The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Gabriel talked as people always will talk to a silent listener. (Silence, Charlie said, seduces.) With a kind of greedy languor, the talkers stretch themselves out in the voluptuous cushions of quietness — something priests and prostitutes, something therapists and interrogators, something bartenders know all too well — the burdened talkers settle in and colonise silence with their unburdenings.

  Gabriel talked and talked and Charlie listened, both to what he said and what he didn’t say.

  The sages tell us, Charlie said, that when doubts about great matters arise, consult the tortoise shell and the milfoil stalks.

  In his own way, he kept the records as meticulously and as creatively as his ancestor, Fu Hsi, recorded the cracks in the dermal plates of muddy reptiles and wrote down, in his Book of Secrets, the arcane translations of scattered stalks. Like Fu Hsi, he was also an interpreter of the gaps and the spaces. When it was necessary, he read between the cracks. He saw the negative print. He underexposed and overexposed as he saw fit.

  “So,” he said to Gabriel at last. “Would you like the job?”

  7

  So she reappeared to him first in the form of her name. Gabriel, angel of the annunciation, brought word of her, and her absence filled the pub and the restaurant and the stairwells and the waiting emptiness of Charlie’s apartment. Absences were potent for Charlie.

  If the potter takes clay, he said, to make a pitcher, its usefulness lies in the hollow where the clay is not. I am quoting Lao Tzu, he said.

  There were absences that had never left Charlie, and he believed that his own absence would have clung to Cat, to all of them, like a second skin. He believed that Cat was fishing for him, that she was using her name as bait. He believed that just as twenty-five years in New York had done nothing to stop them all surfacing and resurfacing in dreams, in the same way they would know, they would in some sense be aware of his return. Cat and Catherine certainly would, though he was less certain about His Honour the judge. Much less certain. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realised that part of the thing that would not be dislodged (he did not name it in so many words; Charlie did not think in words exactly; words were visual objects for him, shapes and colours; he saw a cloudy black tumorous mass behind his own ribs which would translate roughly as “the thing that would not be dislodged”), the more he thought about this thing, the more he realised that part of it lay in the fact that it was all too likely Robinson Gray would remember nothing at all, not Charlie’s name, not his face, not Catherine or Cat, nothing. Robinson Gray’s eyes would be cloudless, untroubled, smiling, full of charm. But Cat and Catherine would sense his return; most certainly Cat would. Yes. She had sent her messenger.

  (Had she sent her messenger to Charlie? Or had Charlie sent for the messenger? Or was someone else altogether leaving a trail of clues for Gabriel to follow, someone who finds it safer and less painful to avert her eyes from certain shadowy corners? Here is my dilemma: an intricate web existed, that much is definite; perhaps Charlie was spinning it as he went along, perhaps he was its still centre. Only now, in his absence, do I sense the full dimensions of his power. Absence is potent, unanswerable questions are the ones that engage us, the silences are thick with story. All I can do is feel my way, advancing, retreating, positing theories, testing, rejecting, going in circles and always covering new ground. Everything I say is provisional. A hapless fly in Charlie’s web, fleeing from memories of my own, I spin my webbed translation as I go.)

  So a messenger came or was sent for.

  At any rate, Charlie did not invent her annunciation in the pub (though since this is my record, my history, Charlie’s thoughts curl up inside mine just as my ideas take shape from his photographs. His words flow into the shapes of my words just as the thought of Fu Hsi reaches us through the commentaries of the Duke of Kau, and through many subsequent scholars.) It is written: the water that flows into the earthenware vessel takes on its form. So Charlie said. So he showed in a black-and-white photograph. And it is noted that Charlie Chang nursed a deep and abiding respect for annunciations, whatever he called them.

  He was waiting for Cat herself to reappear.

  After the last table was cleared and the last drunk shunted out of the bar, in the hours before dawn, Charlie went looking for manifestations. With Gabriel as guide, he set out for the pub where her name had appeared. He crossed the line. He sat with his camera in the bar of The Shaky Landing in the quarry’s first circle, and watched and waited. Sometimes he took photographs, sometimes not, he let his eye decide.

