by A. S. Patric
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au
Copyright © 2012 A.S. Patrić
Published by Transit Lounge Publishing
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover and book design: Peter Lo
Cover photograph: Robert Venturi photographed by Denise Scott Brown on The Strip in 1966 from Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form, a book that describes their seminal study of Las Vegas in 1968.
Printed in China by Everbest
This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
9781921924514 (e-book)
A cataloguing in publication entry is available from
the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
For my darling daughters
Summer & Nevena Patrić
CONTENTS
Beckett & Son
The Mirage Inn
Below Zero
Boys
The River
Hungry Moths
nothing to do with anything
Full-Scale
Minerva Blues
The Interior
The Professional Mourners
Guns N’ Coffee
Measured Turbulence
Elysium Zen
One in a Million
Daughters of Vesuvius
Murmur
The Manx Heart
The Bronze Cow
Sunlight
The Eternal City
Cinders & Bugs
The Wife
Birthday
The Slow Fall
Exit
Ana Schrödinger
Fragments of a Signal
Camelot Toys
Scarring Wood
unSubstance
Voice of the Bee
Cigarettes & Balloons
Las Vegas for Vegans
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ‘Beckett & Son’ Best Australian Stories 2010, Black Inc. 2010 Overland, #199, 2010
• ‘Below Zero’ Miscellaneous Voices #1, 2010
• ‘Boys’ Southerly Volume 71, Number 3, 2012
• ‘Minerva Blues’ Small Wonder #1, Spineless Wonders, 2012
• ‘The Professional Mourners’ The Diamond and the Thief December, 2010
• ‘Guns N’ Coffee’ fourW #22, 2011
• Winner of the Booranga Short Story Prize 2011
• ‘Measured Turbulence’ Meanjin Volume 71, Number 2, Winter 2012
• ‘Elysium Zen’ Geek Mook, 2012
• ‘One in a Million’ Stop Drop and Roll #2, 2010
• ‘The Manx Heart’ antiTHESIS #22, 2012
• ‘The Bronze Cow’ The Lifted Brow Issue #7, 2010
• ‘Cinders & Bugs’ Small Wonder #1, Spineless Wonders, 2012
• ‘The Wife’ Etchings #9, 2010
• ‘The Slow Fall’ Untitled #2, 2010
• ‘Exit’ Island Islet, October, 2011
• ‘Fragments of a Signal’ Antimater #4, Dot Dot Dash, 2010
Escape #1, Spineless Wonders, 2011
• ‘Scarring Wood’ Page Seventeen #7, 2009
• ‘unSubstance’ Going Down Swinging #28, 2009
• ‘Voice of the Bee’ The Diamond and the Thief November, 2010
• ‘Las Vegas for Vegans’ Sydney Morning Herald January 2, 2012 (short version)
New Australian Stories 3 Scribe 2012 (full version)
Winner of the Ned Kelly Award: SD Harvey Short Fiction Prize
BECKETT & SON
Devon’s father had a heart attack. Devon was at home with him when it happened. They were having breakfast and Roland’s eyes blinked and blinked as his mouth opened wide. He tumbled as he tried to find a hold on the kitchen bench. He hit the ground but he looked like he was falling on down through the floor, even though he was still there; back to the tiles, his mouth open, working with soundless air. His legs moved spastically and his arms reached out for something to stop his fall. Their eyes met with everything that was part of the complicated sum of Devon and Roland Beckett.
Devon went to the phone. He stood there—then bent down to take a hold of the phone jack and carefully pulled it from the wall. He walked to the front door and made sure it was locked. He went to the back door and made sure it was locked. He walked around their large family house and checked every window, making sure they were all closed. He pulled the curtains. He could faintly hear his father struggling in the kitchen when he came to the stairs that led up to his bedroom. He climbed the stairs and then he turned on his stereo. A band called Fireside Bellows played a song called ‘I Ain’t Gonna Fall’.
Devon had already showered and shaved. He and his father both had. The rule was to come to the kitchen table already prepared for work. So Roland was dressed in his crisp white shirt when his heart faltered and failed. The only concessions to comfort were that he hadn’t put on his tie and his top button was left undone.
Roland’s hand had tugged open that shirt and popped two perfectly white buttons out onto the tiles. They’d reminded Devon of teeth. There was a little white thread bound within the holes of one of those buttons. Nothing in the other. The buttons had looked lovely lying on the spotless off-white tiles. He had paid attention to them as he listened to his father’s body writhe—the backs of his shoes squeaking as they moved uselessly on the kitchen floor. He’d made himself look at those two buttons on the tiles, and at nothing else.
Devon listened to Fireside Bellows play another song, and for a few moments considered not going in to work. But that choice was so distant it didn’t feel like a possibility. It felt like the idea of suicide. He couldn’t imagine calling Mr Waterston in the mailroom to tell him he wasn’t coming in. The problem was Devon couldn’t lie very well. And the truth was another kind of suicide.
He was almost late getting to Brighton train station. He was usually five minutes early. Today the train was waiting for him at the platform like it was there just for him. He stepped inside the carriage and had the pleasant smell of aftershave and perfume wash over him.
