Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  What I can do for her. Provide a light in all her dark moments. I’ll be her power source, make the thousand links she needs. To think, to go down deep and dig around. Mine is the mouth lowered gently to hers when she comes up gasping.

  Our first time alone together. Rien and I were out in the farthest corner of the Home yard. Backed up against the fence. Cold was oozing from the cracks in the dry ground. The wind was blowing hard. Rien’s black hair flew out like fairy floss. She scraped it from her face as I spoke. The whole time I told the story, she looked at me. I kept trying to check whether she was blinking. That’s how you know the difference between a machine girl and a real one. But I had to concentrate on the telling. It was hard. Speaking that much made my chest whiz and my heart bang.

  ‘I was five, or six. They showed me a picture. A girl and a boy. The boy had his hand up against the girl’s ear.’

  I caught my fingers moving up toward her face. Jerked them back in time. Before I touched her. She didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘There were two doctors and they asked me questions.’

  ‘Doctors, you mean like shrinks?’

  ‘I guess … they asked about what was in this picture. What the kids were doing. I said, “The boy’s putting breath in the girl’s ear”. They asked what for. I said, “To make her go”. They said, “Go where?”. I said, “Just go, to live her”. All my answers were wrong. The picture was about secrets, I was supposed to say something about secrets and whispering. Because the boy who went in after me came out smiling and told his mother what he’d said.’

  I looked at her, how she was so quiet. Waiting.

  ‘I worked it out. They wanted to see if I knew what a secret was. It’d prove I understood boys and girls and people and what they do with their words. But I didn’t know.’

  I didn’t tell her that back then my world was an electric field crackling with information and all I could hear was a dull whirring. Then she started shaking and I’ll never know if it was the cold or the wind. She made a tear.

  ‘There was no right or wrong answer to their stupid question Mark. They were just trying to put you in some category. Who knows what that boy was doing to the girl, maybe he had his tongue in her ear, maybe he was whispering dirty words, maybe he was telling her she was evil and going to hell.’

  I listened hard. But it was work, understanding her. And I was trying to still it but my arm wanted to move around her, to stop her shaking.

  She wiped her face. She was crying and I knew it was about secrets. This meant I couldn’t ask – I knew that it was the keeping that makes things secret. And I made a crazy thought – I could keep her. Then she would be my secret.

  Then my arm leapt round her body before I could stop it. Heart was banging away. She stayed quite still. I wondered if she could feel the heat prickling up and down my limb. Maybe it’d make a forcefield to stop her tears. Field of warmth. Beneath the bang of my heart there was a huge hole. I felt hot and empty. And I counted the next three gusts of wind and kissed her in the middle of the fourth. Her skin and my mouth made a tiny pool of stillness in the breeze.

  That was how I made her shiver. Now it’s me who shakes at her touch.

  I once used the limbs of others like tools. Too scared to take the things I wanted, I’d grab a hand, an arm, take it to the toy I liked. Make it pick it up and give it.

  The way she touches me is different. Don’t know what sort of function it has. That cool hand. Sometimes my mother’s hands were gentle. Other times they invented pain. You never knew which kind to expect. When Rien reached for me the first time I jerked my arm away. She took her hand back slowly. Made it sit on her leg, quiet, like nothing had happened. But the air in the room was sizzling like lightning had torn through it.

  What she does to me in the dark.

  And in the full light of day.

  Plugs my body into hers.

  Does the impossible.

  Electric and infinite at the same time.

  All my synapses implode.

  One night of no stars. Middle of winter, cold and black. I climbed onto the roof of the girls’ dormitory. Told her earlier in the day to watch at the window. Promised her a good show. I went through a box of matches, flicking each one so I made stars twirl and she could plant wishes on all of them. My wish was to be God that night, then I could have granted her a few. Lost my old fear of open spaces with practice. Night-time climbing and a rooftop squat.

  The next night she found me awake in my dorm at 5 am. The only movement was a violet light wrenching itself from the horizon. Until she touched me, saying ‘Mark, put your name on my skin.’ Showed me where to bite her. ‘Harder.’ But I had to stop for the gasping space in between the hardness. All she’d find in a few days – two crescent shadows of my eager mouth.

