Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  He wandered through the echoey hall, running a freckled finger along the wall as he looked up at the mounted pictures, then across to the strange sculptures of foil and cardboard and string, the multi-coloured globules of plasticine imprinted with frail traceries of fingertip, the towering constructions of cardboard, paper and tape. He found a cluster of Mark’s early contraptions, the busy mess of wires that were his signature, the carefully built machines that once enlivened him. They looked a little shabby, as if they had been stored in boxes and bashed around, but still impressed with their complexity. They seemed to Dog Boy to be a kind of transportation system, for along with the wires came wheels and little boxes for sitting in, buttons of all colours to be pressed, levers to be tweaked.

  And then he saw the keys, a whole bank of them laid out on a length of dark cloth and preserved under glass. He grew both annoyed and fascinated, for they were so impractical, bound together with twine and old pieces of rag, built from twigs, teeth, bones and wires. He fingered his own working locker key beneath the creases of his shirt. Then swallowed loudly and heard the glottal echo return from the cavernous ceiling. He could not laugh because he might cry instead. Those keys were truly ludicrous but sad, they seemed to represent a desire for their sculptors’ release but the manner of their construction ensured their uselessness. Did the children who made them want to stay, or to go?

  It wasn’t until he spied Rien’s work on the far wall of the hall that he knew what colour, what temperature, his departure would be. He took his time, throwing his sandy head about, this way and that to peer at the painted bluish girl with no arms, standing on a lawn of swaying grass. She might have been a tree, her body was so shapeless and the hair flowered above it in all directions, but her feet rested slightly above the earth, not rooted there, nor was she solid. Inside the torso a red tomato shape seemed to be under attack from a swarm of insects. Moving closer he saw they were intricately rendered yellow and black, their tiny wings thrashing the greenish wash of air. He could smell the grass in those colours and a crushed ant stink. Beside this picture two letters hung, pressed flat inside their frames. The first began Dear Dad, and contained only two words repeated down the page and across it. Five columns in all of black words, a scrabbling scribble that, said Come home! The second letter addressed Dear Mum and in the same five-columned scrawl, the word repeated down the page was Come! An envelope with its hopeful address hung empty beside the two, the paper had been decorated with a tiny stamp, it showed the same plump heart of the bluish girl and was framed by a square of bees.

  Dog Boy looked and looked and knew some ruined thing, but it took an awful time before he figured it out, peering into the bleak heart of those letters, not so much thinking but allowing his body to register the fact, and then the searing effect, of realisation. Those letters, Rien’s name labelled beneath them, had never been sent. They seemed embalmed, uselessly stuck there behind glass. He glanced back to a fragment of chicken bone bound with pale thread labelled ‘key’ and then to his friend’s desperate request on the wall. And suddenly pictured a swarm of bodies at a great door, beyond which lay the bright, real and scented world. A thousand deformed hands were struggling with the cryptic lock, competing to see which key would fit. The lock was in fact a maze of tunnels, a labyrinth. He saw it required no key but the mind’s own trickery. And knew then he would pass through that keyhole in a blown whorl of smoke.

  And so he made his plans, from that day forward with renewed vigour. Something had curdled inside him beneath the arching beams of the exhibition hall. He did not interrogate the sour feeling but was silently grateful for the way it galvanised him. Each evening Jonas returned to him in nightmares, a ghoul that brought no message but a gleeful final smile. In the morning he repeated his innocence to himself: Mark had assured him this was the truth. He was not responsible. He had struck the match when asked and passed it, that was all. He had even turned then to leave his friend in his private petrol swoon. But in his dreams the sound returned – the whoosh of flames – and the sight of Jonas alight and thrashing against the greasy concrete floor.

  Big John returned to sit beside the suffering boy, laid like an offering at his huge feet. You flip round more like a hooked fish, Big John told him, than a true dog. And then his hand of HATE pulled the wire and brought the boy close to where a wet sewery smell oozed from tiny holes in his sneakers.

