The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  21

  Blixen returns before I am able to finish my ride. I guessed that she would, when Travis looked that way at me. The work of the female nude in paintings over the ages confirms the fact that posture and poise, point and pose, sublimate defects…which then return as disturbances. Blixen returns, is unsettled, begins to drink early. I sense this already, out on my ride, and I turn around at twenty-five kilometres; make my way back. I find her lounging, disgruntled, moody, snapping like a turtle. I soothe her without words, massaging her back, rubbing her feet. I carry her to the bath, which I’ve filled with oils and calm her down. My surgery is also a repair shop, unguent, perfumed with care. Mindful of how much I can administer, aware that soap runs out as it did for my father, I leave Blixen to soak. Downstairs, in the surgery, I wipe my forearms with surgical pads soaked in alcohol. I look out the window and expect Janet Cordillion to fall out of the sky onto the line of the horizon, the oil tanker providing a smokescreen. It’s a battle on the Coral Sea.

  Stung patients have not stopped turning up at my door. Those that have already been treated, return with side effects: some patients have severe pain in their backs but anaphylaxis has not yet occurred. Pre-treatment with adrenaline may have prevented their mild bronchospasms. I am irritated at myself for having missed these contraindications. I notice that I have been forgetful lately, leaving lights on, my car keys stuck in the boot, bills that I have paid twice. I am overworked, but I have also exercised excessively. All this I have called The Blixen Effect. She reflects me in my worst light; perhaps it is my increasing intake of alcohol which she encourages, bringing back all sorts of exotic recipes for cocktails so that at the end of a long day it is almost impossible not to slide into a sort of coma, and then she will bring out the make-up that she has gathered, all the mascara, rouges, lipsticks and we will paint each other in drunken barbarism, faces dotted like island chieftains, this epidermal pointillism resembling nematocysts on the tentacles of jellyfish, each dot a copy, a plague of dots replicated to achieve the overall result of ferocious abnormality when viewed up close, but which appears at a distance as a benign and camouflaged uniformity.

  22

  Cordillion was optimistic in his report to his consortium. He was wrong. The Chamber of Commerce noted that tourist numbers had been declining; sales of luxury apartments and houses had almost come to a standstill, though their prices still hadn’t dropped. Commercial fishermen are out of work, restaurants have reported fewer customers, boat owners have started to sell up. I renegotiated the price of the Rastoni with Carter. He backed off and then agreed to lower it. Renovators would start work on the gallery immediately. It was a small infusion of business confidence. Every little bit helped.

  The stinger season has almost come to its end, but jellyfish are still thick in the water and people complain of feeling nauseous when they go out in boats, as though the masses of jelly increased the pitch and yaw of boats, made the water heavier, prolonged the swell and slowed the waves, and a viscous blubber was now forming beneath them, and even on shore they feel its pull dwelling at the bottom of their bellies and they cannot eat, any slight smell of cooking oil sending them out into the courtyards, beachfronts, parking lots, retching, heaving, vomiting. The pharmacy is inundated with customers. Travis brings me the pathology reports and hangs around in reception, but Blixen does not appear. I try to encourage Travis to go home. He’s shaved his head. It’s made him aggressive. I don’t like him observing things through the open door of the surgery when there is a break between patients, hoping to catch sight of Blixen. It’s as though he’s become too familiar. Yet I feel that if his presence was missing, Blixen would pack up and go back to Sydney. She has found his persistence flattering. She has booked a room for a week at a lodge in the Daintree, a room overlooking a waterfall. It would be a good break for her, as she hasn’t really had one since coming up here, but it would mean I would have no help in the surgery. She didn’t want me to mention anything to Travis.

  Alone, in a dry bath. I sit there feeling the contours as if she had been there; for a week, the insulting blue outside, the offensive glare and sheen of bright sand and in my dry bath, fully clothed, I brighten and darken my windows to achieve the effects of cities, seasons and sounds, the lamplights frosted with green, heralding the coming of spring in the Place Vendôme near my childhood apartments, the brown waters of the Seine in flood during autumn, the glow from the stoves of the chestnut vendors at night, shouts from the illuminated haze above the Parc des Princes during the six-day bike races. But the light here is unrelenting, unmodulated. Almost antiseptic, it conceals a monotony which induces a pressing need to wander, to break out; an irrestible, purposeless need to travel as erratically as possible. It isn’t something that is obvious or general until it is named. The bath fugue may still have its day in the Australian sun. Free to wander without imprisonment or punishment. Up there in the Daintree forest, Blixen is sitting in her bath trying to hear the waterfall. Down below, there are no jellyfish; the water in the river is cold and fresh. She plunges into it from her balcony. I hope she understands form; measurement; the depth of the water before the rocky bottom rises up.

