by Brian Castro
The shutters in my room emit a smell of The East. Sandalwood, perhaps. I’m not an expert in the varieties of wood. Driftwood more my style; bleached and salted. I think of the skinny blonde. Imagine making love to her, but nothing fits. Roll a little rush of ideas. Light up. This loosening gives me a better grasp. Who was the raven-haired executive next to my table? Inhale. Fold back the covers of her black notebook.
1
From the Journal of Doctor Judith Sarraute
Something had gone terribly wrong. There were no fish in the sea; not even little reef sharks, which used to nose shoreward at dusk, black shadows darting between clouds of sand.
From my surgery window I can see Janet Cordillion hanging from a parachute, being towed by a powerful speedboat out near the reef. An oil tanker is heading north, spewing smoke. Gosh look at my reflection. My beautiful long black hair turning grey. The gap between Janet Cordillion and the tanker widens very slowly, and the smoke looks like it’s engulfing her. It must be her. She’s para-sailing every morning about eleven, when the wind comes up, with the speedboat driver and his assistant, skiing into the air and when aloft, kicking off her paddles then hovering in the updraft, a weathered eagle; I know the crow’s-feet behind her shades. No idea why she does it; she’s fair, yet deeply tanned, and will get skin cancer. I copy this from my journal onto her patient card. I note that above the card I have also written suicidal – she expressed that to me when she asked for the sleeping pills which I was reluctant to prescribe, but she would have got them anyway from the doctors in Cairns, driving there in her dark green Porsche. I hope she wasn’t storing them up. Janet Coeur de Lion, was how she pronounced her name. Her husband Carter Cordillion is the district’s biggest property developer. He’s running for Parliament. God knows why. It’s not for the money. Somebody will probably shoot him.
A sonic boom from a low-flying aircraft no one can see, shakes the windows. No fish in the sea. At this time of the year the box jellyfish have taken over. Scientists do not know how to exterminate them, so tourists can swim safely all year round without having to don smelly wetsuits. Exterminate. I’m worried about their use of this word. Out here, in the calm, unruffled waters, nature cannot be controlled. Much of my surgery time is engaged with first aid, treating stings by Chironex fleckeri, which can be fatal. Box-jellyfish are cubozoans. Picasso would have loved them. Totally transparent, four-cornered, each corner sprouting up to fifteen tentacles. Three-eyed cubists trailing three metres of deadly poison, fired off through hollow shafts. It’s simply a reaction, on the part of both jellyfish and victim, a kind of neutrality of the sting. No party intends it, for both are in the abyss of a chance encounter with nervous systems. In a more pleasurable and benign sense, it’s like encountering music or painting…initial incomprehension and then the horror of dawning reality, ambushed by surprise and anguish. The pain experienced by the victim usually becomes more intense as time passes and in a few minutes, the heart can stop beating. The common symptoms…lower back pain, muscle cramps, nausea and vomiting…occur within half an hour. A symphony of symptoms. Vinegar, when applied immediately, can slow down the process and alleviate scarring, but it’s not an antidote. There is no known antidote. Ambulancemen bring me marinaded patients, their privates shielded by towels, their faces distorted, arms outstretched like victims of crucifixion. I inject them with analgesics, principally with morphine. Then it’s a balancing act between the dosage and toxic side effects. My whole life has been a balancing act. Judith…my father said to me…you must balance your life and not be like your mother. That was probably during one of his more sober moments. When my father talked with me about my mother, I would run from him and lock myself in my room on the rue Marie Curie in Paris, opposite the laboratories where he did his research in tropical medicine. A Bach fugue playing in the background. Point counterpoint. His hi-fi with six stacked records guaranteeing eternal return. Through the misted windows of his office, I could see him sliding his palms up skirts as though he were palpating an orchid. He liked to kneel, embracing their thighs. In Paris in the nineteen-sixties, it was de rigueur to have two or three mistresses at the same time…if you were a famous professor.
There’s Janet Cordillion descending, rather ungracefully, over the reef. The tanker has disappeared. Her chute folds down on top of her. Let down by men who know the ropes.
