements.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “A catalogue we call it,” he explained, “and a catalogue it is.”

  I considered this idea as I sorted more cards. “Howard, when people pay a buck, they don’t expect an orgy of advertisements. Unless it’s Graphis. Um. You know.”

  “We make no claims which are false!”

  “True,” I agreed, “that’s where it’s at.”

  “Now look here.” The executive desk was puzzled but hearty. “I consider that I’m as well equipped with a set of ethics as the next man, Brian, and I don’t see anything objectionable—”

  “Oh my God!” I cried in horror. “I should glue my lips shut. Here I am, seeming to be impugning your ethics—”

  “No, no,” said Howard. “Of course I didn’t take it that way.” He has wonderful gold link shirtsleeve restrainers, and he pushed them higher on his biceps where the white linen gleamed under the fluorescents. His watch is also very pretty. “My good fellow, you must say what you feel. Brian, that’s what’s wrong with the world today. No-one dares to speak up. You’re frowned upon if you do. Someone is standing by with a little book, ready to take down any remarks critical of the Establishment, putting all our hard-won privacy and integrity in jeopardy, turning us all into mere digital pulses in a great computer.”

  I was feeling very weak.

  Some cards later, I said, trying really hard with the deepest frown of concentration you’ve ever seen to get my finger on it, “You know, that’s what we’re doing here.”

  You could tell Howard doubted it.

  “After all, these poor buggers think they’re gunna get extra information from Science Today Publications when they send in their post-free card. That’s not how it works though, is it? Their names go straight to the sales divisions of all these companies. On to the computer tape. Forever and ever. Badgered and harried.”

  “Well, Brian,” the Boss said shrewdly, “I thought of that. So I extracted a promise from all those companies that the information was to remain confidential and no high-pressure tactics would be used as a result of our little service.”

  I looked at him, then went back to sorting cards.

  Howard shook his head ruefully. He sat and thought for a while. I swear before God to you, one and all, that these were his final words on the topic: “Brian, perhaps I’ve been a bit trusting.”

  1980: apocalypse apocalypse apocalpse then

  DECEMBER ELEVENTH NINETEEN EIGHTY

  The 1960s died on the 11th day of the twelfth month of 1980 when, outside his New York home, five bullets were pumped into the body of John Lennon by the music critic Ronald Reagan, who was later released after questioning by police.

  The 1970s died much earlier, on the 19th day of the eighth month of 1969 when half a million children pitched their sad loony tents in a field outside Woodstock, in upstate New York. A recorded interview was later released to the media.

  It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Picture a skinhead bootboy with razorblades at his toes and safety pins through the flesh of his cheeks, stamping on his own face forever.

  No. Picture four scrubbed and patched middleaged Swedes rampant on a field of armwaving eight year olds argent, droning the theme of the decade: “Money money money.”

  No no no. Picture Linda Ronstadt and Governor Jerry Brown on undecorated sheets in a single bed, Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta flicking and sliding in the mirror above their heads on squares of pure light.

  No. Alice Cooper eating a live chicken. The Kiss in their six year old fantasy greasepaint and ten thousand decibels. Sid Vicious in spoiled brat psychopathic rage working out the punk dreams of his generation in the murdered flesh of a convenient woman.

  The seventies was waking into the hungover spoils of the party. Everyone had died during the night.

  Jim Morrison was dead in whiskey, caught by the snake.

  Hendrix was dead, all his flashing crying chords jangled.

  Joplin was dead, swallowed up and chewed into lard and blood.

  Presley was dead, fat and banal, in alcohol and spangled spansules.

  Marc Bolan was dead, gnawed by Tyrannosaur’s jaws.

  The Beatles were dead, John by an assassin’s gun, Paul by his own hand.

  Abba were born dead.

  Disco was a corpse plugged into a fibrillator.

  Like old pre-industrial gods, the remnants of the pantheon took themselves into eclipse and changed their wigs, were reborn, shook it again in the video clips: David Bowie falling in endless rebirth, Lou Reed transformed, Carly Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Brown; Heavy Metal clashing by night, Tangerine Dreaming their remote electronic buzz; and Dylan was Born Again.

  Robert Zimmerman was Born Again.

  The music of the Seventies was a pike gaffed into the belly of the Eighties.

