After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  Then the camera remembered its purpose and swung abruptly back to catch the SIP (Slightly Important Person) as he emerged from the meeting. I ask myself—Wrathall wrote—is it only my imagination, or are you able to make extraordinary, but ostensibly accidental, things happen—like the cameraman forgetting the reason for his camera being there? Who was it you wanted to be seen by!

  Though I have never agreed with that ‘No man is an island’ business (we are all islands, but formed of coral and founded on the summit of a single submerged mountain) I knew that Wrathall was adrift, mad. Still, he was sane enough to understand that I briefly believed, while helping him, that my pity and complicity had cancelled the murder, that, because I helped him, there had been no murder. To understand that I had carelessly crossed over into insanity, and that I too had discovered that really there are no borders: sense and nonsense, sanity, madness, grace, monstrosity and moral peril were all one vast, unbroken country on which no boundaries have ever been drawn.

  He wrote: So here I am in jail, functioning, but very far away from myself, unable to recognise myself anymore. I’m not really interested in living and still I keep on eating, sleeping and exercising—a man whose body is a world in which he is defeated, polluted by pains and needs, enduring, not fit for anything else.

  I burned the letter, rolled it into a tube which I lit at one end, watching the blue and orange iris of flame moving towards me, eating the rings of words. His thoughts were too terrible to confront; a badlands to be crossed backwards and after dark.

  I am not a fake, but a fledgling. It is true that sometimes I find myself full of unearthly vitality, the nerves in my body a web of fire, my mind a sail filling with a storm of light. Then I know there is nothing I cannot reach or touch. And I can discharge this tormenting energy by—say—turning the camera. But if I do somehow contrive to discharge the power, I feel terrified, lonely and unclean, and poisonous to everything around me. I want to be stopped, caught and earthed. For this reason I could sometimes be seen standing at a window of my Grans’ place, probably looking like an unhappy puppy, watching my grandmother out in the rain, rearranging the rockery above the retaining wall, her face pink, her thin grey hair flattened against her skull, the nylon parka wet and translucent over her thick old jersey with holes at its elbows. Shifting stones; strong as women are who have lugged around kids, shopping and baskets of wet clothes. Till finally I go out to persuade her to come back into the warmth. Wanting her to come and take this terror out of me by just being there, moving around the house, talking, breathing. Shyly trying to tease her, nag her, coax her indoors, knowing I’m setting myself up against her own near-fanatical will to defeat forever—now, today—the disorder in the garden.

  Then again, there was Basil: who arrested me momentarily in the course my venomous energy was to carry me, that night on the Hill, by suddenly imposing himself, the moment I made my entry—fussy, raucous, shouting: ‘You may well say!’

  I had tried, in a letter to Meredith, to explain what happened to me that night. In trying to make sense of the story, I gave reasons for my actions; but not the right ones, or the only ones. I tried to ‘mean’ something—responding to the irresistible human instinct for meaning—and immediately found myself standing in a ring of salt, summoning demons.

  I set my alarm for seven and lay in bed listening to the wide-open sound of a windless, midwinter night. After a sleepless hour I got up again, tore my essay notes into strips and twisted the ends of the strips together to make a fat, cheerleader pom-pom of paper streamers.

  Then, before I fell asleep I saw—as if through the wrong end of a telescope, framed and far away—Mark Thornton on Flint Peak, holding out his hand to the universe.

  Basil

  ‘There’s no point staying now the weather’s packing in,’ said the Australian.

  His girlfriend nodded.

  ‘And there’s nothing left to see. We’ve done it all, haven’t we?’

  I sat at the periphery of the hostel group—listening to the Australian jock holding forth to his girlfriend, a Japanese couple, another Canadian from Ottawa, and two bright-eyed beginners from Brisbane, on the first leg of their journey out, north and east.

  ‘We came here first to look up some relatives,’ one of the beginners excused herself. ‘It’s better to arrive in the States in summer, even if it means spending some time in a New Zealand winter.’

