Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  ‘Okay. Your mysterious love life …’

  Rien takes Mai’s arm and turns to the whiteboard where she has written: I don’t want to see Cassie or Mark, and thinks: his kind words and gentleness.

  Mai nods. ‘If you need somewhere to be when this is all over,’ she points to the bandages around Rien’s throat, her rings chinking, ‘when you’re better, I’ve got a spare room which sort of belongs to Mr Whiskers but his royal catness can come and sleep with me for a while. He has been spayed after all – control yourself, Rien, no laughing, or the enema.’

  She pretends to glove her hands, stretching her fingers extravagantly. When she turns to leave she spins back suddenly and asks, rather loudly, ‘I just have to know. Those gowns. The split in them. Are you allowed to wear undies?’

  Rien nods carefully, wincing a little at the flesh pinching at her neck.

  ‘I meant what I said, before, about the room, okay?’ Mai says, turning toward the doors that will lead her back to the sanctuary of her life.

  The televisions flicker in the chemical light. Rien watches an action movie featuring muscular men in tight pants. Two of them leap into an escape car. It’s tomato red and called a Vortex. The men depart, swallowed up in whizzing comfort.

  Rien knows her request will hurt Mark, though no pain is intended. She hopes the nurses might frame it to sound like a rule they have imposed for the good of her health. She doesn’t want to look into his familiar eyes, or attend to his inevitable questions about the night of falling. He will want to solve the puzzle of me, she thinks and wonders at his stamina, he has endured so much already. She had begun to think of herself as a kind of love vampire, taking but unable to return it. For though she expected Mark’s considered attentiveness, she was compelled to mock it.

  Vampires can’t stand the light. She had watched a program about them one afternoon, narrated by a hollow-voiced man with pale cheeks and white hair. They cannot see their own reflections, he intoned through thin, dry lips. Perhaps the ghouls are allergic to the brutal illumination of awareness, unable to face their endless debts to strangers or friends. Perhaps it wasn’t the requirement of blood that made the creatures evil, but the veiled manner of its harvesting.

  She glances across the shining lino of the hall to where the other patients wheeze or emit small electrical beeps. The tailwind of the nurses’ passing blows apart the flimsy fabric around the opposite bed. Rien sees the opal tones of flesh, the blotched face of a man adrift on an iceberg of pillows. She worries that he has died; at each glimpse she sees the same expression on the shrunken face. A gathered look of puzzlement or intense concentration.

  She turns back to the television where a blurred figure leaps through the burning door toward a man whose one arm shields his face from a black collapse of walls. Courage, she knows, takes place on tenuous ground. The earth shaking, the sky collapsing. The air you breathe turned mud.

  What she remembers most is Mark’s face at the salon window, his repeated words and how he had not turned away. Behind him she could make out the approaching figure of the drunk. Mark’s voice seemed to come from miles beyond the scene, some far planet suddenly illuminated, where everything will be alright. He seemed then to truly believe in the force of a word after a word.

  An Ushering Light

  Mark forges through the room. Thoughts fire in every synapse of his head – if he keeps moving, he won’t break down. A single tear will rust him up; somehow this movement composes. He peers at his friend – Dog Boy tightly curled in a corner.

  There’s an absence in Dog Boy’s eyes. The sea-green has ebbed, leaving his irises pale and dry and rimmed with red. He rubs his eyelids. He has not slept. A film plays continuously in his head: a woman takes a blade and moves it across her throat. As if to sharpen it with skin. Unlike memory, the image has no smell, taste or texture, the action takes place on a glassy screen with slow deliberation. Dog Boy thinks of the miniature, glowing rehearsals he had conducted before his own escape. For days he had drizzled rings of petrol on the concrete floor of the Home toilet block and watched the flames complete the tiny circuit. He had wanted more though, than his own green gaze upon that fiery work, he had wanted an audience. And he thinks of Jonas, gone for good. How the colours had been the same.

  He sensed there was no planning in last night’s event. Rien’s face looked as surprised as their reflected ones, and she had parted her lips while the blade burnt its jagged path across the skin. She performed like a puppet – her arms moving jerkily through the air.

