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FIVE: something borrowed

For fiction offers us not transcriptions of actuality but systematic models which are distinct from reality . . . They know that reality can be neither captured nor escaped, and their response has been to redefine the aesthetic act itself and argue that all works of the imagination are plagiaristic.

::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"
 

the twelfth photograph

 

Taken from the first or second floor of a building across Darlinghurst Rd, with zoom lens, TRI-X 35 mm film pushed to 800 ASA, and barely adequate early sunrise light, the photograph angles on airborne Caroline. There is no resemblance to a bird in flight. Nor does the shot possess the stillness and layered one dimensional tranquillity of Magritte's famous painting. Violent turbulent buffeting is bashing the boundary where Caroline stops and air begins. She is immersed in air, but its liquid does not smooth her path. Her eyelids are peeled back by its force. She has fallen already scores of meters and her intersection with the palpable air disposes her legs and arms awkwardly, contrary to the expectations of gravity and muscle. The pressures of her fall from the open window, grainy and crepuscularly open at the top of the shot, has torn her dress up over her shoulders, covering her throat and mouth, leaving visible only her husked eyes. From this angle it is evident that she is innocent of underclothing. Recently she has shaved away her public hair, so that her naked limbs and belly present a strange duality, innocent and lubricious at once. No one gazes out from the window to witness her plummet onto the painted metal of the fire hydrant below. It is an impossible photograph. Who could have taken it?

 

the thirteenth photograph

 

In this photojournalist's routine and unpublishable Nikon pic, Caroline's broken body is being removed from the blood-splashed King's Cross concrete footpath by two ambulance staff. Their faces are rigid with the necessity to deny any direct connection between this torn meat and their own tired morning flesh. Caroline's clothing has been drawn into place, but it is clear from the shape of her corpse that the hydrant has failed to show her any respect. At the very least, its crunching impact has dislocated her right shoulder, shattered half her ribs (broken and oozing through her uniform like a defrosted rack of lamb), and, most horribly, torn out her left eye.

 

the fourteenth photograph

 

This Kodak VPS blow-up could be a sample from an advertising campaign, either for the company's range, for the Mamiya 645 camera, or perhaps in support of funerals. Details are crisp, definition superb. Although it is raining, an awning has been arranged for the protection of the principal mourners. Onlookers have fetched their own umbrellas, not all of them black. The open coffin, beside the deep, muddy grave, attracts the interest of a horde of emotional adults and children. Caroline is at the center of the photograph, her repaired face tanned with cunning cosmetics, eyes only lightly closed, lovely in a white lacy dress from the turn of the century. Mr. and Mrs. Muir stand prominently in the front of the gathering, distraught and still apparently in shock. Caroline's father's large hand rests on the edge of the open coffin, touching the silk, above his daughter's shoulder. Almost out of the shot, at the rear of the crowd, drenched Joseph leans toward Lanie. His eyes are smeared with rain. Lanie wears a dark plum dress, muted and melancholy, under an incongruous transparent plastic raincoat. Her hand hangs limply beside Joseph's. They do not touch.

 

ambit claims

 

Dead? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Was there no end to this damned visceral manipulation? Was not Caroline at this moment somewhere safe in Bangalore, full of beans or at least hardly defunct, seeking the meaning of life in a landscape no less alien than the right hemisphere of the brain to its left partner and rival? Ha! Dead! Impossible! It cannot be! I'd not believe it though herself should swear it. (Henry Carey, more or less, 1693?-1743)

I edged myself into this question with a paradoxical conceit, a waggish antinomy.

Humans were the only animals capable of knowing truth, and compelled by its quest, I proposed; they achieved this end by lying.

Certainly deceit was a gambit in the broad evolutionary repertoire, but by and large it was chicanery of an essentially passive kind, baffling perception. Chameleons were adroit at dissembling, stick-insects (Diapheromera femorata, say) at outright mendacity. Yet even the predator, actively straining for stillness under the skittish gaze of its prey, employed a passive falsehood.