  I come down from the rooftop after a while. Watch Rien wrestle with the last minutes of sleep. Her body makes the shape of a star in bed. Her face is a white electric moon. Eyes twitch. Her breath fizzing as it comes.

  A circuit of dreams whirr and hover over her sheaf of hair.

  Above her left ear: She’s in shadow. Gathering limbs like dead wood at the base of a street of tall buildings. Arms moving in a semi-circle around her. Beside her there’s a stack of body parts. Tied with the red cord of her bathrobe. Fingers askew. Pointing in every direction. Knees bent the wrong way. Bony ankles. Clouds are scooting across the sky. I expect her to wipe a dripping brow. But she doesn’t. Her cracked lips say a French word. ‘Larmoyer. Larmoyer. Larmoyer.’

  Twitching over her crown: A row of white kittens in a processing machine. Each contained in a metal box. The machine moves toward a row of blades so fine they’re barely visible. The kittens pass through the blades and emerge the other side. Although they’ve been sliced through, they appear intact.

  Obscured by her right cheek: A football field of boys from her third-grade class. Their names suddenly remembered. Rien walking across the field. Then taking flight. Bruise-coloured sky. The field now a stormy sea, slowly encrusting. In it a stuck ship with flames for sails. Listing to the right.

  Seeing those boys makes me think about what I have and they don’t. Asked her when we first met if I was the only one. Peeled off all her clothes in the dark. Weren’t there queues at your door? Lines the length of your street? Could hardly believe I was the first. She stopped my mouth when I asked ‘virgin?’. Put her tongue in there to taste the word.

  Sometimes I pass her messages in the night. Connect my body up to hers. Dark therapy. She woke once. Soaked in sweat. Not sure who the dream belonged to. Woke babbling a story I knew every detail of. Each thought coming through the liquid passed from my flesh to hers. Her soaking back lay against my side. The sweat-chill made her shudder. Long after the dream was converted into the black molecules of memory.

  She wakes now and I take myself a kiss, salty taste in her mouth.

  ‘Blood, sweat, tears?’ I want to know the fluids that have passed through her life. Each with their own devastations. She swings herself off the bed. Haughty. The way I recognise her in the mornings:

  ‘I don’t need you to … to describe my sleep.’

  Her movements send the dreams shattering. They fall around her like coloured dust in the light from our window. I hold out my hand to catch the traces. Check one palm. Emptiness.

  I’ve got new things to figure out now. Like what comes after the world of machines. Lots of the Home kids loved turning things, round and round. You could sit for a whole day. Spin a wheel, a marble. But something’s changed for me. I am trying to explain this clearly. It’s hard though. I’m no good at wiring up words to make a sentence. I like poems though. And I like lists. How you leave a breathing space between each word. The poem’s like a scary machine. It lets in more chaos than my old constructions. You can’t control a poem.

  When I was twelve we had a special visit. Along comes this street poet to teach us a bit of culture. Used to perform his work in pubs and on the radio. The teacher said he sp
oke ‘the language of ordinary people’. I wondered where those people lived. Sure didn’t know how to talk to us. Got down on his knees, ruffling kids’ hair up the wrong way. Could have told him a thing or two about the world like NEVER touch us on the head. He reckoned we’d all have lots of ‘material to work with’, us having such tough lives. A ‘veritable smorgasbord of detail’ was what he said. I wrote it down. Someone fired a spit bomb at the back of his neck. Dog Boy asked if he ever set his poems alight while he read them. ‘Well that would be quite a statement!’ Poet said. ‘But perhaps a little dangerous, eh? You must have some good angry words to write young man?’ Then Poet wrote five new words for fire on the blackboard. Dog Boy stared him out while the other kids snickered. I listed the fire words in my schoolbook. He asked us to write a poem about our favourite things.

  I like small spaces

  a rabbit hutch

  under the bed with the clothes pulled over

  top of the cupboard

  I like clocks

  and water meters that tick

  electric wires that fizz.

