Drift

by Brian Castro

  He arrives. Not what she expected, Judging by her frown. A man in pin-striped suit and bifocals getting out of a government car. No loose change there. Checks all his pockets.

  Just a few beans, mate, for a war veteran.

  Piss off.

  That’s how they treat national treasures these days. I was in the Navy. Knew all about navigation. They never thought to keep me on, use my talents. She rises a little to adjust her skirt. Mr Deakin… she says, holding out a hand as though it were made of porcelain.

  He’s watching me while shaking hands, just in case I get near his car… in case I piss on the tyres like a dog.

  17

  I said to Byron on the way back, I said, Byron, do you ever think how the individual is never in command of himself, like the way someone else’s voice takes over the story he has to tell and soon there’s a chorus and the chorus is like distant cannon fire, the wind melting everything into dust, all the great ideas, and the dust blows into some old farmhouse, sifts a little under a chicken that’s roosting on the rafters, a tiny puff ruffling its bum feathers, and all this the end result of a momentous single experience? He thought long and hard and it took a great deal of effort because he had abandoned all this and I could see he was tired of turning experience into thought… it’s the greatness of the world that words are no longer sovereign, he said, truth is simply a language game, and I said no, that wasn’t what I meant at all, narrowly missing a kid riding his bike on the wrong side of the road, since kids always ride on the wrong side because they’re told to watch the oncoming traffic, watch their oncoming death; no, I said, I mean… shit. Another one on a bike and this time I’ve scraped the little bugger’s handlebar and I can see he’s let loose with gestures and I stick my stump out the window, my extruded finger outdoing the turd in obscenity; no, I said, I mean when you’re not in control of who you are, not knowing your place in the world and others begin to tell your story and sooner or later you have no story that’s yours. The core is an emptiness. Byron shifted in his seat. Rejoice, he said. Rejoice that death is inside life. It took me a while to realise he had his Walkman plugged into his ear and was singing to some scratching rhythm. Another bike coming towards me. This time I really have to get close because a semi-trailer’s coming the other way, whole heap of lumber swaying on the curve and chains raining down across the bitumen sending sparks up into the grey air. Hell, I said. Other narratives stem your obsession. A crowd of us without a cause can create havoc; mass death; extinction. Rejoice! he yelled, that there be no longer signification. And then it came to me: When I was driving the coach, I said, I used to tell the passengers stories about places, stories I was told to tell; then I started to change them. The passengers got very interested. When we arrived, I would say: look; there’s absolutely nothing here. Nada. Nichts. Niente. All the rainforests have been cleared. Sooner or later some of the smarter ones would get it. You can always tell. They’ve stumbled upon loss. Enlightenment comes when you’ve lost. It would transform their lives. First there would be two, then three, then more. Soon the whole busload would be shaking their heads whenever we arrived at a rainforest or a view. There would be no more life back there, in the place from where they had come. They were now on a mission of liberation. It deferred appreciation; seduced them with death. You see, I said to him, I am like them now. I was so preoccupied I forgot about the bike and swerved to the side of the road to avoid the flail of chains, narrowly missing the kid, the VW hitting a ditch, bouncing out, doing a rim and the tyre going fup fup fup. I had to stop. Byron was philosophical. He removed his earphones. It always comes to this, he said; a black hole and some meaning grubbed out of the gutter to impede forward motion.

