Terribly tired.
Caroline
boxed in
IRON LUNG
Certain diseases and injuries can paralyze the muscles of the chest to such an extent that breathing is impossible. Since respiration is essential to life, machines have been devised to take over the job of the muscles for such patients.
The iron lung is a large, air-tight container with a pump or diaphragm allowing internal pressure to be increased or decreased in a regular cycle.
The patient’s body, with the exception of the head, is totally enclosed within the iron lung. As the internal pressure builds, the air inside the patient’s lungs is forced out. When it drops, the chest expands and draws air in.
Naturally the machine has to opened from time to time, to permit washing, excretion and medical attention, and during these intervals the patient’s head is enclosed by a dome or mask attached to the pump.
* * *
Bitter salad: Alum entree, my dear Watson
* * *
The iron lung was invented by Philip Drinker, an American, in 1929. With the control of poliomyelitis (a severe paralyzing illness) by the Salk vaccine, the machine became less important in medicine.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its use is that people can tolerate such an existence. But the human spirit can flourish in infirmity. Indeed, one Australian woman doomed to spend her life in an iron lung has actually conceived and given birth despite her affliction.
1970: civilization and its discos
5 Rozelle
June 2nd
Dear Pog,
A day late, I just finished a 3000 word essay (rang them with the news that I’d had a minor car accident) on Conflict in Societies. I’m awash with it. Got in my bit on glorious western civilization (My Lai) versus controlled hostilities in savage tribes. I was so bold as to say that egalitarianism is fascist—you’re familiar with the argument. Pretty old hat, but still…
Cockroach Tavern is full of loonies and screaming nutters and boring turds and interesting passers-through. Aggression and bad vibes resound in the halls.
After the few days visiting with you in Melbourne I felt nothing but happiness. Contentment, warm inside. Hope you felt the same. I came down almost immediately with violent bronchial flu. I know, I know, you warned me—so? I don’t care, I’m happy sharing your yoghurt and licking your spoon.
A local photographer has offered to use some of my crocheting in a color spread for POL, when I have enough of it done. My God! Lanie nude in Chance (maybe, if she gets her nerve up) and me in POL!
I visited Martin Sharp’s exhibition this afternoon. Exciting, very phallic stuff, brilliant colors, cartoon twists and satiric images splashed over traditional prints. I wandered around exhilarated by the pumping music and zany words scattered and resounding. All of that was rather shrouded, I admit, by the blaring black prices—$50 for a print poster in an edition of 10 or 20, $1200 for a painting, $1100 for a collage—Christ, he’ll be the wealthiest hippie in London!
Evidently his prices were lower at first until he discovered the impact he’s made in Australia, the charisma sparking from his name. So he bumped the prices up. Can’t blame him. While I was there I spotted him wandering through the crowd, the artist in full bloom. You’d have enjoyed his satiric obscenity.
Margie has found a new gentleman friend and is thoroughly In Love. From this I deduce that he’s neither tugging her pants down nor biting her boobs.
no more, no more,
Caroline
1983: pants and boobs
On Brian’s express orders, Joseph accompanies him to a Saturday afternoon barbecue. Everyone there is glossy with social competence. No red sauce runs down their chins, no sausage leaps to the dried-out grass from seared fingers. How is it that Wagner knows people of this stamp? Good God, one of them is Howard, editor and appliance-fancier from Science Today Publications. All those years ago. Balding, bland, cheerful.
Nice to see you again, Joe. You’ll have some Chablis?
It’s true. Howard remembers everything and knows the meaning of nothing. Rather like Joseph’s own case, put that way.
Must go on my hostly way, Joe. Glad you could get here.
Joseph retreats to the farthest extent of the yard, gazes down on the pool and its sagging nylon cover, safety net for leaves, dust, pensioned-off spiders.
Hello, I’m Mandy.
She is plain, short, female.
Brian tells me you used to work with him.
Not exactly.
It’s too difficult to explain, so he smiles at her instead.
