As the game finished, it occurred to Rick that this room had always been their true place of worship, not Church — and that these three people, his family, his ideal of Family, had always been the core of whatever he believed in.
Later, sitting at his desk in his study, listening to Mozart, he finished a long letter to his parents, asking for forgiveness, hoping for understanding. He also tore open the last letter he had written to Ben, to be read on his eighteenth birthday, and added several more words of love. Perhaps it was the Mozart, perhaps it was the sedative leaching into his veins, but with these tasks completed he found himself facing events if not with equanimity, at least once again with certainty.
Linda appeared in the door, agitated, trembling: ‘We can’t go through with this. It’s absurd.’
He led her into the bedroom, they lay down together on the bed, and held each other tightly. They had planned to make love one last time, but the act suddenly seemed irrelevant, and meaningless. She was still trembling; he rose and fossicked a Bible from the bookshelves, and for a time they read alternately: the poetry of Isaiah, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, St Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, various Psalms. The texts held only a minimal promise for Rick — ‘we’ll see,’ he joked grimly to himself — but some deeper music in the words had a soothing effect on both of them, like the drug he had swallowed, or the Mozart itself: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …
He might believe in little beyond family love, but these words seemed the culmination of all their nights of book-readings, as if those thick books — Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray — had been a preparation for this moment, this last distillation of the written word.
In the next room Ben landed on Mayfair, with hotels; the children abandoned their game and joined their parents in bed. Linda slipped a small butterfly-needle into Rick’s veins, and taped it in place, despite shaking hands; she then repeated the procedure on Emma, finding the task surprisingly easy: the girl’s veins were more prominent than her father’s, her skin far more delicate than any thick-skinned navel orange. Emma flinched, momentarily, then watched solemnly as two syringes were loaded with morphine. Her wide owl-eyes seemed to be looking at everything simultaneously, taking everything in. They lay together on the bed, all four of them — just as they had been together at Emma’s birth, six years earlier, in the Maternity Suite at the local hospital. Ben seemed finally to grasp the enormity of what was planned, his eyes had reddened, but the seriousness, the methodical ritual of events seemed to keep any terror in check. They had debated allowing him to watch, to participate, but even now, at the point of no return, there was surely something less terrifying, and certainly less bloody, about this occasion for him than there had been at his sister’s birth, when her strange alien-being seemed to burst from his mother’s innards. Linda felt that for his peace of mind later, as an adult, he should be a participant, he should be there. He listened quietly as they explained the last few steps, he kissed his father, and lay on top of him.
And so they lay together, a last few minutes of handholding, and tears, before separating. Emma seemed less concerned than her brother. Her clear contentment, lying there, clutching his hand, forced the last doubts from Rick’s mind, and induced a parallel contentment in him. His heart pounded, but the flow of his thoughts was suddenly calm and steady. Even Linda felt that her daughter’s serenity somehow cancelled out, at least for the moment, whatever misery she and her surviving child would subsequently endure.
When her husband was ready, she nodded, and pressed her face softly onto his, and he squeezed his own syringe, and waited, holding them all, but not for any length of time.
READING NOTES
AFTERWORD
While much of what I have written becomes unreadable or embarrassing as it recedes into the past, a few things, at least, seem to move in the opposite direction, improving with age. Perhaps this is to meet the requirements of some unknown physical law, a conservation of achievement that requires an average mediocrity. If enough bad writing is written, an equal and opposite amount of good must therefore arise? If so, I should try to write more badly, more often.
Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam has passed my personal test of time — so far. One reason a story or poem might avoid disillusioning is that it refuses to have its meanings exhausted by rereading; it will not allow the reader (and the writer is the first reader) to be bored. It continues to yield crops, including some from seeds which weren’t consciously sown at the time of writing. I haven’t exhausted Sunbeam — I still see new things in it.
Today I thought I saw this: the worship of family is a deep and nourishing religious practice. In our secular society, we might pretend to believe in very little — but of course we believe in much, even if we keep our deepest and most sacred beliefs hidden from ourselves. The urge to religious belief is hot-wired into us according to the anthropologist Walter Burkert. In his book, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion, Burkert traces how religious belief takes similar forms (e.g. sacrifice) in different cultures. Like our sexual impulses, our religious beliefs resist the attempts of local culture to suppress them, although cultural pressure always deforms these biological imperatives into interesting and unique local shapes, going by the names of (say) Christianity, or Animism, or Islam, or even High Church Modernism.
