Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  “Have to go sometime, lovely.”

  “Yes.” She turns and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. “We’ll give you a big send-off. And the other bit?”

  “What?” Joseph is confused. From the corner of his eye he sees Ray Finlay’s frown, his slow smile.

  “It couldn’t all have been about cockroaches, they’d spend the whole day talking.”

  “I can’t tell you, it’d excite Ray’s Christianity.”

  “Whisper it in my ear.”

  Joseph whispers it in her ear. “The greatest of these is love.”

  A DOG’S WIFE

  …lift-off

  My breast became suffused with awful foreboding. I had seen that look in Spot’s eye before, under a dust of stars hurled into heaven with a mad jeweler’s abandon.

  “Space,” he cried. “Boojum, the final frontier.”

  “Please don’t call me that,” I begged him, down on my knees on the broken, urine-dank sidewalk, arms about his straining neck. “If you must employ a diminutive, I much prefer ‘Jinny’.”

  “The spirit bloweth whither it listeth,” said my husband, as he quivered and shivered in the epiphany of his hunger, and I knew that I had lost him at last, lost him to the call of the wild.

  caroline’s flight

  Late spring, her jet roaring into the bright afternoon, nearly summer, rising, turning above the undisturbed bottle-green landlocked harbor waters, long white ribs of surf seaward of the heads.

  In her seat, next to Lanie, she grins.

  Look at the bloody roofs.

  Yeah.

  The plain of domesticity yields to the Blue Mountains, to the endless primary yellows and reds. Hour after hour. They hang in the long bright padded aluminum tube reading Time and drinking free brandies and tonic. The dinner trolley reaches them.

  Plastic food, Caroline says, gagging.

  This isn’t the Town House, my dear.

  She trances out, looking down ten thousand meters for the unknown land of her birth.

  Hey, it’s gone.

  That’s the Timor Sea, Lanie tells her.

  Its white streaks.

  And clouds, the day’s first.

  In the gathering twilight Java is dark green. Abrupt, between cloud banks. The engines drop an octave. The long glide to the sweating Singapore night.

  In the taxi they sit half dazed, watching the bicycles, the towering blocks of flats Band-Aided with washing, the milling Chinese and Malay faces. Crazy with his horn, their driver brakes and surges through the crowds. They zip inches from bird-thin Chinese in tattered singlets perched over bowls of soup at street stalls. Cauldron steam glows incandescent under the pressure lamps.

  Christ, it’s humid.

  It is the tropics, you know.

  At the dark end of a minor street they stop. Four shillings each a night, they’ve been told by the student travel agent. The Chinese hotel is clean, simple, proof of the paranoid righteousness of Lee Kwan Yew’s capitalist utopia.

  While Lanie goes to the lavatory down the hall, empty Caroline fishes a leather pouch from her waist. Passport, health certificate, book of traveler’s checks. Photograph.

  Joseph sits at his desk, indoors, at night, his typewriter pushed to one side, playing with one of his cats. Kitten, really. Caroline shifts the photograph into better light. Her arm still aches from the cholera shots. The kitten sits on an open book, blurring a paw at Joseph’s admonitory finger. Half in darkness, half in light, his lips smile with mock rebuke at the animal. In her mouth and stomach, Caroline tastes tangible loneliness.

  Hungry?

  Not really.

  Still, Lanie insists, we should have a look at things

  Hand in hand they take the high, cluttered pavement past shuttered shop fronts and tiled walls until the way is blocked by a pile of bicycles, a mother feeding her baby. Instead of a gutter, they must jump a two-meter-deep trench. Dodge trishaws, motor bikes, pass plaited bamboo garbage bins, to the brighter end of the street.

  Noodles?

  Okay.

  There are two street stalls.

  We could sit in the café.

  Fans like plane propellers turn slowly over circular marble tables. In one corner a fire burns in an earthenware pot, and over it in a shallow iron bowl a fat Chinese woman turns and mixes fragrant alien food. A few customers sit here already, staring without seeing at the besuited politicians on the walls, listening without hearing to the radio and the street noise.