  ‘Couch, Dog Boy, this is called a couch.’ Mark thumps the old brown lounge and looks at the floor where Dog Boy is curled. The voice makes Dog Boy jump and he turns his fear into a vigorous scratching, drawing five welts up his bare arm. Dog Boy knows a simple equation: he had been present at both events. He is aware of his role in the first one, but can’t figure out if he’s responsible for the second.

  Mark instantly regrets his words. He knows Dog Boy blames himself for what has happened. So he wrenches his anger into a new shape: pity. Despite Dog Boy’s claim to have turned wolf, he was less powerful to change events than any yapping mutt. What had he said to Rien? Mark tries to remember the stammered details. Does he practise, he wants to ask his friend, at being so naive, in the face of all the daily evidence at the Home, his own parents’ plain neglect? Mark stares down at the freckled face, so young still, and watches a stricken look pass across it, his body like it’s been kicked, gathered in against the wall.

  ‘Fucking comic is what this is,’ Mark says. And stops himself from bringing up the past, the secret sworn between them, as if Jonas and Rien – or fire and blood – were the same things, as if they were a currency that Harry traded with his friends.

  Act like a man, act like a man! is what he wants to yell. The same words that dripped onto the dull metal of his own brain during the fitful twitches that passed for sleep. In the too-bright morning the phrase was rusted clear enough. He levered himself from the bed and checked the time. Ten o’clock, the ambulance men said after their questioning, phone at ten. He hadn’t told them anything much, her mother’s name and the suburb where she lived, but only after they’d put the screws on. He knew she was the last person Rien would want to see when she woke to the newly hurting world – she had trouble enough imagining a reunion when life approximated fine. It was a matter of waiting, Rien used to say, for the right kind of sign. Then she would call her mother, maybe even make a surprise visit. He wonders what form the sign would take and tries to think of motherly gestures. For a moment he detects the clotting stench of milk. And tries again to picture something, the pursed working lips of a baby at the breast, a fleshy embrace. But cannot.

  He walks to the couch. His fist thuds against the high cushiony end over and over. Maybe I can level the fucker so we don’t have to sit night after night half askew. He sees her sitting there, her head in more than its usual dip to the left shoulder, blood crawling down her neck.

  Then he’s out the door and down the road.

  It’s his first trip to a hospital since the days of slicing back at the Home. The resident nurse used to stitch him but one afternoon he had torn the flesh of his belly and possibly punctured something deeper. He was disappointed with the hospital – he wanted to see the machines they used to keep people living, the ones with flashing lights and the fine lines that tracked the heartbeat. Instead he sat in the olive tones of the casualty ward watching a young girl run water across the raspberry burn on her hand. She tried to talk with him, despite the muzzling glance of the nurse, laughing and wincing as she told the story. She had caught a stream of boiling honey and plastic as it dropped in a gold thread from the melted base of a bowl. It’s my right hand, she sighed, no more violin for me. He formed a little picture then of a honey-smelling home, the girl sawing her bow across the instrument, a wistful tune pouring out. The picture made him want to cry, so he bent to the floor and began to play with the switches on the wall, on off, on off. He wished the switch l
ed to his own heart-machine and he could watch the green line waver.

  He takes a seat at the front of the bus where the driver leans, one knee sticking out from the cramped cabin. The driver chats to a dapper old man fingering a pair of striped braces. The man describes his married life, three wives in all. ‘Three times!’ says the bus driver. ‘It’s hard to find a good one eh?’ The dapper man says the wives were all beautiful. The first died in childbirth. The bus driver listens then answers the dapper man’s questions – married? kids?

  ‘No well, yeah, one marriage one kid, but I wouldn’t know him if I tripped over him … I was young, stupid, got into one of those situations … anyway, enough idiots in this world, no point creating more. You? Kids?’

