I spent a long time looking at your chat icon and thinking of the right type of veiled nonsense to say, hoping for something magnetically inductive, some kind of magic I guess, the type of words I could believe you might imagine me saying but in a transcendental way so that they became my own and met the promise of your imagination in a shape that would absolutely fulfil the purpose they never existed to create and thereby satiate the need to say them by not being needed. I wanted words like that and never said a fucking thing.
I’m worried that Sammy is getting fat, he’s been looking kinda plump about the guts. Maybe I’ve been feeding him too much. It makes me feel terrible but I can’t deny that squishy face, pucker-lipped and pouting, I just want to make him happy. It’s probably good that there aren’t any mirrors nearby, I wouldn’t want him seeing what my weakness is doing to him. I mean, I didn’t think fish even got fat, I figured they just metabolised it. Man, I hope he doesn’t have issues with his body, I’d feel less guilty if he just died.
She trips a little while we walk and I get a flash of her falling onto the road, lying with her arm stretched out and a desperate look in her eye. She needs me, but I don’t help her. Traffic blooms over the horizon with the sun’s darkening fate and in a moment I picture my whole life without her. Then she recovers her balance and so do I, falling into the familiarly paired empty stride. ‘Almost lost you,’ I say, and she pirouettes behind me, dancing in the blind side and singing, ‘You’re never going to lose me.’
Caleb calls it satire, a piece of dry reportage on the subject of animal farming lensed by its social implications, saying the key to elucidating its humour is in the specifics of its objectivity. I wonder aloud whether it’s alright to make light and Caleb clucks his tongue. ‘Light,’ he says, again, ‘is defined by its darkness and deceptively perceptual.’ Orwell, apparently, was alight. ‘The spirit of the times boiled inside that man before he splashed them on the page.’ I really wish I cared but I’m too engaged by all the animals to monitor his thoughts right now.
I push my hand into her hair, coarse but yielding, shaping my fingers around her skull in a basketball stance. She stiffens from the neck down and I feel it in the molecules of the couch as they separate between us. Nothing gets said and the music plays on, anachronistic sludge pop slitting at the atmospheric wrist. I try to sense her through my fingertips but nothing gets through, all signals blind firing at a wall. My joints ache and I start to lose my grasp. I let it drop and my hand falls, still full of empty wants.
That was the moment I loved him the most I ever would. Drenched in his own sugary cynicism, with just enough smile eroding the sneer to make him seem beautiful. Things would get difficult later and I knew it, but the future was something that happened in Blade Runner and I didn’t much care to see it. All the times I’d ever need fed into each other like film moving through a pinhole camera. I would have loved myself back then if I could’ve been me now. And him, if I saw him, I’d know there was no future.
I click my fingers at Laura, telling her to get the legs. The guy doesn’t look heavy but moves like a bureau, dead stained oak. We roll him into the tub and close the curtain on his face. Laura sighs with the effort and not the regret, her blood splattered chest ballooning with a sparrow’s slender plumage, flecks of the man’s red sparkling in her ash blonde hair. Preening back a lock, her burgundy hand leaves its mark upon her temple, consecration of the sweated brow. Glowing with the honesty of effort, smiling, she tells me, ‘I hate cleaning.’
Fucking Damien, with his skin stinking like cigarillo pale ale and day old pork crackle, wreaking sweat into the bed. Fucking Damien, throwing me down with juggle clubbed hands and thickly mallowed fingers making clumsy fumbled passes. Fucking Damien, ploughing witless, greedy furrows in the dirt, clotted ruts and too much traction. Fucking Damien, channeling away, an inept oarsman throwing stroke after stroke and grunting, gormless with the effort, racing trials against my ghost upon the swell of my repentance. Fucking Damien, as if I hadn’t already said yes, he has to take the joy out of it too.
After the nurse calls her in I’m stuck sitting with Dana’s stepfather. There isn’t much for either of us to say in the bloated sterile silence. Part of me expected to detect a seething anger from the man, some sudsy fury carved out of a telemovie melodrama or maybe something more cartoonish but certainly palpable to the point of being very nearly visible. Instead he wore a sheet of nothing coated with small checkboxes and faintly drawn labels that listed normally gratis human manoeuvres; fatherly concern, conciliatory hug, softly stern but knowing look. Very few of them were checked.
Graham, suffused with marijuana smoke, reads his lines from cards held in the ether. ‘The truth has never been real,’ he says. The cumulous pall built about his skull grants the manufactured mysticism of a Himalayan diorama, peaked ideas clotted with cotton wool clouds. ‘What is shown is shaped by the hands that reveal it. What is known is flexible enough to snap.’ The words fall out of him with strange waylaid purpose, a bundle of skydiving knives, inevitably swift and dangerously misdirected, building momentum and heading towards a pointless incision. ‘I mean, have you even read the data?’