People, though, tricked one another with deliberation and intent. The mismatch of stimulus and perception was wilful, informational, communicative. Map, ho hum, no longer reflected territory.

The implicit assumption in that line of thought, I noted, was that Territory did equal Reality. Yet how could that be? Only eidolons were known, schemata, those structures into which perceptions were slotted, out of which they were built. True, it was economical to posit a coherent, consistent Noumenon that gave rise to those patterned inputs from which minds constructed Phenomena and their experienced qualia. But it remained logically impossibly to know whether those features of the soi-disant Noumenon that were abstracted and represented in cognitive maps were even remotely relevant, let alone central, to the true fundamental structure of the Noumenon.

So in the first instance the map a lie misrepresented was another map. Of course, if that original map were in error, the available means of modifying it lay in positing yet another, inconsistent map—in terms of the primary map, to "lie"—and let the two compete for traffic.

Thomas Kuhn had described this procedure as the construction and competition of rival paradigms. I was prepared to be less fancy, and recognize a lie when I saw one. (But which one was the lie?)

Didn't this leave out the moral intentions of the act, and the degree of commitment your true liar had to the propositional system—its data and their internal relations, as he accepted them—that he attempted by his falsehood to subvert? For surely a lie was a prudential evasion (unless motivated by sheer pathology) uttered within a covert meta-affirmation, its goal being, say, the attainment of power, or the avoidance of aversive consequences, in principle describable on that meta-level in exactly the same terms by both liar and lied-to?

Besides, there were more varieties of truth than one. Did not even this unorthodox definition apply only in those part-axiomatic realms where the Falsification Test held sway: viz, the austere universe of scientific discourse? While a scientific theory could reasonably be construed as a lie by the honest lights of its antagonists, I might hardly implement the same rubric in dealing with the rich ambiguities of fiction, of art in general: ambiguities that bid to resolve, with benevolent, dialectical prodigality, the contradictories of linear imposition.

Well, I bought none of this. I was convinced of the deep identity of science and art, if only because they both pertained to the same class of neural algorithms. It was the same brain that did the sums as did the petit-point, the oratory, the hunting&gathering, the nuclear physics, the philosophy and the dishes. It was the same brain, overloading, leaking ions and neurotransmitters, and running its programs haywire, that sent Caroline Muir into the madhouse and delivered unto Ray Finlay the mystical trance which passeth understanding.

The mysteries of Art! I laughed. The Muse! How unlike the crass operationalism of science, according to some. Regard the Reader, withdrawing attention from signals at skin, muscles, deep gut, delegating all that inconceivable mental power and complexity of cerebral function to a phantasmic, prompted construction of human and environmental replicas, previously schematized with almost total incompleteness by the Writer who, in a comparable state of inwardness, had employed similar hierarchies of abstraction (sub-routines all of a human brain with its grievously fallible memory, absurdly limited attention span, constipating dogma, barbarously blatant stereotypes, ploys old before Homer) to mime out an interior shadow play.

Yet the undeniable delight of this process, I told myself, was of heightened, not diminished, not reduced, not denuded, but magnified and robust experience.

In part, I mused scientifically, it was due to the compression of time. An initial practitioner (the Writer) spent days, months, years engaged in the programming and interrogation of his or her sub-routines, modifying them, checking for parity errors, testing them for consistency, pith, even "validity"—and distilled the results into an input meant to be experienced full-bore by the subsequent practitioner (the Reader) in mere hours.

Add to this the artist's specialties—verbal facility, perhaps; peculiar insight, or simply peculiar views; keen eye, ear, fancy—and the Reader obtained the frisson of living inordinately beyond his or her means. Next to this gratuity, the simple traditional pleasure of storyhearing—wish-fulfilling content—ran a beggarly second. Tinker, tailor, rich man, poor: what booted it, if the tale were well told?

So, I realized, by my earlier accounting I had here two lies. The first was the Writer's: that these lay figures lived, that this schematic was more than a rudimentary sketch of a map of a map. The second was a lie shared by all the Writer's Readers: that they were not gazing at lines of print but witnessing other lives entire; that, in the worst case, they were no longer themselves but someone other, in a denser, more selective universe.