  The quarry is far larger than appears on the map. Far larger. Nobody knows exactly where it begins or where it ends, most people have only hearsay and their fears and nightmares to guide them. Everyone knows certain details of course, the quarry brushes us like cobwebs in unused rooms, some of us descend into it and climb back out (and yet our memories remain very unclear, our memories are instinctively — protectively — fuzzy), some merely descend, everyone has felt glancing blows (panhandlings, muggings, fights, stabbings, sexual assaults, drug transactions, break-ins, the numerous small acts of arson, the blastings and tunnellings) but it is difficult to pin down facts.

  In Sydney, it is said that the quarry began in the rift valley of the Redfern railway station, though some claim the Newtown station, when squatters (the Mole People as we began to say, a permanent and wilful underclass as the newspapers intimated), when the Mole People began tunnelling into the rock cliffs. Homes for the homeless, they chanted, chip chipping through the back passages of the city. And the newspaper dirge, antiphonal, responded with a slow black tolling of headlines: honeycomb hovels, shit holes, rat traps, rabbit warrens, cankers, the deadly lace-trace of white ants, the under miners. That was the beginning.

  Others date the quarry from the year when inner-city insurance became untenable, when burned-out buildings were boarded up, left to decay left to squatters; when the squatters began digging in the burned-out shells, tunnelling their way down beyond basements and into underground parking lots, occupying the zigzag layers of concrete, setting up camps, invading the subways and sewers.

  But what does anyone know? Even underground, no one knows. I used to live there. We used to grope about on the underside of Sydney, we used to put our ears against rock, against concrete, against earth, we would hear the world. I have only black misshapen memories and Charlie’s photographs and Gabriel’s obsessions to guide me. Poor Gabriel, afflicted with the conviction that atonement must be made, that the futility of action does not absolve from the failure to act, alas poor Gabriel, he knew the quarry well. Sober and clear-eyed, he probably knew the quarry — in one sense, anyway — better than I ever did. I imagine them, Gabriel and Charlie, in the quarry’s first circle.

  Now let us descend into the blind world down there, began Virgil, deadly pale. I will be first, and thou second.

  Let’s go, Gabriel says. I’ll go first and you stick close to me, Charlie.

  In the bar in the quarry’s first circle, noise inhabits Charlie, he breathes it in and out. Through the soles of his feet, through the nerves of his bar stool, through the skin on his face, he ingests the music of a heavy-metal band which might conceivably launch earthquakes. Two men in black leather pass a rag doll of a woman back and forth. She is limp with dope. Charlie is strobe lights and sound waves. He watches himself being shredded into particles of coloured glitter and reassembled on the opposite wall. He tastes amplifiers, drums, electric guitar, the quick slash of deals contested. Soon he may piss knives and sweat blood. He paws at the air in a vague distressed way, as a dog with its guts on the street might do, wanting to breathe, wanting to clear a little space in the fights, in the smog of noise. And a voice slips through the clearing.

  “Shit, the way that cat moves.”

  Noise smashes and flows and spumes around the words. Then another tiny lull, a bobbing phrase: “She’ll be the death of him, she will.” Do these splinters have anything to do with Cat? Unlikely. The mind gathers
up what it wants to, it picks and chooses sounds as children choose shells on a beach.

  But Charlie takes messages as they come. A photograph composes itself: a woman, sinuous as a cat, slinks along a bar on all fours. Her thighs are bloody. Louts surround her, catcalling. She turns her face back toward the camera, exposing a man’s head in her tiger jaws. The photograph is entitled Catcall. It exists.

  It is written, Charlie said, that the ruthless man, oblivious to what he has bred, will step on the tail of his own palace tiger and be devoured.

  He leaves Gabriel and strikes out on his own. He pushes his way past the black-leather thugs, past their limp rag doll, past the door, past the boarded-up buildings. His nerves listen. He skirts the small craters and shanties of the Princes Highway. A kid shoves someone who shoves back, a knife moves, and the kid teeters there for whole seconds before falling like a swallow. You’d think the little rifts and canyons sucked him down.

