Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  ‘Hey boopster,’ I croon, rubbing Rosie’s back. She burps up a little creamy sick that dribbles down onto my shoulder. ‘That’s my girl,’ I say.

  •

  I have some sympathy for Orpheus. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to cellars, basements, caves and catacombs. There is, surely, a Freudian frisson to my fascination with vaults, crypts and bunkers. It occurs to me to wonder, on my regular perambulations through the hospital’s cavernous underground car park, if my pseudo-gynaecological expeditions mask a benign desire to regain the original comfort of the womb or a more malign instinct to pierce and penetrate. Do I descend to the netherworld to liberate Eurydice, or to ensure my presumptive gaze annihilates her hope forever?

  Orpheus had the good fortune to be created, by Apollonius Rhodius, an artist of sublime skill. In the original mythology, he is a valued member of the Argonauts who rescues his beloved wife from oblivion.

  He subsequently had the misfortune to be redrafted by Virgil, Plato and Ovid, who between them not only contrive a tragedy from our hero’s brave harrowing of hell, but in the process render Orpheus an ineffective coward who extinguished Eurydice.

  Their justification was that Orpheus lacked a true commitment to his wife. In other words, they believed he should want to die in order to be with Eurydice forever, rather than simply resurrecting her from death.

  Thus, as his love was not true, Orpheus was punished by the ever-mocking gods.

  In the dark corners of my netherworld, prowling the shadows of the hospital’s caverns, I wonder if any mortal should be expected to have the courage of the gods’ convictions, who have all of eternity in which to debate the theoretical pros and cons of the ultimate in self-sacrifice.

  Later, over dinner and a nice glass of red, I tease out the subtleties.

  ‘So you’re asking,’ Cassie says, ‘if I’d rather be rescued from hell or have you come join me?’

  ‘That’s pretty much it, yeah.’

  ‘Hard to say, really.’ She forks home some pasta and chews, considering. ‘We couldn’t just swap places?’

  ‘I don’t think Orpheus was offered that option.’

  ‘Typical. I’m betting it was a bloke who wrote that story.’

  ‘Actually there was more than one writer. But they were all blokes, yeah.’

  ‘There’s a shocker. So would you?’ she says.

  ‘Would I what?’

  ‘Swap places with me.’

  ‘That wouldn’t make any sense. Better I stayed alive and tried to get you out, no?’

  ‘No. I’m not offering that option. So would you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say, because you’re not in hell.’

  ‘K, we’ve just moved in together. How much worse could hell be?’

  ‘Point taken.’

  I met Cassie through a lonely hearts column. What I liked about her advertisement was that she required asoh. Most people specify a good sense of humour, but Cassie wasn’t fussed. Laughs are laughs, she said.

  Most people say they’re first attracted by a sense of humour, the implication being that physical appearance is of secondary importance because beauty is ephemeral. The assumption here is that a sense of humour cannot age, that humour is immune to wrinkles, withering or contracting a tumour. People presume the things they cannot see – hope, oxygen, God – do not change, grow old or die.

  A sense of humour is like everything else: it serves a particular purpose and then converts into a new form of energy. The trick is to be fluid enough to go with the flow and deal with each new manifestation on its own merits.

  •

  ‘You might want to scrap the next bit,’ I say. ‘It’s an excerpt from that novel Karlsson was writing.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Not really. Mostly they’re just doodles, scraps of ideas.’

  ‘Can we salvage any of it?’

  ‘Not really. To be honest, they were meant to be rubbish, to point up Karlsson’s delusions of grandeur. And as far as I know, they were the bits that put Jonathan off. With the pervy sex, like.’

  ‘Colour me intrigued. Have on, Macduff.’

  •

  Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

  Cassie, my elbows skate in ungainly loops across the cheap varnish of this plywood desk as I write to unremember. The flat white sponge soaks up the words. Cassie, bury me in a cheaply varnished plywood coffin. Then look beyond the past. Train your eyes to see beyond the horizon of what we used to know, all the way back to where our future ends.

  Cassie, we should have danced together, once at least, but you stumbled over words like ‘imaginings’.

  Did I hate you really? Did I choose you for the exaggeration of your form, for the overflow that allowed me to wallow in the cosy warmth of incestuous oblivion? Were you really the mother I never had? Withdrawal was always the sweetest relief as I slid out and away to limply drift back to the world.

  Cassie, why did I want you only when you were lost?

  •

  ‘Dump it,’ he says.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘All that incest stuff, Jesus . . .’

  ‘I already said, it’s gone.’

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘You get your first official warning.’

  •

  The old new orders were, no smoking inside the hospital. The new new orders are, no smoking on hospital grounds. So the cancer counsellor makes an official complaint. If he had made a verbal complaint, I’d have received a verbal warning. An official written complaint results in an official written warning. My supervisor tells me this as he hands over the written warning.

  ‘What about the rain forests?’ I say. ‘Don’t cut down trees for the sake of an official complaint. If you have to make an official complaint, send me an email, or text it. Or recycle. Just send out the written warning on the back of the last one.’

