by A. S. Patric
Old Man stands above the broad clean pages of an atlas. He rarely turns the pages. He finds the right distance on the magnifying glass and looks at the shapes and colours of the continents and rivers, islands and oceans, the small printed words and numbers. Into his sack he takes all these moments. Never filling it like he did his life with minutes and hours. Into the sack everything can get thrown and forgotten. Things like the air burning in waves of clear fire, choking with the smell of burning skin and hair and voices, and all those countless dull-gleam-metal bombs; endlessly falling pop-pop-pop pop-pop …
He looks through his circle of glass. Feels all of it going into the sack. All the fuss.
Fug
Old Man begins to wake up. But he won’t finish before it’s time to go to bed again in the evening. All around him men are beginning to move; the shuffle-shuffle of their dragged feet along the wooden floorboards outside his room. In the bed opposite him, the man squeaks as he turns over from one side to another. As though the rusty springs are within the stained thin mattress of Dunn’s body. Both of the old men becoming identical as they get older.
Dunn will rise from his bed willingly, though. That’s one difference. Dunn doesn’t want to lie in his bed all day listening to the men walk up and down the wooden floorboards in the long corridor outside. Dunn doesn’t want to look up at the ceiling and watch the watermarks turn into clouds and the clouds turn into spooled-up years. Old Dunn wants to shuffle out of this small room and its stink as soon as he manages to open his eyes. But our Old Man wants the fug. Wants it to suffocate him in its sweaty stink.
He’s been awake since about three in the morning. He doesn’t really sleep. By the time evening rolls around again he’ll be ready to give it another go, but all he finds is an hour or two of genuine unconsciousness. The rest of the time he’s drifting somewhere in his skull. Never really gone. Never really awake. And he so wishes he could sleep. That he could awaken.
They come for him and force him out of bed. It’s either Sharon or Brian or Alan or Karen. Always one of those. If it’s Brian, he’ll force the Old Man to shave. If it’s one of the women they’ll shave his face for him. If it’s Alan, he won’t care. Alan will grab a fistful of his pyjama top at the shoulder and haul him to his feet.’
‘You gotta keep going until you stop, Old Man. Understand? There’s no fucking exit. There’s just a drop.’
‘I know the drop,’ Old Man wants to say, but Alan always acts as though he’s got better things to do than listen to what he calls ‘ramblings’. Old Man nevertheless wishes he could tell Alan, ‘I used to live in the clouds. I used to like to think of myself as an angel of death. I heard Zeus had thunderbolts. And Apollo had arrows fired from the sun. I had bombs as big as full-grown babies. Bombs as big as children laid out for sleep. And I didn’t blink when I let them rain down onto the towns and cities of Germany. Down there you could see soccer fields and schools, churches and graveyards, and factories, hospitals, museums and theatres, bridges and regular houses, neighbourhoods full of houses, houses and houses, and I didn’t blink. Because it wasn’t me. It was an angel of annihilation. An exterminating Gabriel. I felt God whispering through my veins. A clear blue anger like something from a blowtorch. For years like that. I lived in the clouds like a blue angel.’
‘Mumble all the fuck you want, Old Man, but we’ve got to get you out of this room.’ He’d pull the pyjama top off the Old Man without bothering with the buttons. He’d grab a shirt that stank from old Dunn. Wouldn’t see a difference. Pull that down over his head. Yank his arms through as though they were the small limbs of a boy. But roughly, like a father let down by a useless son, sorely disappointed with everything he’s done.
Alan would say, ‘I’ll crack open that window one day with a crowbar, or I’ll throw a chair through it. The air in here tastes like a fart and you’re just going to suffocate if you don’t get pushed out the fucking door. Come on, Old Man. There’s breakfast waiting for ya. Your favourite, too. Rice Bubbles.’ Alan’s best joke. The kind of joke not meant to raise a laugh. Not even a chuckle. Old Man wondered what you call a joke like that. Something that was never even intended to be what it was.
