Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘You told me once that the sick, too, love truth,’ she replied. ‘And you have to make up your mind whether you take omens or whether you don’t take omens. Now that you’re forty.’

  They kissed at customs control and he felt shielded by the automatic sliding doors of the airport departure tunnel and glad that she was out of the country – her and her Stabilo spells.

  In December he turned forty. He spent Christmas and his birthday with Belle, the wrong person. They stayed drunk and debauched in motels around the country and then in the bush, but they knew they were the wrong people to spend birthdays and Christmases with and that they were waiting for someone more suitable to those sorts of occasions to come along in their lives.

  ‘But it feels OK,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, with genuine enthusiasm.

  In February he met his friend Milton at the international airport on his return from study leave in the US.

  Milton said, first thing, ‘What about the Jonestown suicides!’

  ‘Why do you mention the Jonestown suicides?’

  ‘I was in this commune in San Francisco when it all happened,’ Milton said, who always spent his study leave in a commune. ‘We were on the fringe of that scene.’

  ‘Here, let me take your luggage,’ he said to Milton, ‘but go on, tell me about Jonestown and I’ll tell you my story.’

  ‘I had this incredible fight with Sheena – really bad in a way neither of us had before with anyone else in our lives or with each other. We generally never fight like that. Pulling hair – smashed mirrors – and she scratched me, flesh under her fingernails …’

  ‘A White Knight private investigator would have found the flesh under the fingernails.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing – go on.’

  ‘It was so bad. We both went off – I went to this bar to drink myself to death. I don’t know where she went but we both felt suicidal. She tried to telephone this doctor she knew to get sleeping pills. I kept working out in the bar how to drink enough to kill myself. Next day: Jonestown.’

  ‘Jonestown.’

  ‘Yes, really! A guy at the commune who is into lasers said that the Jonestown thing triggered suicides all over the country. That there was this beaming out from Jonestown, and Sheena and I were lucky to have resisted it – just. The signal was too weak.’

  ‘It could have been the hills. The reception is bad in the hills of San Francisco.’

  They put the luggage in the car.

  ‘How was Jones going to broadcast the signal?’ he asked Milton, who knew these things.

  ‘It was a beam – a head beam.’

  ‘Oh. I thought that it was Alice holding the end of the pen,’ he told Milton, jocularly, ‘that’s our lives.’

  ‘You’re right!’ Milton said. ‘The CIA is in there somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll tell you my story.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Milton, ‘I’ll tell you what’s really coming down the tube from the Jonestown thing.’

  Milton talked dysrhythmically as they drove around the car park looking for an exit. Milton hit his forehead with his hand, ‘Of course – I missed at first – the Ballad of the White Knight – White Knight! Jesus the ramifications are fantastic.’

  But he thought that Milton seemed to shrink away from him after he had told his story of the White Knight.

  He did not work in January – the White Knight folder was still lying on his desk from November. When wandering in the city, hours early for an appointment, he bought the seamail Economist for November 25.

  The Economist had ‘something to say’.

  The religious sects are the grass forcing itself through the concrete … religious innovation is one of the last and best examples of free enterprise … half forgotten fragments of animism and the dark other side of the religious coin … if things go well the time between now and the 21st century could prove to be as important in the development of human consciousness as, say, the fifth century BC (which saw orderly intellectual thought taking root in Greece); the first century of the Christian era (which saw the offering of a new link between the spiritual and material halves of life); the seventh century (which saw the first real explosion of the idea of man’s individual powers and responsibilities) … it could lead to a pacification of the long civil war in inner space … most appear to have drunk cyanide found mixed with grape drink in a tin tub. Mr Jones had dispensed mock suicide potions before. The spasms of the first children ended any doubt. Many tried to run into the jungle. They were turned back by the camp’s armed guards or shot down … at one level the story is another example of the special quality of America; the country where the best is better, but the worst is also worse, than anywhere on the globe.

  The pacification of the long civil war in inner space, yet.

  Now if the Economist leader writer had been at lunch at the New Hellas he would have had something to say. But it was not a Sydney way of talking. We could do with some panoramic thinkers.

  AAP-Milton telephone: ‘More on Jonestown – I’m over my dysrhythmia now – more stuff is coming down – I’m told there are 913 bodies in a hangar at Dover Air Force base in Delaware. No one will claim them. They will remain there forever. Refrigerated. A complete commune. The dead commune – the title’s yours, have it, take it. The ramifications are truly fantastic.’

  ‘It’s the grass forcing itself through the concrete,’ he told Milton.

  ‘Riiiight!’

  Was this the commune that beckoned him? Was this the commune, at last, that wanted him?

  He learned from a friend in the US airforce that the bodies were in fact flown from Dover Air Force base to California to be buried. Delaware didn’t want them buried there.

  Sandra rang about the television treatment on the White Knight series and he told her he had not done any work on it. He told her why.

