Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  “Come off it, Joseph. Ray might be mad but he’s not stupid.”

  Sulking, Joseph makes a production of opening the bottle. “I had heard that it’s part of the satisfaction of the thing.”

  “No, essentially Ray’s is a cognitive conversion. With ethical side effects. He’s most apologetic for the way he’s been treating me.”

  “How has he been treating you?”

  “Like shit. Look, shut up, Joe.” She finds a switch for the small lamp beside the bed, taps it on, rises, flicks off the room light, crosses her arms over her sweater and turns it inside out over her head. On the end of the bed, bare to the waist, she has one boot off and pulls at the other while Joseph is stepping from his own heap of clothes. He gives her shoulders a shove and she rolls back, arms akimbo. The boot comes away in his hands, followed by her slacks and high-waisted white panties. Over his shoulder they go.

  “The way of the cloth is not that of the flesh.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It’s one of Brian’s,” he footnotes dutifully.

  “Sod Wagner. Kiss my breasts.”

  There’s no confusion in his erection now. Shrilling with lust, his central nervous system cascades with adrenergic neurotransmitters. He fears loss of control, pulls back to the forms of tender banter. “So you’ve finally progressed to incest.”

  “To what?”

  He is crushed again. “You forgot.”

  “It seems so.”

  “That night I stayed at your place. Years ago. ‘77.”

  “You silly,” she says, hugging him down on her. “Do you suppose I’d forget that? Rather a wasted opportunity in retrospect.”

  “You said it would be like incest.”

  “Never mind. If that’s what turns you on, I’ll call you Daddy.” A quick involuntary shudder runs through her, and Joseph sees the edges of her mouth draw back. “I wish I hadn’t said that.”

  The bed is not wide. They roll across it, hit the wall. Joseph caresses her, finds her dry and closed, wets his fingers and sends them down. After a time she sighs. He enters her. Marjory’s legs lock across his buttocks. She twists violently, rolling sideways. He fights to keep his center of mass above her. She bites him, flexing like a cat. They fall from the bed.

  Joseph’s shoulder cries out, rapping the floor boards, and Marjory’s weight crushes the wind from his lungs. Dazed and angry, he finds Marjory no longer with him. He belches stale beer. Suddenly Marjory is above him, taking his prick in her mouth, the dark, moist sporran of her pubic hair coming down toward his claustrophobic mouth. He gags, extends a hesitant tongue, reaching up to hold her broad buttocks with his hands. She is making the most extraordinary grunting noises, driving his penis deep into her throat. It is the reverse of erotic. Rolling hard, Joseph knocks her to the floor and spins above her as fast as his drunken reflexes allow.

  “Oh shit,” Marjory mutters in despair. “Another missionary.”

  Light flickers from the bedside lamp as he catches his rhythm, rising and falling, the light spilling, not spilling, held back, so many years. On to the death. Only a tight light. Oh Marjory, the speed, the speed, the need for speed. We’ll die in our tracks. Marjory, the Night is Dark and we are Far From Home. Can you see in the dark, little fox?

  Her fingers needle his back. As he winces, she goes to the side and rolls him under her once more, raising herself above him on her elbows, her breasts falling to his chest, beyond reach of his lips. Joseph lets his head rest on the dusty, rumpled piece of carpeting, closes his eyes. Marjory can dictate the pace. A quickening pulse heralds his coming. Desperate, drowning, he heaves himself above her again, comes without making a sound, capsizing to the floor. Marjory labors over him, her hand tightly gripping him, racing his dying organ to her own climax. With seconds to spare she collapses across his drenched chest.

  Blind eyes. Limp hands. Her back, her buttocks. She breathes, matching his quick, slowing inhalations with her own. His head presses something hard: the door jamb. Amazing. Marjory stirs, blows a stream of air in his face. Joseph opens his eyes.

  “Hello, Marj.”

  “Hello, Joseph love.” The lovely scent of her.

  “We’ve fucked our way right across the room.”

  “On a return ticket, I trust.”

