The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  What happened to you last night? We were all sitting around in my backyard having a nice time and all of a sudden you were gone.

  I’m sorry.

  You just took off. Do you even remember how you got home?

  Sort of. Not really. I’m sorry. I went off the rails a bit.

  I don’t know why you’re apologizing to me. I am neither your conscience nor your liver. Emergency police, fire, or ambulance? What state and town is the emergency in? Connecting ambulance for Maryborough, Queensland. Do you want to talk about this off-the-rails business?

  No, I’m fine.

  Oh, fuck off. That’s such a don’t call me, I’ll call you response.

  I didn’t mean it to be.

  I mean, do you know you’re drinking too much?

  Only sometimes. It’s just. Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?

  Maeve was correct in saying that I had begun to drink as though I were hoping it might kill me. Nights when I couldn’t remember what I’d done, but my phone contained messages I couldn’t remember sending, half-formed, desperate, misspelled missives from a woman half wild. Mornings when I would wake up in the half-light of my bedroom and spend the next hours asking somebody else, often Maeve, to explain what had happened to me. Sometimes I would receive flashes through the fog—a rear car door opening, a face across a table, fingers in my hair. But sometimes I got nothing, and then I would face down the formless, dark thing that lived inside me, the thing that destroyed story.

  Blackouts happen when there’s so much alcohol in your blood that your body stops being able to store new memories. The larger narrative of your life is there. But nothing new, when you’re in that kind of state, gets incorporated into the framework. The right-now splinters away from your ability to record it. And so a person blacked out is living in the absolute present tense. When I drank, my responses became more visceral, activated by the baser instincts. My inhibitions dissolved. And on those nights of blackout I could stumble down quiet, dark streets, invite myself into the back seats of cars, scream at the face across the table, enjoy the strange fingers playing with my hair. I could abandon the everyday project of my safety.

  I’m sorry, I told her. I’ll do better.

  “It is impossible to imagine a more desolate region,” Oxley wrote in his journal in 1817. “And the uncertainty we are in, whilst traversing it, of finding water, adds to the melancholy feelings which the silence and solitude of such wastes is calculated to inspire.”

  Oxley was in a bad place. He was not of sound mind. The horses had died. Food had become scarce. They survived on bush rats and bandicoots. One night, when his men were starving, they managed to catch and kill a dingo. The party gathered together and roasted it over the fire, and although the men said it didn’t taste too bad, maybe a little like mutton, Oxley retreated to his tent. He could not bring himself to eat it.

  A dingo was, for him, an indignity too far.

  One night in this hallucinatory nightmare he had wandered into, as the hope died and his dreams flailed, Oxley heard shouting and barking. In the distance, along the edge of the dark, he could make out the figure of a running man. The dogs chased after the figure. They attacked. It was the only Aboriginal man the party had seen in weeks. He was a man six feet tall, with a long beard, and “no arms of any kind.”

  The weekend before Maeve left, we drove north and stayed overnight in a campsite somewhere near the mouth of the Hawkesbury River. On the radio the news discussed the likelihood that it had been “kids,” by which they meant “boys,” who had been responsible for starting at least some of the recent spot fires. We drove north through Ku-ring-gai, along the dark lightless roads where once I remembered the national parks service telling my mother and me to turn back. The bush we drove through had been burned once, and had long since regrown. As we drove, Maeve remarked on how eerie it was, how dark and silent the country. There were stars, but no streetlights. Eucalyptus and ocean in the dark blue of distance. You’d get murdered out here, said Maeve.

  When we arrived at the campsite the light had already faded and neither of us had the wherewithal to pitch two tents. We stopped after we’d assembled one, and prayed for a windless night. We opened a bottle of gin, and listened to the car radio with the passenger door open. We had decided that this trip was the thing we should do to celebrate my leaving, and hers.

  We should go to bed early, she said, if we want to be up for the dawn.