Come away with me Mandy, and we shall all the pleasures prove. But his ears redden, how can he carry this sort of thing off?
Naughty.
She’s scribbling on a piece of notepaper.
Call me about the middle of next week. I’m just too exhausted right now, just got back from Bali.
I like your suntan, Joseph tells her in a frenzy of hope.
He inveigles Wagner into accompanying him by taxi (Wagner’s car is on the point of death) to Mandy’s apartment on the following Friday night. Trembling and full of preposterous terror.
She gives them coffee. A very plain young person, when all is said and done, but she’s been to interesting places. In her car they dash into town for a bit to eat, a movie. Wagner insists on a monstrous and pretentious pub in the middle of the city. Joseph is rather shocked. He has always assumed that the inner metropolis is dedicated entirely to nasty department stores and yawning glassy caverns of finance. Beaten copper, Aztec patterned carpet, dark wells of snug seduction.
Mandy asks for a Harvey Wallbanger.
They stock up well enough on pepper steaks, brandy, creme de cacao. Appallingly expensive.
Peter O’Toole is screamingly funny.
As they go about finding her car Mandy makes several jokes that send Joseph to the pavement, cracking his knees.
Getting out of hand.
Brian is obliged by a previous engagement to leave them. Blur of careful driving.
You might as well stay the night, you’ll fall under a tram in that condition.
But she keeps her pants on under her shortie nightie. And the bed is only a single. They lie extended like nails. Joseph quivers.
It’s that time.
What?
Very bloody.
An old-fashioned and absurd objection, Mandy. Haven’t you read The Female Eunuch?
Of course she hasn’t, that was ten years ago at least. Cosmopolitan seems to have turned against menstrual sex. It must be the New Romanticism.
She shows him the trick she uses to build up her chest. You press your palms together, elbows out like a plucked chicken’s wings, and push like buggery for a count of ten. It doesn’t make your boobs bigger, but the underlying pectoral muscles increase in size and this plumps out the chestal area.
The chestal area?
Yes, haven’t you heard that hilarious Woody Allen record?
Joseph has missed out on many of the last decade’s more salient cultural events. Now he makes good his ignorance. Mandy pops the tape on. It is screamingly funny, but only while it lasts. Mandy turns her back and goes to sleep. Joseph lies beside her, his spine like a stake through a vampire’s heart, and waits for sunrise so he can skulk home.
Mandy’s apartment faces the Royal Park Golf Course, and beyond that the walls of the Zoological Gardens. As the early summer sun whips the lid off the sky, bleary Joseph hears the lions roar for their breakfast.
1970: eaten inside
University of New England,
Armidale.
June 10, 1970
dear grub
Without the decencies of modern mechanical transduction, in chilly Armidale, forced to take up the archaic pen (tried using Paul’s typewriter but it possessed so many astonishing faults that I gave it up), here, alive and well, or approximately, looking into the sky for the secrets of Time and Space. Maybe, one day, anyway.
I wo
uld have written earlier but so much sudden organizing has disrupted my habits. After you returned home to Sydney I dithered with my flu for a few days and decided at last that the only sensible thing to do was plunge in, put my bloody theory to the test, so I flew up to Armidale. If Paul and I do find any time-reversed tachyons in our mess of pottage I’ll use them to signal my former self and spare both of us all this hurry up & wait.
My body has been rebuking me. The day before I was due to catch my plane north, there came a crotchety gnawing at the entrails. As luck would have it, Martha had prepared one of her glorious carnivorous curries, a splendid trencher of lamb and beef and spiced vegetables and coconut snowed across the lot, and her famous yoghurt, and spliced bananas and diced apricots and small pieces of tomato and onion and cucumber, and chilly beer in each fist, and my metabolism rebelled, overloaded, croaked it.
In mid-munch I hied me to my bedroom, guts growling and snarling with unknown pains, where I capered in the semi-dark acrobatically seeking some posture that might supply relief. No way. All the shades of gray and blurting blurry trumpets. In and out of consciousness I went. I might have been having a miscarriage (yes, I thought of your pain), had the plumbing not been otherwise.
