by Luke Carman
When Dr Young asks me why I’ve reverted to smoking, I’ll say that the nicotine makes a nice oscillation in the dulled Paroxetine calm. His owl-wide eyes will be on me, as he leans over his notes, and he’ll know I’ve rehearsed this answer, as always, in some pre-emptive attempt to seem worthy of salvation.
I can’t see my brother any longer, he’s a vague movement in the dark. Far to the south of the city, my father is sleeping in his little room, attached to a monitor strapped round his chest which reads his pulse in the night. We are all attached to our little lives, and it is right to keep clinging on. But, like any addict, the former lunatic must keep abreast of uncommon rhythms, tics and changes in pressures around the head and in the chest. I go in when the smoking is done and look across the threshold of my room. I hit the switch but its wires have become crossed, no light comes on and the room remains dark. To no one, I say aloud the strange lines of a Pink Floyd song that always make me happy, replacing only one word for my own amusement: ‘There’s no dark side of the room, not really, as a matter of fact, it’s all dark.’ This is not much of a joke, but it’s a sign of life, and, as ever, that is enough for now.
FATHER AND SON
After my son was born his mother and I spent nights watching over his cot, patting his back while he cried and wriggled and dozed and woke again. The floorboards outside his room were creaky, and we learned to step with such a slowness of motion as we left his room that it sometimes seemed as if we weren’t moving at all. Were the boards to creak despite our sly stepping, his eyes would shoot open, a piercing wail would sound, and we’d rush back into the room and pat and rub the strange crying creature we’d created until he surrendered again to sleep.
Just outside his bedroom, where the boards were most sensitive, was an IKEA bookshelf where a collection of classics with decaying covers my wife had inherited from her paternal grandmother was kept. On one occasion, as I was leaving his room at a glacial pace, I grabbed a title from the array of decrepit spines and opened the book up to discover it was Gogol’s Taras Bulba. I hesitated outside the doorway long enough to read the opening scene where the old Cossack, Bulba, greets his two sons with insults and jeers upon their return from the Academy in Kiev. The older son responds by threatening to punch his father in the head, and a donnybrook between them erupts. The mother – fat, kind and ugly – shrieks from the doorway, ‘Look, good people! The old man has gone mad – he’s pummelling them!’ Bulba tells his wife to shut her gob while the men are bonding, and after a few blows to the ribs and head, father and son embrace each other, and a feast is ordered amidst a flurry of kisses. Despite Gogol’s claim following this scene that men like old Bulba ‘could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century’, it did not take much of an imaginative leap to see the mad Cossack as a close analogy for my own old man. While I was not yet a Bulba myself, the thought that one day, the fitful, chubby creature in the cot behind me might want to rain proverbial blows upon my head in some suburban driveway was terrible to contemplate – the thought of wanting to strike him back even worse. Just at that moment, my weight shifted, and the boards beneath me creaked. My son’s mind-bending cry erupted from the darkness of his room, and all thoughts except rushing to his aid and patting him back to sleep were obliterated.
In those early months and years, my wife and I were coated with dried drool and milk stains, the bins were overloaded with nappies, and a purchase from IKEA was interminably being assembled somewhere in the house for the growing child’s amusement. Too tired to read, let alone write, we watched television, slumped into each other on the couch like a beanbag of body parts, straining to hear the muttered dialogue over the constant radio static of the baby monitor. What little social life we had was soon reduced to trying to listen to visitors speak while a toddler crawled over our faces. It got worse, of course, when his mother and I split up, and for the next few years I’d get up early, fold up the futon of whatever spare room I happened to be living in at the time, drive out to my wife’s house through the drudge of peak-hour traffic, and take over my son’s care while she went off to work at the university.