Trouble breeds in the miasma of awareness. It’s a flyer for indigenous rights. I show it to Mikey and he cocks a lazy fist by his head like a slot machine arm. ‘Powah,’ he says, grinning in his iceberg way. When he drops his arm I wait for the coins to spill out but he just clicks his tongue with mechanical emptiness. ‘We shouldn’t celebrate diversity. People wouldn’t bothered if they didn’t know they were different.’ Ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power. I tell him somebody said that but he already doesn’t care, telling me ‘I get it.’
A tee started it, the blue-green three quarter he slept in. It hadn’t been washed since and the scents in it kept him close. Cynthia would take it to bed and crawl inside, trying to dream of before. Soon she was into the rest of his closet, chasing down memories of him and wearing them through her days, all the best parts put together like an armoured garment shrine. Gradually she slipped into his skin, sought its council, and bound herself to its past. In the end she brought him back, but it was her we truly missed.
It sounds like it’s coming from above and behind me, the wretched mewling of a cat in heat. I know there’s nothing there but it could still be real. There’s been a lot of that lately, not ugly cat sounds but the blurred feeling of being indistinct in the face of reality. I’m so substantially intangible and harbour such vivid intellectual viscera, when the lines are not only faint but shimmer and shift with perspective, who knows where the truth intersects. The effort it takes to focus on the agreement is exhausting, I get so tired of hearing lies.
Watching Dana and James make out, trying not to look or look like I’m not. The ice has made everything hyperreal and distinctly absent. I have the sensation that I’m hovering inside myself, separated by a buffer of nothing that feels like falling. Air in a vacuum.
I miss her tongue already.
Five minutes ago she has me up against the bathroom sink, her fingers slinking beneath my skirt. Her lips upon my neck, heavy petting, hot and breathy, saying, I have to have you. Panting and pawing, frenetic, messy, passion riddled moments, melding together as she moves against me, thigh parting mine, stirring my insides, jarring me alive. I shudder and lose track of time.
Somebody turns the music up and I feel myself bump against the world. ‘Is it just me or is it crowded in here?’ Nobody listens. I need to move or I’ll die, so I finish my wine. The kitchen seems so far, but it’s fine once I force my feet to work and persuade my head to stay on straight. I’m walking when somebody stops me.
‘Hey, do I know you?’
Slouched against a wall, slumped though comfortably so, Dylan, slur-smiled and easily unaware. Golden trellis hair laid in disheveled crown of thorns, framing drugged eyes that I can’t meet. ‘Not really.’
‘Nah, not so. You’re Sally’s sister, no?’
Two years ago, hiding at a seek party, wanting not to be sought but resenting the thought. Stuck in a closet, drinking to drown, swallowed by darkness. Though I can’t see a thing, I can feel the music through the floor. It moves through me like the vibrations of a muffled drum, insidious and rhythmic, frustrating itself in the stillness of my body.
‘I can’t believe I found you.’
I want anything other than this. Pressure pawing over me. Calloused hands screaming for satiation across my skin, twin freewheeling pinions. I can’t move. My mind collects my senses and projects them behind closed eyes, a vivid and ferocious, transcendental conglomerate of horrors. I wish them gone or me away. Within and without, stripped apart and reassembled against my will. I try not to think, to breathe, to survive. I hope for nothing and lose track of time.
‘Janey?’
Sitting in the shower basin, drenched and empty, salt running from her skin. Standing there, prune skinned and withered in the steaming air, looking for myself in the mirror’s fog, thinking I can’t cry again. Her words, dampened in the water’s patter, reach me muffled, out of sync, hovering in the heat.
‘Where did you go?’
Dana, standing by me with a hand on my shoulder. Mascara, run since I last saw her, darkening her eyes. Her smile still shines, lightened in relief. Pulled to her, embracing, the pulse in her neck a timpani thump I feel in my heart. I am stretched taut around her.
‘Even when I’m not here, I’m there.’
One day soon she drives us to the beach, rattling there in that old Volvo beater, listening to a scratched copy of Garbage she swears is stuck, an auditory witness to her supposed ignorance as she sings every word. Only she enjoys pretending she isn’t enjoying herself. We throw our towels down on the sand and face up to the sun, our arms outstretched and our fingers just not touching. Sedated by the crushing softness of the waves falling upon the shore with meditative persistence. When she smiles it’s genuine and I take it for my own. Nobody will ever see it again.
A little too early, nobody here and nothing to do. I pour myself a wine and wander through the house, finding James in the lounge room living up to its name, draped upon a weathered chaise and staring down the ceiling. He looks so serene, I want to disturb him. ‘Dana isn’t far away,’ he says. Neither of us does anything.
Somebody hands me something and says, ‘you’ll be fine.’ I smoke a pipe and lose track of time.
A Few Short Words 