by Brian Castro
Thus I, who have never known love, know only of its absence. Its romanticism plays like froth upon the waves and I would presume native cultures have no use for it. Still, I dream of the experience, and deal out the rum. Experience the imagined, willing the capacity to see down one day when a reader of this log will sail these waters, carry off his love and make a fatal turn into history and thus remedy everything I have despoiled by allowing my indignity to remain silent.
Be still, old stomach! I don’t need your growling to remind me of hunger and fear. The crew are restless. Tonight, or perhaps the next, they will attempt mutiny. Standing here at the stern, my hand on the wheel, I allow my heart to spark and fail in this most difficult emptiness in the world, uncertain of what it seeks upon these latitudes hereafter: fire or ice.
21
And now I return to these windswept cliffs several months later.
The muttonbirds have redoubled, mining and burrowing into the soft ash beneath new grass. Emma, if she were here, would have walked down to the sea, wrapping her cardigan around her thin shoulders; would have stooped to pick up pebbles, the wind promising her that the next time what came from the sea would be the answer to the deep longing in her heart, longing for a sail to appear from her words, a longing I knew was not pain, but part of a concentration on small things, like the birds, the wind, life and love.
I remember the soft plateau and the sheep tracks, the dung and the muttonbird burrows, the tussocky slope leading without warning to the precipitous cliffs and the sheer drop into the sea. I remember the Bass Strait winds blowing so fiercely you hung on for dear life to the long grass and prayed the sea wouldn’t heave and swallow you up, when you grew dizzy lying on your back holding down your dress, watching the albatross glide in place, wings perfectly shaped to scoop up the wind which was scooping up your dress… yes, how I remember that!
Gravity had drawn me back towards you. The gravity in you, the gravity of you, which will draw us together, down, deep down, forever.
And thus he had written, in reply to her letters, long before he had met her; long before he had been to Tasmania where love had left him undefended, that lone island within himself dissolving into drizzle, into the salt-spray of soft shapes, into the rich loam of a future coalescence in his watery crossing of the universe.
My sister disappeared on the 13th November 1993 off West Point, northwestern Tasmania. They found her handbag filled with smooth pebbles. Counting stones. She was always collecting them; a miscellany of hieratic and positive things. A part of myself went missing as well, and for months after, I had cause to say: ‘Emma, c’est moi‘, and heard nothing of what people said.
What they said was that the first person he called on was her. He had reached her cabin by walking along the cliffs and then swimming across small bays and inlets. The police were already searching for him, a helicopter whipping at the low scrub with powerful searchlights, worrying the coast like an angry wasp. His clothes were charred and soaked, his forearm burnt, revealing a layer of white skin beneath. Emma was not surprised to see him. She rubbed ointment into his arm and wrapped it in gauze. She fed him and lay with him until dawn, and when they emerged in the morning, an armada of small boats had gathered, a flotilla of birders waiting to cross the straits had assembled for him and they were waving and smiling, readying to forge his escape. With unspoken tenderness, they lifted him aboard and sped him towards Stanley. Once at the breakwater, they transferred him onto the Nora, Morris already at the helm, the diesel motor thumping reassuringly, fanning blue exhaust over the calm water. Three miles out, Morris launched the lifeboat and returned to shore.
These are of course conjectures, and nowadays, probably myths. Some say they saw the Nora dipping over the horizon towards the South Seas and its paradisiacal islands. Others say the wind shifted again and again, and that the old barque took a fatal turning in Banks Strait and sailed due south, heading for ice, not improbably, since B.S. Johnson had left a note together with his credit cards, a birth certificate from Hammersmith (which I will use in due course) and his passport, which I’ve managed to coax from Ainslie. The scrap of paper was the usual writer’s memo:
A list of ices:
growlers
ice bastions
ice haycocks
ice floes
ice rinds
ice hummocks
ice flowers
ice pipes
ice wedges
pancake ice
frazil ice
vuggy ice
anchor ice
rime ice
ice dust
plate ice
bullet ice
drift ice
Out of habit, a plan to use this vocabulary… the listing establishing the moment of arrival at a counterfeit reality which he would then discard.
Whatever the case, it is incumbent upon me to put things in order, to relieve the myth of its importance. And so I am going to Hammersmith to set the record straight, to defend him against accusations of insularity or puritanism or of being a minor participant in the great adventure of the novel. I am doing it not because I believe there will be a true reason for his death, nor because I see it as a deliverance from what I cannot understand, but because I feel a responsibility for the asking of the question. What aileth thee? It would have been enough for him to let the cup pass, renew himself, redeem himself from that horrendous quest for absolute integrity.
Yes, I shall have to recuperate for B.S. Johnson the startling, dazzling and blinding originality hidden in his suicide, (I’m not sure that’s what it was; he may have simply been called away and had the capacity to stay under for a long time, take on a new skin), a death that has become mine, forcing me to retrace my steps, working back to tell the story before this one, and in that, I am finally, I believe, extremely blessed that he had opened a way. By imagining us, he lit a fire in which he perished. In dying, he pushed the truth beyond its own limit, turning the challenge of supreme honesty upon itself:
… what I am really doing is challenging the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing.
The equation is balanced. It made it impossible to live.
On the plane a child beside me has lent me his mystic writing pad… one of those wax tablets upon which everything written can be erased by lifting the plastic sheet. It must have been the same for Sperm McGann, moulding wax over the dead and lifting it off. It was neither death nor life he was creating. Perhaps it revealed the painful secret of existence: that invention was always the result of repression, censorship and violation. Nihil ab origine. Yet, what could be more exemplary than the perfection of one’s own death… in the service of our deepest secret? Byron Johnson had invited me to gaze upon it. Here, I even look a little like him… all except for this withered arm with its burnt and peeling onion skin and this perverse finger, which I hold up to the plane’s porthole as we climb high over Cape Grim… an involuntary gesture, sign of my eagerness to tell… (the sheep and cattle down there destroyed, brucellosis on the rampage… yes, I understand disease… the child is already taking notes)… my eagerness to pass on, if you get my drift, to what matters.
To what has always mattered.
