Fusion

by Kate Richards

  Us on the ground close to the fire, stare into the flames, one of us drinking almost all of the apple liqueur. Wren disappears inside and comes back out with a saucepan and he sits down and puts the pan upside down on his knees and he begins to try to tap out the rhythm of the song with his middle and index fingers – ta-ta-ta tatatatatata-ta ta ta-ta ta ta – and he does get it right after a bit and Christ nods her head in time and they keep going like this until the beat and his hands are one and he closes his eyes, swaying, the song is the whole world, the mystery – his soul flying up from his body to the soul of the music, touching the lips of the music.

  He stomps his feet and hoots.

  But we are still.

  Our left head

  and neck are

  fixed at an angle of fifteen degrees, twisted so our resting position is off-centre in all spatial planes. We’ve never thought it awkward before. Now our right foot taps harder with the beat, and every time our right foot hits the ground, our left head jerks further away like heavy fruit on a tree beholden to the wind. We smile as this goes on (only the quickest flash of bitterness in the smile) but it does go on – the foot-tapping – on and on and our left neck stiffens and two of our eyes go black.

  ‘This is silly. We don’t dance.’

  Tap tap-tap tap-taptaptap!

  ‘Still. Still.’

  Sing softly, an undersong first, low and sweet, arm bent at the elbow, hand – dancing at the wrist, knee swinging sidetoside, right hip reaching forward the tiniest bit.

  ‘Yes!’ Christ claps her hand on the back of the guitar and laughs. ‘Yes!’

  ‘Stop

  no.’ Head back, laughing with Christ, singing with Christ, singing together, together, louder – singing – all these words – asking and losing and knowing and not knowing, telling and not telling and chords breaking, singing – will I let the sun go down without saying sorry, no I won’t sleep without saying sorry I-I-I – singing – I-I—

  ‘Please – stopit – careful – we need to think

  not – no – don’t think.’ Right arm high in the air and fingers reaching, reaching towards the sky. ‘Feel.’

  Our left side – stiffening.

  Our right side – dizzy, bursting. The energy in the night revealing itself, opening up to let the music in – the pulse and the pitch and the flourish, the gift of it and the surprise.

  The longer Christ sings, the more our left neck aches, the stiffer our left leg, the hotter our face, the colder our fingers. Wren sees us and stops playing the saucepan and says, ‘Ease up.’ But Christ hasn’t noticed anything’s wrong. ‘Come on,’ she says to us. ‘Your turn. I want to see you dance.’ She sways on her tree stump, rocking from her waist, her broken leg out straight and then she’s standing up, the light in her eyes hungry, glittery.

  ‘We can’t, we’re not

  cut out for it?

  see

  but Sea—

  no.’

  Our right leg tucks under our body, knee bent, foot pressing into the ground, leaning forward, springing up up, standing, tiptoe, dragging and singing and whistling and singing – will I let the sun go down without saying sorry, no I won’t go without saying sorry I-I-I – singing I and o and o me and I.

  Our left side, left head, heart, floundering, failing, diminished, always a sliver behind, always a second slower, following and following, hating now all the pulling, wrenching, swinging round and round, the grabbing of hands and fingers and hair, the rocking, the damage, the dancing. Wren whistles. Christ sings and we swing around again until our precious centre of gravity is lost. Our right leg, still bearing all our weight, buckles. We fall. Fall sideways. Fall heavily. One head hits the ground first and it’s an awful sound. We’re much too close to the fire. Long hair the shade of brown closest to black singes and shrivels. The acrid smell of burnt hair and scrabbling to get away from the fire and screaming – us screaming – one fist cracking into the side of the other jaw.

  ‘Damn. Here.’ Wren grabs our dress and half-drags us out of the reach of the flames.

  Someone says, ‘Sorry.’

  One face blistering shinyred.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ says Christ.

  ‘I’ll get water,’ Wren says.

  When he comes back Christ has dropped the guitar on the ground and is half-crawling, half-limping towards us. Wren puts his hand on her shoulder and shakes his head and we see the shock in her eyes and the flames reflected in them too.

  She says, ‘I didn’t – I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  Wren lays a towel dripping with cold tank water on our leg and then he rejoins Christ on the nearest tree stump and he puts his hand on her shoulder and they sit there on the log together while we are folded up in the dirt on the edge of the light. Rocking back and forth in the dirt. The fire dying down.

  Anima, the Latin word for breath, for soul, is so very nearly animal. We try to reconnect our breath and our dual-soul. To keep up our courage we remind ourself of how animals endure suffering with such grace and quiet. We’re careful. From now we must always be careful. We’ve remembered. And learned. Going one way means life and going the other means death. So we are considered and polite, looking in the mirror without grimacing and tending to the burn on our face, dabbing the blisters with our own salve of eucalyptus oil, beeswax, lanolin and raw honey: the first ingredient as an antiseptic, the rest to soften and heal the surrounding skin. We cut off all of the singed and broken hair. The bruise on our other jaw is a nasty bile-yellow but we don’t wince when our shirt brushes over it getting dressed.

