by A. S. Patric
I lie on the bed. I think. I dream. I lie on the bed.
There’s a clock on the wall. I never know the time. But it ticks. The flat sound of worn grooves in a cheap clock. I wake up hearing it. It keeps me from sleeping. Forgetting it for periods of time is like some bliss I do not deserve. A reprieve of forgetfulness. But it never leaves me. Never stops its torment. For a while, maybe it was as long as a week, its battery ran out. I forgot all about it. But when the battery was replaced it was worse. And it will not recede now. I hear it ticking all the time. The flat sound of worn grooves in a cheap clock.
Outside there’s the sound of birdsong. I forget the birds. I forget the ways they splinter out their diamond sounds through the crystal-clean air. How they open my spaces and reveal the vast canyons of dreams and forests of thought that have always belonged to a world more than a mind. Birdsong that reminds me to explore and wander and drift and allow it all to open and unravel. To unfold and uncrease and unblink in the darkness of the skull, and see where it leads. How it always returns to calling for the rising sun over the horizon and the blue freedom of the air we breathe. I forget the birds, and when I remember them, I want to keep them and fill myself with their singing. But I can’t help it. I start listening to the worn-out grooves of that hospital clock instead.
End of one. One connects like a game of dominoes to You. You will move on through an open window as easily as a fly. A fly must know a torment a man can never imagine with a closed window, where it will die on a windowsill in driedout exhaustion, never being able to understand the nature of the invisible. Invisible to our eyes is how there never was a beginning of an end. End of one. One connects like a game of dominoes to you. You at the end.
I lie in bed and breathe. I sweat and I don’t know why. I feel it in the wet of my clothes. The dampness on my chest. Life goes by in trickles as much as streams. As much a drip as a storm. We know oceans, but it’s not true for our bodies. Water should be salt-free. Clean and clear. But there are puddles in the concrete only dogs drink from. It pools by the roadside for cars to spray through. Rusting drainpipes and roof gutters choked with leaves. Sewers below running with chthonic reflections. Water moans as much as it chortles. And what’s true for bodies isn’t true for souls. Who knows but that the salt in us is the only thing divine. Some trace element of the ocean. There’s what we were before arms and legs. Before the taste of water, clean and clear. Where salt was always in the mouth and almost sweet, not something we excrete through our skin and call sweat. Because there’s ocean in everything that crawls away over land. There’s time in trickles as much as streams, and there’s time that is salt. I lie in bed and sweat.
And I will not tell you of any of the dreams I had because I only remember the one. I was walking through the city. Walking for hours everywhere, with detail more nuanced than anything I would have noticed in life. Down Degraves Street, with people dressed in clothes all of their own choosing, eating different dishes, drinking and having their conversations like the words didn’t come from my dreaming mind, suddenly knowing I needed to get somewhere within the next five minutes but it’s slipped my mind where. I keep walking, hoping I’ll remember, getting more and more frustrated, and worried by this inability to recall my destination. I walk out onto Flinders Street towards the corner of Swanston with an idea that if I see the clocks there on the outside of the station I’ll know where I need to go. At least the time to go along with the ticking—finally. But when I get there, it starts to snow. At first flakes, and then more of it, covering everything in ice-white. Everyone going about their daily business as though this were nothing more unusual to them than to New Yorkers in winter. But I look around and I know, and then realise I’m in a dream, and that I know I’m dreaming. I look around at this world that’s supposed to be the creation of my mind and I know it isn’t. It’s as much a part of the world as the Melbourne in which it never snows. Then I hear my alarm clock. I lean out of bed to switch it off. But I fall out of bed. There’s no alarm clock and I’m in hospital. Awake.
It must have been a depression. It must have been mental illness. It must have been a loss of faith, even if I didn’t believe in anything divine; didn’t believe in a soul or any of those invisibles. Something that made sleep and dreams run from me like starved cattle rambling through the dust of inexplicable famine. Something that crept in with the half-bitten strawberry and champagne at euphoric meetings with clients signing their lives away, to us, for our visions of their market conquests. Something in those perfectly mapped plans for glittering futures, destinies that came wrapped in boxes with the ribbons of Empire and the skin of God. Something in those boxes. Something in the paper we spilled our promises over, our imaginations and our hunger for shared victories. Something in the complete sincerity with which we lied, and our total commitment, for years on end, to those sustaining lies. So, a depression or an illness of the mind, but I think, a loss of faith. A loss of some kind of substance. Because I could still find the ideas. I could kill with those ideas. Or I could make the helpless couch-crushed suburbanite pray for salvation with them. But it was a loss of something. Something in myself. First at work. In the lift every morning. Then in the evening as well. The round plastic numbers in their faded circles, ticking up and up like I was being raised and raised to ever higher levels, began to make me feel light-headed. The descent down and down into drowning vertigo. I stood outside the lifts and watched myself come and go, entering and leaving the booth and disappearing to reappear again most of a day later; all these people like me, ready to move into the booth as soon as I’d entered or left, to sit at my desk, to speak the same inane banter with my PA, to talk on the same phone, and to the same partners, or different ones, it didn’t matter. The picture of the woman on the desk, the wife and the name, entering and leaving my bed with me, brushing her teeth in the mornings and evenings … could come back with someone else lying in her bed and barely blink. All of them, and everyone I knew, the same. Barely a blink. Looking in the mirror—it was there in that face as well. The pills in the bottle (useless pills that only managed to knock me out with a kind of throttling-hands effectiveness, when they didn’t just half strangle and leave me feeling brain dead) were just as replaceable as anything else about me. Tomorrow the elevators would travel up and down with their cargo.