  Maeve slept in the tent but I preferred to sleep in the car. In the dark I could see the light upon the river. I thought the sound of the water would lull me to sleep, but stretched out on the back seat I couldn’t get comfortable. My rolled-up cardigan made a poor pillow, and the sound of the cicadas was deafening. I watched Maeve in the tent from the car window. Making sure she was safe.

  ____________

  In the morning I was woken by banging and shouting. It was barely dawn, a thin blue light. The cicadas were gone, or muffled, perhaps, by the smacking on the windows.

  I shot up.

  Maeve was tugging on the locked door behind my head.

  When I pulled up the catch she flung open the door and threw her arms around me. What’s wrong? I asked. She was breathing hard. I thought you were dead, she heaved into my hair. In the tent she had only half-slept, and in the half sleep she had heard somebody come for me in the car. Lying there in the tent, she was paralyzed, there was nothing she could do. She was stuck inside her own limbs. She was unable to cry out, or run to me. She came out of the paralysis shouting, unzipped the tent, and came fast at the car. She was wearing only underpants and an old T-shirt, her bare feet in the eucalyptus dirt luminescent in the gray light. The Oaxacan heart on her wrist stood out sharply on her pale skin, as though to sloganeer the savagery of love.

  A nightmare, I said. I stroked her hair.

  I know, she breathed.

  She opened the door to the passenger seat, crawled in, and closed the door. She dozed while I lay back down, unable to sleep on the rolled-up cardigan.

  In time, I edged myself quietly from the back seat and walked down to the water’s edge. The river flowed east.

  The river stretched out still and windless, the trees closed in. I wrapped my cardigan around my body. The tide was restless and dark. A cloudiness that was unappealing. I could not see the bottom. I remembered the stories I had heard, of the sharks that trawled the mouth of these waters. We would not be swimming. It was too cold. Too muddy. We had come up here for nothing, I thought. We had supposed that we would enact some kind of baptism, some final rite of friendship before we both left. But we had fucked it all up. The sun had already risen.

  Watching bodies of water is soothing, I told myself. Just watching it might be enough. Watching the tide is like watching something broken trying to make itself seem whole.

  When Maeve woke we drove out of the national park and back to the highway. We rolled the windows down, and as we approached higher ground the car radio began to pick up FBi and we began to see signs of different lives.

  We stopped in a roadside McDonald’s and brushed our teeth in the bathroom. We ate hash browns and drank bad coffee at sticky tables. Children screamed in the parking lot and we listened to them instead of talking to each other.

  He and I sat shoulder to shoulder on a bench at the top of a hill with the entire city stretched out below us in the dark. A bottle of red wine passed between hands. Lachlan slid back, his legs spread wide. His hair was unruly and standing up in tufts. He seemed distracted, as though perhaps he didn’t want to be there. And I wondered why he didn’t want to be, since he was the one who had asked me to come out.

  Are you OK? I asked.

  Yes. Why?

  I don’t know. You seem. Something.

  I’m fine. Are you?

  Sure. I exhaled. I took a swig from the bottle.

  Lately he had been telling me about the great loves and hates of Patrick White. White had listed them, once, in preparation for a portrait sitting. Lachlan
had them pinned above his desk on the wall. White had loved reading, uncluttered landscapes, sex, whisky, and the thought of an Australian republic. He had hated writing, insomnia, noise, motels, talkback radio, and “the overgrown school prefects from whom we never escape.”

  In turn, I told him about things I had written down in the notebook. I told him, for instance, that throughout most of history, Chinese scholars were obliged to study and commit to memory the Mandate of Heaven. The text, very ancient, justified the rule of the emperor. One could tell when heaven had withdrawn its mandate, for there would be a flood, a fire, an earthquake, or a storm. Until the very end of the empire it was standard practice for the emperor to issue an edict of remorse and self-criticism after a natural disaster befell the country.

  Why do you know all of this stuff about disaster?

  I just pick them up at work, around the emergencies. Fun facts.

  Fun.