  I once saw one fall to the ground in a storm

  could have been a snake black and hissing

  but it gave out sparks so you couldn’t look away

  and you wanted so badly to touch

  The poem was the truth but also a lie. Poet asked me why I liked those things, maybe I could put that in the poem. I couldn’t give the answer because it was about disappearing. If I told the world then I’d never get any peace. And I never said how much I loved matches and sharp tools, bits of glass and knives. And the things that flames can do.

  I wander round the suburb with the second-hand camera. Bought for me courtesy of Rien’s first pay. Click click. The world looks good through this small space. Good and tidy.

  I pick up a pack of photos from the chemist. Blurry bits of our suburb, close-ups of Rien’s face, looking sexy at me. One shot of her and her leaning head, looking out at the new garden. The look on her. Lost. A pair of scissors in one hand. She’d taken a break from her newspaper searching. Stood to peer out at the fiery sky. Or the shoots of her new plants in the soil.

  The second film is full close-ups and blurred shots taken in the street. I lay them out on the kitchen table like a pack of cards. All kings and jokers. A cross-section of our male community. I take a careful look, holding a mirror up to my own face. Nothing, no resemblance. Blokes scowling, looking suspicious. Men with paunches. Shufflers with old zip-up bags. Suits with gleaming glasses. One smiles out of a car window, stopped at the traffic lights, smoking a cigar. Another with a moustache like a dead caterpillar stuck to his lip. He wouldn’t, would he? No father of mine.

  Falling

  As Rien reaches the small rise that leads down the street to Delilah’s, she sees the horizon has reddened. Dark clots of cloud are piled up above it. This morning the view is confusing – she’s not sure of the difference between a natural sunrise and the brilliant effects of the city’s pollution, or whether the sky’s colours are fed with smoke. She thinks of Dog Boy’s stories about the magnificent sunsets that occur after volcanoes. He had become an expert on Krakatoa after a science class and had filled her in on all the ways the earth was transformed by the event. A brilliant corona surrounded the sun, he said, his arms making circles above him, and there was darkness at noon, ashes falling so the air was thick and sulphurous.

  Each step she takes is full of effort, the force of the wind like a hand flat against her chest, her hair streams out behind her. Some mornings the city oppresses but today the banked-up soot in the sky makes her grateful for her surroundings. At least here they are safe from bushfires, she thinks. The suburb is so crammed with buildings, crumbling wrecks and new structures that shrubs and trees barely have a chance to blossom before they are forklifted from the ground to make room for another office block or supermarket.

  As she walks down the slope toward work she finds three dead baby birds – splayed out, crooked and squashed on the pavement. She looks around for the trees they have fallen from and for the first time notices several skeletal apparitions along the street. She has passed them each day, mistaking them for telegraph poles, or light posts, so straight and smooth and thin are their trunks, so leafless are their spindly lower branches. Now when she looks up in search of nests she sees that the bushy upper limbs could house a bird or two.

  The squashed chicks are so young their flesh is barely feathered; she can see the veins and bunches of muscle beneath their weirdly transparent skin. She thinks their tiny wings must have failed but then recalls the lecture she was given in the Home after she and Dog Boy discovered chicks that had fallen from one of the playground elm trees – Never touch young birds because their mothers will leave them.

  They had heard the birds cheeping one cheerless drizzling afternoon when they were both on rubbish duty, mooching around, trying to pick up as little as possible and wishing for the sound of the bell that would signal their release. They glanced at each other with recognition though they had never met, and headed towards the plaintive cries – a patch of long grass and paspalum up against the fence. They found three tiny sparrows, opening and closing their beaks in a chirruping lament. In silent agreement they gathered up the babies and walked solemnly back to the dormitories. When they reached the concrete wall of the building she broke the quiet.

  ‘I’ve got a shoebox.’

  It was decided. They took the chicks up to the girls’ dormitory. By the time the bell rang they had agreed on a roster. Dog Boy would find the worms, Rien would keep the birds warm at night, smuggling them under her covers.

  Their friendship was formed this way, in the dutiful feeding and quiet cradling of the chicks. And in the solemn burial service they performed for the first casualty, crushed in the middle of the night by Rien’s restless dreaming. This event prompted the first lie between them.