  Behind Charlie’s shoulder, someone leans out of the charred skeleton of a building and his nerves feel it, see it. There is another head inches from his. An absolute stillness hangs within the uproar like a bubble.

  “Cat got your tongue, darling?” A feline voice, scarcely audible, comes slinking into Charlie’s ear. The voice purrs, it tastes of syrup and hate. “Cop’s like a piece of rotten meat,” it says sweetly. “Smell one a mile off.”

  “I’m no cop,” Charlie says without moving. “But I’m looking for someone.”

  A thin young woman (they are all dreadfully thin) leans over the blackened sill. “Who’re you looking for, luv?”

  “A woman named Cat.”

  “Fuck you, darling,” the woman says in her honeyed whisper, leaning close. She spits in his face, then she withdraws behind the wall.

  Behind the wall, there is nothingness. Behind the wall, an old construction site corkscrews dizzily downwards, strip-mining its way, circle by circle, into hell. Behind this wall, behind the next, behind every burned-out shell of a building: a grand canyon of random blasting and burrowing by quarry squatters. Lights float about the crater like small moons. Just below the sill, Charlie can feel the struts of a ladder, he can feel it sway as the woman climbs down, he imagines her looking up, waiting for him, mocking him, daring him, lithe as a kitten, a gaunt siren. Not gaunt, he thinks. No, not exactly gaunt. Wiry, or feral, perhaps. He imagines reaching for the scruff of her neck as a tomcat might. He shivers and swings himself woodenly, deliberately, with a show of indifference, across the sill and onto the rungs.

  Down, down. He passes rock ledges where people are still swinging hammers and scraping with scrapers, savagely, mindlessly, maybe they do it all night long, maybe they can’t stop. The hammers fall one microsecond after the other, a jazz riff with syncopated words: she’ll be the death of me, Cat will, Cat will, Cat will, and the way, and the way she moves.

  There is order and disorder, both, he thinks, mesmerised. His eye speaks to him, he adjusts lens opening and shutter speed, he hooks his legs around the ladder to leave his arms free. He sees: The Grid System of Chaos. This photograph exists.

  The photograph is heresy, but Charlie calibrates the spillage and run-off daily, in files and negatives and dreams. The quarry is leaking into the city, and the city is seeping quarrywards. Everyone knows this, but everyone denies it. The quarry is growing, imperceptibly, relentlessly, inch by inch. This is held to be inevitable, given the times, the nature of the times, the limited wars here and there, the worldwide recession, the unemployment, the migrant problem, the angers, but infiltration of the city proper is denied and the spreading is not a problem, not a problem at all, officially speaking. Officially, there is a policy of containment. Conditions with respect to the quarry, the government announces daily on national television, are stable. The boundaries and demarcation points are clear, although they cannot be shown on a map. Between city and quarry, the division is absolute.

  In one sense, this is true. Of course the funnels of the quarry, when compared to the spread of the city, are minuscule, a negligible area, but it is feared that the separate vortices in the capital cities might now have serpentine underground links, illegal, untraceable, and alarming. This is what is widely believed: that the quarry is not only chipping away at the walls of its cauldron, gnawing at the flanks of settled suburbs, the quarry is tunnelling its way beneath the streets, there are miles and miles of intestines winding below the larger urban lots and landscaped gardens. Nothing can be done about this. Rumours fly: that the quarry tunnels have entered the subway system, that its feelers have merged with city sewers. As far from the quarry boundaries as Toorak and Vaucluse and Ascot, in those manicured suburbs where alarm systems blink their electronic eyes, people can hear a tap tap tapping at the undersides of their pillows at night. The sound is faint, like a parakeet pecking at soft wet wood, but the dreamers stir uneasily and thrash at their sheets and wake and lie waiting for dawn. It’s nothing, they tell themselves resolutely, listening to the soft thump-thump of their fears.

  The concept of seepage is not countenanced by the honourable members of parliament, the directors of public welfare, the rulers of straight lines. “Triage,” they say earnestly, on the Prime Minister’s behalf, “in such times as these, is a moral imperative. For the greater good, for the healthy growth of the body politic as an organic whole and a flourishing plant, a certain pruning is essential. The burning off of dead wood is required.”