  Dogs don’t treat humans the way humans treat animals, Dog Boy thought. But it was true a creature could turn, if sufficiently provoked. He had once witnessed a black and white pup thrown into a river so it might learn the mechanics of swimming. The puppy’s owner stood, a can in her hand and guzzled some liquid as she shouted. Dog paddle, go awn ya silly creature, swim! The dog’s terror was clear as it waggled in the water and was finally dragged to the lurching land. A burp ballooned from the woman as she bent to pet the sopping dog. The pup began to whimper at the sudden onslaught of a gentled hand. Its small ears pressed back, the broad head was cocked, the tail began to slow. And then the bedraggled creature twisted and leapt toward the hand and bit hard into the erratic gristle.

  It had seemed then to Dog Boy all cruelty had come winnowing down through icy air to concentrate beside the river. And he turned then to run as the next instalment of violence played out, the woman screeching and pulling her hand high with the pup still clinging to it and now paddling the air quite expertly. From then on he was rarely surprised at human brutality, but could never anticipate its sudden eruption. Now, he sees a purpose in having watched that drama of fur and blood and scrabbling paw. For he knows the true bruise colours of the world, and that you don’t have to lie still under its brutish hand.

  Dog Boy smelt again the sock and foot odour, the mouldering stench of the shed. Beside him, Big John was squirming. Dog Boy put one shaking freckled hand toward the reddish skin and tore at the folds above the inky HATE, gathering his body into a hop and run and leap toward the scrap of light below the door. He was then suspended for one stretched second like a cartoon figure in its stationary sprint above a yawning gorge. But in his mind he was running still and had reached the dampened grass, the night air whizzing and singing above his small pink earlobes. He heard his name, a distant calling.

  Big John pulled the wire noose and dragged the straining figure backwards to teeter at the cliff edge, his limbs loose, dangling. Some blunt thing came down hard and thrumming on his head. And his body churned like the mountain in sudden eruption, the hot rocks of his organs shook and a red stickiness flowed from the core of his self, carrying him brokenly to a burning land.

  Gone

  Three days pass slow as rust. He spends his mornings in the gloomy cocoon of the bed, the sheets rucked up around his body. After midday the television chatters in his head. He watches news reports, soaps, reruns of old serials. He leaves the front door ajar at night. She might come home. Does she have her key? He digs out the poem he had left on the whiteboard for her and wonders if this was what made her decide. No more visits, the nurses had said, and of course she wasn’t talking on the telephone. Now it seems a frivolous thing to have done while she lay with all her secret thoughts, tucked safely in those hospital corners. His fussing around with words and meanings. He reads it through again. The last line isn’t too subtle, he thinks. Was it too demanding? What about ‘portals’, sounds like something on a ship. He knew he shouldn’t have used the thesaurus, maybe she wouldn’t know all of the words. Probably lucky if she didn’t, it was a crap poem anyway, he thinks. He tries to picture his unyielding girl and looks to the couch to imagine her on it, her head tilting in that queer questioning way. Her neck bloodless and pale.

  The opposite of flying is falling. That’s why she’s a bird girl, he thinks, takes off when things start to falter. What the bird loves is the nothingness of air, the wind to take you somewhere else. He sees her struggling against the weight of her falling body, the pressure of the past. And it’s then he knows that she won’t come back to him, that she’ll flap
what’s left of her baby wings and take off for somewhere else.

  He watches the evening news. A chemical spill in the west, two suburbs evacuated until the poison fumes drift to another, less wealthy zone, four car accidents, two vehicles like scrunched balls of aluminium foil. A murder, a body found in the neighbouring suburb, dumped on the banks of a river. The face was beaten, barely recognisable. Across the tattered neck was the purple imprint of a wire. So far no one had come forward to identify him. Male, Caucasian, fair-skinned, the detective said.

