Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  Florid Jowls says, ‘And you told her that?’

  ‘Sure. What’s it cost to tell a dying person a lie?’

  ‘When’s the last time you saw Mrs McCaffrey?’ Salty Pepper says.

  ‘About three nights ago.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Certain, yeah.’

  ‘Okay,’ Florid Jowls says, ‘you can go. But we might want to talk to you again.’

  I head for the door. ‘A word to the wise,’ Salty Pepper says. ‘No one likes a smart-arse.’

  ‘Not everyone needs to be liked,’ I say.

  I can tell, by the way his eyes narrow, that he is not unaccustomed to considering this concept. I close the door behind me and breathe quick, shallow breaths. Blood roars in my ears. Tomorrow I bomb Nagasaki, etc.

  My supervisor takes the cigarette butt hint and finds a new parking space. This time it takes me a whole hour to find his Opel Corsa, out back of the ambulance station to the rear of the hospital.

  Strictly speaking, this is illegal. No non-essential vehicles of any description are allowed in this area. A kid propping his bike against the wall is looking at a hefty fine for interfering with an emergency service. A badly parked car could obstruct an ambulance on its way to resuscitate a coronary victim. Each minute that elapses before an ambulance reaches a coronary victim reduces his chances of survival by 10 percent, give or take.

  There was a time when Sirens lured and seduced; today they alert and alarm. Ambulances are the all-wailing, all-blaring placebos of our generation. A flashing blue siren has replaced the Sacred Heart flame. The stench of burning rubber has become our incense. In CPR we trust.

  My supervisor has violated this covenant. He has parked his non-essential Opel Corsa in a restricted zone. It is my duty to reprimand him.

  I wear a ring fashioned into an Ouroborous, an ancient symbol of intertwined snakes, one depicting imminent annihilation, the other rising hope. In Asian cultures, the snakes become dragons. I have sawn through this ring so that one jagged edge overlaps the other. I dig this jagged edge into the paintwork of my supervisor’s Opel Corsa and gouge a line the length of the passenger side. In theory, this means he will not discover the gouging until long after he has left the hospital grounds.

  My line for today is, Why stop now, just when I’m hating it? (Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

  Cassie is a beautiful woman. This makes her difficult to live with.

  Sex stunts the imagination, narrows focus, and diminishes the contemplation of perspective, scale or the possibility of diversions. Sex is an Opel Corsa careering downhill on a steep one-way street. Sex is half-chewed fuel-lines. Sex is dying before your time. Sex is defying destiny. Sex is waving two fingers in the face of infinity, and then slipping said fingers into infinity’s lubricated vagina. Sex is hoping infinity gets off first.

  Cass is a finicky eater, an amateur photographer and a book club enthusiast. She admires minimalist two-tone interior design. When she was a child she wanted to be a blacksmith. Today she works as a physiotherapist. When we first met I thought ‘physiotherapy’ was massage parlour code. I was to be disappointed, but by then I didn’t care.

  Today is my day off. We meet for lunch in town. It is a mild, bright day, the first real swallow of summer, the sun a bowl of peach punch drained. We skip the food and grab some take-out coffee, find a bench down along the river. We talk and watch the river flow by.

  This is always an enjoyable experience. Cass is generous with her time and spirit. She possesses the rare talent of making everyone feel at ease in her company, a skill and gift essential in her professional life. She listens when other people speak. This attentiveness is flattering, even after you realise Cassie listens no matter who is speaking and regardless of the topic being discussed. Conversing with Cassie is like whistling into a soaked sponge. She hears everything but absorbs nothing. This is one reason I like Cassie.

  Another reason is that she takes a double-D cup size. I was not breast-fed as a baby. I was a puny youth, five feet four inches when I first began to masturbate. For most of the two decades since, I have masturbated at least once a day.

  While Cassie talks, I calculate that, were it not for masturbation stunting my growth, I would be twelve feet seven inches by now.