  ‘There’s procedures,’ he says. He wears a buttoned-up stripy shirt under a v-necked sweater, his hair greasy where it straggles over his collar.

  ‘Get a haircut,’ I say, ‘you look like a sleazy monk. Smarten up, unbutton that top button. Being married is no excuse.’

  I do not say this. What I say is, ‘How about the far end of the overflow car park, the one the cheap bastards use when they don’t want to pay for parking in town?’

  ‘Karlsson, there’s no smoking anywhere on hospital grounds.’

  ‘You can’t even see the hospital from down there.’

  ‘It’s the rule.’

  ‘Look, I can run with the logic of no smoking in the hospital, but––’

  ‘Karlsson, if I catch you smoking anywhere on hospital grounds, you’re fired.’

  ‘Okay. So when do we stop the consultants drinking anywhere on hospital grounds? Like, when do we start testing the surgeons’ coffee-flasks when they drive up in the morning?’

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ he says. ‘You’ll live longer.’

  This new ban has nothing to do with my health and everything to do with his, because he has a sickness for which orders obeyed are the placebo du jour. Who am I hurting by smoking in the overflow car park? I’m hurting me, sure, but I’m killing him.

  ‘If you can tell a man how he should kill himself,’ I say, ‘you can tell him to do anything. You’re just hanging around waiting for someone to tell you which window to jump out of.’

  I do not say this.

  ‘You’ve had your warning,’ he says.

  ‘Can I super-size that, with extra threat?’

  But he’s not listening. My line for today comes courtesy of Aristotle: No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

  •

  ‘We should probably kill the Aristotle bit,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if people respond all that well to insanity, not unless Russell Crowe is playing the lead. And the foul language, that should go too.’

  ‘No lunacy,’ I say, making the appropriate n
otes, ‘and no swearing. Anything else?’

  ‘Just one thing.’ He reaches into his backpack and comes up with a sheet of paper. ‘I took a stab at this last night. Something I remembered about Cassie. Want to try it?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  He makes to hand the page across.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s your stuff, you read it.’

  ‘I don’t have much of a reading voice,’ he says.

  ‘You want to be more real, don’t you? More authentic?’

  He crosses his eyes, mocking himself, then grins. ‘Okay,’ he says.

  •

  Sometimes Cassie sings in her sleep. The words are incomprehensible, the melody non-existent. There are moans, yelps and high-pitched squeals. None of these make sense in themselves. Nor do they make any more sense when heard in sequence. If a straight line exists between the static of the cosmos and a Mozart requiem, between pointless hiss and perfect design, then Cassie belongs in a choir of whales.

  She might not sing for two months, then sing three times in one week. It might last for five seconds or minutes at a time. Why?

  I have recorded her singing without asking permission. An unforgivable invasion. Except Cassie doesn’t know that she sings. If I tell her, she might never sing again. What then?

  I’ve slowed the tape down, speeded it up, played it in reverse. None of the manipulations yield any semblance of meaning. So far I have eliminated the following possibilities: hymns; pop songs; TV theme tunes; advertising jingles; nursery rhymes.

  All I know is that her singing is not intended to be heard. It is not even the unselfconscious cries of a baby, because a baby is at least aware that it is crying, and that its inarticulate bawling signifies hunger, wet or pain.

  In the darkness I wait for Cassie to sing. In the there and then of my waiting occurs the tangent point where I intersect with the human race, that unique breed aiming out along an arc designed to contradict nature’s irrefutable logic.

  •

  ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘You got the tone right,’ I say. ‘And I like the way you’ve made yourself sound like a tender pervert.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’ he says. ‘Me chipping in now and again, I mean.’

  ‘Not at all. The more you write, the less I have to do.’

  ‘Hey,’ he says with that shy, goofy grin, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if I ended up writing about how I don’t want to be a writer?’

  ‘Get me a whalebone corset,’ I say. ‘I may have just cracked a rib.’

  •

  This morning a thick mist rolls down off the hills, a faint but pervasive drizzle. The kind that’d go through you without so much as a bounce. I stand well back from the window with the lights off, sipping my coffee and watching Billy read over something he has written, now and again glancing up at the chalet.

  Around eight-thirty he leaves, slouching away around the stand of bamboo beyond the goldfish pond, shoulders hunched against the rain.

  Something in the way he walks makes me realise that the extra three inches of height come from lifts he’s had put into his shoes.

  He hasn’t even had a coffee. It was my turn.

  •

  In reverse order, the hospital’s chain of command works something like this:

  roaches

  porters

  porters’ supervisors

  nurses

  ward sisters

  matrons

  interns

  consultants

  specialists

  accountants

  the board of directors

  God

  All these wondrous creatures need to defecate. Sooner or later, the works gum up. Everyone waits until the porter hoses out the Augean edifice. Then it all starts again.

  I like to call this process ‘Tuesday’.

  Everyone has a thing about Mondays, but Mondays do their best.

  Tuesdays are evil.

  Tuesday is Monday’s Mr Hyde, lurking in the shadows and twirling its luxuriant moustache. Tuesdays take Friday the 13ths out into the car park and set their feet on fire, just to see the fuckers dance. If Tuesday was a continent it would be sub-Saharan Africa: disowned, degraded and mean as hell.