  1970: believe it or not

  Shakespeare Investigations

  21 August 1970

  Here’s what I’ve heard about Laing. A, harumph, gentleman friend of Martha’s visited the house a few afternoons ago in Bob’s absence. I spoke to this guy briefly and it turned out that he’s a trainee trick cyclist. He’s heard that it’s well known in the trade that Laing periodically freaks out and puts himself away for his own good, though actually he wasn’t certain—it might have been Laing’s offsider David Cooper who does this. Ronnie is said to play bizarre roles even when operating as a psychiatrist, such as wearing all green matching clobber down to green fingernail polish. This has evidently been accepted by his clients as part of his brilliant new methodology (and for all I know it may well be). Such roles are liable to alternation without notice, up to several times a day, so that he conveys a different personality each time to the non-professional eye. This is all a very rough rendition of utterly unauthenticated rumor, and could well be the sort of scurrilous flak attracted by critical innovative-thinkers like Laing, but it fits unnervingly with what you reported hearing. I suppose rumors tend to have that feature.

  Queensland staff and students have put out a huge book titled Up The Right Channels that criticizes each department and evaluates each staff member and offers arguments for student control.

  Bye,

  Joseph.

  1970: systematically distorted communications

  Rozelle

  Sat 29 Aug

  Dear old Horse

  I write letters in my mind, I write on paper, tear them up and cry. I started crying in the lift the other day thinking of you. I have a new job waitressing in a hotel, taking meals up to rooms. A ghastly thing happened—I went to get “an inch” cut off my hair & they cut off four or five inches. I came home and wept for hours. I really did feel castrated. I can’t do anything about it. The bastard pulled my hair to the back so I couldn’t see how much he was cutting off, though I had told him. I don’t want you to see me like this which is ridiculous but I feel so unhappy about it.

  a sad beast

  Caroline

  1970: the flight of the emu

  Kings Cross

  Tuesday September 8, 1970

  My dear Joseph

  I thought I was going mad again but I wasn’t. It’s all right now. There are tears ahead for both of us, but that’s nothing new. At least this way there’s a fresh start.

  I had a dream that I was a flightless bird. A big fat emu with lice, stuck on the ground, running in stupid circles. Nothing very subtle about that. When I woke up I was crying. Lanie heard me and knocked at the door. She hopped in the bed with me, because she is a dear kind creature, and I told her how absolutely desperate and fucked up I was feeling. She said that she’d been in exactly the same state when she’d decided to just piss off, take all the money she had in the bank and buy an air fare to Malaysia and GO. It was like magic in my heart, Joseph.

  Just go. Why not? I owe you that money, but I don’t give a stuff about debts to anyone else. They have just slammed me down, broken my bones. So now I have made myself a promise. I am the only one who defines who I am, what I do, where I go, when I do it, with whom, how I feel about it…I’ll get you your money, don’t freak. Then I’ll buy my ticket and fly, fly, fly.

  Lanie and I saw a documentary at the co-op on the weekend about India. Like my naked heart torn open and displayed to the sun. Joseph, I wanted to go there and see all that amazing humanity, and it didn’t occur to me that there was nothing I needed to do but just go. Now it has. So that’s what I’m doing. Lanie will probably come with me, possibly only for a holiday or maybe for good. We will take Australian seeds and plant th
em in that strange soil, and find a guru and learn mysteries. I am not coming back. You hang about my neck. You are my burden, my cross if you like. I know that you saved my life when I went mad the first time, but now it is your turn to be my oppressor, my slave master, the tyrant caging my free heart. You are a black saint.

  Those splotches are tears, yes, how banal. I do love you, Joseph, even if you have never really loved me and never really loved yourself. My mother and father loved me too, and look what that did to all of us. Distance is a knife for cutting through love. The distance between Melbourne and Sydney is not sharp enough.

  The documentary was about Bangalore. It’s the sixth largest city in India, the capital of Karnataka state. The weather is said to be pleasant. You’ve heard of it, I suppose, because it was the British headquarters for fifty years from about 1830. Its name means “village of boiled beans.” I think I’ll go there. Definitely non-trendy. I’ve never even heard of anyone who’s been to Bangalore in search of truth and mystery. I won’t write, Joseph.