  ‘Jesus! This isn’t what I’d call winter, it’s just a little wet,’ said the guy from Ottawa.

  It was early July, a week before I was to fly out of Auckland, and I was with a group of hostel guests, waiting out some foul weather in a hotel bar in a small town in the far north. At four in the afternoon the lounge bar, a shabby room lined with water-filled radiators, carpeted red and purple, and graced by wood-veneer formica tables and vinyl-covered chairs usually to be found in classrooms, was near empty. Past the bar we could look through to the public bar and at the back of the barmaid who, after serving our drinks, turned away to carry on a conversation with the men there, three of whom were clustered around a radio and the racing page of the paper. Beyond them, a group of younger men played a casual game of pool. These men and the barmaid would stop to watch us from time to time, curious and mildly territorial.

  I wasn’t taking part in the conversation, and had only been included in the general conviviality because the hostel’s entire population had migrated to the pub. It wasn’t that the group was in any way exclusive—the conversation was being conducted slowly and clearly for the benefit of the two Japanese, who were leaning forward over their Cokes, faces still with attention as they listened, and then smiling and animated as they acknowledged they understood.

  I was slouched in my seat, overhearing the talk but not attending to it, watching the figures of the pool players silhouetted against the hotel windows and the grey afternoon light. The light, the rain, and the imminence of my departure recalled me to the earlier occasion on which I had been—as now—waiting out the weather.

  Throughout the afternoon of Easter Saturday we waited—Hannah, Ellen, Wrathall, Kelfie, Jill and I—in Motueka Community Hall. The Civil Defence had set themselves up there, but were nearly all out, the only signs of their occupation some trestle tables covered in maps, rulers, papers, pens. There were four matrons nursing a single tea urn, there was a silent telephone and radio telephone, and clay-slip bootprints tracking the floorboards.

  After making our phone calls we sat for several hours in the hall’s fuggy air. Jill told me her brother-in-law was picking her up and offered me a lift to Nelson. The Motueka matrons fed us, wrapped Kelfie in a warmer blanket and plied us with endless cups of tea.

  Jill, Kelfie and I sat lined up along a wall, in plastic bucket chairs which we never thought to move closer together. Ellen and Hannah sat on the floor, snuggled up to each other. Wrathall; after making his call, went and stood at the hall’s only open door, in the lea of the building where the rain couldn’t blow, inside. For half an hour his figure, leaning in the entrance way, head nearly touching the wire cage around the porch lamp, was just another part of my general impression of the dreary place—the stacked chairs and benches; the dry, smeared footprints on the floor; the sour, dusty smell like gymnasium locker-rooms; the sick whir of the electric clock on the wall above the kitchen service hatch, which, last night in the storm, had suddenly begun to run backwards, much to the annoyance of the Motueka matrons, who had found an alarm clock and installed it in the hatchway. It faced out into the hall, ticking in a fussy argumentative way, its hands gesturing insistently in the opposite direction to those of the disturbed clock above—clock-wise and clock-zany.

  Wrathall waited, motionless, and I didn’t really consider why he was waiting, attentive, like a sentry, someone who hadn’t finished being upright and active (which was odd, since we were all so exhausted). Then there was the sound of tyres on sodden gravel and he moved out of the doorway, going down to meet the police climbing out of their white car with i
ts urgent blue lights.

  And I felt my face go long and loose with shock, because I had forgotten, and all the horrors I had discarded poured back into my consciousness—as though my thoughts, like some early Antarctic explorers, had dumped goods and livestock to unburden themselves along a difficult route to safety, then found their flight, following a crazy compass, had described a circle and returned them to their abandoned possessions and the frozen carcasses. My mind came back to the things it jettisoned to survive.