  We ran on the spare to the service station, something clunking underneath, the motor farting and backfiring down every hill and coaxed the mechanic to hook up the muffler. He donned a mask and began to weld, sparks lighting up the workshop while I roamed, studying tyres and analysis machines, watching a tanker pull in to fill the underground tanks and thought of the welding and the tanker and the proximity and asked myself how close, what the differential of distance was between the two before the explosion… when suddenly this fellow walked in, looked as though he’d been sleeping rough, not a good thing to do around these parts, and he stood round near the radiator rubbing his hands together, taking advantage of the fact that the mechanic was under the car and couldn’t see him. He was from Germany, Bavaria, he said, and could take this climate, backpacking his way around Tasmania. He had lost some teeth and his hands were blackened, so he seemed to have come from a burnt-out place, his clothes dirty, his boots split. He told me how the year before he’d been in Philadelphia where the government couldn’t run the asylums and the loonies were pushed out into the streets, yes, hundreds of them going on walks round the countryside because they had this pain in their heads, they do that when the pain comes, the talk going on in there telling them they have to keep on the move to where there’s no people, trying to get away all the time. Then he was asking me what I thought of house prices around here, how much cars cost etc. discussing VW’s, which he said was the people’s car, recalling Hitler had something to do with the design of that because Hitler admired Henry Ford, ‘Fordismus‘, he called it, which soon became a much respected noun like ‘genius'. So someone like Porsche possessed Fordismus and designed a people’s car, but the war stopped that for a while, progress shifting in a new direction… and he kept talking as he walked off because he saw the mechanic sliding out from under the car and he had been talking so much I hadn’t noticed the welding was over and the tanker had pulled out and when I tried to pay for the welding the mechanic said my friend had already paid, but when I looked around, found that Byron had disappeared, as though he’d departed in the skin of the other man, simply walked off down the road. I tried the toilet just in case, but the mechanic said he’d gone. Who? Well, he said, I’ve seen him around before, kind of gone in the head, and he shook his own head saying how the government was shutting down institutions and how they supposed to be non-violent, but you don’t want to take that too literal, he said, wiping his hands with a rag, how would you ever know? They talk a lot, he said, and then he himself spoke no more, turning his attention to another engine. Fordismus. Maybe Byron Johnson had it, re-inventing himself on an unending, schizophrenic, production line.

  I drove up and down the road looking for him but couldn’t find him anywhere, so I turned around and drove home. Ainslie wasn’t there. For the first time in two days, I broke the seal on a whisky bottle I’d been keeping under my bed in the caravan.

  18

  I presumed he took a lift with the tanker driver, your honour… on my own honour, cross my heart and hope to die; no, maybe not the last. I don’t really have aspirations that way. I’m an upright citizen, I pay my taxes when I can.

  But you can imagine the kind of desultory conversation, the exchange between working men:

  How far you going?

  Smithton.

  Going as far as Burnie to refill, then to Wynyard. That’s as far as I go today.

  That’ll do.

  Looks like sleet.

  How often you do this run?

  Three, maybe four times a week. Depends.

  The less you speak the more you are trusted, Byron must have been thinking. When necessary only say practical things, but only if the information is useful. The motor ran rough. He knew about diesels. Wind gusted in blasts of icy, finger-numbing barrages. The temperature dropped suddenly and then seemed to rise again, gums turning grey when it began to sleet. Burnie’s Tioxide and paper mills slung a vast low cloud of white fumes into the hillside. A slurry of bark and sap sucked at the tyres.

  But just a moment, your honour. I forgot that Byron Johnson was black.

  Start again.

  You mind if I grab a lift off you far as Smithton?

  Sorry. No can do. Company policy.

  Listen. Just get in and drive. See this here stick of jelly? It’
s sweating. See this detonator? I’ll just ease it up its arse and put the whole thing down your shirt. This little wire here? It’s electronically tuned to my Walkman, this little yellow-back radio. Very sensitive. Now, let’s fuckin get outta here.

  Careful with that thing matey, Christ.

  And so on. Interminable silences. Necessary trust. The driver’s nervous as hell, almost stalling three or four times.

  Something’s wrong with the motor, he says.

  Nothing’s wrong with it, Byron says. He knows about diesels.

  They stopped at Burnie and because it was raining now, quite steadily, and the air was heavy and dark, nobody noticed Byron in an oilskin and Akubra, filling the tanker at the depot. The driver signed the sheet and they were on their way.