  She said, ‘Oh,’ and then asked him how he was coping with being forty.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  In April, he read that the code name for the suicide pact was not ‘White Knight’ but ‘White Night’. It had been misreported. There was no explanation of either code name.

  He felt something lift from his whimpering psyche but still could not work on the White Knight project.

  He rang Milton. ‘They had it wrong,’ he told him.

  ‘But Jesus,’ Milton said, ‘you came within one letter of being hit by the laser.’

  ‘I missed by one letter – a kay. I’m A-Okay.’

  ‘Don’t joke – that’s the way it works. There’s a lot of stuff coming out on that sort of thing from Hungary.’

  That week while contemplating beginning work ‘on the treatment’ (and his new life) he fell down writhing with pain on the floor of his office amid the struggling indoor plants.

  Gripped with agony, he called a taxi which took him to the doctor and from there he was taken to hospital for emergency surgery.

  He came out of the operation with tubes in his mouth, nose and penis, and with a drip in his arm.

  They gave him Pentathol and he saw a sun-filled field of yellow flowers and it beckoned to him. It was, he thought, death beckoning. No doubt. He considered it, saw his great-grandmother and grandfather standing in the field beckoning, but for no obvious reason decided this time to say no he wouldn’t go yet into the never-ending warmth of that sun and to death’s corny field of swaying yellow flowers. Not yet.

  He then fell into a deep sleep and did not die.

  He convalesced on his own in a small quiet hotel. He could not go to Belle’s house because she was not someone you convalesced with, her life-urge was over-vigorous, and she had once said that she was into ‘scars’.

  The months of August and September he spent in Canberra, the seat of government, on IAEA business. While in that city a Senator Knight rang and wanted to talk to him about nuclear waste.

  Of all the senators why Senator Knight? He told himself that
it was White Night now that he had to watch – the Knight business was all over. But he went to the appointment cautiously.

  Nothing of note occurred.

  In August, still in Canberra, he read a poem in the magazine Quadrant written by Evan Jones. He did not register the name Jones until he had entered the poem.

  Sometimes he read poems because he knew the poet, sometimes because of the title, sometimes he just grabbed a poem and read it as a random sample of ‘poetry being written now’. He had read this poem as such a sample.

  It was titled Insomniacs but he was not an insomniac, that was not the reason he read the poem.

  In stanza three he read:

  Insomniacs, bless them, are never afraid of the dark:

  bad nights are called ‘white nights’ for that dull white

  which lurks behind their eye-lids, dingy, mean.

  Nothing at all like innocence, purity or peace,

  signalling that all the nerves would like to break.

  Something in the whole being is at war.

  He put down the magazine. Oh oh, something was still going on. The laser was still searching for him.

  That night and for a few nights he sweated after going to bed, fearing that his sleep would now be disrupted – that that had been the message of the poem. Could you die from sleep deprivation?

  His two companions in Canberra were named Lewis and after a heavy drinking bout with one of the Lewises, in the week he read the poem, he became ill again with hepatitis.

  He could hardly move from his bed, pinned down with an immense lethargy. He found that he could now do nothing else but sleep.

  It had got him, the laser.

  That night while lying in bed with his new sickness in his rooms at University House he heard music from a radio carried on the wind and he heard the announcer say that the piece of music which had reached him on the wind was called White Night and that it was played by Kenny White and his orchestra. The wind dropped and he heard no more.

  While lying there during the next few days he wondered why his two companions in that city – the seat of government – should both be named Lewis. He asked one and she said that Cottle’s Dictionary of Surnames said that Lewis meant ‘great battle’.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  He shook his head, the message was there but could not be shared.

  This Lewis dropped in the airmail Guardian to him to read and he read that the Moscow International Book Fair had refused to allow the book White Nights by Israel’s Prime Minister Mr Begin to enter the Soviet Union. The book was an account of Begin’s persecution and torment in a Soviet labour camp.

  In the next airmail Guardian he read of a recent screening of Bresson’s Four Nights which was based on Dostoyevsky’s story White Nights and he further read that Visconti also had made a film called White Nights based on the Dostoyevsky story.

  Hepatitis had drained his energy so that clipping even the tissue-thin pages of the airmail Guardian took a long time, but he clipped the two reports and would, from time to time, study them for messages.

  The clippings yielded nothing, but the word ‘guardian’ addressed itself to him and he felt comforted by it.

  There was, he intuited, an airmail or air-male or heir-male Force of Destruction coming in from around Jonestown and an heir-male Guardian. There was a battle going on for his psyche. He being, of course, the male heir. His suicidal grandfather was mixed up in it somewhere.

  As soon as he was well enough he went to the National University library and found all Dostoyevsky’s work there except White Nights.

  He stood there in the gloomy aisles of books sweating from a nervous impotence, having confirmed, once again, that desperate feeling he always had in libraries that what he wanted would not be there, or that he was looking in the wrong place.