  When Gottlieb told me about Fabiana during an unguarded moment in my surgery in Double Bay, I made it a point to visit her shop. Women have an instinct for allies. Fabiana invited me to her spring, her waterhole, to swim one windy summer’s day. But down by the water there was no breeze since it was shielded by willows and the waterhole was in a depression, cut off from the wind, calm as an oasis. There, Fabiana, who was in a psychotic state as she often was, told me that we were being watched, by whom, she didn’t wish to say. The story of the spring was true, she said. What story? I hadn’t heard of it, I explained to her. Oh, everyone around here knows. The mystery of Roger’s disappearance. It was true, she said, that her husband, who had begun life as a parquetier, a floorer, if you like, had bought the Putty property from the Grace family, the last of which was a surviving male, to whom the place had been passed. Roger had bought it back for her, his beloved Fabiana. It was true, Fabiana said, that Roger had gone out to fight that bushfire by himself and that the water tanker had dodgy brakes and somehow, while making the trip between the waterhole and the forest fire, the truck had disengaged and rolled into the flames. It was true that Roger’s body was never found. But as you know, there are a whole lot of subterranean rivers and springs out here and in the past, cavers had come, asking permission to dive, which I’ve always refused, Fabiana said with a sigh, since it was too dangerous. It was I who told the police that Roger may have sought relief from the heat of the fire by plunging into the spring and had somehow been dragged down by reeds, into the strange and unmapped apertures beneath. It was true that the police sent down divers, but were incredulous that any human body could have slipped into those small crevices, let alone be sucked through them into subterrenean caves. Fabiana then told me something that she had not told anyone before. She said that she thought Redvers was in love with her. He thought he could solve her mystery by widening an aperture with a stick of gelignite.

  One death was an accident; two was carelessness; three would have been intention. Gottlieb pre-empted that. To be tortured by Fabiana would have been agonising. I know. I’ve met her. It was much worse than being tortured by guilt. My dry bath provides me with a memory. I had written on Redvers’ card that he was a fugueur. He needed to travel for no particular reason. Always riding his bicycle. If someone had said to Redvers: Don’t try to be a detective, you can’t possibly ever be one; or if someone shouted at him: Look, you’re stirring up the dogs with that crazy behaviour, you have cyclic automatism; or if they simply said: Stop acting on hunches, you’re just sleepwalking and dreaming in circles; then Redvers might have survived, simply through knowing how he appeared, how he was named. Once classified, he might have watched himself; fictionised a normal existence.

  23

  Slide #4 Chironex Cyclops

  You have to read Redvers back
wards. The reason why he claimed your confidence was that he only had one sighted eye, and that with an optical nerve at the wrong angle. The other was blinded by a stone thrown up from a car while he was riding his bicycle in India. It made him an extraordinary badminton player. He learned all the best strokes in Delhi; all the acutely angled, unreachable, unreturnable shuttlecocks geometrically calculated to perfection, flights of impossibility. He could glide from one side of the court to the other without being seen. But this made him obsessively one-eyed and saturnine because he couldn’t see himself. It didn’t enlarge his understanding of others.

  The huntress Diana spent much time by a river washing and hunting. She never ate the animals she killed. She donated her catch to the Cyclops, industrious slaves who served her. Her extraordinary skill was to convince the Cyclops that they were the masters, captors of an Amazon, carrying her from her bath dripping wet, laying her on silk sheets to be ravished at will. But in reality they were held captive by her; by her muscles, her power, her deadly aim. Her victims watched themselves being caught in the trap of a never-to-be-satisfied desire. They grew thin in her cage, fretting, fragmenting, thinking all the while of the impossible freedom to fuck her. It was because they were oneeyed. I without the You. Unable to think as someone else, they could only guess at perspective. Jason Redvers had chosen to die rather than to have surgery. His prostate had metastasised. He told me the fig had dried. It’s like a rule in rugby, he said. Use it or lose it. He ran a high fever the last time he came to me so I put him in a bath of ice. He said his grandfather was a poet who wrote verses in a tub, reciting one from his Water Clock series entitled ‘Perspectiva.’