  Along from me Kelfie got to his feet, dropping the blanket, and watched as Wrathall stood talking to the officers. His face, usually animated or impassive, wore an expression it seldom assumed. At that moment of atypical unselfconsciousness it settled into a cold watchfulness, which made him look ancient, inhuman and heartless.

  We watched Wrathall get into the back of the police car. One of the officers clambered in beside him, closing the door. They departed. Kelfie retrieved his blanket, wrapped up again and sat down.

  ‘Any idea what that was about?’ Hannah asked him.

  He shook his head.

  Some time later two traffic officers and a Ministry of Works engineer arrived. A short discussion ensued between the officers, engineer, Hannah, Ellen, Jill and Kelfie about when they would be able to retrieve their vehicles. During the discussion Jill’s brother-in-law came in and stood to one side rattling his car keys suggestively and looking irritable and martyred.

  When everything was settled I collected my pack. Jill and I spent a minute saying goodbye to Ellen and Hannah, and we left.

  In the car Jill’s brother-in-law asked her, ‘How long were you caught up there?’

  ‘About sixteen hours, I think.’

  ‘That would be right,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Have you eaten? Are your clothes dry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mary will have dinner on when we get home.’ He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Have you got somewhere to go?’

  ‘If you could just drop me at the Youth Hostel, that would be fine.’

  He nodded. They were silent throughout the remainder of the drive.

  When we stopped outside the hostel, and I had eased myself and my pack out of the back seat and closed the door, Jill wound down her window and held out her hand to me. ‘I hope the rest of your trip is safe and pleasant, Basil.’

  I took her hand. ‘Thanks. Look—I’m sorry about everything.’

  She shook her head, squeezing my hand. ‘You’ve got nothing to apologise for. I didn’t agree with you about what was happening, but now I think you weren’t far wrong, after all.’

  ‘Well that’s—’ I was about to say ‘gratifying’ but she freed her hand from mine and gave me a contrite, quelling smile. I shut my mouth, smiled back and waved as the car pulled away.

  ‘It feels amazing to be finally on our way. Five weeks in the Shaky Isles, a week in Rarotonga, then on to LA. We’ll buy a van when we get there. That, and our Superlite tent, ought to save us heaps for accommodation—’

  The romance of travel. Not my reason for travelling.

  As an older teen I’d spent several summers with my great-aunt Pat in her lovely A-frame house on Vancouver Island, painting, mending and gardening. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, when she died, she left the house to me.

  My dream house—and I sold it to get the money to travel. My family assumed I did so because travelling was more important to me. Yet what I chose to do wasn’t a matter of priorities, a ranking of desires. Although I didn’t think about it till much later, in leaving home I was leaving a life where things had rejected or eluded me—love, friendship, sense.

  I wanted to go somewhere where I couldn’t read the papers or books, where I couldn’t understand the language, where my ignorance of the language would be an excuse for my failure to find sense in what people said or did. I wanted somewhere I could never expect to meet those who, for me, were vanished or estranged. Somewhere appropriately alien. Somewhere else. A human wilderness.

  And, in a certain, curtailed way I found what I wanted in Asia. I could even cope with the beggars, because they never expected me to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to them. I was happy just wandering around, a nobody of whom nothing was expected—until the day I encountered another impossibility.

  It was something comparatively trivial. I had been walking around Kuala Lumpur all day, almost the only white in streets full of Malay, Chinese and Indian. I had just left a bank where, while standing in a queue, I had seen a leper beg a cigarette. Someone kindly put one into his bandaged hand and I watched as, while he waited to cross the road, the bandage on the diseased hand caught fire and burned, the flames wrapping his stubby fingers as he stared obliviously about at the traffic, unable to feel the fire. I had watched that. And taken in the sight of police carrying machine guns, and a whole family of Indians (a mother and four children) begging at the gates of the Monkey Park.