  ‘What does it mean that the book White Nights by Dostoyevsky is not in the library?’ he asked a helpful, new-breed librarian in jeans.

  ‘It could be out on loan.’

  He wanted a different category of answer to his questions. But that was asking too much even from a new-breed librarian.

  ‘But all his other books are there in multiple copies.’

  ‘Maybe it is at the binder – that would be another possibility.’

  ‘That all the copies of White Nights wore out at the same time? Could you check to see who has all the copies of White Nights?’

  ‘That would be confidential. Would you like it to be public knowledge that you, say, borrowed a book on menopause, hypothetically – if you were a woman?’

  He did not wish to be drawn into hypothetical discussion – in another gender – on menopause.

  ‘It’s odd, that’s all,’ he said, a touch of peevishness in his voice, ‘that you have multiple copies of all of Dostoyevsky’s work but that all the copies of that title alone are missing.’

  She shrugged, and began to fidget nervously with her confidential cards, moving surreptitiously towards the security button.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  He had never been welcome, not for one day on this planet had he ever felt welcome.

  Outside the library, he thought, I am becoming grumpy, I am now forty and I am becoming grumpy.

  He recovered and returned to his own city where he told Belle about the White Nights and about the books missing from the library and the rest.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said, humouring him.

  ‘Don’t humour me,’ he said, grumpily, ‘I think it bears some attention.’

  ‘I cannot explain the White Nights thing,’ she said, watching him, he thought, closely, ‘but I have two copies of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. I don’t want you to make anything of it.’

  ‘Why two copies of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights?’

  ‘I cannot explain why I have two copies and I do not want you to make a thing of it.’

  She brought him a copy of the book.

  He examined it and read the novella White Nights.

  He then explained to Belle that white night referred to the midsummer nights at the sixtieth latitude north.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I am in the midsummer latitude of my life.’

  ‘Oh.’

  In November, one year from the Jonestown suicides, an American journalist flew in and telephoned him, Joe Treaster from the New York Times.

  Joe Treaster wanted to talk to him about the IAEA.

  ‘Who put you on to me?’

  ‘The Department of Information.’

  A few days later a friend rang and invited him to a party. ‘Joe Treaster from the New York Times will be there. You should meet him.’

  ‘Yes, he rang me.’

  ‘Did you know he was the first journalist into Jonestown after the suicides? He’s very interesting on it.’

  ‘No!’

  He then rang Joe at his hotel but could not reach him and left a message for Joe to ring back.

  But he was due in Vienna and could not fit in with Joe’s itinerary. They didn’t meet, which he thought was probably just as well.

  That week Senator Knight from Canberra dropped dead at the age of forty.

  He gave up the White Knight TV project, not having written a word of it.

  He said to Belle that he did not really suffer from the illusion that the universe was rearranging itself to give him a personal message. He knew that was ultimate egoism.

  But he could be excused for thinking it was a year of shadows, confusing linguistic signals, ricocheting beams, that maybe a bony hand had been groping for him, inviting him to dance, lanterns had been waved in the dark to guide him towards the cliff. But he was through it now.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Belle said, ‘I thought for a while there you were loony tunes.’

  Later in the next year, having again given up the idea of being a writer, he was working at a university and they had given him a room formerly occupied by a medievalist.

  He was sea
ted at the desk for some hours before he realised that a poster of an ivory chess piece on the wall facing him was a white knight – the caption said it was from the Isle of Lewis. The white knight was glum and toy-like and it did not frighten him. He photographed it and during his time at the university became quite fond of it.

  Libido and Life Lessons

  When he noticed that his libido was low while in Vienna the first time he thought it was because he was travelling – the beast out of its habitat does not feel secure enough to mate or, maybe, to perform any part of the breeding act. He reasoned that animals needed to be confident of their safety. But we are not purely animals. And sometimes he had become randy while travelling. Now he didn’t feel randy for days and days. It continued after his return to Australia.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘is this some sort of suicide?’ Was this why his grandfather committed suicide? Which came first, the loss of interest in life or the loss of libido?

  His fantasy life became dulled. He was able to have sex, but without much drive. Another explanation was that he was ‘growing up’ and putting behind him random sexuality. Was this the way an adult genital male should be at forty? All the books said that turning forty should not affect the libido. Were the books lying?

  He found too that he desired to feel desire as much as he wanted to have sex; to feel the full juices of desire, to be restless with appetite would please him now.

  He could recall the visitations of desire for Belle. The desire strong enough to make him get up from his bed into a car and to drive in the middle of the night to see her.

  He understood why Faust in the Gounod opera wanted the return of desire as part of his contract with the devil.

  Or was he in fact better off without it?

  He wondered if it were absent long enough would it fade as a known part of his person – would the feel of it be beyond imaginative recall, even?

  That might be all right.

  It was, he would now have to explain to Belle, that he could still visually recognise sensuality or sexual attractiveness but it seemed disconnected from the hormonal physical reaction in him. The line was down.