I rebuked myself. This critique was philistine, asinine! To equate Art with Deceit was to reach for your Luger. What else could humans share except abstractions? The touch of a hand and one's emotional joy in it (or fear!) were finally electrochemical abstractions borne to and within the brain by jostling neurotransmitters. If these abstractions were decked out with our elaborations, shading them the colors of our choice, where was the metaphysical burden? What else was feasible?

I sighed, putting the last of the photographs back on the missing hike's study desk.

 

1983: the mystical tree

 

"It looks much prettier from up here."

"If you discount that brown furry stuff they seem to have hung over the front of the city offices."

Coming up to the fourteenth floor in the slightly grubby lift, crepitating from the lobby of the Queens Lodge Motor Inn, seeing Grant Moore and his portapak-toting cameraman to the opened window of the main function room, Marjory has no love left for Melbourne in December.

"Don't be a grouch. Look, stick your head out. You're not agoraphobic, are you?"

"You mean acrophobic, Grant. I have very few fears, none of them irrational."

"What the fuck are they doing down there?" Grant puts his arm lightly across her shoulders. On one of the playing fields fifty meters below them and beyond the roaring traffic, several teams of brightly clad brights swirl and flow, step and halt, interpenetrate and coil apart like some Tai Chi kindergarten ballet.

"It's a simulation game of Ray's. Like Dungeons and Dragons, but more cerebral. Like chess but more fluid. I hope your team on the ground is getting some of this, it won't be worth a peso from here."

"They better be, or I'll have their balls." He squeezes her trapezium slightly with his thick, smoke-browned fingers. "You'd be surprised what we can get from up here. Good as a chopper, except for panning. Bill has his zoom right down the front of their dresses." He gives a booming chortle. "Wanna smoke?

"I've given them up."

"The other sort. We'd have to go down to my room of course."

"If that's what you have in mind I think you'd have to extend yourself to something for this itching I have in my nose."

"It's probably just your nasal septum losing its footing," Grant tells her. "I can probably get some from Mark when he comes up after he's shot as much of this as he can stand. What are they doing, a Rite of Spring number for Big Brother?"

"Hardly original, Grant."

"Only four more weeks to 1984, Marjory."

"Yes, that's been mentioned a few times in the press. See that group in the middle? They're flipping their scarves around so you can see the green or red lining."

"The footy season's over."

Corning upon them from behind, Joseph explains, "They're quarks and gluons."

Bill the cameraman grunts, changes his focus slightly.

"Fuck. Do tell. Hey, I know you."

"We met at Jean-Pierre's bistro nine years ago."

"During that big bash you buggers had. You're . . . Joe Williams."

"Joseph."

"Right." The function room is virtually empty; all the hikes not participating in the simulation are down on the playing field watching. "They're being atoms, are they?"

"Subnuclear particles. The constituents of nuclei, of protons and neutrons." Everyone on the grass spins, coalescing into groups of twos and threes, merging, rebounding, their scarves twining and folding, red flipping to green, yellow to red, green to yellow. It is like a mating of insects with three sexes.

"The gluons transmit what we call a 'color' charge. That's what bonds the quarks together. It gets stronger the further apart they are. Close up, as you can see, the quarks and gluons are free to jostle each other about."

He's right; it is as if the triads are governed by an invisible cattle fence. Their members roam and flutter, switching scarves, never moving beyond arms' breadth.

"Who are those guys in white caps? They're breaking the rules."

"Photons are allowed to," Joseph says.

"If you're gunna be like that."

"The colored ones get together and make up heavy particles called hadrons. Photons are particles of light. Well, waves really. They transmit the electromagnetic force holding electrons in orbit around protons." Abruptly the scarves come off, are tossed wadded through the air. Several small children dart from the edge of the field, collect them, run off. The dancers take striped caps from their pockets. To unheard music, their choreography modulates to a higher blocking. Bunches of checked caps form. Individuals in merry cherry bands run at them, hands waving; slow; touch, grope, rebound, bond.

