by A. S. Patric
Veronica woke slowly; coasting on the verge of consciousness for hours. Perhaps they had kissed after all and a green smudge of absinthe had been on his tongue. There were moments where she was fully conscious yet a dream persisted, scrambling her mind with images she couldn’t make sense of. Passing hallucinations rolled in as seasons that would last as long as an autumn or spring. Whether from a few drops of absinthe, exhaustion or illness, it didn’t make a difference—they were eternal moments she couldn’t dispel by telling herself she was awake.
Veronica knew she wasn’t back in her Melbourne bed and yet the dream went on, persuading her that she was. The Italian voices coming through the hotel room doors became the sounds of men the landlord had sent to paint their apartment—Evan had agreed on the date and time. The Italians painted the walls and every bit of furniture. The picture frames on the walls weren’t removed; the roller brushes covered them in paint. Doors opened and closed. She heard their footsteps across the carpet. A sheet was placed across her body to protect her from spatters of paint. The feel of fine linen on her face was real. She murmured to the painters beyond, even though she knew they couldn’t really be there painting everything white—she told them she would need to get up soon and that the weight of the sheet was beginning to suffocate her. They moved things around so they could do their work. She could feel the mattress moving beneath their feet. Maybe they were painting the ceiling. One of them might even have fallen on her. She moaned and wanted to wake. He groaned and pushed away. There wasn’t the usual darkness behind her closed eyes. There was a light in her mind that was gradually getting brighter, whiter, until there was nothing that hadn’t been bleached.
It was dark outside. She’d been asleep so long, full wakefulness felt as if it might take days. Traffic flowed outside her windows with horns blaring no matter what time of day or night. Perhaps the blinds were perfect in the de la Minerve because it was always evening in her hotel room. She couldn’t get out of bed and thought she was still sick until she realised that her last meal had come from a plastic tray on the airplane. She could barely swallow, her mouth and lips were so dry. She managed to call Evan’s name. She called out six times before she reached over and found nobody there. Veronica got up onto an elbow, blinked her eyes open a few times before she could see clearly.
There was a note on Evan’s pillow. A page torn from his Moleskine told her in language of the same rhapsodic flavour of the night before that he was going to join friends down in Capri. He’d be back within a few days or she could come straight down and join him. She’d be feeling better soon, he was sure, and they would have a great time on the island. A long rest was best for her. She couldn’t argue with Evan’s note. He’d been in Europe for a month and she could feel how everything had opened up for him into a grand adventure. Veronica hadn’t had a day off in a very long time. She’d worked right up until she was set to join Evan in Europe.
Capri would be nice. She picked up the page again. She’d always loved his handwriting. Through blurred vision it looked like the wavering lines of a chart tracing a pulse across unfolding paper. An elegant heart. She was beginning to tremble and flopped back down on her pillow. The phone was on the bedside table. She needed to pick up the receiver and push the room service button but she couldn’t move. Come on, she told herself. Don’t think about anything else. Just get some food. Everything will be fine on a full stomach. Maybe they serve pasta to your room in Rome. She could imagine steaming clams. And there would be delicate Italian wine in a small glass resembling a goblet. The bathroom was lovely. There was an immense bath she could soak in for hours. Luxuriate in perfumed bubbles.
Evan had written that he was going to stay a night in the abandoned villa of Emperor Tiberius. Veronica was part of a literary audience when he wrote these letters. She didn’t feel as though he was writing only for her. She just had front row seats to his life. Evan had been told you could sleep in the ruins of the villa and you would remember every moment of every dream you had during the night. He was hoping to move deeper than his own consciousness and find a racial dreaming where origins whispered from the faces of living gargoyles. The doors of paradise have ever remained open—they might say to him. No heaven or hell. Rather, an underworld where rivers need to be crossed to arrive at eternal pleasure or pain. And then there was the Blue Grotto, a cave that could only be reached from the sea through a small hole in a wall—illuminated within by majestic azure lights, scintillating against the cavern’s rock. If Evan and Veronica swam into the Blue Grotto as he hoped, their bodies would glow with that electric radiance. She put aside the piece of paper. It had been carefully torn from the book so that the words wouldn’t be damaged.