  Yet it could not have happened that way either, I beg you all to realise, for the lack of words, the silences, would have prevented the continuity of forward progress, Byron Johnson would have been thinking as he sat in the cab of the semi, for that was the way he used to think, aloud, and not a lot of it made sense, as he sat thinking how he’d paid the driver for a lift at the service station and then discovered a seam of narrative, when in drizzling Burnie the driver filled the tanker and Byron Johnson drove off while the driver went for a leak, heading for Cape Grim, a narrative in his head which would have now become for him a maternal mission, a ritual of obsession, historical continuance, a beacon, an observatory, a monitoring station of fair play. A final equation. It had a wonderful purity.

  All this time I sat drinking in Ainslie’s new wooden house, sniffing at Oregon, Cypress, Ironbark, the weather closing in outside and he, discovering all the controls in the tanker, breathing in the diesel, working the wipers as he bounced over the dirt roads out on the track towards Northmere. He understood the possibility of undoing the cocks and then driving up onto the grassy clifftops, understood the rate at which refined petroleum could be pumped out, a mere two hundred barrels while driving around, nobody noticing because once a week a similar tanker manoeuvred to supply dieseline to the station. Standing on the clifftop he could see that petrol had started to fill the caves below and then fifteen minutes later he judged it to be enough for him to flick on his lighter and run a trail of flame over Suicide Cove, cascading over the edge and exploding the caves below. They lit up like an abandoned and fired hive, incandescence honeycombing the cliffbase, cells glowing red to illuminate his second project as his soul descended into the wan light of the dead, wishing McGann was with him, daring him to stay with him, ride with his words, challenging him: Are you too white to do this? Are you free if you don’t use your freedom to act? Then he would drive back and fire the grasses at Northmere as they did centuries, or a millennium ago, the wind from South America distilled by oceans, the wind pure and fierce and driven, taking the flames inexorably towards the station. Soon the spires of the cathedral of silence and deception would be glowing, in its heart an empty cave. Oh, a conflagration never to be forgotten, the nave taking the first impact of the runaway tanker, then the choir and finally the tombs disgorging their bishops and nobles, spewing mummified bodies onto the pavement before the altar. Putains! he screams, his mind thick with smoke; putains! he spits. He was through with bloodlines, lineage, heritage, motherlands, cathedrals. He paused, adjusted the wires and made the connection between the ignition switch and the detonator, feeling the weight of gelignite in his hand, nitroglycerine mixed with wood pulp… He could see it already: the reconstruction of Nature and the return of wildflowers and muttonbirds, the sigh of the sea.

  One by one, page by page, I throw what I have written into the fire.

  I would have to take the trip myself. But sodden, sitting naked before the fire in this wooden house, beneath this cathedral ceiling, this atrium or turret which is so imposing over the living room, I lack the vitality, the courage, the will… all of which becomes reason, and reasonably, I grow old on this night while he, soaked in rain, struggled with the brakes on the truck as it had rolled not more than fifty feet in the direction of Northmere. He found the DD3 actuator, the button which held the mechanical brake, but it was off. So was the hand valve. He had lost the names for things and saw only a black tree against a cold sky; heard the sound of water. Already shouts were cracking the air. He tried to push. Thought of his weight-lifting, the Valsalva Manoeuvre, an increase in intrapulmonic pressure by forcible exhalation against the closed glottis. All Byron Johnson knew though, was that there was a pressure high in his chest, and at that moment I couldn’t breathe, thinking of WORÉ giving herself to Sperm McGann as part of the negotiation for peace and I let a burning page waft upwards towards the ceiling. Johnson did not know if he existed either. After all, no one could see him, as though their gazes fell away at the appearance of an extinct species, for they did not know how to look. But suddenly the other pages in my hand catch as well and I try to slap them out and my arm is burned. I sit there waiting for the delayed and terrible pain which I know will come, tingling, searing, and I remember burning paper once as a child and holding my hand over it, an experiment in self-loathing.

  There must have been a child.