  Fried rice, please, Lanie tells the fat woman. And beer.

  The order is relayed into a recess. A boy fetches beer and two glasses half full of ice. A few minutes later the rice arrives, with forks and spoons. Lanie pushes them away, takes wooden chopsticks from the glass in the middle of the table.

  I never learned how, Caroline confesses.

  On her first attempt she scores six grains and a bean shoot. The second wins her three grains and a fragment of meat. The third nets only rice. It makes her hungry and cross.

  It’s easy. Look at him. Eating like a native. Lanie sniggers.

  A stick man in rubber sandals and shorts sits at the next table. His legs are crossed beneath his chair, livid with varicose veins. Caroline watches his fingers, flickering like the antennae of some huge inquisitive mantis. She abandons her misery to the art and technology of inconspicuous consumption.

  1984: on the road goes ever on the road

  Here we are, then. New Year’s Day, 1984, Joseph tells himself under the appalling sun. Surely there must be some significance in that, some triumph. But in this place they plot the launch of the year on a different trajectory. He swings north, thinking of Caroline standing in this dusty road. Joseph cannot believe, for long stretches at a time, that this is actually happening. It has the weight of some metaphysical imposition. A Sisyphean task. The Augean stables, all the crap in his head. Pretty stupid metaphors in this country the Greeks never got on their maps.

  Guided by an old paperback printed in London at the arse end of the flower-and/or play-power regime, he sleeps cheaply in the hotels that for centuries have served itinerant Chinese merchants. He sleeps for free in the Sikh temples that play host to any man who promises not to shave on the premises. His beard thickens.

  At George Town he calls at the Post Office on the way to the wharf. There is a copy of Ray Finlay’s irregular quipu REBUFF waiting for him, and a friendly postcard from Marjory. He tucks the card into his shirt pocket, jams the quipu unread into his rucksack.

  zarathustra

  Brian Wagner rolled a clean stencil into his heavy manual machine and squared it up, sat down in his solitary splendor and hummed a line from Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” He sensed a mini-saga coming on, and felt confident enough in his prowess to type it straight onto stencil without a preliminary count.

  [bq]FALLING OUT

  Tired of drudgery—drab files, study, waitressing—honey hair to her bum, eyes kohled, calves hirsute in feminist zeal, Caroline sought a fresh start.

  Inside the reactor vessel, legs splayed, brush poised, she heard her geiger counter drone.

  At early retirement, she consigned her mutant babies to jobless, hairless tedium.[/bq]

  Wagner scrolled up the stencil, checked the number of words (spot on), narrowed his eyes at their content and wondered for an instant if Marjory Finlay might not be right to suspect his attitude to women.

  caroline in the red light

  Half-drunk, belching from the fried rice, the women decide on a circuitous route back to their hotel.

  The dirty, slow-flowing water of the canals carries a cargo of rubbish at random through the quarter.

  They stroll slowly up a major thoroughfare. Cars and trishaws bluff one another murderously. Pedestrians glide through the mêlée.

  I think this one runs parallel to ours.

  Might as well try it.

  A brightly lit alley leads off at right angles. Caroline is suddenly frightened. They move in a slow stream of men and boy
s.

  Listen, is this safe?

  Of course it is. The police are sudden death here.

  Small stalls obstruct them every few meters. They stop at the first. In its puddle of light from a pressure lamp, Caroline sees a sorry collage of good-luck charms, pen knives, cigarette lighters, horoscopes, trinkets. She lifts her eyes.

  Oh. Lanie, I think we’re in the wrong street.

  On the other side of the alley, open doors are oblong pink wounds in the peeling whitewash. Women sit inside in the grimy pink light, listlessly showing their thighs. Caroline is astonished by their impassivity; the whores read or sew, chat together or simply sit. The boys, the hairless men, laugh and point, and the women sit.