2
Between November and May one should not be in the water. Irukandji syndrome: a slow incapacitation named after a local Aboriginal tribe near Rim Cove. Cramps, difficult breathing, lower back pain, a feeling of impending doom. This last an interesting phenomenon. I’ve had patients who were not stung by the Carukia barnesi, but who experienced impending doom for most of their lives. Patients in Sydney. Walter Gottlieb, for example, who soaked his bread in vinegar and dabbed it onto his lips. It was a peculiar gesture. He rang me just as he’d finished writing the last lines of his manuscript – a moment of triumph which his wife Marie was not there to share…she was in Paris curating a photographic exhibition at the Pitié-Salpêtrière – telling me he had just run a bath…he was depressed, he was saying to me on the phone and he was alone. I alerted his neighbours just in case. They must have knocked for quite some time. It was just moments after his death, his leaden eyes staring up at the gilded mirror on the ceiling.
One should always deal with impending doom intravenously. Morphine, for instance. For years, they treated sting victims by rubbing on vinegar, which had no restorative power, for it was only a temporary salve. Or they bathed the patients in water and wintergreen, which sent them mad with pain, sometimes inducing pulmonary constriction. Besides, baths are enervating and bathing in a tub is not a particularly hygienic form of cleansing.
For years, my father took baths, even during the war. In Paris, we had a giant double-ended roll-top Bateau copper bath with a wood patina finish. Even with such a tub he had to go without soap. There were ersatz products, but he declined using them. His desire for soap was so great he developed an obsession-compulsion. Lack drove him to become a soap fetishist. He always carried a small, genuine cake in his pockets, so his handkerchiefs smelled divine and his hands emitted seductive fragrances when he positioned slides under his microscope. Look at that, he would say, swinging my chair towards the instrument. He breathed into my hair. He carried soap like others carried chocolate; warmed, for personal use. His soap fetishism did not pass onto me, but his concern with lack did, imposing an iron discipline, driving me in my studies so that my medical qualifications were second to none. I still do not bathe in a tub. I shower instead, and there is a plenitude of efficiency there. I could say like my love affairs, but that would be untrue. From my father I inherited the habit of never saying too much, thus cleansing words of their impurities. It’s my soap. That is why I am a doctor and not a novelist. But that may be untruthful. I have a cast of characters, a plinth of notes, grammatical prosthetics made out of necessity: I tell some of my more hopeless cases, old men with fatal prostates, that the word ‘Viagra’ did not possess magical powers, did not even have as much virtue as a good bath. Of course they keep asking for the former.
Sans vie, my father used to say…without life. He was referring to what he was examining, dead microbes, but I rather think he used the term to disapprove of restricted moralities, teetotalism, lack of risk-taking, satisfaction with smallness. For him, death itself was a failure. His excesses were legendary. I guess that’s why I’ve taken on an observer’s role. I have not left the microscope. Smallness is about first things. The first discovery can never be a copy, even if it is a discovery of one thing among many which are still not named. It is the naming that justifies all kinds of primacy. Dr Jack Barnes, for instance, gave his name to the box jellyfish which causes the Barnesi syndrome. I study his findings and read his work deep into the night, refusing a dinner invitation from Carter Cordillion in Port Douglas, even though Carter was hosting the president of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, who was staying at Cordillion’s Temple Meridien r
esort. Envie…which is not in life, but outside of life…envy is the sad embalming of lack and of desire.
3
Things slide about. If you place a jellyfish under the hot light of the microscope it liquifies. It has the ability to be transformed into its own medium; the merest illumination and it becomes transparent. Few swimmers have ever seen what stings them. There are people like that. They sting invisibly while they are living their lives, just by living their lives. I try not to imagine the lives of my patients. I note what they have to say and that’s all. Then I make general observations. My father taught me how to assess what is general. All people, he said, fall into categories. They become predictable even when they seem to have unexpected urges. If you imagine them, they become too unique; if you observe them, they do not differentiate too much. Like jellyfish, people too, melt into their own medium.