But all of that was yesterday.
And now everything makes sense. Everything is understood. But only in the ways it did before I got washed down the nowhere at the bottom of my skull. None of the spaces above or below open up anymore and there’s little I can say for certain about any of it.
There are times, when I’m walking and when I’m driving, and when I’m eating, and when I’m waking or going to sleep, and when I’m talking, and when I’m sitting on the couch watching the tube, when I’m doing the washing, or getting the mail, when I’m pulling on socks, when I’m putting on shoes, when I turn my wrist to check my watch, and lift my sleeve to check my time, when I feel like I’d like to go back to the swirling sway of stars inside and their endless birdsong.
Maybe it’s because there was a once-upon-a-time and a happily-ever-after in there. There were doors to paradise and gates to the underworld. There was substance. And there was something else.
VOICE OF THE BEE
Olive cut her foot in the bathroom on a piece of broken mug. She dripped blood while she squeezed her eyes shut and thought, OK, the pain will go away. It won’t last forever. Promise, promise, promise.
She hopped along, to the third drawer down of the vanity unit, and pulled out the Band-Aids. She put one on the ball of her foot, knowing that it wasn’t likely to hold very long. Not in that spot. She put on another six bandaids, wishing that they would stay on. She limped out of the bathroom and into the lounge.
Daddy was sleeping on the couch, half-naked and hairy like an ape. The television going. Some religious show from America was on, so he must have fallen asleep during the car racing. Which was earlier. She’d been asleep als
o but she’d had too much juice at dinner, strawberry milk and too much ice cream as well.
She wanted to go straight back to bed but she couldn’t now that her foot was throbbing. From the bit of mug her mother had broken in the morning. Dropping it and screaming. And now Mum was in the hospital, and Dad was drunk. Because he was snoring and he never snored unless he was drunk or very tired.
That was something Olive heard her mother telling her friend Lesley on the phone. Talking about all the things wrong with Graham. That was her dad’s name. Olive went to the fridge and opened the door. She sat on the kitchen tiles there by the open door, letting it make her feel cool again, because it had been so hot every night this week.
She liked the little light in the fridge, which made everything around it feel neat and clear. It was still a pretty new fridge. Nothing had gone bad in it, and it smelt like what she imagined white would smell like if a colour could have a smell. Nothing bad had ever happened in the fridge. But her mother had been crying about things her father had done that were bad. And she listened because she’d never really thought of them like that. Two people like anyone else out there on the television.
The bandage was starting to bleed through and drip again. Maybe she would need to go to hospital now as well. For stitches. She could be in the same bed as her mum. And maybe she wouldn’t be so scared this time. Everything so sharp and in pain at hospital and everyone rushing over her and falling down.
The phone started ringing. Olive didn’t move, because a phone ringing in the middle of the night meant Grandma had died or something like that. It couldn’t be good because everyone should be asleep.
Her father got off the couch and picked up the phone, blinking into the fridge light as though he couldn’t see Olive sitting there by its open door. He listened to a voice on the phone.
Olive could faintly hear the voice as well. It was similar to the sound a bee makes against the glass outside on a quiet day. He had tears in his eyes and there was a strange smile on his face, as he looked down at Olive—sitting on the tiles by the open door of the fridge. ‘How does it feel to have a little baby brother?’ he asked her.
CIGARETTES & BALLOONS
A man drives up my street in a white van. It takes some vicious pulling and pushing at his steering wheel before he manages to make a U-turn. His side door needs to be facing my driveway. Maps and delivery details and invoices cover the top of his dashboard and his front seat.
He’s been all over Melbourne—a city that sprawls great distances. No-one knows all of it. He gets out and lights a cigarette, consults a clipboard and tilts his head left and right, looking for my house number. Doesn’t see me looking from my upstairs study. He opens the big door in the side of his van. I’m expecting to see a mess of tumbled-over packages. It’s one huge bag in the back. He pulls on it, and it jostles but doesn’t budge. He uses both hands and a foot on the side of his van to yank it out, violence in his fists. An immense nylon-mesh parcel, filled with vibrant colours, ready to burst or float into the dismal winter skies above. That’d be a sight. All those balloons let loose and floating free. It would be a quick glimpse. They’d get lost almost immediately in Melbourne’s wide winter skies.
