by A. S. Patric
The water finished gurgling down the drain minutes ago. Whistling along the corridor outside pulls him out of his reverie. The footsteps come and go, the happy tune with them. Jovan washes his hands. Washes his face. Can still smell Tammie’s perfume on himself as he walks out of the clean birthing room. Looks into his mind for some poetry. Finds none. Nothing but the fluttering feel of glossy black feathers rising ruthlessly through his intestines.
An elderly patient comes in Tuesday morning to see Miss Richards. While running him through the usual lenses to cope with deteriorating vision, he complains about letters appearing before his eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of it. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe because Mr Donaldson has difficulty explaining things at times. She tells him anxiety, or various emotional states, can affect how well the eyes worked. So they can reschedule and he won’t be charged for this appointment. He leaves mumbling about that damned contraption of hers doing diabolical things to his head.
Miss Richards sits in the chair and swings the Optical Refractor around to look through his last lens. There’s a letter scratched into the lens itself. A very small, very precise letter T in the middle of the glass. She swings the machine around. Finds the next lens in the series has a letter also scratched into the lens—a capital R. Scratched isn’t the right word. Engraved is better. They are exact. It is the same blockish font as the Snellen eye charts she used. When she lines up all the lenses on her small desk she finds the message reads:
TEST TO DESTRUCTION
It is a term used in medicine. Manufacturers use it more commonly. If they develop a new design for something, perhaps a brake pad, they need to work out what its response to the stress of its function is. The way to test full tolerance is a test to destruction. So she knows what it means though she has no idea what this vandal wanted to say by it. She throws those lenses away. Checks all her other lenses. Finds nothing else. Miss Richards orders replacements and arranges for new locks to be put on her doors.
The first thing she does the next few mornings, when she comes in, is check her charts. Goes through all her lenses carefully. Sometimes more than once a day. She calls Jovan to make sure the eye charts were incinerated.
Jovan enjoys reading the local rags more than the proper newspapers. He is amazed that someone has caught a massive barracouta off Frankston Pier. Every time he’s walked up and down it, the fishermen, with their three or four rods each, seem so hopelessly fishless—sitting forlornly against the wooden railing with lines slack in the shiftless waters.
Last week on the front page there was a picture of a tall, lanky youth, with a stretched out, crooked smile—his two-metre-long barracouta beneath it. Jovan examines his smile in this newspaper image and wonders what it was about the big fish that made William Hay feel so joyous. He’d merely cast a hook in the water. A fish had sniffed out the little bit of bait and thought it could eat it. Fell for the deception. Was William Hay a man happy because his little trick had paid off so handsomely, or was there a larger feeling of cosmic blessing he felt on Frankston Pier?
This week the local rag had a picture of the water cooler near radiology with the tape Jovan had put around it and the senseless words above the image: Origin of the Species.
Jovan reads the article. An interview with a local psychologist and Frankston-based writer who is good for a few quotes as well as the appearance of some solid research done.
Doctor David Dickens opined that from what he’d been shown of the graffitist currently pestering the Sandringham Hospital there was a frustrated artist at work in all of it. He also stated that this should not be underestimated as a cause of the mental illness widespread in our society.
Jovan folds the paper up again. His break is almost over. He spends the last few minutes thinking about the young man who caught a big fish. A barracouta resembles a small dinosaur. It’s strangely long and thin and its jaws have miniature alligator teeth. Jovan had never been fishing but he would enjoy catching an Australian barracouta from Frankston Pier—when it dangled from a line held in his outstretched arm, still alive and flapping.
An odd bit of data floats into his mind about how the early Christians didn’t use the crucifix as the central symbol of their faith. It had been the fish, a representation of the soul in the ocean of the Holy Spirit. Everyone has scraps of mythology in their minds, and it’s probably foolish to spend more than a few seconds considering them, yet he does enjoy the idea of a barracouta soul.
In the afternoon Jovan carries leaking green bags of refuse from the kitchen to the skip a few metres from the back door. One breaks open and spills out onto the hot bitumen. He’s swearing at it, and at the thought that he’ll have to clean this mess up now, when he finds that a bald man has materialised behind him.
He’s watching Jovan quietly, listening to Serbian profanities. He smells of incense and wears the kind of Indian apparel you can buy in the stores that sell that incense. It’s a strange fashion some people wear in Australia. Back in Bosnia the poorest wouldn’t have worn it. Even Gypsies would have ridiculed it.
Jovan picks up the pile of bones and rice and carrot, all soaked in gravy and a variety of unknowable juices. Strides away from the man to the mini skip. He walks to the kitchen with the man following him. He washes the putrid stink off his hands, applying the pink liquid soap three times before he is satisfied. Cleans beneath his fingernails with a dishwashing brush. It’s not only the odour. It smells noxiously of the rotting chicken flesh he’d found in the mess and Jovan has been paranoid in the extreme ever since he’d suffered through food poisoning back in Bosnia. The word alone, Salmonella, feels toxic in his mouth and ears.