I was always up for games, and tried to be a playful father, but after three laps of chasing my son around the kitchen table, my heart and lungs began to give out, while his stubby legs kept pumping from out the holes in his nappy, until he would overtake me, and I’d collapse into a chair, telling him between gasps of exhaustion to go on without me. I have never liked sunshine much, but on grey enough days we’d go out to the park and kick the ball. It always ended up in a tree or down a drain, and my boy would look at me with disappointment as I reminded him that I had an antipathy to heights and an aversion to enclosed spaces. Some days we attempted field trips, but more often than not we’d come to the foyer of some museum or the aquarium in the city to discover that I didn’t have the dough to get us in, and we’d circle back while I explained that whatever we’d come to see would have likely been underwhelming anyway. I deployed cultural criticism to save money – circuses and zoos mistreated animals, museums had colonial associations, Hollywood movies were propaganda for American exceptionalism, electronic devices were peddled by manipulative technocrats, and sugary foods were toxins perpetuated by corrupt corporations – but he learned to see these rhetorical positions as self-serving pretences for depriving him of liberty. Most days I’d spend a few hours half asleep on the couch, watching television, while he stumbled about in a dance of boundless energy.
Above the television in the house in St Peters at that time was a 3D print his mother had hung on the feature wall, where our boy’s face was shaped by the clumped clay readings of some newfangled scanning machine that had painted his portrait while he was still in the womb. He would come running over just as I was about to nod off, leap up onto my lap and squeal in his whistle-high voice, ‘Daddy Pirate! There’s a booger in my nose!’ Sometimes I was so tired that instead of bothering to find a tissue I’d squash his clear nostril closed, put my lips up to the squishy stub of his nose and suck out the oily cluster. The tangy blob would sink slowly down my throat and congeal to a stop in the centre of my chest, and I’d have to hit myself like a broken vending machine to keep it moving. He’d wince and slap my cheeks trying to get free from my grip, and his skin was soft as silken sponge-cake, and he smelled like soapy sweat. Occasionally he’d grab my head with his soft hands, covering my ears, and stare into my eyes like he was peering directly into my soul. My wife explained that this intense interaction was called ‘facial tracking’, and it was part of every infant’s development, but I knew he was some kind of earthbound angel, and each time he looked at me like that a dizzying wave of pure love would pass though me like a blast of God’s own radiation.
Once he was beyond the age where every utterance was a novelty, he began to take pleasure in singing rhymes with altered lyrics, like ‘Old McDonald had a bum! E-I-E-I bum!’, for hours on end while he stomped about the floorboards of the house, his blonde hair like a slick mop of straw that had been dropped onto his cantaloupe head. ‘You’ve got your mother’s hands,’ I used to say to him, and he’d give me a flash of his lightning-bolt-blue eyes and punch me in the crotch, running off into the kitchen just fast enough to dodge a retaliatory kick up the backside. The days were listless beyond bearing, and I knew I should have been writing. For as long as I could remember that had been my reason for being, and there was plenty of time to do it while also being a body in the room as my son was growing. It would have taken no extra effort to take notes for some new work of fiction, read the classics, or study a foreign language – but most afternoons when I walked out the door of the house I did so without having had a single sentence pass through my mind, and this realisation would lead me to make a quick stop at the pub on the way home, enough to get a rush of alcohol through the bloodstream, and I always left with a couple of six packs in my arms to get drunk on, and pass out with an open bottle by the bedside. Most mornings I woke up hung over, and would need to spend time reclining to shake the grim lethargy
of intoxication out of my body, telling my son ‘Daddy’s feeling sick again’ while he ran around banging fire trucks into Duplo towers.
One morning, during one of these recovery sessions, I changed channels to find the Prime Minister on the television, standing before a Christmas tree and making some kind of announcement. The sound was down and his teeth looked like clippings of steel cemented into his mouth. Across the room, my son had climbed up on the kitchen bench and was peeking under the closed blinds to watch the grey morning rain slop onto the roof of a car yard across the Princes Highway. I took out my phone to relax and take a read on Facebook, and discovered everyone was tagging ‘#illridewithyou’ in the wake of a siege in a Sydney café. A distant cousin with three children had posted ‘As a mother, I have to ask, what in the FUCK has this world come to!’ and hundreds of people had given her the thumbs up.