  There was always a child transfixed by burning paper, and now on a windshift, sparks pepper the dark like fireflies, the horizon alight, a thin, luminous ribbon. Yes, on a windshift Byron Johnson saw in the other light streaming from an open french window, the unmistakable figure of Julia Dickenson in a translucent nightgown, or a cage of whalebone, saw her turn fleetingly to go back inside, her swollen silhouette framed in the doorway, saw the transformation from imperial glory to the pathetic irony of heritage, shackled to lone assumptions beating into the night, foundering as luffing men o’ war seeking purchase on slimy rock; saw love crumbling like chalky cliffs; saw all those ladies with fine naval fervour and mean usage in heated drawing rooms spreading purification and perfume and the Great Tradition unaware of their illegitimacy, bastardry ground away like polenta beneath the deadly rolling-pin of history which continues to build castles from ruins, imperial cathedrals, confident that obsession will not turn like a rabid dog. He knew now what the girl had meant at Ypres, knew that history wasn’t everything. He sought the talk-back channel on his radio.

  There must have been a child, but after love there will always be silence.

  He saw on a windshift how his arson had swept back towards the sea and spared Northmere, saw how Julia had paused… perhaps longing for the cataclysm, yet another, to take her out of this sheltered nullity, longing perhaps to submerge the cathedral of continuity beneath the sea, to drown forever the spirits within it which haunted her night after night with eerie cries… when the wind turned the flames harmlessly away, the fire subverting itself, burning itself out, so it became nothing but an upstart idea, a brief and flashing bulb.

  Byron Johnson stood on the rise silhouetted in the purple light. He wanted to unburden himself, of the weight on his chest; took off his coat, tore at his shirt.

  It was the moment when I knew I had failed him, my passion gone; pushed madness over while hungering for ethical reappraisal and historical outrage, unwilling to bring extinction upon my head. It was also the moment when I understood him perfectly. The future belonged not to the imagination, but to biology. Simple cells. There must have been a son which Cavalho raised in his hut. There must have been a squalling and a caterwauling, a mewling baby with powerful lungs, breath held only to hear Cavalho’s wheezings, the final pulmonary spasms against which it lay its head, to hear the final expiratory curse at the government nurse who duly recorded the name… McGann… and who promptly despatched the baby to an orphanage.

  And so the wind changed and turned the fire upon that which begot it.

  There was a muffled explosion.

  19

  It was on the news the next morning.

  There were no bodies to be found at Cape Grim. The reports carried a particular refrain, echoed down through the ages, resonant of the fate of so many Tasman explorers, convicts, escapees, dreamers, native
s… there were no bodies, no sir. Vanished into that gaping maw of wilderness or sea, the thick carpet of jungle or water. The incident was seen as coincidental at first: rumours of St Elmo’s Fire, a chance lightning strike, a random spark from an electric fence which blew the fuel drums. They did not find the remains of the tanker until later. Even much later, evidence of gelignite. Then it became clearer. The purified wind had changed in a moment of magic and the ghosts had come alive, had begun their ancient practice: the fire always turned in a semi-circle, sweeping back the game; look there, ten thousand breaths speeding cloudy galleons across a clear sky, back to the horizon whence they had come.

  Tom McGann packed his things. He had taken heed of too many signs throughout this life and needed to make a path all his own, satisfying the nomadic turn in him which leant far over and sought nothing on the nether shore. He tidied up the caravan, took Ainslie’s things into the house, stepping lightly over the charred wood and creeping water, heard the crackle in the early light and listened for a moment to a car to establish its continuing rhythm. He collapsed the roof of the caravan, hitched it to the VW. He took a plastic case from the glovebox, examined the syringes inside… the vials of Melanotan… and closed the lid.

  He started the car, heard the caravan crunch after him, and drove away.

  20

  From the logbook of the ‘Nora’ under the command of Captain Orville Pennington-James. 19th July 1829.

  Fair winds for the first part of the morning. I have a feeling this log will end almost before it has begun. Imagine. Six months at sea and I’ve written that first line, with slight variations, almost a hundred and fifty times… to keep the owners happy. They want to read happy stories. Yet today, there is an unusually vinous pungency about this wind whose only previous landfall has been South America and which will touch the tip of Cape Grim some time this evening, wafting a sigh of unusual solace before those elemental cliffs, drawing out the natives towards the sea to view us arriving before it. First contacts are always sentimental… before the violence.