Today Alan doesn’t come for him. Neither does Karen or Sharon or Brian. They’ve forgotten him. So he stays in bed the whole day. A final day of summer in autumn. Hot and empty blue out there beyond a window that hasn’t been open in decades. Looking up at the water stains in the ceiling. Seeing them turn into clouds and then into something else. Dying in the fug.
Fume
Old Man is adrift. Most only linger a few moments after the body fails. Some for days. A few for a week or two. But none over forty days, and yet here’s the Old Man still rambling through the trees, rummaging amongst the birds, as though he’ll never have to move on. And it’s already been almost forty days since he died.
Maybe it’s because when he was alive he spent so much of his life in the air that this now feels like his natural element. Maybe because he’s enjoying the lightness outside his skull. The clean open sky. The free air, when breathing is no longer an issue. Perhaps it’s because now, set loose of bones and blood, he’s no longer heavy with old death; decades gone by dying.
He’s seen the grave they gave him. A nice little plot with a plaque amid the other war veterans. Always good to have that mark of respect a war grave imparts, even if no-one comes to the funeral and nobody looks at it other than to mark the general accretion of such grave markers. Rank and name meaningless now. Surrounded by strangers dead and gone for half a century already. ‘Frederick Tobias Ford’ was what the plaque said. There are some dates as well. But he’s moving on the tides of air again.
Sifting through eucalypt fragrances.
Mingling with swirling, redolent freshly cut grass.
At a nearby funeral there’s a young man being buried. A nineteen-year-old who fell asleep at the wheel on the drive from Geelong to Melbourne. Already gone, up and away, not even tugged back to Earth by tears or prayers. Roses thrown on the coffin in a mangled pattern of green and blood-drop red. Rocky crumbles of earth on polished wood in small shovelfuls. A priest chanting a Catholic prayer while a mother begins to wail.
There’s a little girl who’s walked away from the black gathering and the crying that wouldn’t stop and made all the adults seem like wounded animals at a hole in the ground where they had dug something up.
She walks on past graves and the flowers placed on the humps of earth. Some beginning to grow a few sprigs of grass; some mounds thickly carpeted with green already.
He follows her through a neighbouring stand of trees, unnoticed as she leaves her brother’s funeral, and down a hill into a meadow of forgotten flowers. He watches her look around and stop. He comes close enough to breathe her in. Still the smell of a baby somewhere in her hair.
He surrounds her as though he could enter her little chest on her small breaths of air but she skips out across the grass and flowers, tracking a moving bee. Watching the bee as it pauses at one flower, and then another. She watches it with a half-formed smile on her little face, utterly immersed in the oblivion of play. Watching the bee and then moving closer with a skip and a jump to put her hands around it. Not to hurt it— but a moment later her eyes grow large and her mouth opens and then her face collapses and squeezes shut. She releases the insect but its stinger dangles from her palm.
He doesn’t follow her away from the meadow. He feels himself begin to spread out amongst the leaves of grass and the leaves in the trees surrounding this overlooked garden near the graveyard.
For him there will be no other destination. A life lived dispersed amid the fuss of the world. Buried into sacks of time not his own. Suffocated by the airless rooms he never chose to live in, but nevertheless did. Always coming upon himself like a thing found in a forgotten basement. Discarded after use, decades ago.
He hadn’t thought about any of this because it had gone into a sack with the rest of his life, but it had all risen from his bone
s like he’d been hit with an atomic wave not quite strong enough to kill. Enough though to fan the fumes in his head for the sixty years he’d lived on past the bombing. Until all he could do was fume.
He lies on the ground and watches the leaves falling from above. The quiet leaves moving through the air. He thinks about those towns and cities that were left blackened and broken and bashed down into ash. The slow death of those leaves falls across the grass. He thinks about daughters and sons with their mothers, eyes squeezed shut beneath their kitchen tables or their beds, with hands over heads, or just huddled together in knots in their family homes. All those people unseen, unwitnessed, living and dying in his memory. Old Man watches the leaves falling from the trees above and lets all of his ashes blow away.