  •

  ‘I was wondering,’ Billy says.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How come, in the original draft, you made me a midget?’

  ‘As I recall, the idea was so that you’d have a Napoleon complex.’

  ‘It wasn’t to make yourself feel taller?’

  ‘Why would I want that?’

  ‘Everyone wants to be taller,’ he says. ‘A man needs stature.’

  ‘Danny DeVito seems to be making out okay.’

  He grins. ‘That was funny, in Get Shorty, the way they had Danny DeVito playing an actor who plays Napoleon. Remember?’

  ‘Hilarious, yeah.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘Something up?’

  ‘Nothing, no. Why?’

  ‘You seem a bit off this morning.’

  ‘Not at all. I was just thinking that you’re what, an inch taller than me now?’

  ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘I could lop off an inch if you want.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. It’s not an issue.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’

  ‘I’m certain.’

  ‘Okay. So what’s next?’

  I consult my notes. ‘You were rejigging another excerpt from the Cassie novel.’

  ‘Try this instead,’ he says, handing across a sheet of paper.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That time with Cassie, in Zanzibar, when you had me talking about the Temple of Diana? That got me thinking.’

  •

  The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were the Pyramid at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

  Known to the Romans as Diana, Artemis was the Greek goddess of the moon, the forest, hunting, witchcraft and childbirth. Although herself a virgin, she was also a fertility goddess.

  The architectural apex where culture, history and philosophy met, the Temple of Artemis was one of the most important edifices of its day, and arguably the most important. So it should have been no surprise to anyone when Herostratus burned it to the floor one night in 365 BCE.

  A mediocre man, Herostratus turned to destruction in his bid for immortality. The arson was deliberately engineered in an attempt to be remembered by posterity, which was where Herostratus went wrong. The point of destroying buildings is not to be remembered, nor to become the patron saint of the disaffected. Nor should it be for the simple pleasure of seeing things burn. The point is to destroy something people revere. This may or may not result in people thinking twice about taking things for granted. This may or may not result in people asking why.

  In the aftermath, Herostratus’s name was banned on pain of death by the city elders. Ironically, it was this censorship, rather than the act itself, which ensured his name would be remembered. The inhabitants of Ephesus circa 365 BCE were no less curious, stupid or dazzled by celebrity than we are today.

  Sadly for Herostratus, legend has it that on the same night in 365 BCE, not too far from Ephesus – in Macedonia, to be precise – a baby called Alexander was born.

  I like to imagine Herostratus on a ridge overlooking Ephesus, howling at the moon as the distant flames flicker across his deranged features. This is Man versus Space, Time and All Points Between, with Man coming home three lengths clear. This is Herostratus taking his place in a pantheon that includes Lucifer, Prometheus, Cain, Judas, Martin Luther, Kepler, Galileo and Darwin. This is simmering resentment boiling over, disaffection coming home to roost, hate crackling like bottled lightning. This is the natural or
der exacting retribution on the complacency that presumes to recline on a couch of innate superiority. This is Jimmy Cagney atop an oil derrick screaming, ‘Top o’ the world, Ma!’

  My line for today is an exercise in wishful thinking: There might be Herostratuses who would set fire to the temple where their own images are worshipped. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human)

  The old man has heard about Mrs McCaffrey. The rumour has slipped into his ward beneath the ebb and flow of aimless conversation to circle the foot of the beds, waiting for the unwary to dip a toe. The rumour has flicked its tail and glided out of the ward again, and the flicking tail has slapped the old man in the face. He appears gaunted, frightened. He is an old man adrift on a strange bed beneath which circles a rumour of premature oblivion.

  ‘I’m not ready to go yet, son,’ he says.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be worse if you were and couldn’t?’ I say. But he’s not listening.

  ‘What age was she?’ he says.

  ‘Eighty-one.’