He shakes the water from his hands in one big wave from elbows through wrists to fingertips and looks at the man patiently waiting for Jovan to finish. The bald fellow is wearing small round glasses. He lifts his right hand as if to clear his mouth before speaking, then doesn’t get the chance to talk because Prasad, the kitchen’s chef, has stepped between them to tell Jovan to go help the delivery man bring in a large shipment of frozen meats hanging in his truck.
“Not my job,” Jovan tells him.
Prasad is dumbfounded, blinks it away and says in a rising voice practised at throwing around orders, “Your job is what I tell you. You go and help him. Now.”
“Not my job proscription. Kitchen not my job. Hospital is my job.”
“What do you mean? The kitchen is part of the hospital.” He speaks in an accent that makes Jovan think it’s an attempt at posh English, that gets carried away with some Indian flowery vowel sounds.
“Part of this job. Not part of you,” Jovan says flatly as he shakes his hands one more time over the sink and uses a towel he keeps in his back pocket.
“What the bleeding hell are you talking about? Part of this? Part of that? Do you understand basic directions?” Prasad leans forward without moving his feet. Jovan starts towards the door and the small, pot-bellied chef is quick to dance out of his way. Jovan walks out the door with the silent man still following him.
“My name is David Dickens,” he says, as they walk towards the next clean-up request that came through on Jovan’s pager fifteen minutes ago. A woman’s waters have broken in the lobby. When Jovan hears the name he stops and turns towards him. “I’m told you’re the man to speak to regarding the graffiti. Because you’re the man that cleans it all away. And I found myself interested in the water cooler that was in the Bayside Bugle.”
“Yes, and you this psychologist they ask to understand him.”
The man nods without really hearing. Intent on following a set of sentences he’s already prepared. “It seems interesting what he’s doing. I’ve been told he used his own blood to write a message on the walls of the operating room. I was interested in what the message was.”
“The dots in his blood. Maybe his blood. Maybe from somewhere else.”
“What dots?”
“After the sentence there is the dots, to say there is something more, but it is
not …” Jovan taps his finger in his palm three times to indicate the trail of ellipses.
“Oh, the dots were in blood. What was the message?”
“I cannot tell you right this time. I have my job I have to do.”
“I understand,” he says, reaching out a hand to touch Jovan’s shoulder. Realising instantly it’s a mistake and dropping his outstretched arm. “I’m wondering if they tested the blood. They could still match it to a hospital employee.”
Jovan lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed to make sure they were clean as he thought about the question. “Can hospital afford this?”
“Well, yes, of course. They do blood tests all the time. Matching DNA wouldn’t be exorbitant. It’d be an expedient response to the ongoing cost of this vandalism.”
“No. This is not my question. Can hospital afford if vandal is doctor. If this doctor works here—in this hospital.” For the first time Jovan feels as though Dickens is listening to him. “Not story for small paper, asking you for answers. This for real newspapers, for radio and the television, and the patients and lawyers and judges talking for years about big money.”
“Yes, but what are they going to do? Just let it go on?”
“They ask me to clean. Maybe his blood. Maybe no.”
“He seems smart.” Dickens walks with Jovan, moving to the service entrance together, as though they were friends. “Probably too smart for that anyway,” Dickens says, as he stops at the door. “I just think it’s interesting. Anyway, thanks for your time.” Dickens offers his hand and they shake. Dickens gives him a nod and a smile before he starts to walk away.
“I want to talk to you about something you say in the article,” Jovan tells the hippy psychologist. “We talk again later.”
They meet again a few hours afterwards in a café on Bluff Road. Dickens had been drinking herbal tea while he waited. He is now satisfied with glasses of water. He watches Jovan devour three different kinds of muffin and drink two cappuccinos. Jovan’s hair is wet from the shower he had after work. A feminine berry smell to the kind of shampoo he uses.
While he watches the big janitor feed, Dickens talks about what he’s mentioned in the article—how the frustrated artistic impulse lay at the root of many forms of schizophrenia, also contributing to the ever rising instances of anxiety and depression, even in people that did not consider themselves artistic in any way.
It was due to the artistic impulse in itself being a function of imagination, and imagination being unavoidable in the human animal. Imagination wasn’t simply a reflex action of higher cognitive processing, it was the reservoir of all experiences and passions, positing within itself such speculative notions as God and Soul, even Ego, Superego, Id, and whatever other names we chose to use for its contents, including Life, Humanity and World.
This went to say that Imagination was not a discreet function of the brain, but a fundamental explosion of everything we knew, everywhere we looked. The repression of this artistic impulse led many people into lives that continued to diminish until they collapsed in on themselves. The simple equation he put forward was that everything that cannot find expression will melt into a molten subterranean river of repression.