"We'll have a bloody newkyular explosion if they keep that up."

"No, the Simulation randomizer has changed the matrix. That's a small segment of a brain you're seeing now."

"Hey, this is good," the cameraman says too loudly. Grant taps his own unencumbered ear. "Oh. Listen, see if you can get some sound for yourself. Skyhooks."

"Shit, I should have thought of that," Marjory says. She dashes from the room. After a moment the function hall's acoustics come alive with thundering rock.

"They're brains?" Grant yells

"Neurons. And neurotransmitters going back and forth between them. This is a simulation of drug action. Those people with the bright red hats represent brain chemicals like norepinephrine and acetylcholine that control messages to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems."

"What, inside your head?"

"And your body. It's a pity we're not down there, you can't get the fine detail from this distance. There are codes for the different transmitters—dopamine, serotonin, GABA, the endorphins, ACTH."

"Good Christ!" Grant turns from the window, digs into his shirt pocket for a Camel, blows horrible smoke in Joseph's eyes. "Last time we met you were on the bludge. What have you done, a brain surgeon's course?

"If you must know, I've been teaching myself Samoan."

"Go on. Say something."

"My pronunciation's probably terrible."

Grant grins. "I won't let on."

"E a pe a ta sisiva." To his shame, Marjory returns at this moment. She smirks at him.

"What's it mean?"

Joseph blushes, looks out the window at the dancers, in time to see the psychoactive drugs coming in from the outer boundaries of the mind's fleshy world, through the blood-brain barrier, into Caroline's poor battered brain to soothe the whirling violence of her own hopelessly fucked-up interior communications. Neat and ordered as a commercial. Hugging the cross-checked receptors beyond the synaptic cleft, the major tranquillizers block off the buzzing, eager transmitters.

The manic Skyhooks record stops dead; Lou Reed drones. Oh Jesus, she was Caroline, too.

In go the antidepressants, spinning and slowing, gripping hands together in a barrier at the vesicle source of the transmitters, norepinephrines and serotonins straggling back from their journey across the synapse, exhausted, seeking oblivion but blocked against absorption by this tricyclic wall. So away they go once more, jittering clowns juggling their messages of phoney glee across the abyss. And now their return journey is hazardous with monsters, bizarre Chinese masks a decade out of date.

"Shit, Grant," the admiring cameraman reports, "there's three bloody Chairman Maos down there."

The transmitters quail, menaced by MAOs. Not a moment too soon the Marines arrive, Green Berets to inhibit these impertinent interlopers. Joseph smiles at Wagner's lunatic contribution to the simulation schema. Who else would embody monoamine oxidase inhibitors so grossly? And the neurotransmitters are free, carrying their wretched counter-revolutionary messages across the gulf of the synapse and into the brain, into the soul, into the damaged crazy heart. If this is true, Joseph tells himself at last, if this is true, if all that jabbering Freud and Laing and Lacan is finally just the froth on the churned soup of neurotransmitters, the tread on a tire whose wheel and axle are broken from the motor, why, then Caroline was the victim of her neurochemistry after all, as are we all, nudged and pushed by peptides a few dozen or hundred atoms long, atoms made of dumb whirring quarks and their color-drunk gluons, everything skeining in a vacuum of babbling lacy rushing hiss, no tachyons, no block universe of destiny and destination, a gabble of GABA, a hawking of quarks, transmitters with no senders and receptors governed only by the clever mechanisms of inert chance. You can go anywhere in a universe like that, Joseph tells himself in a blazing rush. Caroline was right. You can get a ticket and go. Just go.

"It means Feel like a dance?" he tells the interviewer, balder now than in 1975 but chunkier, more macho if such a thing is possible.

"Not with you, mate." Grant places his hand once more on Marjory's shoulder. "Not with you."

"Ua lapo'a le pe'a i lo le mogamoga," Joseph mutters. "Aua tou te fa'amasino atuina ne'i fa'amasinoina outou." He leaves them to it.