On the television, a few seconds of footage of the gunman was now going around and around on a loop. He was scuttling sideways like a crab with a human shield and a black backpack for a shell. A scarf inscribed with a language-other-than-English was wrapped around his head. If the television had been unmuted, the newscaster would have told me that the script said ‘We sacrifice ourselves for God’, and I would have struggled to understand the meaning of the message, or why someone might pick up a gun in the first place and take themselves out to a bright, gold-trimmed café in the city where the chocolate is served in a fountain, put black banners in the windows, and wait for a SWAT team to come and kick in the door as smoke bombs filled the room with stinging grey clouds.
‘I love you daddy, on Triple J!’ my boy said, still facing the grey rain outside. My wife’s cats were behind the television, sitting below the framed 3D scan, watching dust and dirt fall from a hole in the ceiling, where, somehow, a sparrow had made its nest. I knew there was no way the cats could get to the bird, but the shrill sound of its chick, and the cold interest on their feline faces as they looked up at the call of this little creature was sparking inside my skull like the blooming seed of an aneurism. I got off the couch, went over and helped my son stack up some towers, and he handed me a fire truck so we could crash into things together.
When my wife came home I went for a walk on Newtown’s King Street and imagined the many cafés all under siege by invisible gunmen, inflamed with mad grievances, ready to swallow up the active-wear parents and their innocent babes in their sports utility strollers. I stopped at the end of the footpath near the Bank Hotel to let a young blonde girl on a scooter go by, and for the first time, without knowing precisely where the tangible essence of it might lie, I saw something I’d always suspected other people recognised instinctively, just by dint of being human. I could see for the first time why all these people were scrambling about the streets with their coffees and phones in their hands, or lumbering into bars to get loose and sloppy, and I could see why signs and banners were painted in bright colours on the store fronts, why the young people had dyed their hair and rolled up their sleeves to show dark tattoos, why the roads were packed with passengers on buses, and workers in hi-vis uniforms were digging down under the pavement or tightening powerlines, why the bums were begging for coins with their dogs’ heads on their laps, why the window washers were carrying dribbling squeegees near the traffic lights, and why the cranes moving over the skyline like steel behemoths were swinging their loads through the fading light of the grey afternoon. It occurred to me that this endless rumbling of energy and motion was done for the sake of tiny, growing children, all to keep their miniscule hearts beating and expanding, and their little lungs moving sweet warm exhalations of breath out between their thickening bones. Corrupt and debased as the world was, pernicious and petty and evil as its carnivorous ways were, this vast human activity and its enormous complexity was running up against an unimaginable and inexhaustible threat of extinction, so as to keep small crying babies growing and suckling their mothers and gulping at bottles in the ordinary shade of houses and units and cafés and parks all over the city, from one generation to the next and on and on into eternity.
The girl on the scooter rode down King Street and out of sight, and it occurred to me that I’d spent so long clinging to the consolations of a life lived in fiction that I’d allowed myself to miss the point of life completely. Through all the ordinary misfortunes of existence, I’d used the idea that one day I’d be a writer as a kind of transcendental promise – if report cards snitched on my laziness and caused my parents to adopt a disappointed look, or if bullies assailed me on the bus and threw my school bag in some hard-to-reach place, I’d go through the motions of an injured ego, but there was always the icy secret hidden deep inside that one day I’d escape from the crude confines of the real and into the open expanses of fiction. From the very beginning, I had trained myself to renew my flagging spirits with the thought that someday I’d set down on pages a work of redeeming colour and shape, and I’d come to see the lives of people around me as a kind of abstract resource to be used to perpetuate the arrangement of my words.