Expression rising from repression equals liberation. It wasn’t a way out of emotional pain. It was a way out of neurosis because it contextualised the pain. It let the imagination develop an image of psychic contents. Anything could be tolerated if it was understood. A person could develop, and imagination has always been a tool of evolution, so this was critical. The idea of the path, or course of life, was crucial if the individual was to allow the power of evolution to push him forwards. There was destruction expressed as disease in anything counter-evolutionary.
Jovan presses the last bit of muffin down into the plate so it will stick to his finger, raises his hand and eats the crumb. “Hipip-hooray,” he mutters to himself.
David Dickens continues without pause, “With a man like the graffitist that you have running amok in your hospital, we find an interesting mixture of desperation and philosophy, the waking mind and the unconscious, a desire to destroy as it seeks to be understood, a hallmark of this whole current generation—”
“A question for you,” Jovan says loudly, placing a full stop into the doctor’s mouth, because clearly Dickens could go on pleasantly theorising for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
“What if the man has this monster in the imagination?” Jovan asks. “And monster wants to come out? Into this world? He wants to live here. Making a story for him does not make him something else. He is still the monster. He still want to eat people. Monster want to be real.”
David Dickens drinks his glass of water and clears his throat as though he’s ready to launch into another psychological sermon, which might or might not answer Jovan’s question. Jovan tells David he must go home now.
“Well, I was just starting to enjoy our conversation.”
“If we fish in Frankston we catch no barracouta. Noise is good for catching nothing.”
Bewilderment passes across the psychologist’s face, as he seeks to appear understanding and to bid farewell, all at the same time. It’s an expression Jovan enjoys remembering on the drive home.
In the kitchen sits Jovan’s birthday cake. Something Slavko’s wife, who loves to bake, thought would be nice. Thirty-nine candles stuck in the top. It will sit there for a few days and get thrown away without comment, into the green wheelie bin outside, not the kitchen bin in the cupboard beside the stove. Those unlit candles and the unsung cake—quietly covered by household refuse.
Jovan goes to bed. He doesn’t sleep. He gets up and takes a sleeping pill. When he still doesn’t drift away, he gets up and takes another pill. He does this in half hour instalments until he is unconscious. Despite this, the night feels long and broken, hard and relentless—Suzana is waiting for him at the other end of it, saying happy birthday and kissing him for every year of his life.
And perfume, in heavy drops of redolence, filling nose and mouth. Drowning in the wake of passing love.
In the morning, Jovan buries his face in a clean face-towel in the shower, then rubs it across the back of his neck. Lets the water run across his face for long minutes as he wakes up slowly. The dream drifted in and out of his recollection, ready to disappear completely and forever. He coaxes the dream back and tries to remember some of its features. It came from something Dr Graffito wrote.
Jovan had been asleep when Suzana started kissing him this Friday morning. She had the earlier start today. She’d pulled him from the dream—he’d fallen back into it as soon as she left him to his sleep.
A man, already half-dead, can drown in a few centimetres of love.
In the dream, he walked from house to house, through unknown suburbs looking for his wife, because he knew she was cleaning one of the homes. He walked into twenty or thirty, maybe forty different houses, knowing she had to be close from the wafts of her perfume. Every house had been cleaned yet was also empty of everything. No furniture, pictures, plates. The wardrobes without clothes. He was mystified, wondering where everyone and their belongings were. It felt epic, a search that could go on for the rest of his life, looking for his wife through the many empty houses of the suburbs. That it would go on, forever and ever, as in fairytales. He walked into an empty, antiseptically clean kitchen, and saw a spotless glass on the bench. The only bit of anything indicating domestic life he’d seen in all the houses. It still had a cardboard smell to it and it sat on a flyer—serving as a paperweight. He lifted the piece of paper. It was a welcome to his new home on this new planet. Soon to be populated and called Crumbs.
The water runs off his face. He lets the strange dream wash away as well. He wonders what Dickens would make of it. He might tell him about it when they see each other on the weekend. The Doctor is coming over to see the plates in Jovan’s garage. The ones that read Masters of Destiny / Victims of Fate. Why is the planet called Crumbs, Dickens might ask, and Jovan would
say that he’d heard somewhere that’s what the planets were. The crumbs of exploding stars. And the Doctor might be able to infer something from that regarding how empty or abandoned Jovan felt, or how it was only people like Barracouta William Hay that had God’s good light shining down on them. Not for people like Jovan, who dwelled in some unpopulated underworld of … No, in general Jovan doesn’t have much of an appetite for psychology anymore. He has done more than his share of reading in regards to Freud, Lacan, Miller, Jung, etc, etc.
He turns the shower taps off, remembers not to turn them so tightly that Suzana will have trouble the next time she uses the shower. One of those things he forgets sometimes—turning them too tight. Creating that instant of despair for Suzana as she stands naked in the cubicle unable to budge the handles without calling him out of bed.
