Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  I take a well-earned coffee break. I casually mention to Maura behind the canteen counter what I have heard about rats chewing through brake hoses. Maura is suitably aghast. Before I leave the canteen I have seen her tell the story to three customers. This is a method of mass communication only slightly less effective than skywriting. Up, up and away. Go tell the Spartans, etc.

  My line for today is, When you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through. (Charles ‘Hank’ Bukowski)

  I meet Frankie for a pint after work. We play some pool in an upstairs pool-hall, betting on the outcome of each frame, double-or-nothing each time.

  ‘Frankie, man, you’re sharking me over here. You’re a fucking hustler. Paul fucking Newman, man.’

  Frankie is a big man, muscled and hulking, but he has a surprisingly delicate touch with a cue. I like him. Despite his obvious limitations, which include a deprived socio-economic background, Frankie is ambitious. He always has a plan.

  Frankie wins six games on the bounce. I concede and shake his hand, in the process palming the ounce of dope. ‘Call it quits. What d’you say?’

  Frankie is agreeable. He has just scored a couple of weeks worth of low-grade bliss. In the process he has implicated himself in the tragic elimination of my supervisor. Should the truth about tampered brakes emerge, Frankie cannot take to the witness stand, unless it is to confess to gross negligence. He would have to admit to a dereliction of duty in the pursuit of illegal narcotics, behaviour unlikely to impress prospective employers.

  We go downstairs. The pints are on Frankie. He tells me about his latest plan, which is to translate his experience at the hospital into a company that will provide security staff for bars and nightclubs. The pitch is that the cost of employing Frankie’s well-trained bouncers will be less prohibitive than paying out insurance claims to customers who have been manhandled by delinquent primates. He has been to the bank, laid out the business plan, and all lights are green bar one tiny hitch: Frankie needs to go back to college. He needs a piece of paper that says he understands management theory, basic accounting, tax laws, etcetera, ad nauseum.

  Frankie’s dilemma is that he can’t afford to take two years out to go to college, but he can’t afford not to either. His girlfriend and future life partner, Joanne, is not an especially demanding woman, but Frankie wants to achieve security and respectability on her behalf. Joanne’s interpretation of security and respectability includes a three-bed suburban semi, at least one car in the driveway and a non-negotiable one fortnight per year in sunnier climes. Aspirations such as these require cold cash, or at least the illusion of cold cash that lending institutions create.

  Thus Frankie’s ambitions are reduced to hard currency. This is the process by which Frankie will be brought to heel. This is how Frankie becomes a meek cog in a machine that despises both meekness and cogs.

  ‘What about you?’ he says. ‘Anything cooking?’

  He asks this because the income of a hospital porter is insufficient to qualify as adequate by the modern world’s expectations, which appear to be index-linked to inflation. Thus I should be plotting my escape. It does not occur to him that such a question would be offensive to a hospital porter who believed he was providing an invaluable service to society by taking on a job no one else wants. Sacrifice is passé. There’s no percentage in martyrdom these days, in the Western world at least.

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘I’ve enough on my plate working out how to blow up the hospital.’

  ‘Blow it up?’

  ‘Blow it up, close it down – what’s the fucking difference?’

  He nods. ‘It’s some fucking dump, alright. Once I’m gone those fuckers can kiss my hairy hole.’ He sups again, frowning. ‘Y’know, I can’t think of anyone who wants to be working there. Not one fucking person. You’d only be doing them a favour if you blew it sky-high.’

  ‘Apparently a building that size only needs to move four or five feet in any direction. Gravity does the rest.’

  He nods, drains his pint, then looks into the glass as he swirls the creamy head around the bottom. ‘Want to go again?’

  Cassie has book club tonight, so I nod. ‘My twist,’ I say. ‘Put your money away, Frankie. Your money’s no good here.’

  The pints arrive. I toast him. ‘Here’s to going back to college.’

  ‘To blowing up the hospital.’