Veronica couldn’t call him because he’d dropped his mobile while up north—on the Rialto Bridge in Venice. He had brought back a postcard but there was nothing written on the back of it. It must have slipped from his books and papers, lost in the sheets of the hotel bed. Did the empty postcard mean Evan was done with Venice and Veronica would have to travel there alone? It was the only city in the world that didn’t have cars and she wanted to stay there a night or two. She liked the idea of sleeping with an open window, no engines and horns, the sound of an ancient ocean caressing the smooth stone below. Travelling down to Naples from Rome by train, ferrying across the bay to Capri, and then finding the place Evan was staying in on the island, didn’t sound easy. She would have to wait for the phone to ring. How long would it be? Maybe a day. Hopefully not longer than that. They couldn’t afford this hotel. It was an extravagance they’d booked for the beginning of their holiday and it was a shame she was too ill to enjoy it.
Veronica folded the page from Evan’s notebook and tossed it back onto his pillow. It was as though he had already kept company with Tiberius and swum in the bay of Naples to find that hole in the island. His words were charged with everything he’d been told by fellow travellers. The friends he wanted to meet in Capri had been made a few days ago in Bologna.
When she found the strength to lift herself to sitting at the side of the bed, she decided she didn’t want exotic food and wine. She couldn’t imagine anything better than a club sandwich and a glass of orange juice.
She picked up the phone and was about to speak when she felt Evan’s residue run from her. She had been so deeply asleep, she’d been so tired and unwell—practically a corpse. He must have undressed her and he must have redressed her after he had finished.
The Italian voice on the phone was asking Veronica how he could help her, first in his language and then in English. She put the phone down. It was a small discharge, almost over already. A warmth that soaked through her underwear and rapidly went cold.
CINDERS & BUGS
She was crying in line at the post office. Too close to me. Every time we moved forward a step or two, I hoped she would take the space to settle herself—or spread out her grief—but she pressed forward. I wondered how far my charade of deafness would stretch. Her tears came with words for her companion. A man who told her to be quiet; that they’d talk about it later.
She was persistent in her grief, which trembled with an anger that had, for the most part, been beaten out of her. Violence is a heat and it wafted from her like a house almost burned to the ground. Her words were cinders burning what was left standing.
We moved another few centimetres. And another step, together. She pressed her sobs into the back of my head and said that the man had been cruel talking about the bugs in her hair. The man shooshed her. She washed regularly, she said, and telling people she had bugs in her hair was a hurtful lie.
She was whimpering while I continued my deaf-man pantomime, perfected my performance as a bloke simply waiting in line, as though I wasn’t disgusted or afraid, but I could feel those bugs hopping up and down below my ears.
THE WIFE
The birds aren’t even singing yet but X feels himself waking up. It’s not unusual. He hasn’t slept through to the alarm for weeks, maybe months. He can’t
cross the six o’clock threshold in the morning. As long as those birds are singing then he feels better about waking early. At least they’re intending to sing soon. He hears a few chirrups for the earliest illumination of the sky.
His wife has no such problems. The alarm always rouses her from the deepest reaches of sleep—hauls her out on a long metal cable like a leviathan with a hook through her cheek, sighing on entry into this flat world, where she’s nothing more exotic than a worn-out woman in a bed, sleeping beside X and his blinking eyes as he looks to the curtains for suggestions of light.
He turns onto his right side and slides his hand across her, but his arm crosses the mattress and not her body. A cool emptiness, like she hasn’t slept there at all. She must have gone to the toilet. He rolls onto his back again.