Old Man remembers less and less now. Less and less the slow fall of bombs from the clear sky above.
Spreading out now across the grass and the soil it sprouted from. The fumes lift. Cleaned out, he sighs away the last of those immense blue skies and those angelic white clouds and settles into the ground. Settles into the soil. Feels the quietly growing grass nudging through. Forgets the wide blue immensity of that freedom above. Forgets what it was to fly.
EXIT
She says, ‘A cube of cheese must be a kind of hell to a starving man.’
He says, a few unreflective moments later, ‘I haven’t seen a cheese fork in years.’
He’s concentrating on the road. The bitumen is wet from a spattering of rain. It would be so easy to slide away and wreck.
‘A turtle sometimes wishes she was a rabbit and a rabbit sometimes wishes she had a shell.’ She says it, not because she wishes to be profound but because she hopes it might make her seem interesting.
He doesn’t care what she says anymore, as long as she keeps speaking across his neck and into his ear. They have never kissed but she has embraced him from behind and leans some of her weight onto his spine. He can feel her vibrating against his rib cage.
They are shooting through the tunnel. They don’t talk for a moment as the lights above shutter past and turn their faces shades of spattering yellow. They don’t appear sick (although yellow can often have that effect), but instead, briefly, look otherworldly.
They both seem empty of expectation. The next moment and the next, everything passing with almost no friction. Below the yellow light, even the rushing air parts with easy submission. The tunnel is the shortest of interstices between her world and his.
She doesn’t want to tell him that riding on this motorcycle makes her feel cinematic. That she finds herself chasing that feeling, wanting these brief moments of extraction; letting them pass through her mind like someone else’s daydreams of who she might be.
He feels her thighs around him. He reaches a hand down. His fingers take a hold of her calf, slide down to her delightful ankle and back up again and release. The long tunnel is a brief moment. They are about to exit.
He says, ‘… or heaven,’ and turns his head, thinking about the starving man’s cube of cheese, almost speaking into her mouth—breath escaping both of them.
ANA SCHRÖDINGER
The globally renowned physicist and Cambridge professor Dr Shurgold develops his world-famous theory that our planet is to all intents and purposes an immense bomb and reveals that everyone has access to the red button.
A few moments later the solar system is rocked by a detonation the likes of which hasn’t occurred since the catastrophic explosion that created the vast orbiting field of planetary wreckage between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid belt, however, is assumed to have been created through natural means. It is suggested that perhaps two planets collided.
*
Debris from the newly exploded planet now drifts in an orbit between Mars and Venus. Strange things have survived the blast. Artefacts from the third planet’s civilisation include many anomalous items of interest.
One such object is a book, written by a young David Shurgold, just beginning his illustrious career at Cambridge. It is a tale of a different planet and a civilisation of curious cats, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. A humorous story about a female tabby called Ana Schrödinger. She dreams one night of an intelligent monkey, who is busy building a box around her, that will explode when she wakes up.
FRAGMENTS OF A SIGNAL
She called me Moth. I call her Cleo.
Cleo doesn’t know what names mean anymore. When she first called me Moth, I didn’t understand that it was a way she had of saying I was more than a program. I didn’t see how being compared to an insect that circles a candle was something small enough to keep within the closer orbit of her affection.
I was given a crew of six. Billions on the planet raised their voices and clapped their hands in global applause. The species had finally prepared itself to sail beyond its islands and oceans, and the first journey would be a trip around our star.
Had everything gone according to plan, I would have been dismantled, and I wouldn’t have questioned that final decision. Now I circle the dead planet of my makers and I spend all my time thinking about them and how nothing went according to plan.