Reluctantly, fearful of paramedical scorn (amazing how these high-level social responses surmount our most bitter and unmediated pangs) I made the great trek back to the dining room where everyone ate happily of pudding, and consulted our resident nurse. Quaffing her prescription (copious milk and aspirin) I went back to die in my room.
Horrid, frightened night. Next morning to the local quack, a ponderous oily sweating man with a Hitler moustache who prodded and poked and ruminated and thank god saw no cause for a barium meal. I must abandon nicotine. I must exercise like a decent Christian. Above all, I must eat only of the fruit of the blandest tree in the garden. The list he provided is horrendous: custards & milk shakes & no booze & nothing of a fibrous or irritant nature.
No ulcer, at least. Stomach cramps due to tension and lack of god-fearing sport. So for a week now I’ve been dining breakfasting and lunching on gloop. There is no end in sight. It does help a bit, true. He suggested three months. I shall certainly go mad. I know you will not credit this, but I have cut down to four or five ciggies a day though it’s creeping up again. I spend most of my conscious hours sneaking up on the clock, watching the hands creep: my rule is one smoke every three hours. Dementia. And the man speaks of tension as a cause.
I got to Armidale just under a week ago. As I think I told you on the phone, I’d arranged with Paul Ramsden to have the tachyon detector wired into the SQUID by his lab tech buddy in the physics department. My precipitate arrival was greeted with less than the total enthusiasm due a man who was going to share the next Nobel Prize; in fact, Paul berated me for a reckless spendthrift, but took me in and gave me the spare bed in his study. Cats lie on my face at night. (Martha is looking after mine, never fear.) There are no suspicious squeaks from the, ahem, master bedroom. Either Paul and Tom have got past that sort of thing, like my parents (and, to be honest, as you and I did for fair stretches) or they go about it with great delicacy.
Without the detector and its computing interface, I disport myself about the house in rather the way I’ve become accustomed to at home: dipping into physics journals, making endless inconclusive calculations concerning the boundary conditions we can expect to obtain in a universe closed at both ends by a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, both connected by swarms of shuttling tachyons, reading novels, wondering how I can turn all this into usable quipu form. And eating bland (yuk) meals.
Tom Truczinski, Paul’s friend, is very good about this. He won’t have either Paul nor me in the kitchen, except to wash up, and he insists on giving me what the doctor ordered. A few years ago he had a genuine ulcer, none of your crypto-bellycramp bullshit, and takes it all fairly seriously—knows what to warn me off.
Other than that continual kindness, we have a highly ambivalent relationship. He’s quite aware that I’m not queer, that on that level I’m no threat to his er “marriage” with Paul. He strikes me as absurdly insecure, given his proven accomplishments in particle theory; I take it that he’ll be the youngest person to have a high-energy physics Ph.D. in the history of the State. Still, he resents my presence ferociously because I distract Paul from total preoccupation with him.
I’m taking all this subliminal flak with as much cool (but warmish cool, if you see what I mean) as I can sustain. Since this sort of confused subfusc meta-communication unnerves me and makes me hostile by turns, I can only hope the damned detection apparatus is up and on-line soon.
It looks as if I’ll be stuck here a couple of weeks at least. Don’t know what darling Tom will think of that…(Yes I do.) So meanwhile write to me here.
lots of tachy love
Joseph
A DOG’S WIFE
…three
For some days we hid out in a Lina Wertmuller festival. Without disrespect I must reveal that she is not my ideal auteur, but Spot always makes taking in a movie such fun, and I was terrifically excited when he told me how much I had always put him in mind of Mariangela Melato, whom Lina employed with some wit.
“Hang in there, baby,” Randy told me from the West coast, his voice oddly interspersed by bleats of telemetry from the space shuttle preparations. “We’ll have the kid back on the bomb bay floor by New Year’s.” For a fleeting moment I wondered if Father’s lawyers had misunderstood the quandary facing my husband, and were in fact directing the enormous resources of the studio to the task of getting Spot into rather than out of the weapons research program. Such things had been known to happen.