  Hey, lady girls, you Americans? You want good money?

  Piss off, Lanie says. We’re tourists, not hookers.

  Look, here is my money. He brandishes a fistful. Caroline’s attention slips, somehow. She hears the tinkle of a passing tricycle bell, the mournful cry of its owner sounding incongruously like agape, which, as she looks at his wares, must presumably be a kind of soup or noodles. Turning, she bumps into a stall. Bright capsules and pills gleam in lamplight.

  Shit, Lanie. For God’s sake.

  She recognizes the brand names instantly, the familiar prescription-only antibiotics. No clinical white shelves of hospital or pharmacist, only a Disneyland of physical corruption and magic science. Caroline feels, as perhaps she is meant to, sick to the stomach.

  Jesus, the pictures!

  They have been clipped or torn ragged from medical textbooks, pinned framed and unframed, the sharp triumph of the colorgravure printer’s art. Cancers spill from the wall, decaying, suppurating organs, children with hideous developmental defects, cleft palates, anencephaly, botched, blotched skin, a dozen diseases and poxes of penis and scrotum, genitals eaten and stained and leaking and rancid with gangrene, legs swollen with elephantiasis and fingers truncated by leprosy.

  Do they really think a few antibiotics will cure this sort of thing?

  Come on, Caroline. Let’s just go.

  It’s horrible.

  Of course it is. Yes, it really is. Lanie smiles at her, and Caroline sees how tired they both must be. Touching her face lightly, her friend tells her: We’d better get you to bed, Caro, before you keel over with culture shock.

  The alley ends. Whores conduct their endless trade at Caroline’s back. A trishaw pings as they cross the street to their hotel. The lobby looks like a box. In their room, Caroline falls on to the bed in exhaustion and kicks off her shoes. The huge propeller of the fan turns and turns in the room’s cloying air, like the coughing prop of an old airplane she’d seen lumbering down the runway as her own sleek jet landed.

  It turns and turns above her, trying to drag the ceiling to the floor.

  Caroline sleeps, and dreams of India.

  faust

  Relenting, Brian Wagner ratchets the stencil out of his machine, platen whirring, and spins another in. Clean and yellow-white. Waxy as a classical scribe’s tablet, waiting for the concussive incision of words. Fifty words, plus title.

  [bq]LEAPING[/bq]

  he types; stops, broods, bursts into tattoo:

  [bq]Caroline, ready for world, love, mystery and truth, abandoned the castle.

  Her cropped head, her face pale from the wimple, took the sun in a hot tremulous kiss.

  She turned her feet to and fro, admiring the edge of sky on her mirrored toes.

  Caroline shivered, already half in love.[/bq]

  1984: joseph

  He walks slowly down the short main street, his feet aching, buys a bunch of bananas and eats two, stowing the remainder in his knapsack. A small black and white flag flies over a low concrete structure on the outskirts of the village. Joseph opens the garden gate and approaches the temple.

  A girl of seven or so is playing on the lawn with her sister. She rises, greeting him with a grave smile. “Come with me.”

  He follows the child to a small house behind the temple. A turbaned Sikh with thirty centimeters of beard returns Joseph’s salute, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his chest. The girl translates his Punjabi: “Where do you come?”

  “From Australia.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “To Europe.”

  “For you a long way to go, lah.”

  The temple guardian nods to his granddaughter, who leads Joseph to a high, bare room at the side of the temple. Half a dozen beds are all the room’s furniture. They are no more than rope nets stretched taut across wooden frames. An old fellow has upended one, and stands twisting a new net on to the frame.

  “This old man he comes from Calcutta to see us.”

  The man from Calcutta nods to Joseph and continues weaving his bed.

  “Thank you.”

