He lay there in a daze, thinking: Here it comes, the boot in the head.
But it didn’t.
When eventually he sat up, shaking his head slowly from side to side, he looked around him. The Datsun was gone. A woman and her two small daughters were staring at him as if he might bite.
‘Are you alright?’ the woman asked, nervously. ‘Do you want me to call the police?’
‘No, it’s okay,’ he gasped, and his voice came out of empty bellows. He was winded. His mouth tasted of acid bile, his body felt like putty. His heart lurched rancorously into his guts, and with a rising groan he vomited into the grass.
Somehow he drove home. When he got there he made himself a cup of scalding hot tea and put four heaped spoons of sugar in it. Sugar for shock, he remembered. Then he rang David Wang, who said to come over straight away.
David pronounced him mildly concussed and wrote out an authorisation for a head X-ray at the public hospital along the road. Rick thanked him and said he would go there straight away. But he didn’t. He was beginning to feel better; physically, anyway.
David had been outraged on his behalf, had urged him to report the incident to the police. But Rick knew better. It was his own fault, he had brought this madness on himself, not that he could explain this to David, who prided himself on his counselling skills. David would warn his patient about the classic syndrome of the victim blaming himself, feeling that he had somehow invited attack, that some inadequacy or quintessential unworthiness had marked him out. Everyone knew this sort of spiel by now; it was even in the lifestyle section of the papers. But Rick knew that for one thing he had struck the first blow. And there was something else, and it was this: he had looked into the younger man’s eyes and seen his own madness, his own ugliness, his own rage and humiliation reflected back at him.
That night he waited until Luke was in bed. Then he told Zoe what had happened. ‘I got beaten up today,’ he said baldly.
What had he expected? Sympathy? Fear? Cool disdain?
She screamed at him. ‘You what! You hit a black man in the middle of the city …’ Her first shriek trailed off in disbelief. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
And before he could respond, could say anything more, like ‘It wasn’t in the middle of the city’, she screamed at him again.
‘How could you? How could you? There were children there! Young children. And what if Luke had witnessed it, his father being beaten up in broad daylight! As it is, he’ll probably hear about it!’
Her face was a grimace of pain. Tears leaked from her eyes. At that moment, he could see, she despised him. ‘And what about us? Did you think of us? You could have been seriously hurt, you could have had your face smashed in, you could have had your ribs broken. You …’ her voice cracked and faltered, ‘you could have been killed!’
But I wasn’t, he thought. I wasn’t. I was agile, and I did okay. But those vain thoughts were just a last gasp of self-defence against a great grey tide of self-pity that was about to engulf him at any minute. He couldn’t bear the despair between them for another second and he got up from his chair and walked through the open door of the kitchen and out onto the back lawn. There he sat under the platform of Luke’s tree house with the base of his spine against the rough bark of the tree trunk, and when he put his head on his knees he could feel the synapses in his brain firing and misfiring over and over and over and over until he thought his head might explode.
After a while, he looked up. It was a clear night. The stars blinked down at him.
When he went inside she was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for him. She had been crying. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something to say to you.’
Here it comes, he thought. Divorce. He could see Luke asleep in his single bed and he knew he would do anything not to give him up.
Her voice was low, quavering and grim. ‘I can’t go on living with your anger,’ she said. ‘In the last year you’ve been unbearable.’ She spoke hurriedly, as if she could not afford to pause. ‘Either you go and see a counsellor and get some sort of therapy, or I’m leaving.’
Therapy, he thought, what was the point of that? He had tried it once in the past, and while it had helped, it had not been enough. The vessel was still half-empty. He wanted something more, something more than – what? Something more than comfort. But what else was there? What else could any of us offer one another?
For most of the next day he slept.
In the evening Zoe brought home takeaway for dinner and they barely spoke. He jabbed at his food listlessly until the silence got to him and he stood up. ‘I’m going to sit outside for a while,’ he said.
Out in the shadowy courtyard he felt spacey, disoriented. There was an obscure humming in his head. He sat down, carefully, on the edge of an old deckchair, and, closing his eyes, he began, involuntarily, to relive the events of the previous day. A garish reel of film ran in his head, sometimes speeded up, sometimes in slow motion, until he could bear it no longer and blocked it out in a black dissolve …
When he opened his eyes everything in the garden seemed exaggeratedly there, larger than life but alien. His senses were acute. A mosquito buzzed his ear and he looked up. It was a warm, scented night and the brightness of the moon ought to have calmed him but his pulse was slippery, his breathing taut and irregular, and his heel drummed against the concrete slab. A slow, disengaging cog began to shift and grind in his chest … he looked down, looked up again, blinked … the back of the house was receding from him, the kitchen window panes framing little squares of golden light that seemed to grow smaller and smaller and smaller. He stood up with a start and shook his head. Any minute now he would lose his grip on reality, would tear and splinter into gaping viscera and jagged bone.
In the kitchen Zoe was sitting at the table, reading the paper. He stood in the open doorway. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. This is it, he thought. I will start to walk, and then I will just keep on walking until I drop.
She nodded curtly. Then she looked up at him, and her eyes were full of a sadness he hadn’t seen there before. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, and rose purposefully.