  Tuesdays are in a perpetual state of incipient rebellion. I can feel it. Tuesdays want to be Saturday nights, and a few pancakes once a year aren’t going to keep them sweet forever. When it all blows up in your face, don’t say you weren’t warned.

  We have chained Tuesdays too tightly, allowed them no time off. We have taken no notice of Tuesday’s concerns about working conditions. Tuesday is Samson, blind and furious, his hair growing back by imperceptible degrees.

  You have been warned.

  The union rep is on the phone, so it must be Tuesday.

  ‘You got another official warning, Karlsson,’ he says, ‘and one member’s shoddy work practices reflect badly on the entire union. You need to take that on board because we’re all in this together. If enough people share the load it doesn’t weigh anything. You know the cleaning contracts are up for review next month.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?’ I say. ‘I’m being fucked up the arse, metaphorically speaking. What’s the protocol for shouldering a metaphorical poke in the wazoo?’

  ‘Rules are rules,’ he says.

  ‘There’s such a thing as a bad law,’ I say. ‘Not only is the law an ass, it must be seen to be an ass.’

  But it’s Tuesday and he’s not listening. ‘One more infraction and you’re suspended,’ he says.

  ‘One more and I’m fired. Where’s the point in suspending me after I’m fired?’

  ‘Consider yourself disciplined,’ he says. ‘You’ll be receiving official confirmation within three working days.’

  ‘Can I wait until the official confirmation arrives before considering myself disciplined? I have issues with imaginary manifestations of authority.’

  I say, ‘I’m an atheist, send a plague of locusts.’

  But it’s Tuesday. He’s not listening.

  •

  ‘Again with the foul language,’ he says.

  ‘Duly noted.’

  ‘And there’s maybe a little too much Tuesday stuff. But,’ he adds, ‘that’s just a suggestion. You’re the writer here.’

  ‘No, you might have a point. I’ll take a look at it.’

  ‘Okay. What’s next?’

  ‘Another excerpt from your Cassie novel.’

  ‘I thought we were dumping all that.’

  ‘We dumped the last one, sure. But I realised afterwards that the excerpts were intended as Karlsson’s love letters to Cassie.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  He shrugs. ‘Give it a whirl.’

  •

  Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

  As a young man in Vienna, Hitler failed to woo a Jew. A bullet tore his sleeve as he charged across No Man’s Land.

  Cassie, six inches could have saved the Six Million.

  Cassie, they say Hitler once enjoyed the company of Jews.

  How then can they speak so blithely of fate, destiny and procreative sex?

  Damn the future, Cassie; dam it up. Give me handjobs, blowjobs and anal sex. Offer me your armpits, you wanton fuckers. Let us lacerate the sides of virgins with gaping wounds and fuck so hard we shake God from His heaven. Let us feast on snot, blood, pus and sperm; only save your tears for vinegar, to serve to martyrs who thirst.

  •

  ‘That’s a love letter?’ he says.

  ‘It’s a Karlsson love letter.’

  ‘Doesn’t know much about women, does he?’

  Debs opens the patio door and pokes her head out. ‘Hey, Hem-ingway,’ she calls, ‘your daughter’s got a poopy nappy. Chop-chop.’

  I wave to her. ‘Gotta go,’ I tell Billy. ‘Family day. We’re taking a spin out to Drumcliffe for lunch, it’s time Rosie visited Yeats’s grave.’

  He drops the shades,
gives me a one-eyed wink. ‘Cast a cold eye,’ he says. It’s hard to say if he means his Newman-blue or the sucked-out prune.

  I hold up the Sermo Vulgus excerpt. ‘So what do you want to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t like it as a love letter,’ he says.

  ‘I can kill it if you want.’

  ‘See if we can’t work it in somewhere else,’ he says. ‘Somewhere it doesn’t have anything to do with Cassie.’

  ‘Will do. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘On Saturday?’

  ‘Oh, right. Monday so.’

  ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I could do with a sleep-in tomorrow anyway. All these early mornings are killing me.’

  ‘Try having a kid,’ I say. ‘You’ll know all about early mornings then.’

  He glances at me then, something hawkish in his eye.

  ‘That’d be up to you, really,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You want Cassie to get pregnant?’

  ‘I think it might be good for us.’

  ‘She’s on the pill, though, isn’t she?’

  ‘She is now. Maybe you could swap her pills for folic acid or something.’

  ‘Without letting her know?’

  ‘Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that what the best stories are about anyway?’

  •

  Buddhist monks have this thing going on where they construct complex mosaics comprised of thousands of precisely delineated sections of coloured dust. It can take years. When they’re finished they sweep the whole thing into a corner and start again.

  I appreciate this perversity while I mop the tiles in the hospital corridors. By the time you reach the far end of the corridor, people have trampled all over the point from whence you came. Ashes unto ashes, dust unto dust. The priests say this so as not to scare the horses. It would be more correct to say ashes from ashes, dust from dust.