I’ve explored this in a little more detail in two essays — ‘The Biology of Literature’, and ‘Waiting for the Martians’ in my collection of essays, Navel Gazing.
When other gods fail, there is still the worship of family, and the household gods of this last surviving religion are its children. But what happens when those cute gods fail? Family worship takes many forms — from the sentimental pieties of Hollywood, to the countless automatic rituals and routines that deeply nourish domestic life. In us we trust? The line from a John Berryman poem has always echoed in my head. The sacredness of family is also surely hot-wired into us, if partly for the usual genetically selfish reasons. What blood sacrifices might be offered to that sacred faith? What crimes committed in its name? Me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousins; our cousins and us against the world excuses everything from fratricide through clan warfare to ethnic cleansing and genocide — but there may be more subtle, suburban weirdness to emerge from family worship. This story explores one such little nuclear detonation.
Sunbeam strikes me more and more as a special story; certainly in the sense that it is a story that no-one has written before. It has another claim on me: as a father in love with my children, I understood it instinctively, before I began to half-understand it at a rational level. It seemed, simply, true.
The best stories are often deceptively simple; they speak to us, to our unconscious, in ways that can not be immediately grasped; but we feel the fit, even as we are horrified, or awed.
Stories about the death of children are not new, of course — they are among the oldest, their common tune one of the most easily played for effect. Dickens killed more babies than a minor diphtheria epidemic, and even Oscar Wilde’s famous comment that anyone who could read the death of Little Nell without laughing ‘had a heart of stone’ is surely a defence against his own suppressed sentimentality. Wilde may or may not have convinced himself, but he has helped to convince us: a Dickensian rendering — a rending — of the death of a child is impossible in today’s fictional world. ‘The blood of the children flowed in the streets … like the blood of the children,’ Pablo Neruda wrote in a famous attack on the use of artistic effects, such as simile and metaphor, to describe the unspeakable. Tell it plainly, I assume he was saying. Tell it as it is — at least when speaking of real deaths, real events. But in the world of fiction?
Fiction is a different way of seeing — even its most plain-talking stories operate at a more mythic, universal level. It aims to tell the truth, yes — but in essence, in symbol, in a deeper emotional language that illum
inates the particulars.
After Dickens and Wilde — and Hollywood — stories must pluck at our emotions more subtly.
This story has an odd logic — but I hope it is a logic which still locks us in, subtly, and carries us, disbelief suspended, from comforting and loving suburban beginnings into a zone not so much twilight as midnight.
Like crabs in slowly heated water, we find ourselves — I hope — being boiled alive, without noticing how we got there.
Where are we?
Among ancient instincts of sacrifice, and the dark comfort that the dying find in taking others with them, if given a chance, in their pyramids, on their funeral pyres, in their Berlin bunkers. In a world of repressed or sublimated spirituality. In a place where the logic of love has carried us further than it had any right to do. Perhaps.
I’ve added a few pages to the 1993 version which first appeared in the collection Little Deaths.
What we write is usually too much or too little — or looks that way later. I usually err too much towards too little. I used to think the story was perfect, of course it wasn’t, and still isn’t, but it will probably continue to aspire to perfection when it has the chance.
PETER GOLDSWORTHY 1999
POETRY
Peter Goldsworthy has written a number of poems whose concerns overlap those of the novella Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. A reading of these poems might enhance an understanding of the novella.
Songs on the Death of Children
I
Dry eyed after so many deaths
how many could still bring tears?
family and friends
I count on a handful of fingers
and all the children in the world.
With children
the first million is hardest.
II
I walk through their sleeping ward.
Among heads inflated with dreams,
faces loosened on pillows.
Among small milky breaths, smaller than words.
My child
and the children of others.
Shared animal young,
possum eyed and thimble nosed—
shapes that every kind of love recognises.
III
I wake to death
in the night.
The cold weight
of a child in a mother’s arms.
Locked from her grief
and the whole archipelago of parents
weeping with her—
the uselessness of tears.
In this public ward
her private room of pain.
IV
I bring my child home
to smiles and somersaults.
Bedtime rhymes
taken after meals
for the treatment.
I watch her by night
dreaming through her fears,
her small milky breath
smaller than tears.
Ratepayer’s Ode
He walks through an afternoon
of sunlight and neighbours.
Along avenues of home loans,
almost paid.
Slow flies bump at his face,
webs itch like memories.
The cosmetics of summer surround him—
the detonation of fruit trees,
the shallows of lawn.
A paperboy rides towards him
throwing novels into every yard.
He unwraps the headlines and reads.