  He does the math. The bushy eyebrows mesh as he concentrates. He has two years on her. This is of little consolation to a one-legged ex-mechanic who knows a thing or two about how all engines wear out in the end.

  ‘I played centre-back for Coolera the year we won the double,’ he says. His eyes take on a misty, faraway aspect. The thousand-year stare. ‘The summer of ’61,’ he says. ‘League and Championship, unbeaten in all competitions. For the final they switched me away from centre-back out to the right. Their best player played out there, and he was good and fast, but he didn’t score that day.’

  He says this proudly, speaking a little louder than usual. This is not for my benefit. This is so the rumours will hear and understand they are not dealing with any little old ladies this time.

  ‘What’s the one thing you most regret not doing?’ I say.

  He flinches. The dying are not immune to cruelty. ‘No regrets, son,’ he says, but the jaw muscles tighten beneath their frosting of stubble. Even the dying have their pride. The dying have little else.

  ‘When I was a youngster,’ he concedes, ‘I was at a game, I think my father might have been playing but I wasn’t old enough to be interested. I was just wandering around the field playing with a little motorcar, it was my older brother’s. And these knackers, four or five of them, about my age, they came out of nowhere and they wanted the motorcar. I shouldn’t have given it to them, it was my brother’s, but all I could think of was the four or five of them sitting on me and I could smell them, they made me sick. So I gave them the car. They went off laughing.’

  His eyes gleam with more than moisture. ‘I can still smell the fuckers now,’ he says. He looks up at me. ‘It was my brother’s car,’ he says. ‘He died eight year ago now.’

  I nod. ‘The mortality rate of the travelling community is significantly lower than that of the settled community,’ I say. ‘Those travellers are probably all dead now. When the time comes, you might even see them on the other side. And the thing about heaven is, you get to live through eternity the way you want to. You’ll probably wake up in heaven as a centre-back. When you do, go looking for those tinkers. Eternity’s a long time, you could go back every day and whale on the fuckers until it’s time for ambrosia and nectar elevenses.’

  ‘Where’d you hear that one, about living in heaven the way you want to?’

  ‘The Pope came out with it a few years ago,’ I lie. ‘In an encyclical, the time he abolished hell.’

  ‘I didn’t hear about that one,’ he says.

  ‘That’s because no one listens to the Pope anymore.’

  ‘Isn’t that the God’s truth?’

  I stand up. ‘Anything else you need?’

  ‘No thanks, son.’

  He hasn’t paid for the Dairy Milk and peach yoghurt yet, but I take the hit. I lean in, so no one else can hear. ‘Mrs McCaffrey died in a private room,’ I say. ‘So don’t worry about it. Patients in public wards have nothing to fear.’

  He looks up at me, frowning, his eyes pale-blue whirlpools of fear and indecision.

  The old are easily frightened. The old are the young turned inside out and upside down. The old are the young knowing more than any child should. The old remember what it is to be young, weak and terrified, and they do not have revenge fantasies to sustain them.

  The old know that bullies do not melt away when you fight back. The old have shuffled around to the rear of the bike sheds after school and are being kicked in the kidneys by Time, snivelling while Death slaps their face open-handed.

  The old have had their books stomped in a puddle once too often. The old have no big brothers who know ju-jitsu.

  The people we should be talking to are winos, milkmen, pest-control operatives, miners, bouncers, whores, thieves, cab drivers, ex-cops and the guy who gives out change at the amusement arcade.

  Ask those who can see in the dark. Practically all of the universe exists in a state of permanent night.

  When the insomnia beds in I walk the streets. I venture down unlit alleyways to slip and slide on the detritus of split refuse sacks, on offal waste, on the slime oozing up through cracks in the paving. I paddle in overflowing drains.

  I trip over a pair of outstretched legs. These legs belong to a tramp, a bum, a lush. A non-contributor.

  I do not wake him. He has been awake all along, watching me come.

