by Liz Grzyb
While he played, she turned and found me, and gave a little wave as the concerto, taking flight, caused the radiolarian to do the same; shaking free of its moorings, rising on wings of song. I waved back happily as the roof parted and the living artwork rose—sign of this new age, the world that follows after nature is overcome, replaced by a new set of rules—a Freudian system, perhaps, or something else: the logic of art; why not?—thrilling but opaque, as impenetrable as we are to ourselves. It was leaving now, ascending into the lemonade sea, trailing bright music while I hung there, still in the conservatory, attending to the concerto—allegro vivaca caotico—which belonged to the cycle of concerti called in English the Four Seasons—it belonged to that cycle, but it was new too. The Fifth Season: the music of the endless, changeless, ever-changing season of the post-Anthropocene.
* * ** * ** * *
Broad Church
Tess Williams
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to Transubstantiate
—Tom Lehrer
As he enters the Tower of St Roch, Old Man Hendrik is surprised to hear someone sobbing. Dipping his fingers in the marble font, he flicks Holy Sea at his forehead and chest, then walks down the Nave to where the South Transept becomes visible. Yes, there’s the source of the noise, sitting in the Stang Chapel, blowing her nose on her shawl and enveloped by a cloud of shame over God-knows-what. He’s not happy about finding her there. Hendrik has seen a lot of trouble, and enjoyed not seeing it for some years now. The great upheavals of the world and his life are a long way behind him and he hasn’t so much as spoken to an outsider in at least a decade. How did she even get here, he wonders. Then he remembers the intermittent private ferry that runs between the flooded city of Old Melba and the Islands of the Tasman Archipelago. The tickets on that ferry aren’t cheap. She’s either rich or desperate.
She blows her nose on her shawl again, and Hendrik sees the grimy half-moons of her nails. Desperate. He sighs. Desperate, dirty people from flooded, dirty cities. There was too much of that in his early life. She’s likely sick in the head or dying from some disease he hasn’t had to think about in two generations of seclusion. Every part of him, except his instinct for duty, is telling him to do his meditations and go back to bed. But that young Deacon, Anderson, the one who usually deals with mainlanders, isn’t here right now. Maybe Sister St Kate in the Kitchen? No. She’s as deaf as a post so Hendrik will just end up out here with Dirty Fingernails again. Sighing deeply, the old man mutters a benediction for himself and walks into the tiny Chapel.
Dirty Fingernails is still crying, despite hearing his footsteps, so he places himself near her and waits. He hopes it won’t take too long and that she has organised a room at the Lodge until her return trip. As he waits he looks at the carvings in front of them. Sunlight turns the native celery pine gold as the stooping figure of the Great Mother embraces St Stang. St Stang is a small figure in rags, atop hundreds of carved animals trying to escape from torrents that sweep hundreds of others away. On the walls around them, fires burn in tiny mosaic tiles of red, yellow and orange: burning crops, burning forest, burning cities. He wonders if Dirty Fingernails is here for this, if it is perhaps a pilgrimage she is making. Some still do, but fewer now each year and he always manages to stay out of their way. Just as he thinks he might leave her to her private grief, he sees one eye looking at him. No. This is someone who needs to talk. But he’ll let her make the first approach.
Of course, the first thing Dirty Fingernails does is apologise for crying. Now Hendrik can see her face, he sees she is not the refugee he thought she might be. She shifts a well-made canvas bag onto the bench beside her and with shaking hands folds the shawl on top of it. Old silk. Quite a treasure. She’s not really dirty either; it’s the grime of travel on her. Her hair is professionally streaked with blonde and she is dressed in simple jacket and trousers with well-made canvas shoes that match the bag. The touch of eyeliner and lipstick is smudged but her face, apart from being tear-streaked, is unlined. For the first time in a very long time he wonders about the appearance he makes: his favourite but very faded robes, his rheumy old eyes, white unbrushed hair. His worn shoes. He takes a surreptitious look at his own nails.
He asks if she is all right. If he can help with anything.