There weren’t many seats available. He looked at his choices and saw a group of three, dressed in business clothes. There was one seat among them, though there was barely any space to get into it. They shifted their briefcases and moved only the minimal distance they could to accommodate him. Devon didn’t mind. He wanted to be as close to them as possible. He always chose men like these to sit near. He could see their faces had just been shaved. They looked so smooth and clean, all of them. They smelled of shampoo and deodorant, dry-cleaned clothes and shoe polish.
Devon had his iPod playing and couldn’t hear what they were saying. He listened to Ian Curtis sing ‘Twenty Four Hours’. It amazed him how many times he could listen to a song and not really hear parts of it. It was like all those parts had to find a way to fit into his mind. That they had to wait for him to be ready before they could enter him and leave their gifts. The next song on the album was ‘The Eternal’. He didn’t like it and turned down the volume to zero. He wanted to hear what the three men were talking about.
He’d watched them become more animated. They were a few years older than Devon—maybe in their mid-twenties. It was possible they were even older but the gusto with which they attacked each other in their arguments made them seem just out of high school. Men who worked in his father’s firm would rarely show this kind of excitement in public. And they would certainly not a
llow themselves to look this earnest.
The one with perfect teeth in front of Devon was saying, ‘… and of course you’re going to go and lay it all at the feet of Greenspan. Doesn’t matter, I suppose, that he tugged the US economy through the ’87 Crash and post 9/11. That means shit. He was supposed to predict that the banks would start playing fast and loose. That’s what he should have known, hey?
That they’d want to screw their own shareholders …’
‘What? He wasn’t warned? Is that what you want to believe? That you had to be a prophet to see how this was going to play out?’ The man with glossy black hair sitting next to Devon had cut in and now the third man was forcing his way in with his views.
‘But that’s what they called him—the fucking ‘Oracle’. The fucking ‘Maestro’. Did he tell anyone he’d decided on a fucking funeral march?’ The swearing barely marred the elegant voice. The use of the word ‘fuck’ was just something to give his soft voice bones. ‘A fucking elegy,’ he said in conclusion, but the one with perfect teeth began talking a torrent again.
Devon thought they were more interesting when the volume was up on his music. His father talked enough about all of this. Men like George Soros and Warren Buffett felt like uncles. Ones who were never pleasant when they visited and who took over the house; changing the music to what they wanted to listen to; the television to programs they needed to see. He picked a song called ‘Wolf Like Me’, by TV on the Radio.
The train vibrated and swayed. It rocked and let Devon touch the man next to him at the hip, the knee and the shoulder. He felt his warmth. The commuter’s face was so smooth it made Devon want to run the back of his hand across the man’s cheek.
All three of the young men wore wedding rings. Devon liked the idea of wearing one of those gold bands but knew that wasn’t likely to happen because he was probably gay. He never thought about making love with men. Didn’t dream about them or fantasise about men in elaborate sexual positions.
Problem was, that was true for women as well. He didn’t know what he was, but women didn’t really exist, so he was most likely gay. Secretly he probably wanted all three of these men to stick themselves into him even if the thought frightened him. That was the thing—you never knew what was behind the fear.
As the train vibrated and swayed he felt the suffocating presence of his father very near him as well. But he knew how to push his father away so that even when he was very close, like now, he was somewhere else. In science fiction they called it a different dimension. The world was the same here, but in this dimension, his father had never existed. And if Devon had never existed as well, that was also fine. You couldn’t be unhappy about never being born. You couldn’t be anything.
When the song ‘Wolf Like Me’ finished the band played another song which was all right, but he switched to Built to Spill and played his favourite song by them, ‘I Would Hurt a Fly’.
The three men rode into the city with Devon and they got off at the same time. It looked like they were all friends. Devon was delighted to be able to follow them under the station to where the underpass came out, onto Degraves Street.
They didn’t stop debating the whole way. To Devon they looked like glorious heroes of a noble capitalism. Their hands and arms suggesting traffic could be directed through any and all confusion. Their forceful group stride—that forward momentum would carry the day. Stepping up the slumping tired stairs and out into the city’s busy morning light, three strident visionaries.
Devon knew he needed to have his headphones turned up with ‘Black Steel’ by Tricky playing for the illusion to work, but he allowed himself these fantasies when he could find them. If there was no truth in a trick then there was nothing at all that would catch your eye. The rabbit had to disappear, not necessarily into thin air, but it did have to vanish.
Devon wondered whether it was even possible that these three men might possess the secret to the causes and solutions to the Global Financial Crisis. They moved through hundreds of people pushing past on their ways to wherever they were working. All part of the problem. All part of the solution. And these three like seers, looking into their complex interweaving and intermingling, trying to discover a way to understand it all and solve it for them. The people of Melbourne just went on into their own discrete worlds.
Devon was going out of his way now, following these three men. The thought of being late finally pulled him out of the thrall he was in. He turned down Collins Street and headed towards King.
His dad talked about the GFC a lot as well, and despite having understood the markets for over thirty years, he didn’t have an easy solution either. He didn’t go in for blaming people like Greenspan or Bush, Senator Phil Gramm, Abby Cohen or Kathleen Corbet.