  He scrambles to his feet and emerges into the faint orange light. His hair is matted, wild and grey. His eyes burn like embers. He is The Watcher, and he resents being watched. He makes threatening gestures, like a goose hooshing cattle.

  I stand my ground.

  He is foul-mouthed. He tries to roar but the raw wheeze suggests his vocal cords have seized for the want of social lubrication. His voice cracks. His face is the colour of jam sponge scrapings, the breath harsh as petrol. I smell methylated spirits.

  By now his face is nose-to-nose with mine. He is ranting, the cracked lips flecked with spittle. I hold my Zippo up to the side of his face. The flame allows me to see his eyes properly. The whites are jaundiced, the pupils dilated.

  He hesitates. He sputters to a halt. In the quietness that follows I hear an eerie high-pitched squeaking.

  ‘In an urban environment,’ I say, ‘the ratio of rats to humans is nine-to-one.’

  He stares. He croaks a foul imprecation that tails off halfway through. His shoulders slump, and the eyes narrow down into hard-cornered triangles.

  I allow the Zippo to flicker out. I hold up the cardboard beaker I am carrying in my other hand. I say, ‘Old man, how would a cup of hot coffee taste right now?’

  •

  ‘So now there’s an Angel of Death,’ he says, ‘and an Angel of Mercy?’

  ‘That’s the way it was,’ I say. ‘We don’t have to keep it that way.’

  ‘It’s too blatant,’ he says. ‘Too Jekyll and Hyde.’

  ‘So we scrap the Angel of Mercy?’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  I make a note. ‘Consider it done.’

  •

  Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

  Cassie, the flesh is an abomination. This is the logic of all religions, even the Buddhists, who consider themselves above and beyond religion.

  Religion demands that the flesh be mortified, mutilated, disowned and discarded.

  Yet I am flesh, Cassie, the flesh of flesh. Even now I can feel the blood ebbing through the capillaries of my flaccid penis, as tentative, as irrepressible, as the very first tide.

  Cassie, to reject the flesh is to reject a logic so implacable that it requires no explanation or justification. To wit: we were born to enflesh. We are our means to an end, and our end to our means. There is Fucking, then Everything Else.

  Think on this, Cassie: the scientists and priests agree that eternity exists. The scientists and priests agree on the theory of infinity. But only the priests pledge to abstain for all eternity. Only the priests resolve to set themselves against the implacable logic of the univer
se for so long as it exists.

  Cassie, have you the courage to join the dog-collared rebels on the barricades while they eternally rail against the will of their god?

  •

  ‘Anyone ever tell you,’ Billy says, ‘that you have serious issues with priests?’

  ‘It’s nothing personal. It’s more a zeitgeist thing.’

  He ponders that awhile. Behind him one of the carp, a flash of orange, breaks the surface of the pond and is gone again.

  ‘What are we supposed to be saying, though?’ he says. ‘That I was abused by a priest?’

  ‘Not explicitly, no.’

  ‘I don’t even know any priests,’ he says. ‘I mean, you never even gave me a childhood.’

  ‘Like I say, it’s not a personalised thing. It’s more to do with the idea of innocence being abused by religion.’

  ‘I’m only one man,’ he says. ‘There’s only so much I can shoulder. You don’t think you’re asking me to do too much here?

  ‘The truly great leaders,’ he adds, ‘had this notion where they’d never ask anyone to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves.’

  ‘Except I’m not leading you, Billy. We’re collaborating.’

  He smirks. It’s there and gone like a flash of carp, so fast I’m not even sure I’ve seen it.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What am I missing here?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ he says.

  ‘What was the smirk in aid of?’

  ‘Smirk?’

  ‘Yeah. You smirked.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Don’t fuck around, Billy. What are you not telling me?’

  He allows that to hang for a while, then reaches for the makings. ‘Let me ask you this,’ he says as he builds a smoke. ‘What colour were Karlsson’s eyes?’