She is rueful, apologetic. Yes . . . No . . . Actually it’s not her who needs help. Actually it is her who needs help . . . but it’s about her child. She needs to understand what she should do. Doesn’t really know where . . . To go . . . Who to speak to . . .
They both fall silent. Hendrik can see the struggle in her; she wants to tell him her problem and yet absolutely doesn’t want to tell it to anyone. There is a war going on somewhere inside her. Despite his years of seclusion, he is not finally proof against teardrops trembling on lashes. Maybe it’s the chapel, the sunlight on a golden martyrdom . . . his own memories of suffering he thought he’d laid to rest. Instincts to be of service die hard. He pats her arm with his leathered old hand. Her grateful smile is shaky.
Is the child ill? He asks but is careful of what he offers. Of course, if she is begging she has come a long way to do it and to an impoverished faith centre. Can Hendrik perhaps pray, he suggests. Intercede for the child in some way?
No, the child is not ill. Well, not exactly ill . . . but maybe ill. Because not exactly well either. And the mother might lose the child—him—or maybe not. It depends how you define loss. She’s not sure what the future of this child can be, or where she went so terribly wrong. She’s worried it will have a difficult and unhappy future. There are few faith centres in which to seek comfort on the mainland. Well, maybe the one dedicated to the two St Francises but she wanted to come somewhere she was not known. An aside: Does Hendrik know how busy they are in the Cathedral? Does he know faith centres now write referrals to hospitals and psychiatrists, she asks bitterly. And no one understands what the children are doing, and how can they want to make decisions like this? To change themselves so completely? To become something entirely different? The woman suddenly bursts into paroxysms of grief again and pulls at her own hair. How can her child do this? How can she have gone so terribly wrong!
* * *
Hendrik is taken aback by the fresh outburst. He’d thought they’d passed through the crying and were speaking, so he babbles a little to get her through the spasm. Yes, yes, he’s heard of growing numbers in the centres now they’ve changed the liturgy so much. More appropriate to the—what do they call it?—the post-climate-change world. But no . . . he didn’t know about the psychiatric referrals. That seems . . . odd.
The woman sniffs, then hunts around to blow her nose. Old Man Hendrik moves as fast as he can to save the silk shawl and produces a yellowed but clean handkerchief from his pocket. She mops her face and expresses appreciation.
As the howls subside, he gently asks the child’s name.
Between hiccoughs she starts from the beginning to explain how precious this boy is. How she had worked so very hard to save for the light of her life when she entered the contract for his future expenses. He was selected via a conception centre. The donor was agreed on, and everything was legal and sealed, despite the expense of the lawyers and paralegals. She knew everything had to be set up perfectly, so she had followed prescriptions and trends and even invested in a heritage expert, too. The expert had chased her forefathers back over a hundred and eighty years to Herbert Hanson. An immigrant accountant who had come to Old Melba by ship from England and begun a business that lasted until the terrible depression of 2020. Herbert: a name with history and promise. The name is common now, well liked, dignified and she even had a faded photo of the revered ancestor turned into a print for her son’s bed linen. She dabs wildly at her face with the handkerchief as she becomes more distressed again. But Herbert wants to change the name she gave him to . . . to . . . to Delphine! A wail goes up again and the face disappears into the handkerchief.
Hendrik feels that it was unfortunate that the woman has
placed so many eggs in a basket that would grow up to think independently, but he knows better than to make those kinds of observations. Also, he feels he is probably on firmer ground now. There was a lot of this when he was very young, over sixty years ago. Gender had been a bit of a muddle since the late nineteen hundreds really, a bomb with a fuse that extended throughout history and biology, which exploded in the late part of the twentieth century. Gender. Things got very scary for nearly fifty years there and lots of mistakes were made. Underneath it all was the long, long fight for equal rights, but then body control and interventions were a minefield too. First the gender reassignment maze: clearly doctors should not ever make decisions about intersex infants; lots of gender swapping and body conundrums—who was who and why and how much? The primitive, political bathroom access debates; fiendish ignorance about coercion and rape; utter ignorance of same sex love. In the end, Anti-Gutter press laws were brought in, social media guardians were appointed, and politicians and churches were disciplined, but not before a generation protested through ‘gender refusal’—shaved heads and universal Mao pyjamas. As soon as the children went to school they were taught by the older ones to practise solidarity. Jewellery did well at the time, fashion not so much. Hendrik finished his own community apprenticeship around that point and for four years worked with Amristav Krishnan in legally blocking the two-sex system. It suited him to be writing policy documents to enforce education service acceptance of the 26 genders chart and to advise on the establishment of free or assisted choice options on gender for everyone aged over twelve. That, of course had been while the worst of the weather damage was being done too, so there was personal trauma, but so much more. Hendrik had been at the forefront of both of those, with close friends fighting the abolition of dirty energy.