It is science fiction again.
It is always science fiction.
The Dark Side of the Head
After a line by Wittgenstein
I.M. Gwen Harwood, 1920—1995
Just around the corner of the eye,
at every reach of its big screen,
there is a magic which is neither
black nor white, but only absent:
the disappearance of all world.
Even when the eyes are shut,
and all the field is pink or dark,
it still unhappens, at the rim
—a sudden gradual nothing,
beneath the notice, or beyond.
I sometimes hope that if
my head jerks leftwards, quick
as warp, I might just catch
the edge of right-side visual field,
as if there is no dark side of the head
but one world only, seamless,
like the small curved universes
painted on Grecian urns,
or like a Mercator projection
of the globe, that having mapped
itself, bent weirdly at the polar ends,
for flat-screen eyes,
now unmaps in reverse, becoming
whole again and full and round
and as satisfactory as heaven.
Eye of the Needle
I.M. Philip Hodgins, 1959-1995
i
In the earth
there are doorways
from this earth
but they are narrow.
ii
the weight of matter
keeps it down to earth,
as if the property called mass
is store-security, a clip-on
tag-alarm that stops us
taking our garment
when we leave the shop.
iii
Thoughts are already things
before they’re set to ink.
Their heaviness is hard
to measure, but material,
being stuff in the head.
Weigh the brain before
and after thinking,
the difference is no
laughing matter, too real
to follow us through Exits.
iv
Even light
is far too heavy.
It must be dark
through there.
DEATH AND THE COMEDIAN
An essay by Peter Goldsworthy
1.
Tell me your favourite jokes, and I will tell you your worst fears.
I sometimes use that line, across late night dinner tables, when conversation flags. It should not be confused with S.J. Perelman’s request: tell me your phobias and I will tell you what you are afraid of — which is, incidentally, one of my favourite jokes.
I once dined with friends at Kinsella’s, a Sydney funeral parlour turned restaurant. We were seated in the inner sanctum, the former chapel. Mid-meal, the poet Elizabeth Riddell recalled that her last visit to Kinsella’s had been fifteen years before, for a funeral.
Her late husband’s coffin, she announced, had occupied the precise spot where our table now stood.
Such ability to look death calmly, even jokily, in the eye, and continue eating, impressed me no end. It also suggested the possibility of finding a narrative tone with which to handle the various stories of death, and grief, and near-death which I had been collecting — or which had been collecting me — for years.
A few weeks before Philip Hodgins death from leukaemia in 1995, I prepared a newspaper obituary after a request from Philip had been passed on through a mutual friend. Philip had finally decided to discontinue the chemotherapy which had caused him much suffering for many years. I sent him the obituary — he was curious to read it — and a few days later received a bottle of his favourite wine, Passing Clouds, accompanied by a congratulatory note: it was ‘an obituary to die for.’
This seems to me one of the great aphorisms, deserving of a place in any collection of aphorisms — and a perfect distillation of Philip’s stoic courage, and style. It’s also a seamless mix of favourite joke and worst fear.
1995 was a bad year for Australian poetry, with the death of Gwen Harwood after a year long battle with what she, also, knew to be a terminal illness. Whatever private demons this forced her to wrestle with, or share with her husband and family, in her letters she remained cheerful and courageous — and as irreverent as ever, her characteristic humour irrepressible.<
br />
I can walk (as if on Jupiter) very slowly, I even look like an alien from another planet; moon-faced and swollen from the medications & decorated with magenta blotches. How uninteresting …
This from the last letter I was privileged to receive, a few weeks before her death.
It would be nice to think that we could all face our own ends with the same courage, and dignity, and tough humour.
I often thought I was dying as a child, suffering attacks of asthma at harvest time — but I liked to over-dramatise. I did spend a week in intensive care in my early twenties with a chest full of blood — but I was too drugged to sense any danger, or take proper stock. The days passed in a dream, interrupted only by the worried faces of my parents emerging and vanishing through the fog of narcotics.
What, me worry?
My experience of death has (obviously) been from the outside, looking on — but the experience has been all too frequent.
2.
People often ask how I manage to mix working as a writer with working as a doctor. Or — an interesting wording — which are you ‘really’. Part of me always resents this: why should the two trades be incompatible, or immiscible? Perhaps the surprise that people express at such a mix — writing and medicine — is due to received notions of an Art/Science Great Divide, notions which are much exaggerated, and usually come as a complete surprise to anyone on the science side of the alleged divide, most of whom read novels, watch movies and listen to music avidly.
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