And walk they did, he unthinkingly beside his sad, angry wife; aloof, holding his breath, oblivious to the blur of shrimp bushes in the gardens beside him, the overhanging hibiscus and the fraying palms. They walked and walked, looping around the hill and taking the long way back, and somehow the walking began to exert its spell, the simple rhythm of striding in step, feet on the ground, arms swinging, the black fog in his heart seeping down into the soles of his shoes, to be left, like an invisible film, on the grey asphalt.
In the weeks that followed he felt as if he were waiting.
Waiting for what?
And Zoe, too, was waiting.
And then one of his software engineers, a man named Carl Kremmer, hanged himself in the basement of their Chatswood office. The cleaners came in on a Monday morning and found him hanging from an air-conditioning pipe. The irony of this was not lost on Rick. A man had contrived to cut off the flow of air through his body by tying himself with nylon cord to a valve that was there to enable him to breathe more wholesomely, more comfortably, without the extremes of heat or cold, without noise or smog or wind or dust, without frost or mist or airborne pollen.
By the end of the month, the human resources people had circulated a memo offering free programs in stress management; a reward, as Zoe remarked tartly, for working late into the night and falling asleep at your workstation. One of these programs was a short course in meditation. The memo came accompanied by a glossy brochure extolling ‘an age-old technology of the self’ and promising a technique that would ‘eliminate stress’ and enable you to ‘maximise your potential’.
Why not? he thought. He had tried everything else, and this at least would placate Zoe, would look as if he were making some kind of effort.
When the forms went back, only two from his team had elected to go. The other was Mark Paradisi
s. Mark was a young systems analyst, twenty-eight years old and cocksure. His reddish-brown hair was shaved with a number-one blade and he favoured a series of stylish, oversized jackets, collarless shirts, and occasional waistcoats that complemented his dark looks. Bumptious and clever in the narrow-banded way of tech-heads everywhere, he treated Rick with a respect that was part mocking, part real; he would circle around him like a teasing child, absurdly deferential one minute, taking stinging liberties the next.
One afternoon he informed Rick that currently he was ‘between cars’, and since they would be going straight from work to meditation classes – ‘Oops, sorry, stress management’ (winking at him) – he thought perhaps Rick could give him a lift, at least to the introductory lecture on the Monday. Beyond that, he couldn’t guarantee that he’d front. ‘They might be a bunch of crazies, K.’ (Rick’s project team all called him ‘K’.) ‘Know what I mean? Hippies, cult-struck mind-benders. Whatever.’
But when the time came Rick was glad of a younger man’s company. As part of a twosome he felt less self-conscious. It seemed like more of a game.
The classes began at seven and they drove straight from work, across the bridge in the lea of peak-hour traffic. On the edge of Taylor Square they made a pit stop for souvlaki, which they ate in the parked car. It was hot and dusty, and as they sat looking out the window at the squalor of the square – its rough street trade, its sinister little patch of concrete between the traffic lights, its pungent smells of burned coffee, rancid frying oil and carbon monoxide – the absurdity of their dinner setting, only minutes away from the meditation centre, made him feel perversely cheerful and he chortled out loud, almost choking on the first bite of dry pide bread.
Mark turned his head sharply. ‘What?’ he asked.
Rick was still struggling to swallow. ‘Nothing,’ he coughed, ‘nothing at all.’
Mark then began, in between wolfing down mouthfuls of the kibbeh special, to launch into a riff on the mechanics of his mental well-being, and it would have been funny if it hadn’t had a certain quality of robotic desperation.
It was like this, he explained: he was not moving forward, he was not making progress in his life. He’d had a few knocks in the last couple of years; been dumped by his girlfriend, got pissed a lot, lost his licence, lost the plot, you might say. Then this free offer came up, and, well, as he saw it, it was like servicing or reconditioning your car. Things wear down after a while – the engine’s not ticking over, there are some clunks in performance – you go to a good mechanic and you get it seen to. So you can move forward, so you can progress. The car you’ve got might not be much good but it’s the only one you’ve got. You’ve got to tune it up from time to time, otherwise the wheels will fall off. You won’t move forward, you won’t progress.
By this time they had finished their hasty supper and Rick had pulled out into Oxford Street. ‘How do you know when you’ve progressed?’ he asked, teasingly. He could see how nervy Mark was, how he couldn’t sit still and jiggled one knee up and down like it was on voltage. Hot-wired.
‘You look at it this way,’ Mark said. ‘You check for reality statements. You ask yourself: where am I now compared to where I was? You get feedback from people you work for. It’s like one of those performance assessments. They’ll tell you: now you score, I don’t know, say, eight out of ten, whereas once it was three, four, something like that.’
Mark was talking as if he were a machine, a machine within a machine, a bright red Honda SL encased in Rick’s silver Fiat. And then he said something poetic: ‘Y’know, K, I’m annoyed at having my future dictated by my footprints in the sand – places I’ve been, what I’ve done in the past, all that.’
‘You read that in a book somewhere?’
He shrugged, glanced away. ‘Yeah, probably.’