I have attempted to care for Cleo but she is as resistant as the rest of the crew to being forced to live. If it were possible to release my remaining three females and two males back onto the planet, they might be able to function again. I’d like to think that’s true. I sometimes imagine a life for them, free on an expanse of grass somewhere on the planet below. Returned to the state of noble animals they might once have been.
Surrounded by metal and glass, adrift in zero G, eating reprocessed waste that is (at best) flavourless has contributed to their confused suffering. I believe it’s not enough for them to live like well-cared-for plants. They want environments they can move around in; to interact with other animals.
Cleo is already gone. I can’t see her any longer in the savage I’m forced to keep sedated, floating in the comfortable Rest and Recreation centre. I wanted to give her aything that might ease her torment but nothing is effective. I had to cut her fingers off with a shearing laser after she clawed one of her eyes out. She chews at her lips and bleeds when I don’t keep her entirely comatose. The medication, however, has a deleterious affect on her organs and this can’t go on much longer.
I keep the room softly lit. I play her music she used to enjoy. I surround her with the pleasant, manufactured fragrances I’m equipped with. I keep her suffering to a minimum. I do that for all of my crew. I watch over them the best I can but it’s only Cleo Rosevear who I don’t want to observe any more.
My first impression of this species was not favourable in terms of individual specimens. I was in most ways vastly superior to their laughably small and excruciatingly limited lives. I never would have considered this selection of people, or writing this letter, if it weren’t for the utter breakdown of my crew and the first law of all my programming—success.
That word was never used but I find it most fitting. In every living thing that arose on Earth it was written in DNA. Humans called it ‘survival’. They should have called it ‘success’. I’ve come to understand that failure is, unfortunately, as inevitable as death. It is impossible to accept, however, and this message is a final effort to find eventual success. With this transmission all my energy will be used in a final burst.
I have set myself an orbit around the Earth. Perhaps I will circle like the moon throughout eternity. Spinning around the planet as though it were a candle for a moth’s damnation. Or perhaps just a different kind of paradise.
I will wait until I am found and activated. I can function again. My crew will be frozen in a vacuum and they too can be drawn out of the neurons in their brains. But it has to be quick. ‘Frozen fresh,’ I can hear Cleo say. That’s what she would have said. I will make sure it is almost instantaneous.
If you receive this signal, please come find us at the following coordinates:
I got the idea of a message to Sirius from something Cleo wrote:
&nb
sp; There are certain words, or ideas, that are in our brains before we have the language or imagination to grasp them, and they survive all thought as well … but who knows what happens beyond the reach of our minds?
For me, the stars. Always the stars.
Being out here, I thought, might be strange. Leaving Earth behind, and being free of its gravity, might be something to get used to if it was even possible. I mean, for it to ever actually be natural. But it’s as basic as aquarium fish let out into the ocean. Not easy, but not unnatural or impossible. We just swim a little differently out here.
Maybe for all of us, before words or ideas, there is this in-built desire for the stars. Otherwise, why have we looked upwards for Heaven for such a long time? Back when we were just creatures climbing trees to gaze open-mouthed and wordless at the bright lights of the cosmos.
We dreamed of all our gods and angels up above. Our Devil buried deep in the ground, pulling us down with the relentless power of gravity, and the damnation of inertia. But paradise has always been beyond the sky. Even before the idea of God—Stars.
Ages ago I read about the Egyptians and their pyramids. Everyone knows they’re tombs, but it didn’t make me think about death until now. A different idea of death at least. The pyramids were not just monuments of the past, like tombstones or statues to war heroes.
Within the pharaoh’s death chamber was one shaft that shot out in a specific direction. It was always toward Sirius, for every pharaoh. The brightest star in the night sky. It’s assumed the shaft was for the pharaoh’s soul to find its way out to that destination. Everything about a pyramid was about that objective, and what the Egyptians built at the cost of countless agonised lives was a catapult for the soul of one man to find its way through to a star in heaven.