He wishes he had at least dreamed, or had dreams he could remember. Because then he’d have something to mull over other than the Store. The Purgatory, as he sometimes calls his second-hand bookstore, or, more optimistically, his Business. Oftentimes he thinks of it as the Monster, because it swallows all his time, and in the end will leave nothing but a pile of bones, with a picked-clean, bleached skull deposited on top. On the doorstep. Along with the uncollected mail.
He wants to stop thinking about it. About bills and boxes of books. X asks himself over and over—how many times can a man think about the same thing? How many times, the same thing! Boxes of books. Bills.
He hasn’t heard the toilet flush. She still hasn’t returned. Was she ill, and he didn’t notice? Why didn’t she wake him? She isn’t the kind of woman to suffer in silence. Pain is there to be shared. That’s more her way of thinking. If she has a stomach-ache, or period pain, she kicks him and asks him to get her a hot-water bottle. Put a pot of chamomile on for her. If she has a headache, she has him fetch a glass of water and the Panadeine. And what else could it be?
X hesitates as to whether he should get out of bed. He may have been awake for fifteen minutes already but he’s always tired. That’s the thing about waking too early—he needs the sleep. He wishes he could find a method for seducing sleep. A way to romance dreams back into his empty skull. He pushes off the covers and drags his legs out.
Before he opens the bedroom door, he has a terrible image of his wife lying in the hallway, crumpled down into the carpet by some sudden stroke of death—aneurism or heart attack. But he opens the bedroom door and she’s not in the hall. He goes into the toilet and relieves his full bladder, then has a strange idea about human bodies. We’re so quick to make them disappear. Put them into a hole. Or turn them into smoke, like a magician’s illusion. Get them out of the way. But what if we had different cultural ideas, and left them where they fell? Drying out like flies on the windowsill.
He flushes, and lets this strange idea gurgle away as well.
She might be in the lounge room. Maybe she had some bad dreams (which would be a first, but still theoretically possible), and she went out and turned on the television thinking, best not to disturb X, since she knows he hasn’t been sleeping well.
He washes his hands and face in the bathroom basin. Tells the reflection in the mirror that it needs to shave. Get a haircut. Trim nasal hairs, ear hair. The reflection responds with a tired exhalation, as though one of them were responsible for the long lack of sleep, but it’s not obvious who.
Again he pauses at a door. Beyond it, in the lounge, will be his wife, with a ready explanation. It will be an incidental thing he’ll never think about again. A call in the middle of the night from her sister, who is breaking up with her husband and needs his wife to talk to about it all. Maybe her sister will want to come and stay with them for a few weeks, and she’ll have to bring her yelling, running, throwing boys. He is almost angry as he steps into the empty, lifeless lounge.
She’s not in the kitchen either. The fluorescent light she insists always stay on, because it takes more power to turn it on than it does to run it for eight hours (which he doesn’t believe, but who knows—maybe) is turned off.
The only other room is being used as a storeroom for all the books he can’t fit in the shop, and there is no way she’d be in there. Yet she has to be. He shuffles there feeling like he has a head full of bees. What can he be expecting now? It can’t still be reasonable, can it? But she isn’t there. Just the same old bookshelves on every wall, filled with books. The same towers of books in the middle of the room, surrounded by the same boxes of books. And nowhere can he find his wife.
He goes back to the kitchen and finds no evidence of the risotto they made last night. Usually there would be the largest frying pan, encrusted with rice, mushroom and parmesan remnants, soaking in water. There would be plates and cutlery. Instead, he finds McDonald’s wrappers and pizza boxes and the curry-stained clear plastic containers they give him at the Indian restaurant. None of her soy milk containers in the fridge. In the lounge, no pictures of her in the usual frames. There aren’t many pictures of anyone. Just old family photographs covered in dust. And the photo of his wife he keeps in his wallet—that isn’t there either.