  Mark cranes forward, one finger digging into his palm, he concentrates hard on the conversation. He sees the driver glance into the rear-vision mirror, catches his dark-eyed gaze and jerks back against the seat before the man settles, retrieves his leg and starts the engine. He drives chaotically, old ladies lumber up the stairs and he lurches into the traffic before they’re seated, pushing the horn, impatient. His forearms are dark-haired and olive-skinned; embracing the wheel, they match its circle exactly. He puts two chunks of finger out the side window as a car screeches beside the bus. Mark leans forward again, peering at the man’s reflection, then says to himself in a sickening dirge; all the old women flailing in their seats: I am the child of the bus driver, I am the child of the bus driver, I am the bus driver’s child.

  Her hands. The first thing he notices when he enters the room. Odd. They sit folded on her stomach, like two crumpled wings. The shock comes from never having seen them at rest. He tries to stop the worry. She’s probably bored, he thinks, can’t speak. There’s nothing much to do in a hospital bed – he can barely remember the two days he’d spent. He had kept one eye out for the honey-burnt girl but never saw her again, nor did he see a single machine, though something had clanked on a trolley past his bed in the silver night. There was a set of comics, some sort of giant Lego construction he had built.

  He takes one of her hands, opens it and makes it fly like when she’s excited and decorates the air. She looks up, dis­interested. He decides to pretend she has just woken, blurry and terrifying in the morning. They stay like this a while: him in torment, her bandaged throat against a wall of pillows, her body cocooned in white. He loosens the sheets around her, she doesn’t like them tucked so tight.

  ‘I think I saw my dad. The bus driver. He had sort of same coloured eyes. Similar build as me. And he was mean. So fucking horrible … Sorry, Rien. It’s stupid. Forget it.’

  Her eyes follow his movements, but her face bears no expression he can recognise. He wonders if she’s been drugged, the nurses scare him in their violent white. He hadn’t asked them anything beyond questions about her survival. She would heal, physically, soon enough they said as if she was some sort of mental case. But for now, no speaking, that’s what the whiteboard was for, propped up beside the bed.

  Maybe I’ll give up talking too, he thinks, after all, half his life was spent in near-silence. It shouldn’t be hard to clamp those lips, tuck the pointless tongue behind the teeth. There’s nothing much more to be said to Dog Boy. He doesn’t want to blame, but mustering forgiveness for Dog Boy’s part in the whole situation seems impossible. If he forgave his friend’s normally harmless enthusiasms, his running mouth, he would also have to absolve himself for what has happened. He sees again his own face reflected in the salon window, the circular mouth, the slow back and forth of his head like a funfair clown. How uselessly his hands had grabbed at the chilly currents of air along his thighs.

  He forces a final word, giving birth to an alien sound, ‘Rien.’

  He isn’t sure if she hears, her eyelids are pressed tightly shut. He waits for a second and resumes a familiar check for her breath; though he knows she’s alive, she is stiller than death. He hears it finally, a small clicking insect sound as he leans toward her throat, then turns to the board, its ferocious whiteness, and covers it.

  RIEN YOU ARE

  Light that tears open space.

  Clean light, pellucid.

  Torn light scattered.

  Light of fire, warm light, burning light.

  Light of home.

  A light that gathers, an ushering light.

  Hushed.

  Sea light and greenness, arboreal light.

  Light that smells of moss.

  Misted light, gentle light, open light.

  Light that is teetering.

  Light of trembling, of timidity.

  Steady light, pouring.

  Marauding light.

  Light that signals the portals of your body.

  Light of flesh. Come Home!

  He reads it through, his leg jiggling. The words had come staggering out early one morning. He had intended it as a draft of a prayer for his machine, but it also spoke of what life with her had shown him. A nurse appears beside the bed, holding her hips as if they might fly apart. He spins around guiltily, to cover the poem.

  After the gloomy bus ride and some aimless wandering, he arrives home to a change in the smell of the air. He looks around, checks the lounge corner, then behind the tilted couch. Finally he finds a note on Rien’s pillow. He lowers himself to the bed like a tired old man and reads the ragged print. There’s a joke about getting under their feet, a ha ha and an exclamation mark, perhaps he should start afresh, Dog Boy has written. Besides, the pigs’ll come sniffing after me once they know about Rien. PS, moved your machine out of the rain.

