by A. S. Patric
When we ate together, each table became a stage. Nothing as prosaic as the Last Supper. It was the villains of James Bond gathered to dine together. It was the characters of The Crucible or The Simpsons. It didn’t matter. It was all acting—all the time. You practised expressions of torture while you had a shit. If someone asked you how you were in passing while walking down a hall, it was time to bring out a De Niro-inspired monologue from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: ‘I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all.’
GiGi reported a migraine one night a few weeks before we were set to graduate from Elysium House. She also mentioned chest pain before retiring to bed early.
The Patriarch was standing in a small, cluttered prop room, off the side of the theatrette, with some of us who were close to failing. The lights were turned off. We could feel his breath across our faces in the perfect darkness. The exercise was meant to get us to understand the emanation of another being. The presence that needed to be projected if the right gravitas was to be found for stage or screen.
‘Be Atlas,’ he whispered into our mouths. ‘Feel the groan of the species in your bones. Be Jonah in the mouth of the whale. Smell the stench of the world’s hunger all around you.’ We could hear each other breathing but it wasn’t clear who blocked their nose or where the smell was emanating from.
‘Bring a trumpet when you’re a messenger. Arrive on wings when you fly from the sun. Let me see how an idea explodes and show me you understand that words are the only keys to heaven.’ One or two of us in that unlit prop room couldn’t help feeling he was just another bloke, half fucking crazy with his own bullshit.
When he returned to GiGi he found her in their large walk-in wardrobe ‘looking for the exit’ behind her coats and dresses. She was in a disorientated, agonized panic. He guided her back into their bedroom and tried to calm her, but her chest pains got sharper. It became apparent that she was having a heart attack. An anticoagulant administered in the hospital-bound helicopter released a clot in her brain. She was wearing an oxygen mask and her eyes were bloody from a subconjunctival haemorrhage. She couldn’t see or understand a word the Patriarch was saying.
He was desperately hanging onto his wife’s hand as though he were the one dying while they flew to the most exclusive hospital in Melbourne. Brain death occurred mid-air. Her body was kept alive for him at the hospital.
The Patriarch called in a series of doctors. Paid them anything they asked for to tell him that his wife would be okay. Physician after physician came, but no matter how he exhorted or beseeched them for some kind of medical miracle, there was an absolute response that nothing could be done. Every doctor left him in that hospital room with the same body, yet he could barely recognise it. When the machines were turned off a few days later, his wife expired peacefully. The Patriarch still hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to GiGi Tickle.
No speeches. No pronouncements. And for us it was, ‘Everyone out! Every single fucking parasite—out!’ The manor on the Victorian coast near Warrnambool was emptied within a few hours.
Years have gone by and he’s still in there. Alone. As wordless as a character in a silent film.
ONE IN A MILLION
It’s winter. The night has that dead Melbourne air which would be brought to life by something like snowflakes. As it is, just flat black nothing, like endless empty roads.
A white Mitsubishi Colt with a door cannibalised from another year’s model draws into one of the empty fuelling bays. After three in the morning. Nearing half-past. The 7-Eleven on Punt Road, near the Alfred Hospital.
The driver gets out and walks around the side of his car, spinning his keys around once on his finger; a distracted cowboy. He places the nozzle into the tank and waits, enjoying the smell of petrol.
Sometimes it’s as long as five minutes before another car passes along the road. It’s been about as long since an expression passed across his face. Nothing in his head. He gets lost in these long, middle-of-the-night dreaming minutes. In memories dissolving before registering.
The previous morning is already gone. Almost entirely evaporated. But in the clear light of day he’d taken a walk along tree-lined midwinter streets and felt a leaf fall onto his shoulder. Which in that moment felt like something as rare as being struck by a lightning bolt.
The trees naked to their bones. The last leaf of summer. A muffled and meaningless one-in-a-million.
The nozzle doesn’t cut off when the tank is full. Fluid rushes out and down the side of the white Colt. Splashes across his boots and the bottom of his jeans. He pulls the nozzle out and there’s little more than a slight look of annoyance animating his face.
He pours water from the 7-Eleven’s grey plastic watering can to wash away some of the corrosive fluid from his paintwork. Forming petroleum rainbows in the water at his feet.
He walks into the 7-Eleven and pays with a credit card. The Indian woman working all alone through the night doesn’t say anything to him. He doesn’t say anything to her.
He walks back outside to his vehicle. Coming around the back end of his car, he places a foot in the glassy mixture of petrol and water and finds it simply skates out from beneath him and sails into the air, taking his other foot with it.
For a moment entirely airborne—his body falls to the hard concrete. Almost noiseless. He springs up quickly, lightly. Getting back into the white Colt with barely an expression on his face. Pain somewhere inside his body but none of it showing.
DAUGHTERS OF VESUVIUS
Rosetta’s peasant grandfather was sitting on their couch trying to play Star Wars on PlayStation with the twins. He had spent most of his life working on an olive grove in the hills of Naples. Someone took a photo and the rest of the family laughed. Rosetta didn’t even giggle. She might have been the only one who noticed the small dark stain around grandfather Niccolo’s crotch in the photograph.