  Wren and Christ watch us when they think we’re busy with something and just last night Wren stood outside our bedroom door in the dark. They’re worried, which is somehow nice, even though there’s no need.

  This is the time of year we go out to the edges of the wild and collect dead wood that’s dried out over summer so the woodshed is full for winter. Wren insists he can do it on his own, but we need to get out of the house, into the trees and sky with their different kinds of noise and different kinds of quiet.

  Out in the wild we watch for rabbit holes and rocks in the long grass, dip under low overhanging branches, push through the waist-high perfumed heath, squelch over the boggy low points of the valley, mindful of the delicate mosses, and we collect hardly any wood – one heavy, half-waterlogged branch and the rest good only for kindling.

  In spite of the calm we’ve rehearsed with clear-eyed dedication there’s a fragility in our stride, a wobbliness in our knees and ankles and we knock our ankles painfully against one another. Step too close, lean over fast so as not to trip, reach too long and then too wide so we lurch, and once more miss our point of balance, tipping tipping, and now we’re on the ground, flat on our faces with our eyes screwed up against the shame and the damp and the dirt and the failure and the spiky grass and now we’re back in Hope Home, fallen on the bathroom concrete and all round us is laughing and whistling and a hot, wet breath in our ears, freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.

  Christ is staring at three round pearlescent scars on her shoulder. ‘What’re these?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Wren says, stopping the axe and leaning towards her to look.

  ‘They’re so – perfect.’

  ‘From an operation?’

  She shrugs and sighs, letting the shirt fall back down her arm. Wren’s standing with the axe in his hand. High above our heads an eagle hangs in the air. We are desperate to say something – something helpful, considered, warm – anything that isn’t skewered or drowned – so she might think of us as a friend.

  Wren swings up the axe and brings it down and perfectly cleaves another log in half, crack, and again, crack.

  ‘It’s nice here,’ Christ says, looking out across our valley to where mountain peaks rise up and touch the sky. ‘This is a good spot. Right here – not so in the middle of, um—bloody nowhere.’

  It is a good spot. Sheltered from the wind by the woodshed and a couple of snow gums, high enough to see over the
tops of the fruit trees and with the unbridled scent from the shed that we love – dry moss and the mixed resins of myrtle and eucalyptus and mountain pine. Wren goes on chopping as though chopping wood is the most important thing in all the world until he is badly out of breath and eventually he stops and leans the axe by the shed and sits down beside her, ignoring us.

  ‘See the wild horses?’ he says to Christ.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over on the horizon, a pack of them, maybe fifteen.’

  ‘You’ve got good eyes.’

  ‘Couple of foals too.’

  ‘I can’t see them.’

  He takes the tip of her chin in his fingers and redirects her gaze. ‘There, see?’

  We lean back and nod, though only two of our eyes can make out the grazing herd. Can’t tell their colours – just their silhouettes rising and falling on top of a spur high above us.

  ‘It is good here,’ she says to Wren.

  We grin. Wren does too. We wait for her to say something else, something to us – but she doesn’t. Then there’s movement, a flickering, in the pile of wood still to be chopped: the tongue and eyes and head of a snake, glossy dark brown on top, very pale underneath. Ah! A yellow-bellied black snake with a deadly bite and we relax and still but Christ has gone rigid, she can’t get to her feet without a struggle, her pale hands are covering her mouth and her wide eyes yelling ohgodohelp.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Wren whispers.

  The snake doesn’t look at us and doesn’t hesitate, it flows out of the wood like water with its head raised, flows over Wren’s left boot – nearly two metres of lithe muscular breathing blackbrown water and for a moment everything stops, blurs and narrows and then the yellow-belly slips into the long grass and is gone.

  Wren yells, whoops. ‘Did you see that? What a beauty! What a bloody beautiful thing!’

  Christ says, ‘Jeeez, Wren, you’re brave.’

  ‘Nah. You okay, tho?’

  She shudders and leans into him and he slides his arm over her shoulder and holds her to him tight like he’s keeping them both from falling apart and her eyes are red and he’s holding his breath.

  We won’t go out in the wild again. Or climb our mountain. We will not look or seek. Instead we will try to forgive. Ourself. Of not knowing where we went wrong. Of the shock of not knowing and the shame. All of this adding to our fear that trouble is brewing and our fear of not being enough when we thought we understood – together as we are forever, for always and forever.

  Before Wren came to live with us he says he thought a lot about becoming invisible but he says we have never once made him wish he was invisible. On the contrary, we remember quite clearly the morning about three years ago when he said that we are to him like dawn breaking after a long and cold night and there is colour – the first alive colour – in the edges of the sky. Colour you can breathe in, he said to us, very tenderly. The light atomic somehow, he said, very tenderly. And you breathe it right into the centre of your chest, he said. Life-giving, graceful, special. The happiness we felt then was the happiest we have ever been and we’ve kept these words of his close by ever since – some nights we sleep with them on our pillow.