  1983: the time machine

  It has not been a reprise of the glorious, heart-filling Vietnam Moratorium marches led by Dr. Jim Cairns, poor muddled bleeding love-besotted deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns, so soon thereafter to go down in disastrous sex scandal muckraked ruin but not until he had achieved more than any other single man in the decade, had Got The Boys Out; but now there is no rough charisma to light up the mass gatherings in the Treasury Gardens, only gray serious bureaucrats of state and church leading a Palm Sunday parade against nuclear weapons, the Premier, the Anglican Archbishop, the Lord Mayor. Melina Mercouri, visiting fireperson, might have brought some flash and wit to the occasion but the rigors of Greek Melbourne has been too much for her, has hurled her fainting to the ground like some St. Paul of Science and Culture in a brainleeched buzz and whirl.

  No, fourteen years after the Moratoriums, with the doors slammed shut on the sixties and their music muffled by the gray tunnel of the seventies, a third of the way for godsake into the eighties, fourteen years later and virtually a whole new generation of kids on the streets with their cockatoo hairstyles all spiky with gel and hard dyes,

  “Wadda we want?”

  “Disarmament!”

  “Whenna we want it?”

  “NOW!”

  but it just hadn’t taken of, had whimpered out as they strolled with careless propriety, all sixty or seventy thousand of them, most of the length of Collins Street, through the very atrium of Big Business Melbourne, around the corner politely to the urging of the loud-hailers, into the Flagstaff Gardens with its hanged guy, a cloth rapist put down by feminists, its couple of Portaloos and patient lines of pent pissers, and its dull speech-making, no policehorses, no broken heads, no adrenaline, not even any terrible quaking fear of The Bomb. Perhaps that is the way to do it.

  Here, though, in the Nourse living room, there’s been no decline gently into that good night.

  “I see one of your professors has a bit of sense. Still, I suppose even in universities there must be a few people who know something about the world.”

  Marjory actually curls her lip. From the corner of the sofa she shares with her mother she says with distaste, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ray Finlay flicks his eyes back to Jesus of Nazareth, then with an effort of will lowers them to Tom Nourse’s cranium. It is almost totally defoliated.
The neutron bomb has purged all life from it, leaving a seared rubble. Only a few mutated bristles manage to cling precariously to the lower slopes. Broken veins trace thin laval streams on his face. What’s worse, the nuclear bombardment has provoked subterranean chain reactions that will boil forth soon in a convulsion of volcanic spleen. Mere minutes remain before eruption. Duck and Cover, Ray wants to cry. He blocks his mouth before a snigger can get out, bringing the wrath of the Lord upon all of them.

  “Oh yes, you know well enough, my girl, or are newspapers too lowbrow for people with university educations?”

  “If it was in the Sun I probably missed it, that’s true.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they would have reported it in the Age. They gave enough coverage to that disgusting anti-American mob parading through the streets last Sunday.”

  “I suppose you’d prefer to see us all blown to hell by nuclear weapons. That will be good for business, won’t it?”

  Ray returns to Jesus. A gold sphere rests in one oozing hand. The other, visibly perforated though not yet flyblown, gestures with gloomy confidence to his heart, which floats a few inches in front of his robe, dripping blood, torn by a vicious plait of thorns. Dr. Barney Clark, first Mormon with a plastic heart, has finally thrown in the towel and died, Ray recalls. An age of botched miracles. Ray wonders if the incipient volcano across from him suffers heart trouble. If so, Marjory is certainly doing her best to bring on an attack. The Man from Nazareth looks steadily down, serenely untroubled by his own cardiac condition.

  “Joe Camilleri is the one who wants us blown to pieces, by the Russians,” Tom Nourse is explaining loudly. Dr. Camilleri is a sociologist and activist at Marjory’s university. According to the brainless Age reporter, Ray remembers with another barely contained hoot of laughter, Camilleri is a spokesperson for People Against Nuclear Disarmament. God, it’s no wonder we’re all going to get dusted into the sky.

  Marjory has made her own telling retort. Tom Nourse leans forward in his leather lean-back armchair. Once, Ray reflects fondly, Tom was quite placid during these intellectual exchanges. Now the sting of mortality and truth is nipping his hindquarters, bringing the foam to his lips.