  24

  It has grown dark outside. I must have fallen asleep, still in my clothes, but something has woken me; a sound from the bedroom? Nothing. I get up out of the bath, turn on all the lights. The air conditioning is humming soothingly, the sensor lights on the alarm pad indicate it is only my presence in the room. More body heat and mass than my own would have sent the system pulsing with loud beeps before a full alarm. I check all the doors, go down to the surgery and test the system. Ring the security service to report a trial, not a break-in. I go back up, undress, decide to take a real bath. I let it fill slowly and while undoing my silk organza gown, I pass my hands over my breasts, looking for any irregularity, performing my secret rites, squeezing my thighs together, feeling the ropes in my muscles, transformed, from Diana to Aphrodite. I do not touch myself down there. The steam is soft and golden as I negotiate my way to erasing any original sin.

  I have fallen asleep a second time. It is deeper and more peaceful than before and when I wake it has been an hour or more by the little clepsydra I keep over the spa and I feel a little groggy watching the little cupid with his arrow rising up in time to mark the water that has passed. I recall a phrase from a strange dream in which I walked out the back door and saw Travis Cordillion clambering up a sand dune as though sand had been building up behind the house and now he was sprinting and I couldn’t even make the first few steps without falling back and he was saying something muffled, telling me there was somebody left behind…passengers…it sounded like he was saying a passenger had been left behind on the reef and it must have been something I was reading in the papers the other day, when a diving party failed to account for all the passengers on a boat out near Wallaby Reef and returned to shore and it was five hours before they realised that two were missing. The fear of not being missed. I thought of Janet Cordillion and at that moment I woke again, and my previous waking was only a dream of waking, and I realise how tired I must have been. Taking a bath rather than showering has been a new experience, enervating and tinged with dissatisfaction, causing me difficult dreams. I am confused, not knowing whether I dreamt someone had been in the house, or whether there was a real presence and I am annoyed and irritated by the checks I still have to do. Had not I done it all before? It is late. The Chinese cabinet swings out its carved wooden doors as I pass. That teak cabinet in which I keep my collection of venoms and antivenoms has been unlocked, the key which used to be on my keyring left inside. Its wooden doors flap uselessly against the sides. My heart leaps. I feel violated, raped through my own negligence. The rows of bottles are regular. I cannot tell if some phials are missing. I will have to take an inventory, fudge it if there has been a theft. All this carelessness has been my fault. Lack of vigilance. Inadvertence. I will not be able to report it, to state that I was in the bath, in the process of erasing original sin, not hearing anything.

  I rush out onto the balcony. To the left, several cars are cruising slowly on the Esplanade, their lights dimmed. Passengers. Are there any passengers in them? In my dopey state, still clad in my organza gown, wearing my black booties with the white lace cuffs, I do not know whether I was dreaming when I caught sight of a car towing what looked like Cordillion’s speedboat. I know the boat, the one Janet used on the reef before it dragged her further aloft – Cordillion’s speedboat, which was shaped like a swordfish with the name Passionjuice painted in purple on its side. I don’t know. All speedboats look alike to me.

  Implant

  They’ve grafted a little microchip under the skin near my heart. It keeps me going after the bypass. I’m like an old car stalled on a slip lane; the motor needs a few turns, a few coughs, before things get unblocked. At night I lie on my mattress in the caravan I’ve rented and listen to the sea, and my heart beats irregularly and all that arrhythmia makes me cough… just a slight cough, though a persistent one, and that is bad for business. As a drifter, I risk being noticed. I shadow Doctor Sarraute. My ‘I’ hides in the shadow cast by hers.

  There’s that Cordillion boy dragging his jet ski up the coast where the stingers aren’t that numerous. I’ve never understood how the rich play…how they can never really relax without doing the next deal…the deal is the play. I don’t know why the Cordillion boy always takes the inland route up the coast. Why he always stops off at Butchers Hill at an old house on the Peninsula Road before going cross-country to the Cedar Bay National Park where he launches his jet ski at night.