  ‘Madonna died in sleep,’ Rien told him, faintly comforted by the fact that the statement wasn’t strictly untrue. She passed him the smushed chick which she had tactfully wrapped in a red sock for burial, then pointed to the edge of the sock where a row of glinting black sequins shimmered. This festive shroud went some way toward making up for the tragedy, she believed – a memorial to Madonna’s flashy spirit. He nodded, bowed his head, then wiped a jewel of snot from his nose.

  After this untimely death the remaining birds were confiscated. One of the cleaners discovered the incriminating feathers in the bedclothes, the box of cheeping twins beneath the bed, in bad condition and near death. Rien was summoned and punished, given a lecture by Ms Holmes about personal hygiene, mites, and the inevitably dire results of bird stealing. Ms Holmes assumed she had plucked them from a nest and Rien didn’t bother to explain the circumstances of their discovery. Nor did she betray the identity of the adoptive father. She bent her head and thought instead of her failure to protect them from the far crueller mother who stood before her. In the heat of her punishing lecture, Ms Holmes had chosen not to reveal the whereabouts and welfare of the birds. Rien could only picture Icarus and Trev, in the bowels of the Home, laid out on a shelf with all the other contraband: the knives and slingshots, the syringes and packets of bubble gum, earrings and notes full of secret longings or lurid smut.

  When she broke the news to Dog Boy it was her turn to weep, and he joined in so both were left bereft and without comfort in their loss.

  ‘You’re only crying out of one eye,’ she said suspiciously, as if this betrayed a lack of concern.

  ‘It’s just the way I cry,’ he said, blinking the dry eye as if to urge it into action.

  They parted then, suddenly shy of their newfound intimacy. Dog Boy sauntered off to make another attempt to join the handball mafia, but turned back on his way across the playground to check his fellow mourner’s progress. He lifted his hand in a stiff wave in case she should turn back. But Rien was engrossed in a tuneless singing of Madonna’s ‘Lucky Star’, chanting in time with her footsteps.

&
nbsp; On the night of the birds’ confiscation Rien had turned to the back of her scrapbook and carefully mapped out a wall with a pen and ruler. On the top she wrote My Wall of Friendship. She paused for a minute to look at the sturdy construction and realised, despite the impending addition, that she had been far too ambitious with her bricklaying. She scribbled out four lower rows then scrawled his name inside a brick.

  The spicy scent of aftershave and hair oil stings her nose as Rien enters the salon. Mai is seated in one of the haircutting chairs, a large green-covered book open in her lap. She finishes her pre-work cigarette, stubbing it out in an empty coffee cup, and beckons to Rien.

  ‘I bought this years ago from a door-to-door bloke. Look at it – it’s more brick than book – I didn’t want it, but the guy was a hunk of burning love so I asked him in for coffee. I’ll say no more about that short-lived affair except the bloody thing’s been holding up one side of my coffee table ever since.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re using blokes for these days? Propping up your lounge furniture?’ Delilah lifts her head from one of the sinks, where she has been rinsing a conditioning treatment from her hair.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mai turns her back to Delilah and raises her voice, ‘I found a very interesting section the other night on salt.’

  Rien sees the words Omens, Signs and Superstitions on the spine of the book. Mai lights another cigarette, sucks back loudly and reads.

  ‘Salt symbolises barrenness since it is sterile. You chuck a bit of salt in a baby’s cradle to keep away evil until the kid’s baptised. Black magicians and necromancers never eat salt before raising the dead because it fucks up their spells. Salt is meant to be kind of sexy since it resembles semen. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago refers to passion as “hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride”. Fucked if I know what that lot means but sounds pretty good, right?

  ‘Salt is sprinkled on the dead in a coffin to signify the eternal life of the soul. Ship builders whack a bit of salt between the planks of the ship to make sure the sailors don’t cark it at sea. A bit of salt in a locket around your neck’ll keep you safe from the evil eye and if you’re shit scared of that kind of stuff, you gotta grab a fistful before you go out at night. Stick too much salt in your cooking and it’s a sure sign you’re in love. Put three grains of salt in the right hand of a sick or dying person – if the stuff dissolves, the poor bastard’s gonna die. And this, this one’s a beauty, if you’re a young thing and you forget to put the bloody salt on the table when you’re setting it for guests, it’s a sure sign you’ve been poked.’