  Sometimes one or other of them, someone with tousled hair and boyish charm, a judge perhaps, an officially sanctioned cultural figure, someone who doesn’t rock boats unnecessarily, someone who can be counted on to want his oceanfront hideaway on the side, may pause in an informal game of Rugby or Aussie Rules, reaching for a pass in a city park, drop-kicking the ball to his darling little sons and their mates. He may wipe his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his guernsey and smile into the camera. “There is a tough rightness to our policy with respect to the quarry,” he may say, “that can only be compared to the rightness of a good clean catch in footy.”

  (Sometimes I have tried to remember exactly when newspapers, when all of us, stopped referring to the sinkhole or the cesspit and fled into euphemism. The quarry, we began to say neutrally. The people from the quarry, we said. Or the Mole People, we said, of those who lived in the tunnels and subways. And when did triage first appear in political speeches? Was there once a time when people had to scurry to dictionaries and look it up, when they didn’t kick the word around like a football at backyard picnics?

  TRIAGE: a system of priorities designed to maximise the number of survivors in times of crisis and natural disaster.

  Designed by whom? That is the interesting question, it seems to me. It seemed an interesting question to me very early. In high school, quite suddenly, on a railway platform in Brisbane one day, it seemed to me the only question worth asking.

  Charlie made photographs of triage. For triage, he felt the fascination of a man for whom words are live and squirming. They were creatures that crawled into his brain, he could taste them, smell them. He wrote in light. Here’s one of his words, black and white: the entire photograph swarms with ants. A magnified lens has been used, and the ants are a horrifying writhing warring mass. It is a dark photograph. There is an out-of-focus greyish blur from the top right-hand corner of the print, reaching diagonally toward the centre, and only at that still centre, within a small bubble of light, does the blur reveal itself as the fang of a snake. The elect, the handful of chosen ants, wait in the bubble of light. Triage, the photograph is called.)

  Charlie photographs the swaying lanterns in the rift valley below a gutted building in Newtown: The Descent into Sydney.

  He descends. Down, down, down, past the honeycombed pitface, how many caves per circle, how many bodies per cave, how many new tunnels per body if each has a hammer and a trowel and one little, two little, three little, four, five little, six sticks of quarry-made dynamite, seven sniffs of glue, eight of smack, nine hypodermics, ten tokes o
f dynamite crack?

  The flares and the transistors and the steady percussive hammering mesmerise him. This is how they cope, he thinks. With this and the dope.

  They choose this, the government ministers and the businessmen and people from the university and the wise judges in their cascading wigs all say. They want it this way. Down there they are more like monkeys than like us. They are not at all like people who do not live in the quarry, they have chosen to be there, and for the good of those of us who do not so choose, triage, triage, rhubarb rhubarb, triage.

  It is not altogether unpleasant, Charlie thinks, the pattern of hammers and lights, the rhythms which can be felt through the rock face. There is something hypnotic … perhaps he will stay for the night, perhaps he will take photographs later, perhaps the work … it is difficult to remember what work exactly, it is difficult to remember why he is … A shape, as of a cat slinking along a wall, passes across the rungs of the ladder, climbing up. It is that woman again, he thinks for no logical reason, the one who taunted me, the one who perhaps knows Cat. A hot flash of erotic hunger shakes him. On all fours at the edge of his rock shelf, he cranes his neck up into the glow cast by a flare and he thinks he can see the length of her smooth brown legs and the shadow where they meet. Then dizziness. He has to crawl back, he has to lean against the cliff face, he has to stare at the opposite wall of the pit.

  Across from him, ladders bow under the weight of his watching. The fluid bodies of men and women and children are climbing the ladders, the long swaying dangerous ladders, hand-made, knotted imperfectly with rope. Which is the woman who taunted him? And which one is Cat?

  An image of Cat forms in his mind, as he had first seen her when they were nine years old in Brisbane. She has the body of a tomboy, she moves with feral grace, she is a witch. He imagines the way she might be now: still ugly, still small and wiry, cheekbones high and gaunt, eyes set in deep smudged sockets, a forty-seven-year-old witch. He wants to find her.