  The child departs. Joseph spreads his sleeping bag on a frame and leaves in search of food. Over a meal of chicken and rice that all but cauterizes his throat, he opens and reads Ray Finlay’s most recent or post-revelation quipu. It is largely taken up with a transcript of a speech to be delivered by Dr. Finlay at the Commencement Week Ecumenical Service. This happy event is scheduled to take place at the university where Ray looks inside computers for the secrets of artificial intelligence. Joseph’s mind drifts to lewd images of Marjory. A burning brand of curried fowl retracts his mind to Ray’s new understanding of the human if not indeed the cosmic condition.

  [bq]I am a born-again Christian.

  I know the truth about the universe, the sublime truth that creation is the planned and loving work of an eternal and all-powerful Lord.

  This truth has set me free, as truth must, from the snares and delusions that surround me, has liberated me from unsatisfying rationalizations.

  The truth is that the world is more than an accident. It is more than a breeding place of animals, no matter how lofty their natural estate.

  The truth is that humans are more than animals that are born and die and vanish forever and must live their meager lives in a frantic race for self-gratification before death steals the sweetness of experience forever away from them.

  The truth is that men and women are more than social insects or hairless primates, however moral, however scientifically and socially enlightened. For we are made more than the material world about us, made with the capacity to escape corruption, made with the potential to become one with the Maker.

  I know that God, in Their eternal and infinite generosity, has desired to share Their own happiness with others, and has created humans for that purpose.

  I know that Jesus Christ, the second Person of that Trinity, came into this universe and gave us the opportunity to become part of Himself, to enter and share the divine life of our creator.

  I know that I am part of that great fellowship, part of Christ, part of the God-head, and that the basic force in the universe is Love, for it was from Love that the universe came and it is by love that we shall each be fulfilled.

  Nor is this knowledge simply that of faith. God has given those of us fortunate enough to attend this university intelligence beyond that of most of our fellows, and They expect us to use it in the crucial business of saving our souls. It is no good crying for the simple faith of the peasant. What we must learn from the simple is not intellectual simplicity but humility, abjectness to the will of God.

  Truth and its pursuit are part of the very fabric of humanity. We can only love what we know, and we can only know what we learn. Yet, lest our life of faith become too academic, too abstract, we must remember that our ultimate aim is not merely to know truth, but to love and become it. [/bq]

  Joseph begins to laugh. He gets curry all over his face. Throttling back, he pays for his meal and returns to the temple. The old man from Calcutta lies asleep on his completed bed. Joseph sits in the doorway to the sleeping room and scrutinizes Finlay’s piece again from the beginning, by the light of the bulb on the outside wall. He can not control himself. He begins to laugh helplessly again
. When the Indian rolls over, stirring, he gets up and moves outside.

  “What are you reading?” The two children hold hands.

  “A qui—” Joseph says, and stops. “A magazine.”

  “It is a funny magazine?”

  “Funny, yes.”

  “Give me the magazine.”

  Joseph hands the quipu to the girl who scans it intently in the light. Her little sister solemnly regards Joseph.

  “It is too hard, lah.”

  The document is returned.

  “You speak good English.”

  “Also Punjabi and Malay.”

  “And your sister?”

  “She learns.”

  “Learning is good,” Joseph tells them.

  The little girl says, “Give me paper.”

  Joseph passes her Finlay’s credo, which she examines studiously upside down.

  “Now give me back the paper,” he says.

  The girl prolongs her scrutiny of the inverted pages, running her finger along the lines.

  Joseph tries again. “When you said, ‘Give me the paper,’ I gave it to you. Now when I say, ‘Give the paper back,’ you must give it to me.”

  Evidently a stranger to situational learning, the little girl runs off without warning into the garden, holding the quipu above her head. Her sister, casting Joseph a look of suffering, gives chase.

  Propped in the temple doorway, Joseph watches the two children chase each other around the darkened garden.

  At his back, the man from Calcutta snores on his bed of rope

  [bq]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13prof.html

  At 20, [Terry Tao] finished his Ph.D. Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world’s top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” award that comes with a half-million dollars and no strings…