As he sits on the pew in the Stang Chapel, he realises he is drifting and brings himself back. He gently sympathises with the woman, but asks her about the legal documents she must have signed. Wasn’t the gender choice acceptance clause automatically present in the parenting contract? Did she need to see someone about it to have it explained legally? Or attend counselling or mediation with Herbert, perhaps?
What? The woman is appalled. What do you mean? Does Old Man Hendrik think she is a barbarian? Of course those clauses are in her child-rearing contract. Recognition of the fluidity of gender is also in her own social responsibility contracts, signed at sixteen! And never revised! It’s not about Herbert wanting to transition gender that brings her here. Herbert wants to transition species!
Hendrik blinks. He has been away from media and people for a long time. Surely this can’t be correct. He blinks again and focuses on the wooden carving of the Great Mother and St Stang. She is the patron saint of ecological protection. After losing the good fight, her bleeding feet perch precariously on rocks rising out of the ocean. But now he sees clearly that the rocks are not actually visible, they are formed from a pile of different animal bodies trying to join St Stang and claim protection from her. He sees a small bear has a claw piercing straight through the saint’s Achilles tendon, just above her bony heel. A possum desperately grips the arch of her foot, and a marmoset is linked—tiny feet and hands clasping each other—like a bracelet around her wrist. A small dog and cat are on the other foot, an iguana crawls up her bare thigh, its tail and legs seeming to disappear into her flesh, and a platypus emerges from her shoulder bone. Beneath her feet, ungulates struggle for footholds leaning against her thin legs, horns pierce the unhorned below, and young slip away from their mothers into the boiling flood. There is even a bedraggled bird sitting on the Great Mother’s shoulder. Hendrik has been looking at this statue for years, seeing the woman who was martyred for an ecosystem but never really understanding what that meant. Until this moment, he had never imagined the boundary between human and animal tearing like tissue paper, as once another boundary invested with absolute value had also torn.
Who would imagine? He mutters a small prayer and covers his face with his hand, feeling the droplets of Holy Sea still on his forehead. Who would imagine? He knows there is that part of him that is old and wants to hide behind the tried but likely to be untrue. He could repel this woman with her grimy fingernails and send her back over the strait, telling her it is her problem and not his. He could tell her that the child is acting out, is out of control, is wilful, wrong, not normal. He could heap blame on her and tell her that a deity that (of course) looks like a human won’t appreciate her child, because he is an abomination. But he can’t. In that moment, with his hand over his face he feels the receding pull of one wave of social resistance and the gathering storm of the next.
* * *
How do I do this, the woman asks him. I wanted a child not a dolphin! Old Man Hendrik listens, lets her educate his imagination.
Herbert had always loved swimming but she never thought it would lead to such a thing. He was on a top swim team. Showed real promise but always preferred the waters of the coast to the pools. No sprints for this boy; he wanted marathons. Very logical and liked science: she thought he might be a vet because he loved animals so much. Ha! Technical too—built an old fashioned Grandin Hug machine for his first high school project. So gentle, so musical, so playful, so funny! Apparently that is what dolphins are too, most of the time. There’s an odd sort of bitterness in her descriptions. Then there was an ocean study unit in mid-senior year and he met “like minded” people who wanted to live in the sea not just visit it. They formed a group, he became radicalised. He became radicalised! She doesn’t know him any more! He spends all his time with PEBA. People Ethically Becoming Animals. A big international group, from what she understands, but fringe and riddled with internal conflicts—particularly between non-mammalian supporters and the carnivores. While they mostly concentrate on hair transplanting, dental implants and some chemical scaling of skin, they have put Herbert in touch with surgeons who specialise in more extreme bod-mod. He’ll be the first to go full cetacean! This is a point where the woman breaks down again, but by now Hendrik is feeling quite moved and (glancing again at St Stang) wonders what a full cetacean bod-mod would be.