His hands always had a tremble to them even when he was motionless, and he walked carefully as if his bones might crumble into ash at any sudden movement. There was nothing useful he could do anymore so he drifted around their Toorak mansion finding places to sit quietly as the bustling Battista family, sometimes ten or twenty strong, filled the rooms with the noise of an endlessly celebrating village.
The walls had always been crowded with framed photographs. Mainly of Rosetta, Matteo and Mauro from the cradle to now, and many of the Battista nephews and nieces. There were also portraits of the family from Naples. It was like her Nonno Niccolo had stepped out from one of those photographs. He still looked more sepia than full colour.
Rosetta wanted to see Naples. She wondered if it would somehow feel familiar. The family had been planning a trip for years but then there were Father’s hotels and they could barely spare him for more than a long weekend. Rosetta was fascinated by Vesuvius, which she knew was near her grandfather’s olive groves, and she got her mother to ask Nonno if they had relatives who died there, in the famous eruption, even though her mother had already told her it was too long ago. Her mother started laughing when she translated Nonno as saying he remembered the eruption. Niccolo looked at his laughing daughter and granddaughter without smiling.
Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 and it was probably that eruption Niccolo meant when he said he remembered the explosion. Rosetta was enthralled by images of the exploding mountain she’d seen on the internet, and especially with photographs of the Ring Lady. She was a young woman they had unearthed recently who was still wearing emerald and ruby rings, two gold bracelets, and gold earrings. Another pair of gold earrings lay by her side, and those ones had pearls.
Nonno placed a small leather envelope on her lap and Rosetta opened it to find similar pearl earrings. She had shown her grandfather images of the Ring Lady on the computer screen. Rosetta kissed Niccolo on his forehead and thanked him for the gift with a jump and a spin, diving for a view in the nearest mirror. She wore them around the house the whole morning and as soon as her mothe
r came home from shopping, Rosetta showed her the pearl earrings.
After lunch her mother told her there had been a mistake. Nonno had wanted to show his granddaughter the earrings— he had not intended to give them to her. Rosetta removed them from her ears and placed the earrings back into the leather envelope. When she returned the pearls to her grandfather he let them sit on the kitchen table before him as if he had no idea what the envelope might contain. Rosetta thought that perhaps he had given her the jewellery as a gift after all, and that his age was the cause of the confusion. Niccolo levered himself to standing, using the edge of the kitchen table. He shuffled away to the toilet and the pearl earrings were still waiting in the leather envelope.
The family didn’t make many concessions to Nonno’s lack of English and often watched films that he would not understand. Rosetta wanted to explain some of the details to him but her Italian was worse than basic. She understood her grandfather’s favourite expression, piano, piano con calma and that it meant ‘quietly, quietly and calmly’. She’d never heard him actually say it. Her mother told Rosetta that, back in Naples, Niccolo used to say it all the time.
That evening, Nonno watched a science fiction film with the family and it went on late. The twins were now asleep on the carpet and her father had long since stumbled off to the bedroom to snore in peace (since everyone kept shouting at him to shut up) and Rosetta’s mother had her chin on her chest.
Nonno watched the screen. It was impossible for Rosetta to know what he was making of post-apocalyptic Earth and the synthetic human beings trying to rebuild it. Whether it made sense to him that the Synths were divided by a faction called the Neverborns, and that these rogue Synths wanted to eradicate the last natural humans because they were born as animals and would never be more than beasts.
The screen’s images flashed across Nonno’s face. No matter how many people got blown away or how catastrophic the explosion or how romantic a love scene or suspenseful a dune buggy chase sequence—his face never changed. He barely blinked as the immense plasma washed his face in special effects. During family uproars he was able to sit at the kitchen table or in an armchair, close his eyes and fall asleep for an hour or more.
Rosetta sat next to him and put her hand on his. She patted it and asked him if he wanted anything. ‘Maybe aqua. Aqua?’ she asked. He smiled and placed his other hand on hers and they sat that way a moment. It would have been a lovely photograph for the walls of the Battista house.
Rosetta put her head on her grandfather’s shoulder and he reached out a trembling hand to her chin and lifted it and kissed her on her cheek and maybe because she had started to giggle, his hands reached for her ribs. She thought it was to tickle her. His trembling hands found their way through her bathrobe and reached up for her breasts.
His strength surprised her. His sudden urgency, as he pushed her back on the couch with his head and shoulder and lifted her pyjama top and brought his face down as if to devour her torso. He made sounds like he was eating ice cream.
Rosetta didn’t want to scream because of the twins sleeping on the carpet before the television and especially because her mother, Niccolo’s daughter, was sleeping on the other couch with her chin to her chest. She wanted to believe this was something other than what it was, even as the old man reached for his pants. Nonno fumbled around with his old leather belt.
Rosetta didn’t scream. She didn’t make a sound. She gritted her teeth. Then she quietly reached out a hand and gripped his ear as if it were a page she wanted to rip from a book. She tore down slowly and Nonno squealed.