He walks to the bedroom and switches on the light. He hesitates in front of the wardrobe containing her many dresses, clothes for so many different occasions. Her work shirts for the Department of Defence, her pants and skirts on hangers, and at the bottom, the many, many shoes. Racks of shoes. Like she’s a human centipede. Inside the wardrobe now are boxes of books. Books and more books. And nothing of his wife. Nothing at all.
No wedding ring on his finger. Not even a mark.
He could fall to the floor—to begin writhing. He could close his eyes and start screaming. Because that’s what mad people do. But he walks out of the bedroom and to his kitchen to make breakfast, wondering along the way when he lost his mind. Has he been insane before, and the wife is part of that, and now somehow he’s come out of it? Or is he insane now? He doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t hear her talking to him. He just has memories of a woman who was here until just last night, when they made risotto, ate, watched a 1962 Orson Welles film called The Trial, and stumbled to bed, having already conked out on the couch two-thirds of the way through.
On his way out, he pauses in the stairwell of his apartment block and knocks on Miranda’s door. She knows X and his wife well enough to call them both by name. But she isn’t home. X walks up to another door of neighbours he doesn’t know by name. They’ll be able to tell him at least if they’ve seen him living with someone in his apartment.
One of the two girls who lives at number nine answers the door in her bathrobe. Still more asleep than awake. She has breasts so large that no matter how innocent the conversation, there is always a hint of pornography in the air. She doesn’t say anything. She watches him—waiting.’
‘Hello there. Good morning,’ he says, bobbing his head. He wishes he could point out the gaping part in her bathrobe without appearing lewd. ‘Sorry to disturb.’
She doesn’t move. Blinks a long sleepy blink.
‘I was just wondering ….’ He puts his pinkie in his ear and wiggles it around—a nervous habit that drives his wife crazy. He closes his eyes to avoid distraction.
‘Have you seen a woman come and go at any point over the last few months you’ve been living here? I mean, entering and leaving my apartment?’
She moves back a centimetre. ‘No—I don’t mean that! As if I would. You have to go to hotels, don’t you? Or the other kind of place … I’m getting sidetracked here. I mean, you might have thought she’s my wife. Which is indeed, who she is. I’m just wondering have you seen her around.’
She’s not blinking now. She’s not looking all that sleepy anymore either. ‘You know I’m married, don’t you?’ he says. ‘Have you seen my wife?’
She closes the door.
Insane people aren’t supposed to know they’re insane, but that can’t be true. Most of them would have moments of clarity, where they would look at their lives and Know It. X could look at his life and recollect every detail about his wife—fro
m her date of birth to her maiden name, to her mother’s and father’s names, her mother’s maiden name for God’s sake, her brothers’ and sisters’ names, and the names of their spouses, the problems with those spouses, the issues with their children, and more … and more still. Details you couldn’t imagine. Because imagination only gets you so far. It wouldn’t fill in the trivial details of day-to-day life, would it? Delusions don’t cook mushroom risottos.
X opens his bookstore at the usual time, because it’s either that or go and get himself locked up. He sits down behind his desk, trying to think. Not successfully. Thought keeps getting shortcircuited by panic.
Just as he’s about to pick up the phone and call his wife’s sister, it rings.
His wife usually calls three or four times a day. Some people might think that’s excessive. There are couples that never call each other outside of emergencies, he assumes. But his wife has a compulsion. A need to make sure he is eating what he is supposed to be eating. That he’ll be picking up what he’s meant to be picking up on his way home. And petrol. Don’t forget petrol, since it’s Tuesday, and Tuesdays are cheaper than any other day of the week. If he was mad, would he remember that?
He picks up the phone and hears his wife ask, ‘Hello. I was just wondering if you had a book by Jerzy Kosinski. It’s called Being There. Or, The Painted Bird. Or even The Devil Tree. All of them are by Jerzy Kosinski.’
No, it isn’t his wife. He hasn’t heard her voice. This voice begins spelling the name. ‘J for James, E for Edward …’
‘No, I don’t have it. Nothing by that author. I’m sorry.’