  Not ever. This is it, kiddo. Hence the messy tears. I tried it the other way and look what’s happened. (I’m not blaming you, only the situation. The way it is with me.) So I’ll scurry about the King’s Cross hotel and make my stash and buy a ticket and say goodbye my love, my silly, my stiffnecked horrid hateful lovely love—

  Caroline

  joseph and the cow

  I stood on the podium in the enormous Hall, looking down past the microphones into the gathering of hikes. They shuffled their feet, easing their legs and backs. Some munched on sandwiches or drank chocolate-flavored milk from Big M cartons. Behind me, drastically enhanced by an epidiascope from the small gallery reproduction on the stand, a great artist’s work loomed in light.

  I tapped the microphone. Heads came up.

  “Roy Lichtenstein gave everyone a nasty shock back in the sixties,” I told them, “when he blew True Love comic frames up to the size of walls and, by simple gigantic replication, transformed them from kitsch to fine art.”

  The acoustics of the system were excellent; there was none of that momentary delayed feedback that rattles the mind through the lag at the ear.

  “Pop Art made the medium the message,” I said. It did not bother me that this phrase was an icon of a school of mediating interpretation gone to dust half a generation earlier. “Printers’ half-tone dots in the cartoon were amplified to endless ranks and files of painterly flattened spheres big as fingernails.”

  The lights in the hall flickered for an instant. I glanced over my shoulder. The epidiascope was still casting its great lucent shadows on the wall, the image unscarred by the momentary power surge.

  “During the seventies,” I went on, “Lichtenstein extended his subversion to so many media—Surrealism, Futurism, trompe l’oeil—that he began to seem the Bill Blass or Trent Nathan of the decorator art biz. Yet his instinct was good,” I added, after the polite chuckling subsided. “More than a decade later, his 1972 gags are still startling enough to kick the air out of you in a belly laugh if you come on them unwarned.”

  I gestured above and behind me. They had not come upon this work unwarned. It was the luminous representation of a vast canvas triptych in yellow, white, Benday dots, diagonal stripes.

  The first frame showed a farmyard animal browsing contentedly. In the next, the beast was breaking up into strabismus charts. By the third, it had been rendered into a comic-book reduction of a Mondrian.

  “The title,” I informed them, “is ‘Cow Going Abstract’.”

  Among the burst of good humored laughter there was a splatter of applause. I waited, smiling slightly.

  “Yes, good joke.” I leaned forward on the podium and when I spoke again, it was with an abrupt return to impassivity. “The real point of the piece, of course, hits you a moment later, when you notice that the cow in the first frame is already totally abstract. It is a flat array of diagrammatic elements only marginally more representational, in the illusory or mimetic sense, than the mock Mondrian.”

  Like stick figures, the brights looked back up at me in the frozen postures of dream. “We are talking about Joseph Williams,” I told them pitilessly. “It ought to be clear to you by now that Joseph Williams is a Cow Going Abstract.”

  FIVE: something borrowed

  For fiction offers us not transcriptions of actuality but systematic models which are distinct from reality…They know that reality can be neither captured nor escaped, and their response has been to redefine the aesthetic act itself and argue that all works of the imagination are plagiaristic.

  ::Robert Scholes, “The fictional criticism of the future”

  the twelfth photograph

  Taken from the first or second floor of a building across Darlinghurst Rd, with zoom lens, TRI-X 35 mm film pushed to 800 ASA, and barely adequate early sunrise light, the photograph angles on airborne Caroline. There is no resemblance to a bird in flight. Nor does the shot possess the stillness and layered one dimensional tranquillity of Magritte’s famous painting. Violent turbulent buffeting is bashing the boundary where Caroline stops and air begins. She is immersed in air, but its liquid does not smooth her path. Her eyelids are peeled back by its force. She has fallen already scores of meters and her intersection with the palpable air disposes her legs and arms awkwardly, contrary to the expectations of gravity and muscle. The pressures of her fall from the open window, grainy and crepuscularly open at the top of the shot, has torn her dress up over her shoulders, covering her throat and mouth, leaving visible only her husked eyes. From this angle it is evident that she is innocent of underclothing. Recently she has shaved away her public hair, so that her naked limbs and belly present a strange duality, innocent and lubricious at once. No one gazes out from the window to witness her plummet onto the painted metal of the fire hydrant below. It is an impossible photograph. Who could have taken it?