 

A DOG'S WIFE

 . . .one

 

On the evening of our last day together, Spot and I ventured into Puerto Rican midtown. Drugs dealers conveyed their wares and their opinions to others of their kind on every corner. One in every four of these corners held a dilapidated French restaurant striving to sustain identity and solvency. Young men struggled past us under the load of their gigantic quadraphonic portable sound systems. Spot danced with pleasure; this milieu was not alien to his roots. It pleased him to strut beside me, a streetwise kelpie in Hell's Kitchen.

"Ghetto blasters," he told me, as one kid bopped past in a drench of Hispanic pop. It was a phrase I had never heard before. The acoustic values were sensational. "Third world briefcase," he said, with a yip of amusement. The Walkman craze had not breached the barrio; it came to me that these unfortunates genuinely needed the joint benefits of conspicuous consumption and enhanced personal presence. A news report roared in our ears, simulcast from two swarthy youths passing us in opposite directions, creating a disturbing illusion of dopplered spin.

Whining abruptly, Spot crouched with his ears pricked, swinging his head from side to side in a manner which recalled (I say with some shame) the mascot on His Master's Voice recordings.

"Los astronautas Joe Engle y Richard Truly visitaron ayer el trasbordador espacial Columbia y dijeron que todo luce 'bellisimo' y en perfecto estado para el lanza miento de mañana," the reporter said rapidly, "siempre que el tiempo lo permita."

 

1983: punctuated equilibrium

 

Joseph takes the slow elevator, puts his life in risk crossing Queen's Road. At ground level Melbourne is disgusting. Early summer tawdry, old Heralds blowing along the gutter, a miasma of stoned gloom seeping from Fitzroy Street with its hundred child prostitutes, its five hundred hapless twitching junkies, its drab poets and drunks and dreary fuck movies and greasy souvlakia joints and the flat sea at the end of it. Just go.

At the edge of the oval he watches, sun crushing down in his eyes, as Ray's astonishing simulation segues through its modes, its holonistic transforms. The hike dancers are glazed with sweat but some impulse keeps them there, some intuition of a primal order in things. Joseph's admiration for the wit, even the splendor of the strange game cannot disguise from him his final severance. Now the core dancers have become B lymphocytes, primary genetic source of antibody resistance to invasion. Funny how that theme comes up over and over. Viral intruders surge in, each with its antennae, its color coding of antigen proteins. Now they clash, they do one another cruel damage, and at last the sinister doomed mating is consummated, a single fated stochastic lethal romance between antigen and antibody, the antibody one of a million variants laid up in advance by a lottery of internal genetic shuffling, and now the victorious antibody clones its own message, defender of faith and home, and transmits itself a hundredfold, in symbol at least on this tired plot of grass, a thousand, a millionfold, a carnivorous beast of hungry proteins unleashed by host against dying overwhelmed invader.

And the randomizer clicks; the drooping dancers reach for Cokes, for rolls thick with rancid ham, fatty burgers and souvlakia dripping with yoghurt, lukewarm water in plastic jugs, anything to keep them to the simulation under the sun. Already, barely refreshed, they are into a new and higher level of the life spiral, the contest of the genes, selfish and altruistic, shuffling their cards in a game of stable Mendelian strategies, the theory of games worked out in a dance of murder and parish-pump sociality, God damn, the swinging equilibrium between dove and hawk, strategies vying and falling in their embodied genes and genes in their embodied bodies, levels on levels, holons out of holons, retaliators gentle as doves unless attacked, then brutal as hawks, bullies passing themselves as hawks but fading at the test, the scientist of genes, the venture capitalist of genes, the prober-retaliator . . . How much of this makes sense to the watchers, let alone the viewers who'll get five minutes if they're lucky on Four Corners or Sunday Magazine or 60 Minutes or whoever bloody Grant Moore is pulling his fifty thousand bucks from these days, and all they'll make of it is a bunch of stupid bastards who waste their time with that bloody stupid elitist Mensa rubbish.

Marjory's scent reaches him as her arms go around his waist from behind. "I think it's just about over."

"Yes." He touches her hand, squeezes her fingers lightly. "Ray should be tickled pink, it's gone off beautifully."