  A lot of the pines here have been transplanted. Just up the beach on the other side of the national park is a military area, off limits to all. I have been to the fence where there are signs warning of ‘live firing’, and ‘unexploded shells’. A row of yellow buoys are strung out in a line across the water threatening straying craft with fines for trespass. During the day, sunbathers speak with American accents. I step silently over the cones and needles and watch the calm sea. There is no moon, so I light the lantern I bought at the markets. Perhaps I will see jellyfish rising to the surface. Perhaps that’s why Travis Cordillion goes surf-skiing on moonless nights past the nets and marker buoys, where he doesn’t have to plough through jelly. The pine branches wobble as I part them, tensile, like aircraft wings in turbulence. They’ve planted more pines to keep the dunes in place. To transplant: to dibble, inoculate, vaccinate. A surgeon is also a gardener, grafting parts onto wholes. A Caligari.

  Protection. That’s the doctor’s job. She doesn’t know about me. My friend Ross, the cook at the Rastoni, has lost his job. Without him, I have very few good meals that are free of risk. Ross complains to me at the markets on Saturdays. They’ve gutted the Rastoni, and soon it will turn into an art gallery, with high walls and embedded lights. Graft, implant, embed, bury. Maybe that’s what the good doctor is doing. That’s what Travis is doing when he comes back on his burping jet ski. Burrowing. I blow out the flame in my lamp just in time. The pines have shielded me. Travis is burying something he retrieved from a small boat. He does all this in pitch darkness, squatting on the ground, hacking away with his army trench tool. Then suddenly, as if warned by a sound, he looks up, straight at me, though I’m sure he cannot see me behind the branches, and he picks up everything and comes in my direction, holding the trench tool in one hand, and I back away with a silence that comes naturally to me and when I regain the track, run in the opposite direction fro
m the carpark. I’m good at such evaporation, but I’ve left my lantern behind. My chest aches; I know this pain. The microchip does not like visible and physical risk and it is letting me know.

  25

  I’m afraid there has been a break-in at the surgery, I was saying to Blixen when she returned from the Daintree. I had been waiting three days to say this to her. She looked alarmed. More panic than was necessary. Her first words were: Did you inform the police? Not: What was taken? This gave me the cue to lie. It was her scurrying which set me off. Yes, I said, and there is an on-going investigation. Her face turned pale and she bit her lower lip and this was a gesture of hers I knew was brought on by guilt and I sat her down on the lounge. Blixen, I said, when I was twelve my father gave me the key to his room of poisons, entrusting me with the responsibility which came with knowledge. It’s the essence of all learning: to use what is known to reach the unknown responsibly. The fact that you left the key inside the cabinet demonstrates part of that responsibility. You wanted it known that it was an inside job. There are only two of us, Blixen. She undid the clasp on her ponytail and smoothed back her hair and then tied it up again. This too, was a gesture of guilt, stage two: the point at which she is found out. Blixen is a moral creature, and it is an admirable quality to have for a doctor. You knew it was me? she asked, nodding as she said it, reinforcing the affirmative. The alarm system records my body mass, I said. Unless Travis lost forty kilos, it could not have been him. I will trade you one piece of information for another. This is not a gift. Somebody with a serious heart condition came to see me at the surgery yesterday. This person observed some of Travis’s activities. I presume you didn’t see him up at the Daintree during your week there? She shook her head. Leant back in the lounge so her small breasts were defined through her silk top. She was exhaling heavily. Blixen never wore a bra. I don’t know why I held this against her. I was more angry with this non-wearing of bras than with the fact that she broke into my cabinet. I felt like saying this was why Travis stared so much at me, imagining the satin and lace bra I wore, even under my cycling jersey. I withheld my full breasts from his gaze, I was going to say to Blixen. I imprisoned my breasts because of their unnatural size and their acorn nipples. I was like the Muslim woman who came to save her son from the effects of Irukandji stingers. She was not concerned with politeness. There was a lot of strength in that. In her hijab; in her flowing abaya. Without seduction. One of my patients, I continued, implanted the thought in my mind. What thought? Blixen looked angry and horrified. Travis is a drug runner. He picks up sunken contraband. He does more than diving for a living.