  At first he thinks, it could not be. Perhaps he should call the police, go down there and take a look. He shudders, he’s seen enough bloody flesh to last a lifetime. Of course it isn’t, he says aloud and thinks, surely he’ll return by morning, his eyes greener, his wide mouth running over with fresh news of the world.

  He hasn’t slept alone since the Home. He rolls around in the too-big bed and tries to forget that she’s not there. He used to watch her in the deepest part of night. When sleeplessness would fill and empty his body. How afraid he used to be of the darkness that sleep required. Rien, he thinks, is scared of who the darkness hides – the hulking figure that limps through her dreams. But he worries about his own self disappearing. If I’m alone in the dark, how do I know that I am really there? He thinks about her citrusy note in the Home, her question coiled within it. Do dreams protect your sleep? And suddenly he understands. Dreams don’t protect your sleep, they guard your self while sleeping. That’s why his Dream Converter was so important. It didn’t just trap the bad dreams. It kept the traces of the self that lived while he slept. When it broke down he had no choice but to give up sleep entirely. He feels something lighten in his head and his chest. Dreams are important. They’re comforting evidence: someone’s still there, travelling in dark country.

  In the morning he walks to the Dead Woman’s shop to buy the paper. She barely stirs as he hands her his change. For the first time he grows annoyed at the sagging sight of her. And wants to yell, You’re lucky to be alive, why don’t you at least pretend to be? But his anger evaporates with each step toward the door. What does he know of her life, the trials she might have endured? I should have chosen Love, he thinks, remembering Rien’s morning question about the corner stores. Love or Death – which is it going to be? He forces a laugh but it’s a frail sliver of a joke. He has lost all humour without Rien’s wry smile to acknowledge it.

  On the slow wander home he sees Larry approaching, immersed in his avid chattering, his head bent toward the doll on his coat.

  ‘Larry, how’re things with you?’

  The man glances briefly at this obstacle in his path. He shakes a smiling head and steps to one side in order to pass. Mark moves to block his passage, looks into the man’s eyes.

  ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me, Larry?’

  The man puts a defensive hand to the grubby head of the doll. He repeats a gravelly phrase and looks away from Mark’s demanding gaze.

  ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me …’

  Mark lets him pass and turns to watch. A tuft of black doll hair appears at every second step as the plastic head swings like a pendulum.

  ‘Guess I forgot,’ Mark mutters, mock-forlornly in the direction of the man, ‘you’ve always got company.’ And he thinks of Rien’s theory, that Larry was once a twin.

  Rejection makes an unfamiliar swill in his belly. He peers at the ground, searching for a small creature. Something alive that he can smush into the unresponsive floor of the world.

  In the kitchen he sits with the paper. He dares himself to open it, searches for the story. Perhaps his friend’s bruised face might smile out from the newsprint. He lights a cigarette, yanks the smoke out of it thinking, chaos, this world, fucking chaos. Something shines across the room and he sees the umber-coloured jewels Rien collected last summer, prising them from rents in the local gum trees. Some look like frozen drips. Others are misshapen rubies with bark and bodies of bugs trapped inside.

  It was a morbid fascination – it’s just not healthy, he would joke, a young girl roaming the streets looking for wounds in branches and trunks. When she found a new gob of sap she removed it with great tenderness. As if she felt something for the tree that had such a wound. She would hold the sap with care – it was sometimes still sticky and pliable, or glassy and brittle – trying not to change its shape.