She releases him, stands at his side leaning on the wooden fence. Music blows across the flattened grass. The sound system down here is not nearly as effective as the acoustics in the function room. "What did it mean, Joseph?"

"The Samoan?" He looks her in the eye. "An old proverb. A flying-fox is bigger than a cockroach."

"Oh." She blinks, looks across the field, waves to her husband as he comes toward them from the middle of the oval. The simulation has finished. Hikes wander off in twos and threes, picking up their trash, their discarded clothing. The field is littered with fragments of color coding. "That's a big step for a man from Brunswick."

"Have to go sometime, lovely."

"Yes." She turns and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. "We'll give you a big send-off. And the other bit?"

"What?" Joseph is confused. From the corner of his eye he sees Ray Finlay's frown, his slow smile.

"It couldn't all have been about cockroaches, they'd spend the whole day talking."

"I can't tell you, it'd excite Ray's Christianity."

"Whisper it in my ear."

Joseph whispers it in her ear. "The greatest of these is love."

 

A DOG'S WIFE

 . . .lift-off

 

My breast became suffused with awful foreboding. I had seen that look in Spot's eye before, under a dust of stars hurled into heaven with a mad jeweler's abandon.

"Space," he cried. "Boojum, the final frontier."

"Please don't call me that," I begged him, down on my knees on the broken, urine-dank sidewalk, arms about his straining neck. "If you must employ a diminutive, I much prefer 'Jinny'."

"The spirit bloweth whither it listeth," said my husband, as he quivered and shivered in the epiphany of his hunger, and I knew that I had lost him at last, lost him to the call of the wild.

 

caroline's flight

 

Late spring, her jet roaring into the bright afternoon, nearly summer, rising, turning above the undisturbed bottle-green landlocked harbor waters, long white ribs of surf seaward of the heads.

In her seat, next to Lanie, she grins.

Look at the bloody roofs.

Yeah.

The plain of domesticity yields to the Blue Mountains, to the endless primary yellows and reds. Hour after hour. They hang in the long bright padded aluminum tube reading Time and drinking free brandies and tonic. The dinner trolley reaches them.

Plastic food, Caroline says, gagging.

This isn't the Town House, my dear.

She trances out, looking down ten thousand meters for the unknown land of her birth.

Hey, it's gone.

That's the Timor Sea, Lanie tells her.

Its white streaks.

And clouds, the day's first.

In the gathering twilight Java is dark green. Abrupt, between cloud banks. The engines drop an octave. The long glide to the sweating Singapore night.

In the taxi they sit half dazed, watching the bicycles, the towering blocks of flats Band-Aided with washing, the milling Chinese and Malay faces. Crazy with his horn, their driver brakes and surges through the crowds. They zip inches from bird-thin Chinese in tattered singlets perched over bowls of soup at street stalls. Cauldron steam glows incandescent under the pressure lamps.

Christ, it's humid.

It is the tropics, you know.

At the dark end of a minor street they stop. Four shillings each a night, they've been told by the student travel agent. The Chinese hotel is clean, simple, proof of the paranoid righteousness of Lee Kwan Yew's capitalist utopia.

While Lanie goes to the lavatory down the hall, empty Caroline fishes a leather pouch from her waist. Passport, health certificate, book of traveler's checks. Photograph.

Joseph sits at his desk, indoors, at night, his typewriter pushed to one side, playing with one of his cats. Kitten, really. Caroline shifts the photograph into better light. Her arm still aches from the cholera shots. The kitten sits on an open book, blurring a paw at Joseph's admonitory finger. Half in darkness, half in light, his lips smile with mock rebuke at the animal. In her mouth and stomach, Caroline tastes tangible loneliness.

Hungry?

Not really.

Still, Lanie insists, we should have a look at things

Hand in hand they take the high, cluttered pavement past shuttered shop fronts and tiled walls until the way is blocked by a pile of bicycles, a mother feeding her baby. Instead of a gutter, they must jump a two-meter-deep trench. Dodge trishaws, motor bikes, pass plaited bamboo garbage bins, to the brighter end of the street.