My surgery is in an old house right alongside the beach on the wilder side of the resort strip. It is reached by a dirt road and sits beneath some palm trees and there is a small lagoon which is washed clean by the high tide every month. The ‘clinic’ as the locals call it, is made of weatherboard and stands beside several double-storey holiday homes which all look out to sea. I have bought one of these modern houses which is linked by a walkway to the surgery. I keep the front room of the old house for my practice. Patients seem to feel calmer when they sit on the old captain’s chair next to my desk and gaze out at the green water. The house creaks like an old boat. I deal mainly with geriatric cases, long-time residents who have seen the waterfront develop and their friends sell up. They come to me to complain about everything. Some amongst them have minor chronic illnesses. The terminal ones are mostly silent. Now and again, the odd tourist who has cut his feet from broken glass, allergies, skin eruptions, will ask advice on real estate. In the summer season, from November to May, I deal mainly with those suffering from the Irukandji syndrome. You can’t tell people not to go near the water. Water is a heavy magnet. There are netted areas for them to swim in, but there will always be a few who will display ignorance or bravado, then they are brought into my clinic whimpering and wheezing and tell me they are dying. My geriatrics in the waiting room cluck their tongues like castanets. They’ve seen it all before. I reach over to my small locked fridge and extract a vial of morphine. My heels click. I do not bend my knees. I used to learn ballet as a child and this habit has stayed with me. My patients are always distracted by what they call my flamenco gestures. I wear a white smock and I keep my toenails painted. Patients come from as far away as Cairns to see me and they don’t mind waiting for hours. I must say, this practice is getting too much for me, but I don’t want a partner. Here I rule. My tunic may look odd, not nearly as professional as a lab coat, but it doubles as a priest’s vestment: a sarrotus. My name might be a challenge for them, but they queue to confess nevertheless. Patient records are stacking up and take up most of the room in my offices at the back of the house. I sometimes take out the files and rearrange them in the order of their seriousness; then I shuffle them randomly. The ones which keep coming to the surface form a critical pathology, a baseline which is continuously varied upon by bad luck and tragedy. But if you remove chance you have an epidemiology. Discourse, you see, spreads. But not yet. Not so fast.
Carter Cordillion has high cholesterol and wants to buy my clinic and my house. In fact, he wants to buy up the whole strip, but no one is selling. We have monthly residents meetings to protect ourselves from surprises. I have another practice in Port Douglas. On weekends I work in tandem with Dr Priscilla Kwan in the heart of the Swordfish Shopping Mall. I intend to cut back. I have floated the idea of change. I want to turn my house into an art gallery. Sick people would no longer be shuffling in and out. At least it would not be a hotel or a restaurant where intoxicated Japanese spill out over the dunes and vomit onto sand.
I have to go now to meet Blixen.
Blixen has flown up from Sydney. Whenever she comes to the resort she stays with me and I always look forward to that. We go shopping, we drive up to the Daintree Rainforest in my open Porsche, we go out to the reef in Carter Cordillion’s cruiser, which he has placed on permanent loan to me during the Irukandji season, for reasons I will not go into here.
4
My surgery is my observation post. What crosses my line of vision is the grifter who works this area. I’ve seen him several times, here and in Port Douglas and sometimes in Cairns. He looks different on each occasion, but there is the same gaze, the same camera-eye that he employs…sometimes I wonder if he is tracking me. I see him lift the tip money from plates; I see him placing his order of Moët on the room numbers of others. I see him counterfeiting a signature from what is obviously a stolen credit card. He is moderately handsome; moderately nondescript. He is quiet and well behaved, with very pleasant manners.
He crosses in front of my surgery, which is my repair shop. I re-adjust my perspective. Old Pivot is sitting in the captain’s chair, spinning around and around. He is drunk, doesn’t really want to live, but in my company he comes alive. There’s that drifter again, he says. I try to keep Pivot functioning as long as possible. I inject him with vitamins and saline, ensure he is irrigated. I caulk the seams in leaky boats.