  Somehow all this was OK—it didn’t distress me. But when I stopped to drop an orange rind into one of the big open drains, looking down I saw a scruffy little kitten who had fallen and was caught on a ledge just above the water, about ten feet down. It looked up at me, desperately hopeful and, opening its clean, pink mouth, it meowed at me—silently, its cry covered by the noise of the traffic. It crouched, staring up at me, pressed against the wet cement wall, its eyes so bright there seemed to be a light sealed in behind them. I couldn’t reach it to rescue it—and if I had rescued it I would have had to let it go, to be just one more scavenging cat roaming the streets. That’s what it was, a scavenging stray who had fallen into a drain and was now looking up at me silently asking. Another impossibility, another proof of my uselessness.

  For me, inheriting the house had been a sign: my dream of my future come true. It meant I would survive, and I wanted to survive. But I didn’t want to want. To want to be useful, to understand and be understood.

  Our society so insists that life must be turned to use, that we are obliged to transform all our troubles into lessons—learning experiences, therefore somehow tolerable. Over a period of years I had compelled Russell’s suicide to make sense by accepting it as a handy warning against his brand of extremity and disaffection. By the same token my unrequited love for Audrey universalised itself into one-of-those-experiences-that-help-one-sympathise-with-others. I once told an acquaintance of mine, also unhappily in love, ‘Yes, I know it hurts,’ without realising that I had made my own unhappiness just another part of that semaphore of suffering by which we signal to each other over great distances of difference.

  Then there was my Vanishing House. It, I was forced to decide, was something I was unable or forbidden to know—the universe saying ‘No’ to all my enquiries and outrage. I grazed the edge of some wonderful discovery, feeling that I was about to be admitted to a truth, whether maddening, liberating, or deadly. There was a moment of recognition, then recognition receded. Ideas moved off like a crowd waved away from around the body of a dead stranger (or like, when I would visit our neighbour’s horses after dark, and stand on the lower rail of the gate, whistling, they would walk, unhurried, thudding, to stop where they could see me—the child they refused to greet properly, knowing I had nothing to offer—and I still couldn’t see them).

  The lesson I was forced to draw from my Vanishing House was that all experiences that graze the edge of great secrets are, by nature, unseizable. They come apart when grasped. Like log cabins, which all the historic conservationists at home have found impossible to preserve in their original state. A true log cabin has its walls caulked with moss, keeping the heat in and the wind out. Moss decays wood; therefore a real log cabin must be absorbed back into the land, being as much organic as artefact. What makes log cabins authentic also makes them impermanent. And so—a Vanishing House must vanish.

  The public bar was now crowded, and a group of women had come into the lounge bar and taken the table furthest from us. The Australian jock was getting up with some of our glasses and he
ading towards the bar, singing, to the tune of ‘Amazing Grace’: ‘A few beers, a bit of a yarn, a few beers, a bit of a yarn—’

  I sat, a chill sweat on my face, neck and hands, remembering how, minutes before the earth tremor caused by the second big slip, I had heard Kelfie’s voice calling me, though he wasn’t in the room; and how, seconds later, he was in the room, with rain still running on his face—laughing at me.

  I have a fantasy where I’m driving down a straight stretch of road in the cold desert of central BC, some years from today, and I see him under a signpost on the roadside, standing astride a pack blazoned with a large New Zealand flag, his thumb out. It’s overcast and there are no other cars on the road.

  I slow right down so he can see who is driving. I’ve slowed down and I’m pulling over and he’s surprised and smiling—that same surprised smile he first gave me when I yelled at him after he walked into the room accusing us of breaking and entering. A smile that says, despite its surprise, ‘Of course,’ and, ‘All this has been given to me.’

  But I don’t stop. At the last moment I accelerate, wheels churning the roadside gravel, leaving him alone and genuinely surprised.

  Sometimes, though, this fantasy gets away from me. I slow down and, coming closer, I see he’s older, and the flag on his pack is black. His hair is long and is blowing around and over his face like shadows of smoke. He looks tired and grateful, and has been expecting me.