Roland Beckett blamed a lack of discipline. The principle Devon had been hearing about since he could crawl. That the world only had one true motivation—Survival. The two sides of that one principle were Fear and Force. The only two valid responses—Discipline and Drive. All the talk of love in Devon’s songs was nothing more than folly. A lack of discipline and a waste of drive. When Devon focused on his own survival, he didn’t feel the force Roland liked to emphasise. All Devon really saw around him was fear.
Devon played a song called ‘100%’ by Sonic Youth and got to work only a minute before he was supposed to start. Usually he liked to be at least ten minutes early.
Devon was asked to help out with the sorting today. There were other jobs he preferred but Warwick had called in sick again. He called in sick almost every week. He was already past his allotted sick leave and his colleagues in the mailroom had gone from thinking the guy was skating on thin ice to wondering why he hadn’t been given the sack already.
Roland Beckett could have got Devon a job anywhere in the tower but he wanted Devon to work his way up from the mailroom. Said you only appreciate the top when you’ve been at the bottom. Devon didn’t mind. Soon he’d be going back to uni anyway. He should have gone last year but Devon had taken a bottle of pills and that ruined a whole semester; derailed him for a while in general. Roland thought he’d be ready for it after a year in the mailroom. If not, then there were ways and means of getting up into those offices on floors in the twenties and thirties. Roland would make that happen but first Devon had to show some grit.
The sorting was mind-numbing. Devon could allow himself to drift free and let his hands just throw the letters out to their appropriate destinations. He could ease away the pressure of holding down his thoughts. He could let his father come close again without worrying about the suffocation and crush. Devon looked only at the letters and let a few hours pass. The paper cuts were distant events he didn’t need to worry about.
Music played into his ears and he didn’t have to hear the people talking around him. He listened to two albums by Jane’s Addiction, replaying ‘;Three Days’ and ‘Ocean Size’. He loved it when Perry Farrell sang about how he was born with a heart of stone, how he seemed to pause for the briefest moment, allowing that image to settle in Devon’s mind, and then went on singing about how this heart of stone wasn’t just hard like a rock but could be shattered into fragments.
It wasn’t what had happened to Devon’s father this morning. Roland had a normal heart and it just got worn down with time and in the end it spluttered and stuttered. Finally stopped working, like an old toaster. One last flash of heat and that was it.
Devon didn’t know what Perry Farrell meant but Devon wondered if he had a heart of stone too, because there were fragments and pieces, splintering shards in his brain, and somehow this might explain why most of the time he felt nothing—but when he did, it tore through him into places that could only gasp and tremble.
Mr Waterston found Devon in the toilet. Devon sometimes went into a cubicle and sat there reading the walls and listening to his music. Often he sat there for as long as fifteen minutes. No-one said anything about it, but Mr Waterston knocked on the toilet door like it was Devon’s office and told him M
r Cornell wanted to see him. Devon could see Mr Waterston’s shoes below the door so he couldn’t pretend he didn’t hear him.
Devon had been trying to think about what happened this morning, what he’d done and what it would mean now that Roland was dead, and what that would feel like when the numbness and confusion lifted. But Devon had been living numb and confused a long time. His dad alive had driven so much distortion through his ears that his death didn’t change the distortion still roaring in his head.
Through the door, Mr Waterston told Devon he was to go up to Mr Cornell’s office, now, and he didn’t go away until Devon told him he’d go up as soon as he was done. On the toilet wall someone had written what was probably the name of a band—Perils of Paradise. It reminded Devon of a song he’d heard with the lyrics ‘pain in paradise is a pleasure in hell’. Devon got up and flushed the toilet even though he hadn’t used it.
From the toilet to the elevator he’d kept repeating a phrase in his head. Sometimes this could go on for days. The same word, or a sentence, going through his skull again and again. He wished he could stop it. From the toilet to the elevator he had been repeating the two words ‘studiously aloof’. It just didn’t sound right. Was ‘studiously’ even a word? Even though he knew it was, the final f in ‘aloof’ made him think it should be ‘studio-fly’. Which was wrong. ‘Aloof’ also sounded false. What kind of word was that? So it kept going through his mind as he caught the elevator that would stop only up above floor 17. ‘Studiously aloof’. Over and again.
And then it got worse. Looking at the numbers scroll through 1 to 17 without the possibility of stopping, he got a feeling of déjà vu. It seemed pleasant to most people but to Devon it came with the fear that it wouldn’t end. The déjà vu could start repeating as well until everything he was looking at and everything he was thinking came with the feeling of déjà vu. The stain in the carpet in the corner of the lift. Noticing the stain in the carpet. The déjà vu itself. This trembling feeling he had going through his whole body. The vibration of the lift as it rose and finally broke the seventeenth floor and kept rising now towards the twentieth. The slight pause as though the lift wanted to stop at the twentieth but kept going. All of it, something that had happened before. Even the thought of his father at home in the kitchen, pulling open his business shirt and popping out those two buttons. Déjà vu in those two buttons.