You’re a real corker, Carter Cordillion told me when he was drunk. He had on a dark blue shirt and polka-dot braces and he affected a five o’clock shadow looking like the gangster Sol Levine, whose photo appeared in every newspaper at the time… for his drug wars and art thefts…and Cordillion certainly looked like he may have been a dope dealer or an art critic…pushy, anyway. I don’t know what he meant by that remark…a corker. I thought of Levine and heroin. He had his hand on my knee. It was at the Lions Club centenary dinner. A string quartet was playing Brahms. That was when Cordillion made the offer of lending me his cruiser, a powerful boat shaped like a shark with many thousands of horses, as he said. I don’t care for cruisers, with their gurgling throats frothing up the surface of the water. I thought he should have bought a barque; an elegant sailing vessel. I thought of my father’s bateau-bain, his bath shaped like a deep-keeled boat. I thought of Baudelaire and his Invitation au voyage. Bad Baudelaire. I thought of the dripping tap. Gott-lieb; Gott-lieb; it went, into my father’s bathwater, roseate with his blood. I put on my gloves and turned off the tap. I thought of Gottlieb again. Got leave, he used to say to me; out of this world; on leave with Bach; permeable with the element in which he was floating. I could have saved him with love. It was neither accidental nor intentional that I didn’t. I should go back there. Survey what had happened years before. Do some caulking. To sleep. To lie down on deck and sleep, with all one’s clothes on. I always slept with my clothes on. A habit in war-torn countries.
Jellyfish do not survive by learning or by memory. Their reproductive instinct is their perdurance. They multiply out of mimicry, producing polyps shaped like vases or ancient water clocks, from which dozens upon dozens of copies are spawned. They are a culture of copying; an exemplum summum. Composed of ninety-five per cent water, the jellyfish is carried away by its medium, although it does have the capacity to steer through it. A box jellyfish reacts, like most of its species, to light. It may be that it also reacts to colour; the colour red, for example. Perhaps that explains why Janet Cordillion is out there on the reef in her red wetsuit. A tanker is heading down the coast, sending out black smoke.
The fugueur, a person who loses himself or herself in a fugue state, is very much like a jellyfish, carried away by its medium. We no longer use the term fugueur in its romantic and non-pejorative sense. In history, there were many famous fugueurs, Jesus Christ being a notable one. Einstein may have lost himself in flights of fancy when he discovered relativity, as may have Kafka in his parables. Whatever the case, they may lose track of the subject, venture onto sidetracks, only to return, synthesised into a different pattern; but only temporarily, like a kaleidoscope. The same and yet different.
Bach wrote fugues. The important thing about a fugu
e or ‘flight’ is that all the voices are equal and independent in counterpoint. They are all relative to each other, and in this organised complexity, they speak together, drop out, become fellow travellers, form pairs of dialogues, and in general, mutilate the subject by inverting, augmenting, truncating or copying it.
As with most things difficult and complicated, we label rather than learn from them: phylum: cnidaria; from the group that stings; class: scyphozoa; cup-like. We could say the humble jellyfish has the same qualities as a prophet, divining from a cup and stinging with words. Janet Cordillion certainly thinks so. However with humans, this process of the elevation of the humble is being reversed: prophetic; oracular; bi-polar; obsessivecompulsive; schizophrenic; mentally ill. It is not stretching things too far by saying all Bach’s fugues were gloriously ill; schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, oracular, well-organised voices of prophetic intent. Things come round. Speculation is affirmed.
There’s Cordillion’s cruiser pulling away from the jetty with its searchlights blazing. It is not yet dark. The lactic evening disgorges poets. Jellied hallucinations.
5
I met Marie de Nerval in the hot springs in the Gellert Hotel in the Buda part of Budapest many years ago. She was there, she said, for a cure, though I must say I started smiling at that point. Hot springs cured nothing of course, except perhaps some very minor skin blemishes, or they provided relief for simple or tortured minds. I wouldn’t have said Marie de Nerval was simple-minded, but she certainly was a tortured soul. She was an art dealer and worked at several auction houses and was in Budapest for some rest. In the baths at the Hotel Gellert, we waded round and round clockwise, and then anticlockwise when the attendant blew a whistle…all of us, large and small, mainly round women, all in bathing caps which was de rigueur, though none of us put our heads under the water, afraid of what we would see or ingest. And it was on one of the anticlockwise rounds that Marie de Nerval confided to me, because she always confided in doctors, moreso with female doctors, who were rare in Hungary, at least those in whom you could confide, that she could never have children.