Noodles?

Okay.

There are two street stalls.

We could sit in the café.

Fans like plane propellers turn slowly over circular marble tables. In one corner a fire burns in an earthenware pot, and over it in a shallow iron bowl a fat Chinese woman turns and mixes fragrant alien food. A few customers sit here already, staring without seeing at the besuited politicians on the walls, listening without hearing to the radio and the street noise.

Fried rice, please, Lanie tells the fat woman. And beer.

The order is relayed into a recess. A boy fetches beer and two glasses half full of ice. A few minutes later the rice arrives, with forks and spoons. Lanie pushes them away, takes wooden chopsticks from the glass in the middle of the table.

I never learned how, Caroline confesses.

On her first attempt she scores six grains and a bean shoot. The second wins her three grains and a fragment of meat. The third nets only rice. It makes her hungry and cross.

It's easy. Look at him. Eating like a native. Lanie sniggers.

A stick man in rubber sandals and shorts sits at the next table. His legs are crossed beneath his chair, livid with varicose veins. Caroline watches his fingers, flickering like the antennae of some huge inquisitive mantis. She abandons her misery to the art and technology of inconspicuous consumption.

 

1984: on the road goes ever on the road

 

Here we are, then. New Year's Day, 1984, Joseph tells himself under the appalling sun. Surely there must be some significance in that, some triumph. But in this place they plot the launch of the year on a different trajectory. He swings north, thinking of Caroline standing in this dusty road. Joseph cannot believe, for long stretches at a time, that this is actually happening. It has the weight of some metaphysical imposition. A Sisyphean task. The Augean stables, all the crap in his head. Pretty stupid metaphors in this country the Greeks never got on their maps.

Guided by an old paperback printed in London at the arse end of the flower- and/or play-power regime, he sleeps cheaply in the hotels that for centuries have served itinerant Chinese merchants. He sleeps for free in the Sikh temples that play host to any man who promises not to shave on the premises. His beard thickens.

At George Town he calls at the Post Office on the way to the wharf. There is a copy of Ray Finlay's irregular quipu REBUFF waiting for him, and a friendly postcard from Marjory. He tucks the card into his shirt pocket, jams the quipu unread into his rucksack.

 

zarathustra

 

Brian Wagner rolled a clean stencil into his heavy manual machine and squared it up, sat down in his solitary splendor and hummed a line from Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat." He sensed a mini-saga coming on, and felt confident enough in his prowess to type it straight onto stencil without a preliminary count.

 

[bq]FALLING OUT

 

Tired of drudgery—drab files, study, waitressing—honey hair to her bum, eyes kohled, calves hirsute in feminist zeal, Caroline sought a fresh start.

Inside the reactor vessel, legs splayed, brush poised, she heard her geiger counter drone.

At early retirement, she consigned her mutant babies to jobless, hairless tedium.[/bq]

 

Wagner scrolled up the stencil, checked the number of words (spot on), narrowed his eyes at their content and wondered for an instant if Marjory Finlay might not be right to suspect his attitude to women.

 

caroline in the red light

 

Half-drunk, belching from the fried rice, the women decide on a circuitous route back to their hotel.

The dirty, slow-flowing water of the canals carries a cargo of rubbish at random through the quarter.

They stroll slowly up a major thoroughfare. Cars and trishaws bluff one another murderously. Pedestrians glide through the mêlée.

I think this one runs parallel to ours.

Might as well try it.

A brightly lit alley leads off at right angles. Caroline is suddenly frightened. They move in a slow stream of men and boys.

Listen, is this safe?

Of course it is. The police are sudden death here.

Small stalls obstruct them every few meters. They stop at the first. In its puddle of light from a pressure lamp, Caroline sees a sorry collage of good-luck charms, pen knives, cigarette lighters, horoscopes, trinkets. She lifts her eyes.

Oh. Lanie, I think we're in the wrong street.

On the other side of the alley, open doors are oblong pink wounds in the peeling whitewash. Women sit inside in the grimy pink light, listlessly showing their thighs. Caroline is astonished by their impassivity; the whores read or sew, chat together or simply sit. The boys, the hairless men, laugh and point, and the women sit.