  We touch glasses and drink deep.

  I stagger in from the pub, roll a joint, get some Cohen on the stereo. Open a fifth of McKinty. Now, now I am home. Here with Cohen and Bukowski, Waits and Genet – this is where I live, here is where I belong, horizontal in the gutter of intentional squalor, desperate to ingratiate myself with those who have lived in the shadows, in the margins, in italics, in extremis.

  Cohen and God have this much in common: I am vaguely aware that I owe them something significant for a gift they did not necessarily intend me to receive, and I am helpless in the face of my inability to repay them.

  I suck down a lungful of pure Thai, feel it blossom like ink in water. I press play on the stereo. ‘Is This What You Wanted’ lurches to its feet, Cohen’s voice that of a cancer patient girding his loins for yet another blast of chemo. The voice is the very articulation of humanity: a monotonous procession of shackled grace notes hinting at the impossible wish to negate the contradiction of consciousness, which is to be alive and still hope to be pure.

  Cassie and I bring her niece to feed the swans. The morning is bright and sunny, the river gleaming, sinuous. Cassie’s niece is named for the heroine of a Russian novel. With all the impertinent innocence of those who have yet to learn that the world demands, on pain of persecution, a homogeneity of signifier and signified, Anna calls the swans ‘Pollys’. Innocence is yet another manifestation of purity, and Anna’s high-pitched squeals, as she throws shreds of bread to the impervious Pollys, are all the more delightful for the impending pollution of that innocence. Innocence, purity and beauty evoke the same sensation in the aware observer: awe shot through with a frisson of impending catastrophe, like freshly squeezed orange juice cut with the blade of an early morning vodka.

  But where are we? We are not standing on the bank of the Garavogue, thrilling to the sharp scent of cut grass. We are not half-blinded by the glare of a rising sun reflecting off the river. We are not anticipating the imminent disaster that attends all manifestations of beauty, purity and innocence. There are no Pollys, no nieces named for Russian heroines, no Cassie. We are at home, where we belong, in the gutter of intentional squalor.

  But where are we, really?

  The soundtrack is that of Cohen’s ‘New Skin for the Old Ceremony’, but can we depend on soundtracks to root our perceptions of reality? Surely the point of art is to diffuse reality, to make it more acceptable, perhaps even digestible. Is it possible to slum it with Cohen and Bukowski and still smell the cut grass, to hear bubbles of childish glee float away across the river on the clear morning air?

  Of this I know as much as you. There are times when the only rational answer is ‘Maybe’. In an infinite universe, anything is possible, including God.

  ‘New Skin’ finishes with ‘Leaving Green Sleeves’ just as the windows begin to grey behind the blinds, just as countless nieces named for Russian heroines wake in anticipation of feeding the Pollys, just as countless millions rise from their beds with all the urgency of Cohen’s voice, those millions whose day-to-day existence is a relentless course of emotional chemotherapy, those billions who do not have the luxury of deciding whether or not to slum it, to choose squalor over beauty, to lie horizontal in the gutters or recline on the cushions of comfort.

  The only honest question is this: do you choose pain or oblivion?

  The only sane, reasonable answer is: maybe.

  A brief list of creatures who have repeatedly survived the mass extinctions that have claimed up to 80 percent of all living material:

  sharks

  roaches

/>   spiders

  beetles

  snakes

  crocodiles

  bacterium

  None of the above are prospective Teddy Bear material. None of them lend themselves to the kind of cuddly anthropomorphism that might inspire a young child to take a giant stuffed roach, say, to bed at night. A croc is a croc, even in Peter Pan. A snake is a snake, even in The Jungle Book. The merchandising spin-offs to DreamWorks’ Shark Tale failed to meet expectations.

  True survivors inspire fear, revulsion and disgust. Primo Levi might well have confirmed the truth of this for us, but alas, Primo is no more.

  Thus, this: our mission is to inspire fear, revulsion and disgust.