The cigarette is still burning in his mouth and I’ll certainly give him an earful if one of the balloons bursts before he even gets it to my front door. Though, of course, I didn’t order any balloons. It’s not my birthday and there’s no occasion I can think of that would warrant anyone buying me balloons. I’ve never received such a gift and I’ve never sent balloons to anyone.
I walk through the house coughing and blowing my nose, trying to think of who and why, but I can’t come up with even one likely answer. Elation in all these possibilities as I move towards the unexpected surprise. I almost stumble down the stairs. I chastise myself for this silly burst of joy. What would I do with a big bag of balloons? How utterly useless!
Perhaps I’ll release the balloons within the house. They might move from room to room whenever a gust from the heating or a door opening and closing nudges them along. Maybe they’ll congregate in one particular room, and when I walk through they will sway with my movement. There will be all that colour clustered at my ceiling, nestling and jostling, like creatures ready to lead the way to liberation at the first opportunity.
When I open the front door, there’s a smouldering cigarette on my doorstep. The delivery man has walked back to his vehicle and is shoving the immense bag of balloons back into his white van.
LAS VEGAS FOR VEGANS
I landed in Las Vegas yesterday and all I’ve done since then is spend hours looking out my hotel room window into the desert. I used to think a desert was a place where there was no life, nothing but a moonscape as far as you could see. There are yucca, cactus and grey thornbushes out there; there’s hard green life, all of it clinging to the unyielding ground of the Mojave. I call up food and wine, and then call up a whore as though she’s on the menu as well. She’s very young. I ask to see her licence. She laughs and asks me do I want to fuck or not.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Candy,’ she answers. ‘I’m sweet. And you got a sweet tooth, I can tell.’
‘We don’t call it candy where I’m from.’
She takes out a mirror, even though we’re surrounded by mirrors—on the wall behind her, through the open door of the hotel bathroom and the wide reflective windows looking out across the evening desert. She dabs fresh colour on her lollypop-pink lips and that seems just as unnecessary. The little mirror in the palm of her hand snaps shut.
‘You don’t have candy where you’re from?’
‘We call it something else.’
She shifts her weight from one high heel to the other. ‘What should I call you?’
‘Hunter,’ I answer.
Both of us could be making these names up. I’m not. I’ve read Fear and Loathing though I didn’t love it half as much as my father and mother did.
Back in Brisbane I wouldn’t have considered a prostitute. The women came from the suburbs and felt as though they were relations, or as if they’d arrived from Russia like wholesale mail-order brides. I always felt sorry, maybe even responsible for the circumstances that brought them to their knees.
In Las Vegas, Candy has a trailer-trash soul, and this is practically a respectable profession in her world.
‘So Hunter ….’ She takes a step towards me, ‘I’ll suck your dick if you want. That’s how we could start. Or I could keep doing that for as long as you want.’ She goes to her hands and knees in an easy motion. ‘Sometimes I have dessert for dinner,’ she says, as she crawls towards me.
I look into the desert again. I don’t ask how much it will cost. Candy tells me anyway and when she leaves I’m still here watching as the sun comes up, thinking that back home this same day is ending.
I walk down Flamingo to Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House on Paradise Road. Above the bar, set into the wood with gold-plated letters, is a slogan: DO RIGHT AND FEAR NO MAN.
The waiter asks me if I’ve been lucky and my first thought is that he means Candy so I stare at him and blink.
‘Best thing to do is move on from a place that hasn’t got any luck for you,’ he says. ‘There’s plenty to choose from. You gotta trust your gut when you walk through the door.’
‘Thanks for the advice. But I reckon my gut can’t be trusted on anything. And I don’t want the menu. Get me the biggest hunk of meat you’ve got. I want to see blood when I cut it.’
The casinos are a waste of time. I’ve got no intention of doing anything other than profusely spending the money my parents carefully saved for over three decades. The Alzheimer’s that destroyed my mother had taken a big bite out of my inheritance and my father’s suicide afterwards tied up the rest of it for a while. When their graves began bristling with new blades of grass, their life savings finally poured into my bank account, and I thought Vegas was as good a place as any to find a hit man.
The si
lver Escalade coasts up the Strip and we’ve already settled on a price before he lights up another cigarette. I coughed through his first smoke and when I tried to open my window, found that it was locked. Joseph merely turned up the aircon. I’m sensitive to tobacco smoke. My throat hurts and I’m now coughing even harder.
‘Have you killed many men?’ I ask.
‘I’ve killed enough.’