  the thirteenth photograph

  In this photojournalist’s routine and unpublishable Nikon pic, Caroline’s broken body is being removed from the blood-splashed King’s Cross concrete footpath by two ambulance staff. Their faces are rigid with the necessity to deny any direct connection between this torn meat and their own tired morning flesh. Caroline’s clothing has been drawn into place, but it is clear from the shape of her corpse that the hydrant has failed to show her any respect. At the very least, its crunching impact has dislocated her right shoulder, shattered half her ribs (broken and oozing through her uniform like a defrosted rack of lamb), and, most horribly, torn out her left eye.

  the fourteenth photograph

  This Kodak VPS blow-up could be a sample from an advertising campaign, either for the company’s range, for the Mamiya 645 camera, or perhaps in support of funerals. Details are crisp, definition superb. Although it is raining, an awning has been arranged for the protection of the principal mourners. Onlookers have fetched their own umbrellas, not all of them black. The open coffin, beside the deep, muddy grave, attracts the interest of a horde of emotional adults and children. Caroline is at the center of the photograph, her repaired face tanned with cunning cosmetics, eyes only lightly closed, lovely in a white lacy dress from the turn of the century. Mr. and Mrs. Muir stand prominently in the front of the gathering, distraught and still apparently in shock. Caroline’s father’s large hand rests on the edge of the open coffin, touching the silk, above his daughter’s shoulder. Almost out of the shot, at the rear of the crowd, drenched Joseph leans toward Lanie. His eyes are smeared with rain. Lanie wears a dark plum dress, muted and melancholy, under an incongruous transparent plastic raincoat. Her hand hangs limply beside Joseph’s. They do not touch.

  ambit claims

  Dead? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Was there no end to this damned visceral manipulation? Was not Caroline at this moment somewhere safe in Bangalore, full of beans or at least hardly defunct, seeking the meaning of life in a landscape no less alien than the right hemisphere of the brain to its left
partner and rival? Ha! Dead! Impossible! It cannot be! I’d not believe it though herself should swear it. (Henry Carey, more or less, 1693?-1743)

  I edged myself into this question with a paradoxical conceit, a waggish antinomy.

  Humans were the only animals capable of knowing truth, and compelled by its quest, I proposed; they achieved this end by lying.

  Certainly deceit was a gambit in the broad evolutionary repertoire, but by and large it was chicanery of an essentially passive kind, baffling perception. Chameleons were adroit at dissembling, stick-insects (Diapheromera femorata, say) at outright mendacity. Yet even the predator, actively straining for stillness under the skittish gaze of its prey, employed a passive falsehood.

  People, though, tricked one another with deliberation and intent. The mismatch of stimulus and perception was wilful, informational, communicative. Map, ho hum, no longer reflected territory.

  The implicit assumption in that line of thought, I noted, was that Territory did equal Reality. Yet how could that be? Only eidolons were known, schemata, those structures into which perceptions were slotted, out of which they were built. True, it was economical to posit a coherent, consistent Noumenon that gave rise to those patterned inputs from which minds constructed Phenomena and their experienced qualia. But it remained logically impossibly to know whether those features of the soi-disant Noumenon that were abstracted and represented in cognitive maps were even remotely relevant, let alone central, to the true fundamental structure of the Noumenon.

  So in the first instance the map a lie misrepresented was another map. Of course, if that original map were in error, the available means of modifying it lay in positing yet another, inconsistent map—in terms of the primary map, to “lie”—and let the two compete for traffic.