  My line for today is, Nothing could be decently hated except eternity. (Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard)

  The one-legged mechanic returns. While he was away he signed up for health insurance, which allows him to request a private room. This may or may not be a green light. This may or may not be an old man waving a white flag. This may or may not be a red flag to yours truly, I, Karlsson.

  A rainbow arcs out over the hospital. A spectrum of possibilities presents itself for examination, X-ray and dissection. Each must be investigated. We cannot afford to draw hasty conclusions here. A man’s life is at stake.

  I wheel my cart into his room. He appears to have shrunk and hardened. He has balled himself into a fist to shake at the world, charged with adrenaline and poised between fight or flight. The eyes are shelled peas, his pallor faintly olive. He is glad to see me.

  ‘Ah, the writer.’ Alone in the private room, he has removed his dentures, so that his mouth wobbles loosely when he speaks. ‘How’s that story coming on, son?’

  ‘It didn’t work out.’ I shrug. ‘In any other circumstance I’d say it was good to see you again.’

  He grins ruefully. ‘What can you do, son? The mind thinks one thing and the body goes ahead and does what it wants to do.’

  I allow a respectful moment to pass. ‘Has it spread?’

  He taps his knee with the butt of his palm. ‘They don’t know. They say I should be showing signs of progress and they have me back in for tests.’

  ‘What is it they’re looking for?’

  ‘I’m probably best off not knowing.’

  This is a hospital accountant’s wet dream: a relatively healthy patient who possesses insurance and is unconcerned as to the outcome of an indefinitely prolonged series of expensive examinations.

  ‘Want me to ask?’ I say. ‘If you change your mind, I can probably find out.’

  He shakes his head. ‘No news is good news, son.’

  He sticks with the peach yoghurt and Dairy Milk, reaches for the battered leather purse on the bedside locker. I wave him off. ‘Consider it a welcome-back gift.’

  ‘Appreciate it, son.’

  I wheel my cart out of his room. The corridor is ablaze with red rags, green lights, white flags. The blood pounds in my ears. Tomorrow I bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age.

  Maybe.

  •

  ‘Remind me,’ Billy says, ‘that we need to get a letter from the old man. For Cassie, like.’

  ‘You’re going to bump him off?’

  ‘I don’t know. I like the guy. Being honest, I don’t want him to go.’

  ‘Even if he wants to?’

  ‘That’s his choice, sure. But I don’t have to be the one who makes it happen.’

  ‘True.’

  He sips his cappuccino, leaving a little frothy moustache on his upper lip.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘about the whole blowing up the hospital thing.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, most books come in around ninety or a hundred thousand words. We’re nearly halfway there already and we still haven’t come up with a plausible plan.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve been leaving it with you.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ He tugs at the tip of his nose, then discovers the creamy cappuccino moustache and wipes it away. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘how would you feel if I went ahead and wrote that up myself?’

  ‘Sound, no problem. Just so I know there’s something happening.’

  ‘What I mean is, I write those sections up, then deliver them to you when we’re finished.’

  ‘How do you mean, when we’re finished?’

  ‘When the book’s done.’

  ‘What’re you talking about, Billy? The whole point of redrafting is to blow up the hospital. I can’t write around that not knowing what you’re saying. It’d be a train-wreck.’

  ‘Call it an experiment,’ he says.

  ‘In wrecking trains, yeah.’

  ‘I hear you, man. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  He glances away, and suddenly I realise what the problem is. ‘You think I’m going to steal your idea?’ I say. ‘You think I’m going to plagiarise you?’

  ‘You’ve never come up with anything like it before,’ he says.

  ‘Leaving the ethics of it aside,’ I say, ‘and saying I do steal your idea, what’s to stop you pulling another trick like putting Rosie in the shed? Or maybe dropping her in the pond this time?’

  An angry flash in the Newman-blue eye. ‘I won’t tell you again,’ he says. ‘I didn’t put Rosie in any fucking shed.’