‘Shhh,’ Rosetta said into his other ear. ‘Piano, piano con calma,’ she said as she continued to pull that crumpled page from its book, dragging his face over the edge of the couch and forcing him to tumble to the floor. By the time the twins woke up, Rosetta had pulled her pyjama top back down and was standing over him as though she was concerned.
Mauro asked what happened. When Rosetta said Nonno had fallen from the couch, Matteo got up to see what had happened to the old man, frightened by the childlike moaning sound the patriarch was making. Mauro started laughing and Matteo decided to join him. Rosetta’s mother still had her chin on her chest. Nonno had his knees pulled to his stomach with his hands protecting his face as if he were about to be covered with a blanket of ash.
MURMUR
‘I haven’t felt any love for her for a long time. Yet I’m always thinking about her dying. Like that’s going to be the real test. Maybe then I’ll feel a bit of the love that has to be down there somewhere. I’m afraid that it will be a poison when it does resurface, and I’ll drown in some ocean of toxic regret. Mostly there’s this unnatural sense in me when I think about her, as though you really can’t feel nothing for your mother.’
‘But you bringing it up—doesn’t that say something?’
‘I’m not saying I don’t think about her, but my thoughts never go anywhere. I’m like a goldfish in a little bowl, circling the same object in the pebbles at the bottom, but it’s not a little plastic castle—it’s the body of my mother, and I’m just waiting for something to happen. I want to feel something for it, but I don’t. I just go around and around.’
‘And here I thought we’d had a good time tonight.’
‘We did. You know we did.’
‘I was lying here thinking, you know, I think she’s starting to like me.’
‘I’m not talking about being in a goldfish bowl with you. That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘But the image of your mother, dead in the pebbles. Doesn’t exactly speak of growing fondness.’
‘Not dead. I think, more like some kind of stasis.’
‘Mmm … Still morbid.’
‘Yeah, it’s morbid. But you know, neither one of us has farted yet.’
‘What!?’
‘You know what I’m talking about?’
‘What are you talking about? I can let rip any time you like. But that one’s like Pandora’s box—you never get to put it back in.’
‘I’m saying, we’re still polite. We fuck and we go to a movie and have dinner, some nice wine, we fuck again but it’s still all our Sunday best. What about a real conversation? Not an interface—the usual presentation as we want the world to see us.’
‘Really? But I’ve spent years perfecting my simulations and projections. An occasional sneeze is the only glitch in my program. What’s real and honest-to-goodness now? I’m not sure any more. I can still leak fluid from my eyes, I think—you just tell me when.’
‘You’d do that for me? Let your colours run?’
‘No babe, I’m waterproof. Fade-proof. I eat paper for breakfast.’
‘I don’t know if that makes sense.’
‘It makes sense. I’ve breakfasted on War and Peace. Had dinner with Pushkin and then Crime and Punishment for dessert. The ink runs, but not quick enough by a long shot. Let’s say “metasense” like some say “medicine”.’
‘I didn’t know you even read. No sign of books at your apartment.’
‘That’s because everything important is invisible.’
‘Nice line.’
‘Line? I believe it to my soul! Not that I lay any faith in a soul of course, but another trick of a brain is the mind. A book is just a stack of paper as well and yet I keep seeing things in them.’
‘Are we surrounded by books as we speak, teetering towers of them about to come crashing down on us?’
‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’
‘Hmm?’
‘I don’t like the clutter of that image. I like to think of all of those books stacked on mahogany shelves. No dust.’
‘No dust—that’s a nice thought.’
‘You know it’s mostly dead skin—all the dust you see. We leave layers of ourselves over everything.’
‘Makes me think of dust to dust in a whole new way.’
‘You’re not going to go back to the dead mother.’
‘Stasis. Not dead.’
‘Floating. I understand.’
‘And ashes to ashes. Why is it ashes to ashes? We don’t cremate—not traditionally. Where are the ashes?’
‘I think there’s a metaphor of fire in there. Like, the fire we build with wood and coal, burns down to embers, and then a new fire is made out of the embers.’
‘So it should be embers to embers.’
‘The point for the guy in the coffin is that he came from a long line of death, and he returns to it.’
‘The point for him?’
‘The point for anyone looking at him, then—thinking about their own ashes and dust.’
‘What’s the point for him? Standing invisibly amongst them and the teetering towers of books all around the mourners.’
‘I don’t know. I saw my mum dead in a hospital bed, and all I could feel was that she was already gone, out of that body, and far away from me. Away from all of us—a lost group of people standing around her bed that day. The family my mum made, which only made sense because of her. Yeah, I don’t know about the embers and ashes either. We just seem to evaporate one day.’
‘Well, this sounds like a real conversation. But we don’t need to talk about dead mothers.’
‘I might fart any moment now.’
‘What if it’s something atrocious? Ideally you’d start off with one of those farts that doesn’t smell too bad, that reminds you of home like something burnt on the stove, and then maybe—way, way, way down the line somewhere, you can bring out the stomach-turning stuff, like you’ve just found a dead possum in a cupboard.’
‘Used to be a time where you couldn’t burp. It was impolite. But now people burp. You reckon there’ll ever be a time where we can freely fart, and be okay with that? Acknowledge our common humanity in it, like we do the dust and ashes?’