  Interesting.

  We’re out of wine.

  I guess so.

  There’s a pub on the corner down there, he said. Come on.

  We left the bench.

  We can go back to mine?

  I nodded, and followed him, lagging behind, keeping track of the back of his head, the stretch of his shoulders bearing back down the hill towards Newtown.

  We made our way through the higgledy-piggledy warren of the smokestacks and the rusty corrugated iron. You know, I said, passing through the shadows, when I was younger I would skip school and just walk around. I used to come to this park. I’d sit over there in the grass, reading Lawrence Durrell or Dylan Thomas or something. Hoping somebody interesting would speak to me.

  He looked at me with an expression that indicated he wasn’t uncharmed, which I suppose was what I had been aiming for. Did they?

  Speak to me? No, nobody ever did. Not about the books, at least. I was very plain when I was a teenager.

  The lights flashed red across my skin as we approached the neon sign of the pub across the road from the park. The smell of spilled beer was carried on the current through the open doors. “Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies,” read the sign in the blacked-out window. I don’t believe that you have ever been plain, he said.

  In 1951 Patrick White went out in a storm and slipped in the mud. There, on the ground, cursing God, he suffered a moment of ecstasy in which he at last apprehended the divine. But it was not just God he discovered down there in the mud. God was tied up with the man he loved. They were almost indistinguishable from each other. “My inklings of God’s presence are interwoven with my love of the one human being who never fails me,” White said. Manoly Lascaris, the love of his life, was the man who had saved him from loneliness. The worst suffering imaginable was loneliness. But, like love, God could be only apprehended in fragments, as “the result of a daily wrestling match, and then only by glimmers, as through a veil.” There was both sting and salve to suffering, although, White observed, “I have always found in my own case that something positive, either creative or moral, has come out of everything I have ever experienced in the way of affliction.”

  A game of NRL played on the mounted televisions above the bar. There were sticky floors, pokies flashing in the corner, and tiled walls for the better resonance of misery. The nonstop beautiful ladies had taken their neon smiles and glitter and gone home for the night. The remaining clientele were by then all male, suffering in their loneliness at half past eleven on a Tuesday.

  A witchy shape of advanced age stood by the bathroom walls. She wore a long skirt and neat blouse, with a big carpetbag slung across her shoulder. She swayed a little. I watched her as Lachlan bought another bottle of wine from the bar. When she thought nobody was looking she grabbed what she could from the empty tables about her, angling everything down her jowly throat, but sort of sideways. I saw her leave by a back entrance while Lachlan counted out change. I had liked her and wanted her to stay.

  Come on, he said.

  In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed. The ground shook, the buildings fell, the water trembled and broke its banks and drowned the unlucky. Shortly afterwards, John Wesley noted that it was clear that God had chosen All Saints Day to rain down retribution on the Portuguese because of their stubborn fealty to Catholicism. They had brought destruction on themselves. By his reasoning, God had chosen to punish Portugal for its idolatry, and who was Wesley, or anybody else, to send aid or prayers to ease the suffering He had meted out.

  Lachlan and I spoke at cross-purposes, but there was a common thread I can now detect in our fun facts, our anecdotes. The world was cruel and beautiful, and we longed to have it justified. He, in pinning down the life of a man’s mind in the unreadable prose of a doctoral thesis. I, by the sheer accumulation of information. We both supposed, deep in the most hopeful parts of our selves, that such projects might help us build a kind of life raft we could float on together when the flood arrived.

  ____________

  We stepped out of the alcove and walked down King Street, past the shuttered cafés and dress shops and the bikes chained to the wrought iron of rented terraces. By a yellow building that sold furniture by day, we took a left.

  From a bench by the ornamental grasses a hand emerged from the darkness. It clamped around my wrist. I turned.

  Because she was partly obscured by the long grass, I hadn’t noticed the old woman from the pub as we had walked by. But she was there, looking up at me. Her fingers were very white and the blue veins bulged against bone. She was small. Her hair was escaping its bobby pins and she sat with her ankles crossed like a schoolgirl in the front row of a class photograph. Her eyes were too big in her face.