1970: following orders
Caroline loiters on the stairs outside the English Department, hoping to worm some clues from her tutor for the forthcoming exams. Woe & gloom, her mood. Rising tension, her bodily state. Crabby, her demeanor. He rounds the corner, a man in his mid-twenties with the face of a handsome stoat.
Oh. Come in.
The bastard doesn’t know zilch.
Actually, Miss Muir, I haven’t even seen the exam paper.
I thought you all had to—
If you must know, they rejected my suggested questions.
She does not speak.
What topic were you worried about? I have a busy schedule today.
Drama. The course you teach us.
Actually, I have to confess that drama isn’t really my “thing.”
Caroline is flabbergasted.
Why are you tutoring in it, for God’s sake?
Well, you have to do as you’re told. He smiles enchantingly and pushes back a lock of hair. You know, tote your barge.
Caroline presses her teeth together. Her belly knots. Fool, turd. She says nothing. She picks up her big bulging bag and turns away to the open door.
Oh, while you’re here.
Yes?
He’s glancing at a sheaf of paper from the department secretarial office.
I see you have two extra essays to hand in before the exam.
What? What?
“Death of a Salesman” and “Mother Courage.”
But you didn’t—In panic she delves into her bag, spills paperbacks, brush, an orange. A sheet of paper flutters. She snatches at it. Look, here, there’s no mention of—
Really? No, sorry, I haven’t had a chance to tell your group before this, I’ve been terribly rushed.
But how can I possibly—I’ll need an extension.
No, I’m going to have to be firm about that, Miss Muir. It’s a departmental decision. We can’t accept them after that date. Sorry, sorry, just passing down the orders.
Caroline sits in the union. She sips a stewy cup of tea. Infinitely slowly she takes out a fresh sheet of paper, finds a pen, and starts a letter to Joseph.
1970: view from a distance
Twitchy Cloisters
Rozelle
12 June
My dear Joseph
Kiddo, you gotta watch
yourself. An ulcer can’t be wished away. Do what the man said—go to a gym, put up with the effort and the embarrassment. But let’s face it, when have you ever listened to me about anything?
Had a rotten time with my tutor today. Wish you were here to give me a cuddle. The house is full on and off with dreary, dreary people.
Here’s my big exciting news: I have bought an electric blanket. One depends on these trivialities.
Downstairs the other happy members of our ménage delight in Scrabble, while I stare from the window of my little room. It might be winter but the view is very pretty. Everything is pretty from a distance. You even find me pretty from a distance.
love Caro
1975: the end of the universe
Joseph looks from his podium at the several hundred hikes and hopefuls gathered here, in the Reading Room of the Humanities Research Center on the top floor of the A. D. Hope building in the Australian National University in Canberra, waiting to hear him speak. Mastering the tremor in his arm he takes water, rattles the glass back to the table. They stares at him benignly. He recalls the Bhagavad-Gita:
On all sides That has hands and feet;
On all sides eyes, heads and faces;
On all sides in the world it hears;
All things it embraces.
They are waiting for him to begin. He begins.
“Fellow Australians, international guests, it broadens my bosom, as they say in The Thousand Nights and One Night, to join you at this wonderful convocation. 1975 is a year I shall surely remember all my life. Since I don’t have a terrifically good memory for faces, I’d like you all to hold still for a moment, smile, and say ‘Cheese’.”
He cannot focus his gaze on any one of them. Are they gaping in confusion, smirking at the tremolo in his amplified voice, or perhaps smiling in complicit anticipation as he takes from his soft leather shoulder bag, hung on the back of his chair, a Canon complete with theatrically protuberant fisheye lens attachment. He raises it to his eye, pans across the room, sets the f stop, and hits the shutter button. Light blazes from his flash, rips the color out of their cheeks in that instant.
Quipu Page 17