  He gathers up the objects from around the house, the scraps of paper from his planning, the piles of ragged newsprint, snipped through long ago, takes every extraneous thing he can see and piles it at the base of the chimney. In the bedroom her clothes hang limply on the makeshift rack. He touches the cloth of them but pulls his hand away. Beneath the bed are boxes, photographs and keepsakes, three letters from his mother, some old notes passed at the Home. He finds the box she used to store her clippings in and peers inside though he knows she got rid of her book some time ago – there were drifts of ash in the grate for days, burnt words crumbling. He finds a photograph he’s seen once before, Rien a baby in her mother’s arms, and a small notebook with the childish scrawl of her name at the front. He hesitates then decides, if she wanted it she would have come by now, it’s his right, he thinks, to look in there. The first page contains a list of words and their meanings, the next, a row of signatures repeated. She has experimented with her two names – he remembers the story she told him. How her mother had sung the name in a song one evening, Je ne regrette rien. I regret nothing. The first signature practised the intended name: Reine Arden, and the later version filled the rest of the page: it seems she had decided then, which one she would perfect. Half the book is filled with jottings, small pictures and doodles. He returns it to the box and carries the lot under his arm to the lounge where their life’s clutter is gathered and waiting.

  Then he strikes the match and watches, the box left at his side for a decision. He will save it and read her child’s hand in the evening. Perhaps there might be a clue to her nature, like a trace of sap from an old wound, something that has formed and hardened from her younger days.

  He would like to cry, but since Rien’s bloody fall, and her not coming home, since Dog Boy’s desertion, no form of expression will emerge from his choked throat, the dry mouth and the tongue that lolls woodenly within it.

  Appetite

  Mai conducts bold experiments with food in the tiny kitchen. She serves their evening meals with great ceremony, arranging the laden dishes on coloured placemats, decorating the table with flowers stolen from gardens passed on her walk home from the bus stop. The rich smell of the meals combines with the delicate scent of jasmine or the sharp tang of geranium, and confounds Rien’s sensitive nostrils.

  ‘It was peas boiled to a green putty and carrots like old soggy Wettex, oh and some sort of sausage curry.’ Rien describes the only solid food she can recall being served in the hospital. It’s no coincidence her thoughts have turned to that dull sludge – though the food before her is brightly coloured, she finds it equally disconcerting; a mass of vegetables in a thick gelatinous sauce. Most of her hospital meals had conveniently circumvented her mouth, and were served through a tube in her arm. Now she has to face this array of smell and texture and somehow transfer it to the inside of her body. If she were home she would simply refuse, but she does not want to offend and so takes up her fork with a deep inward breath, as if to prepare her throat for the necessary opening.

  Mai watches as Rien picks at the food, chewing her own with such gusto she might have been trying to infect her friend with ravenousness. ‘I think hospital meals are designed to taste bad,’ Mai speculates, ‘so you’re desperate for real food after they release you and then you stay healthy.’

  This seems to Rien more than speculation – a thinly coded warning about maintaining her post-hospital plumpness. She pinches her dark lips together as she listens to the determined work within Mai’s masticating jaw.

  ‘It’s like men. You spend the night with someone really vile and
I guarantee you’ll crave the good stuff.’

  ‘Good stuff?’ Rien impales a celery chunk on her fork. The sauce beneath the vegetables looks suspiciously viscous. She begins counting the green things on the plate in the hope she’ll end up with an even number.

  ‘It won’t attack you, hon, celery’s the pacifist of the vege kingdom. By the way they serve that hospital stuff in fancy joints now – only they call it pea mash or ragout au sausage.’ She says the last phrase in an exotic way, prolonging the final syllable.

  Rien plucks the offending vegetable from her fork, puts it in her mouth and sucks, perhaps it will dissipate in the heat and pressure and the stringy mass won’t have to be swallowed down. Mai folds her hands in her lap, having scraped her plate clean.

  ‘The way you eat! I really hate to think what you’re like in bed. Such a timid appetite … Hey, hands off.’ She points her pinky finger toward where Rien’s right hand grips her throat.

  Rien lifts her fingers and hides both hands beneath the table. ‘Well I don’t see any queues at your door.’

  ‘With me there’s a recovery period. It’s not something men admit, but some take days, weeks, to … well, get it all together again.’

  ‘Because you’re so exhausting, sexually?’ A deeply lodged husk has split and Rien tastes the bitter seeds in her mouth.