To see for a moment the city’s reason for being – the unbroken chain of causality from which it had all sprung and continued to grow – cast all fear of gunmen and loonies out of my mind. I saw in the evidently indefatigable spirit of ordinary life that there was no reason ever to be worried about any particular detail of the world, which was another way of saying that I would never need to write again – no need at all, since no particle of this strange constellation of the real world would ever need to be revised or redeemed, not by me or anyone else. Men who moved like crabs, holding guns to people in cafés, had been around as long as cats had licked their lips at baby birds; agitators, maniacs, subversives, nihilists, vandals, barbarians, creeps and con artists were always at the gates, and yet, the collective will was overwhelmingly on the side of mothers and fathers and babies needing to be nurtured. For all their faults, love and care had always won, or the world would have ended, and none of what was around us would hold any meaning at all. Despite the implacable horrors and stupidities of earthly existence, all would be well so long as mums and dads stuck to the plan. Having had this idiot’s epiphany, I walked into the nearest bottle-o, bought a couple of six packs and went back to the spare room of my cousin’s flat, unfolded my futon and drank both packs with a crooked smile of amazement on my face. All I had to do for the rest of my life was be a dad.
To say that this feeling of release from the impulse to write about the world endured would be a lie, but it lasted, in oscillating degrees, at least until the day after a recently celebrated royal wedding. The wedding became a family affair for us. ‘I remember when Diana got married to Charles,’ Mum said as we sat around the coffee table in the lounge room with the fire blazing in the combustion heater against a mild chill. ‘Your father and I got dressed up and we drank champagne and watched it on the telly.’ It felt good to be part of a family tradition. We’d assembled in our small home in the western suburbs, and on the coffee table Mum had placed Saos, cheese cubes, pickled onions, sweet gherkins, chips and corn-dips for my brother, his fiancée, myself and my little son – now all of seven – who sat with his head bowed towards his device, having declared the wedding stupid and dumb, while we drank wine from flutes and waited for the Queen to arrive in the church with the princesses and dukes in their gowns and hats.
With much shame I report to drinking so much bubbly in my enthusiasm for this royal family function that I could not remember a thing about it in the morning, and had to scoop my son up in my arms with a pounding in my head that made it hard to walk in a straight line out the door, and up the driveway towards my car in the bright golden augury of the clear May air. My son didn’t seem to notice, intent still on his device, and I buckled him into his booster seat and proceeded east, towards his mother’s house on the other side of the city.
As we drove into the tunnel that dives below King Georges Road, we came to a standstill in the gloom punctuated by brake lights. Even with the windows up, as we in
ched forward with the blockade of cars and trucks, a harsh chorus of sounds began crashing around us, a loud thrumming racket, as though an enormous swarm of locusts were cascading through the darkness. I switched on the radio, remembering that it was sometimes customary for the tunnel operators to commandeer car stereos to broadcast messages to drivers when there were any incidents that might impinge the free flow of traffic. There was nothing there but the buzzing distortion of static. My son remained oblivious, his eyes mesmerised, and I could see the luminosity of the screen reflected in them, his pudgy finger prodding at the objects on a virtual plane. ‘What’s going on?!’ I said aloud to no one, and craned my neck to look further over the halted procession of shuddering vehicles under the low and dribbling impassivity of the tunnel. It was simply impossible to be sure what was causing the hideous noise that was pulsing through the closed windows of the car. It seemed to me, delusional as it sounds now, that for all I knew, at any moment a roaring avalanche of pests might besiege the halted traffic we were in, and swallow us in our cars, devouring our flesh and leaving metal and bone in their wake.
My skin was dry from the wine I had drunk, my eyes were puffed and red, my organs felt swollen and my hair was thin in the lime-coloured light that bounced off the mirror from the dim lamps on the greased walls of the tunnel. A headache pulsed through my whole body from my temple to my toes, and I had a sense that the terrible wave of insects would crash through the windshield of our car any moment and consume us with its million tiny mouths. I resolved that should the plague descend upon us, the only thing I could do in the seconds remaining would be to turn to my son as he sat in the back seat and assure him that all would be well on the other side of life, to give him some consolation to withstand the inevitable horror of being eaten alive by the forces of nature.