  Mark glances out, he hadn’t noticed the wet ground on the walk home. But swollen clouds are gathered above the backyard fence. The inconsequential moon has slipped up high beyond the cracked bedroom window. It looks like something tossed from the earth, he thinks, a curl of clipped fingernail, and the unspectacular flecks of stars seem similarly discarded. Perhaps if it pours his friend will come back and keep him company in the long silent evening. Yes, Mark thinks, he’ll be home soon enough, and there’ll be time to talk about all that has occurred, to make amends for angry words. He holds the note tight so the paper curves and tears.

  After an hour he stands and peers from the window at the front of the house, breathing the sour air from the street. He knows his friend will not return. He finishes the four cigarettes in the pack. Lights a candle and tests his tolerance for the flame, his hand passing closer over its trembling. He feels like crawling under the bed. The boy with plugs and control panels never felt this disconnected. The world could not engulf him like it comes gathering in now. He grips the heavy machine of his self, his arms wired about his body, and rocks until all the hard shapes transfigure into a liquid blur.

  How Babies Are Made

  Kate’s hand made circling movements on her mother’s stomach, her lips pursed in concentration. Cassie looked sleepy, sitting still in an armchair, her arms draped over the sides: she watched the slow revolutions of her daughter’s hand.

  After a moment Kate looked at Theo who was watching her efforts.

  ‘Mummy’s baby does pat sometimes but when you put your hand on her tummy it never does.’

  ‘Wake him up so he will play,’ Theo said, impatient.

  ‘It’s not a him,’ Kate said.

  Ignoring this, Theo flopped his head to one side to gaze quizzically at his mother’s stomach.

  ‘What is he waiting for?’ He stood, ran across the room and took a flying leap onto the bean bag all the while saying booger booger booger booger BOOGER. He wanted to see his new brother, he didn’t want to wait. He flopped his head to the other side and squinted. He sighed. If stared at long enough, he believed his mother’s belly button would untangle itself and produce the stubborn sibling.

  ‘ ’Svery rude of him,’ he added. He had repeated this statement several times a day for two weeks, parroting his father whom he’d overheard on the phone.

  Cassie turned. Rien was standing in the hallway. ‘Hey there, I guess no sec
ret’s safe in this house?’

  At the sound of her voice, Rien walked from the doorway to stop, stranded, in the middle of the lounge rug. She remained there as if balancing on a shaky island, unsure of what was safer – stillness, or to step further into the wavering room. Objects seemed atilt, the air before her spun about. She had quietly taken in the scene and turned the wave of feeling into a swarm of words in her head. She wanted to leave but the desire for explanation had descended, she wanted the high excitement of Cassie’s next word.

  Theo had begun running around the rug where Rien stood, thinking her stillness was some kind of game, like the statues you made when the lady blew the whistle at kindy to say stop running. Cassie’s hand was on her stomach and Rien thought the baby was sending her a secret message. Everything before her seemed in code, hidden. She glanced down at the hand. The stomach below it looked as flat as ever. She tried to ignore Theo’s circling run, the whizzing sound he was making as he passed by.

  ‘Are you happy for me, for us?’ Cassie’s face looked expectant, her eyes wide.

  Happy. Rien wasn’t sure how to make the word belong to her, felt only a yawning emptiness inside as if her own body was making a mocking comparison with Cassie’s. Cassie was not one but two beings now, she would never feel lonely. But how many children did a person need?

  ‘Are you sure, I mean, how do you know?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, goodness, Rien, you sound like a guilty father.’

  Theo changed direction and began to chant a new phrase.

  ‘Agilly father, she’s agilly father.’ His tone was accusatory, in a way that Cassie’s wasn’t.

  ‘It’s about two months old. Theo seems to think it’ll be here any day now, however.’ She looked nervously at her son who, thankfully, was now silent and still.