  Telling stories, we tell ourself stories about the building of cathedrals over on the other side of the world – how the master masons and the stonecutters and the carpenters toiled their whole lives, knowing absolutely that they would die before the holy buildings were finished and that their sons would toil their whole lives and would also die before those buildings became anything like the pictures in our books – things of majesty, of pilgrimage, of worship, of healing. We ask ourself, why? What does this mean? We answer – it is the human capacity for faith. So we reach out with a new kind of desperateness to our own faith in the natural world, in the alpine wilderness all round us and in ourself as a survivor – together forever for always and forever, amen amen.

  ‘Yet

  yet

  give me a boat that can carry two

  and both shall row, my love and I

  and both shall row,

  my love and I

  is it true?

  is it faith?

  is it want, vain hope?

  is it love?

  would we know?

  shall we see?

  shall we ask?

  no we must not

  no

  no

  yet.’

  Wren and Christ are where we left them hours ago – lying in the grass on their backs among the apple trees, watching the stars brighten minute by minute as the evening sun reaches the edge of the earth. Her arm and leg are millimetres from his and we are quite sure he’s breathing all of her in and we imagine the warmth of her skin on our skin, her energy melding with ours, melting us on the inside. They’re smoking weed, bursting into laughter now and then. Though we don’t feel good about this, we creep round in a half-circle and climb the branches of an obliging snow gum not far behind them and here we sit – still as still.

  They smoke the whole joint until they’re both giggly and silly, the stars loop-the-looping across the sky. A cool wind coming down from the mountain.

  Then Wren says, ‘Know what question they ask you in the army?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘What are you made of?’

  ‘That’s the question they ask in the army?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Were you in the army?’

  ‘Sort of. I wanted to be an engineer. Started off slow but the plan was to get stronger with training but I um – I failed the physical and um I failed the endurance test and I failed the team exercises and the trust exercises – not just once, I – I mean I failed them week after week. Anyway. It was all going pretty bad. The lieutenant colonel asked if I knew what hell looked like and I thought I had a pretty good idea but he said I had nofuckingidea. Turned me down for a cadetship, said he didn’t want to see me the next year either.’

  ‘Wren. Sorry.’

  ‘Nah. It’s okay.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You haven’t answered the question.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Mmm. I don’t know either.’

  We wait for them to continue but they do not. Look away from them for a second – up to the sky and the stars fall down from space all round us. Cool wind coming down from the mountain.

  Christ says, ‘I don’t know my own name.’

  Look up at the sky and the stars fall down from space all round us and they lie so close together and they laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Then Christ says, ‘What the hell’s happened to me?’

  Wren says, ‘I wish I knew, I wish I could help you.’

  ‘You could have been an engineer. You could have been in the army, Wren. I think you’re pretty brave.’

  Wren laughs some more and we hear the bitterness in it.

  ‘What about the twins?’ she asks.

  ‘They know what they’re made of.’

  ‘Yeah. I figured.’

  ‘Quantum entanglement.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Quantum entanglement.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a physics thing.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you want to know?’

  ‘About the twins, not about the physics.’

  ‘Quantum entanglement is when two particles or any two bits of matter can only exist if they are together.’

  ‘A-huh.’

  ‘And the only way to define them, like how physicists explain the existence of something, is by their relationship with each other.’

  ‘A-huh.’

  ‘And, if you try to interact with one particle by itself, without the other, they both collapse into nothing.’

  ‘A-huh.’

  ‘And, the only way they can be apart is if they move faster than the speed of light.’

  ‘A-huh.’

  ‘That’s the twins.’

  ‘Faster than the speed o
f light?’

  ‘Funny. Maybe. What I mean is, everything, every single thing one of the particles does is relative to what the other is doing. Every infinitesimal flicker of every breath and every muscle tensing and relaxing, every nerve firing, every little thought.’

  ‘That’s not the twins.’

  ‘Yeah it is. It’s exactly the twins.’

  ‘You’re wrong. They’re not like that, not at all.’

  ‘How have they managed to live this long? It’s because their minds have become entangled just like their body is, even if they weren’t so to begin with.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘I know. They’ll change your perspective on everything. You’ll see.’

  ‘Mmm, but physics?’

  ‘That’s what physics is – how everything in the universe is related and how the relationship itself affects the things in the relationship. Imagine if water wasn’t in a relationship with gravity.’

  ‘But that’s what all living things are about too, aren’t they? Connection.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re just more complex.’

  ‘Fickle, you mean.’

  ‘Fickle? I don’t know. No. What I mean is – your physics relationships follow rules, what do you call them?’

  ‘Equations.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t actually know any equations.’

  ‘So in life – what I’m trying to say is, with people – with love say – anything’s possible. Like the thing infinity in physics.’