  Look at your hair, she said.

  I smiled at her and said, Thank you. Lachlan hovered at my shoulder.

  Titian. The color of your hair is called titian, she said. Do you know titian? It’s very rare, that color. And oh, it’s just beautiful. That color. That’s the right word for hair like yours. The artist, Titian, that’s what it’s named after. Because, see, he painted women with glorious red hair. Just like yours. She wouldn’t let go of my wrist.

  I felt Lachlan shift his weight from one knee to the other as he watched the woman speak to me. Her voice had the same frightened tremor as the women who called Triple Zero in the middle of the day.

  Looking closer, I could see the egg yolk dried in long drips down her skirt. She had fitted a button of her blouse into the wrong hole. It made the fabric gape just under her breasts, where I could see the edge of a dirty white bra and a stretch of soft flesh shot through with broken blood vessels.

  Her grip tightened. She looked right into me.

  That kind of hair signifies fire, you know. I nodded as she spoke. Lachlan put his hand on my arm and gently pulled me away, out of the woman’s grasp. I smiled at her, as though to reassure her. She didn’t blink. A smell of unwashed wool and beer floated in the air.

  I can read your past, you know. Let me tell you.

  But we were already walking away. Her voice rose. I had made her cross.

  Charlatans and whores, the lot of you. Pack of bastards. Here, though. Listen to me. Titian? He painted Mary Magdalene with red hair. Because she was a whore. Ah, go on. You’ll see. The future is coming and it doesn’t look good.

  We turned the corner and continued down the thin street full of terraces and trees. I looked back. But I couldn’t see her. There was only tall ornamental grass rippling in the wind and the yellow streetlights.

  Christ, said Lachlan. You get a lot of attention.

  There are many notable dead seas of the interior. There is, for starters, the Salton Sea, the incidental fuckup of a 1905 irrigation project designed to connect the Imperial Valley to the Colorado River, which caused such high salinity in the water that the birds and fish began to die. If you encounter a dust cloud when near the Salton Sea, do not breathe in.

  Then, too, there is the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world. But the Soviets wanted to grow melons and ric
e. They diverted the waters. Instead of a sea we now have the Aralkum Desert. Winds have lifted toxic dust from the Aralkum and scattered it across the globe. Scientists have detected Aralkum dust in the blood of Antarctic penguins.

  Meanwhile in Africa, water hyacinths began to grow on Lake Victoria. The hyacinths spread like smallpox. Soon the fish below the surface suffocated. More than five hundred species were chased into extinction. Now boats float in fields of hyacinths. The lake is dead, and so are the fish beneath. But observers note that the corpse looks beautiful.

  When he closed the door of the room he pushed me up against the wall, pulled my tights down to my thighs, put his fingers inside me. My knees gave out. Overcome by lust, or love, or both. An ill-fated lifebuoy, this figment of a man I’ve named for a hopeless river. You can’t come inside me again. He covered my mouth with his hand. Our shoes were still on. There were no lights in his bedroom and I could not see the shape of the room around us. I want to be the reason you make those noises. He bit my earlobes and my neck. He bit my nose. I came, still pressed against the wall. We pressed against each other. Heaving. And wet. Everything wet, and engulfing us.

  In his very last interview with a television crew from the ABC, Patrick White was asked, “How important is love to life?”

  “It’s all important—but not lust.”

  “What type of love is important?”

  “Affection, I think. Yes, affection.”

  “Do you have any expectations left?”

  “No. To die comfortably, to die in my own bed. Not in the bath.”

  ____________

  I would like you to know that when I die, I would not mind going out in the bath. Bath, swimming pool, ocean. I don’t care. I only ask that you please let the water take me.

  From way back in the past we can begin to see things clearly. Zoom back. Take stock. Acquire some much-needed distance.