  ‘I didn’t do it. And Debs damn sure didn’t do it.’

  He stares. Then he shakes his head, disappointed.

  ‘So who put Rosie in the shed?’ I persist. ‘There’s no way she could have crawled all the way out there herself.’

  He shrugs, then gathers together his notebooks and pen, his papers, and packs them away in his satchel. ‘You’re a fucking nutcase,’ he says, getting up. He touches his fore and middle fingers to his lips, then waggles them at me. A catch in his throat. ‘Give Rosie a kiss from Uncle Billy.’

  Then he slouches away across the decking and disappears behind the stand of bamboo.

  Three days pass with no sign of Billy. I believe he is sulking and will return when he realises he needs me more than he needs his self-pity.

  After a week, though, I start to wonder if he’s ever coming back.

  This leaves me contemplating a half-finished redraft, which is akin to going to work in my underwear for the rest of my life. Who wants to be found dead in only their underwear?

  A half blown-up hospital isn’t much of a metaphor.

  Debs arrives from the doctor’s with Rosie’s test results.

  ‘Asthma,’ she says. She is dangerously calm.

  ‘Shit. That young?’

  ‘The doctor asked how often we dust and hoover. I said it was every week or so.’ This is a lie. The C-section means Debs can’t hoover, or dust anything over shoulder height, which in turn means the house hasn’t been properly dusted since Rosie was born. ‘And she asked if either of us smoke.’

  ‘You know I’ve only ever smoked upstairs.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. She says anywhere in the house is bad news.’

  ‘So it’s my fault?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of blame, it’s how we can help Rosie now. Which means you stop smoking or only smoke outside. You know which one I’d prefer,’ she adds.

  ‘I can’t write without smoking. You know this.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘To you, maybe.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to convert the shed or something.’

  ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘A baby with asthma. That’s serious.’

  ‘Okay, yeah. I hear you. I’ll take a look at the shed and see if it’ll work.’

  She says something about the cost of medicines, but all I can hear is a rushing in my ears, a wheezing become a whirlwind roar.

  The following morning I’m up at the hospital early, heading for the smoking area where the porters congregate for their pre-work toke.

  Billy joins me as I leave the car park, appearing from nowhere to fall in beside me.

  ‘Apology accepted
,’ he says.

  He seems different. Something weary about him.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I say.

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Austin.’

  ‘No. What about him?’

  ‘Topped himself, didn’t he?’ Bitterness leaking like a toxic spill. ‘Took this big fucking scissors . . .’ He tilts his chin in the air, pulls his fists together under his Adam’s apple. ‘Nearly sliced his fucking head off, they reckon.’

  ‘Fuck, Billy.’

  ‘Fuck won’t cover it, man. Fuck won’t even nearly cover it.’

  ‘You can’t hold yourself––’

  He wheels around under the walkway connecting the old and new hospital buildings. ‘He didn’t go topping himself while he had a fucking job, did he? Happy as a pig in shite, he was, smoking his fucking head off. And where is he now? Fucking nowhere, that’s where he is.’

  A choke in his throat, the Newman-blue eye glittering.

  ‘Billy . . .’

  ‘I can’t deal with this right now,’ he says. ‘Just . . . I don’t know.’ He turns away, sucks down a deep breath. ‘I just can’t deal with it.’

  ‘Okay.’ I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s fine. Get back to me whenever you think you’re––’

  He shakes off my hand and takes a step or two away. Then he stops, takes another deep breath. ‘It’s not just Austin,’ he says, without turning around.

  ‘What is it?’

  Even from behind I can see him swallow hard. He pats the pockets of his jacket, comes up with a folded piece of paper. ‘Here,’ he says, holding it out. Its creases are worn brown.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s, uh, it’s Cassie.’ He turns. Tears stream down his face, both sides, from the empty socket behind the eye-patch too. His face wizening like a Tayto packet exposed to flame.