Complete depilation obviously, but that is only the beginning. Not only will that lovely mop of red hair be gone, but there will be major craniofacial change. This doctor has plans to relocate Herbert’s sinuses up through his forehead and recreate his nostrils on the back of his head. This will naturally make the space between his eyes wider. There will be artificial lengthening of fingers and toes and the insertion of webbing between them. No, they won’t join his legs, as that is too dangerous because he doesn’t have control over respiration and might need to kick strongly to swim out of tricky situations. Yes, one of the simpler things is that his penis will become retractable, into a specially constructed cavity. He is also being interfered with chemically to give his lungs more capacity and to raise his body temperature. He will be the doctor’s work of art! But he will no longer be the boy she loves! No, he won’t be completely aquatic—more amphibious, but she can’t see him enjoying his time on land very much if he can’t see directly in front of him and will be unable to find shoes to fit.
Hendrik wonders if there are any good things to be had from this situation, and the poor woman throws her shawl around herself and wonders that too. She can’t take much comfort in her son being a pioneer in species change surgery and becoming something she is completely unfamiliar with. Well, not completely unfamiliar, perhaps. Maybe in some ways this is better than him becoming something that frightens her with teeth and claws and, she supposes that Herbert might become bilingual and she will be able to have contact with citizens of the sea—something still considered a privilege. Hendrik wonders if there will be special attention for such a pioneer? Well, yes, there would be that too . . . The doctors will feel obliged to do the best they can and yes, Herbert will likely become a spokesman for the blue world, something beyond the bickering of PEBA. In fact, something much bigger. Apparently he’s already being invited to contri
bute to All Lives Matter working groups in the United Nations. But she dreads the responses, the hate speech. Doesn’t know if he would be able to take it. Doesn’t know if she could.
Hendrik thoughtfully suggests they take a warm drink as there is a chill in the chapel now, and his teary friend introduces herself as Magda. Together they walk across the beautiful hilltop to the retreat and stare out at the dark and choppy waters of the strait. Late in the day now, the water exudes an ominous gloom. Not a place either of them would want to live, that grey water, but Magda says Herbert won’t be there either as it has already been decided that he will be joining a pod off Hawaii. Open and stormy waters are probably not the best place for his experiment.
In the kitchen Hendrik brews rosehip and cinnamon tea and butters fresh scones. Sister St Kate is cooking a vegetable stew, but pays them little attention. Old Man Hendrik appreciates her deafness for the first time as he and Magda cement their friendship with a less distressed discussion on the changes in Old Melba. It is not at all what Hendrik remembers now—the canals are clean and smell briny, people have communal desalination plants and use the treated water in their basements for hydroponic vegetables. And, oh, recently tiny ornate bridges have been built between city blocks by the new Art ministry! Magda is in love with these and has photos of her favourites. Here, do look! On a more serious note, to own more than a studio now is considered ostentatious and motorboats have been complete anathema for nearly twenty years. Although Magda can’t remember it, they muse about the flood of fifty years ago being the inspiration for recreating the shattered and renamed city of Melbourne as the ‘New Venice’ of the South. My, what radical changes have come to all of them! Hendrik, normally refusing to recall his early years and preferring to live in a calm and isolated present, goes some way to sharing his ‘traumas of the times’. It’s part of a trauma he feels has been humanity’s somewhat dire adolescence, which has probably lasted a good two hundred years so far for the species. By the sounds of what is going on with Herbert, he suspects it might last a little longer. They laugh about the idea of Humanity finally gaining the dignity of age—it seems unlikely while they are alive.