At that moment they turned into Underwood Street. The house they were looking for was an elegant old terrace painted in lavender and white. It stood on the brow of the hill looking down to the sweep of the bay and had a big peach-coloured hibiscus bush in bloom by the front door. It was one of those stifling summer evenings, the gardens petrified in a humid stillness; Rick and Mark paused at the iron gate, struck by the shadowy beauty of the street, the exquisite tracery of the trees in outline against the darkening sky, the rich, orderly beauty of the terraces unfolding down the hill with the satisfying symmetry of a series of perfect numbers.
The door was ajar so they went in and through to the front salon, a room of stately proportions fitted out like a corporate office: pale grey carpet, eight rows of pale green chairs, and a white-board positioned in front of a marble fireplace. On the chairs were fifteen or so men and women who, like Mark, were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, stressed-out yuppies in casual but expensive clothes. Instinctively Rick cast an appraising glance at the women in the room; he noted Mark doing the same. Primal instinct.
They sat and looked ahead without speaking, as if they had exhausted their chitchat in the car. Before long a man in his early forties and dressed in a suit entered the room from the rear and stood by the whiteboard. Smiling at them, he introduced himself as Jack.
Jack was to be their trainer, and Rick liked him on sight. In his light grey suit, pale blue shirt and yellow tie, he presented in every way as a middle-level executive. Jack’s skin gave off a tanned glow, and this, combined with his balding head and round face, gave him the appearance of a corporate buddha. He had a way of talking with an almost permanent smile on his lips, as if sharing a joke, but his eyes shone with a warm, dark gloss, insinuating that, yes, the unfathomable could be fathomed.
He began by telling them that meditation was a simple, undemanding process through which the mind effortlessly arrived at the source of consciousness. The source of consciousness? Immediately Rick’s fickle mind began to play with this, punning on the idea of source. He couldn’t get out of his head an image of sauce on the brain, a large brain on a plate with a lurid red sauce poured over it, and then a white sauce, and next a yellow, like thick custard … Without this sauce the brain looked remarkably naked, uninteresting even, doughy and grey, like batter left overnight in the fridge that had begun to oxidise … Could this be the organe supérieur, the summa cum laude, the source of all that was bright and beautiful and inspired?
Look how his mind had wandered already! He recollected himself.
Jack was talking about peak performance. ‘During meditation the body enters into deep levels of relaxation and rest, a more profound rest than that experienced even in deep sleep. The body becomes attuned to the subtle vibrations of nature, which repair the body and release the creative energies of the human organism …’
Next to Rick, Mark had fallen asleep, which was not surprising – the words had a high degree of abstraction, an airy quality, and Mark often didn’t leave his workstation until after ten at night. And Jack had a soft, soothing voice that exuded warmth. The effect was indeed soporific. Jack was, he could see, a very contained man, though with a surprising tendency to giggle. Nevertheless, there was something attractive in his persona that was hard to define, a subtle quality.
Rick looked around him. Not everyone, it was clear, had a mind as restless as his or as tired as Mark’s. Everyone else appeared attentive, and serious. Most of them were younger, and as junior executives they were used to paying attention, used to listening for the ‘hook’, the slogan, the key phrases, the code words, the ‘open sesame’. And now they were here for the mantra. As Mark would say: if it works, it’s cool.
In Jack’s discourse there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on the brain. But what about the heart? As if reading Rick’s mind, Jack moved on to the subject of ‘perfect health’ – didn’t these people ever use qualifiers? – and heart disease, and how medical research had shown conclusively that meditation regularised blood pressure and lowered cholesterol. In orthodox terms, this was its area of greatest success.
Beside him, Mark had begun to snore gently. Jack’s soft tones were
such that perhaps they didn’t need to learn to meditate; perhaps all they needed was a tape of his voice, with one of those piping flutes in the background and the sound of running water. On the way over Mark had told him about the time he worked for an IT company in Palo Alto, California, where, during a particularly tense and difficult project, one of the supervisors had had a notion to play a relaxation tape in the office, until all the programmers had shrieked that it was getting on their nerves. Tonight, however, ‘the voice’ was working for Mark, who had dozed through almost the entire talk: eyes closed, head slumped forward on his chest.
Jack concluded by asking each of them to say why they had come. And they all said something sensible. They wanted ‘better concentration’; they wanted ‘to achieve more’, to double their current workload. They wanted to feel less tense, less tired, less impatient, more calm. No-one said they wanted to maximise their potential. No-one admitted to being fed up and angry. And no-one talked about ‘the mysterious absences at the heart of even the fullest lives’, to quote from a book review Rick had idled through in the dentist’s surgery some days before.
Mark woke up in time to say that he regarded his body as a prime racing machine, and just lately he had realised it needed a bit of a tune-up.
Rick said he wanted to get more done with less fatigue. What else was he going to say? That he was angry? And that as he grew older he was getting angrier? Angry at the universe for failing him? Listening attentively to the reasons the others gave for being there that night, he wondered if they too were dissembling, camouflaging some inner vision of flames – some moment of madness, some visceral ache of yearning – with the managerial workspeak of the brochure, a language they had learned to wear like a suit of armour, like battle fatigues.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 10