Hey, lady girls, you Americans? You want good money?

Piss off, Lanie says. We're tourists, not hookers.

Look, here is my money. He brandishes a fistful. Caroline's attention slips, somehow. She hears the tinkle of a passing tricycle bell, the mournful cry of its owner sounding incongruously like agape, which, as she looks at his wares, must presumably be a kind of soup or noodles. Turning, she bumps into a stall. Bright capsules and pills gleam in lamplight.

Shit, Lanie. For God's sake.

She recognizes the brand names instantly, the familiar prescription-only antibiotics. No clinical white shelves of hospital or pharmacist, only a Disneyland of physical corruption and magic science. Caroline feels, as perhaps she is meant to, sick to the stomach.

Jesus, the pictures!

They have been clipped or torn ragged from medical textbooks, pinned framed and unframed, the sharp triumph of the colorgravure printer's art. Cancers spill from the wall, decaying, suppurating organs, children with hideous developmental defects, cleft palates, anencephaly, botched, blotched skin, a dozen diseases and poxes of penis and scrotum, genitals eaten and stained and leaking and rancid with gangrene, legs swollen with elephantiasis and fingers truncated by leprosy.

Do they really think a few antibiotics will cure this sort of thing?

Come on, Caroline. Let's just go.

It's horrible.

Of course it is. Yes, it really is. Lanie smiles at her, and Caroline sees how tired they both must be. Touching her face lightly, her friend tells her: We'd better get you to bed, Caro, before you keel over with culture shock.

The alley ends. Whores conduct their endless trade at Caroline's back. A trishaw pings as they cross the street to their hotel. The lobby looks like a box. In their room, Caroline falls on to the bed in exhaustion and kicks off her shoes. The huge propeller of the fan turns and turns in the room's cloying air, like the coughing prop of an old airplane she'd seen lumbering down the runway as her own sleek jet landed.

It turns and turns above her, trying to drag the ceiling to the floor.

Caroline sleeps, and dreams of India.

 

faust

 

Relenting, Brian Wagner ratchets the stencil out of his machine, platen whirring, and spins another in. Clean and yellow-white. Waxy as a classical scribe's tablet, waiting for the concussive incision of words. Fifty words, plus title.

[bq]LEAPING[/bq]

 

he types; stops, broods, bursts into tattoo:

 

[bq]Caroline, ready for world, love, mystery and truth, abandoned the castle.

Her cropped head, her face pale from the wimple, took the sun in a hot tremulous kiss.

She turned her feet to and fro, admiring the edge of sky on her mirrored toes.

Caroline shivered, already half in love.[/bq]

 

1984: joseph

 

He walks slowly down the short main street, his feet aching, buys a bunch of bananas and eats two, stowing the remainder in his knapsack. A small black and white flag flies over a low concrete structure on the outskirts of the village. Joseph opens the garden gate and approaches the temple.

A girl of seven or so is playing on the lawn with her sister. She rises, greeting him with a grave smile. "Come with me."

He follows the child to a small house behind the temple. A turbaned Sikh with thirty centimeters of beard returns Joseph's salute, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his chest. The girl translates his Punjabi: "Where do you come?"

"From Australia."

"Where do you go?"

"To Europe."

"For you a long way to go, lah."

The temple guardian nods to his granddaughter, who leads Joseph to a high, bare room at the side of the temple. Half a dozen beds are all the room's furniture. They are no more than rope nets stretched taut across wooden frames. An old fellow has upended one, and stands twisting a new net on to the frame.

"This old man he comes from Calcutta to see us."

The man from Calcutta nods to Joseph and continues weaving his bed.

"Thank you."

The child departs. Joseph spreads his sleeping bag on a frame and leaves in search of food. Over a meal of chicken and rice that all but cauterizes his throat, he opens and reads Ray Finlay's most recent or post-revelation quipu. It is largely taken up with a transcript of a speech to be delivered by Dr. Finlay at the Commencement Week Ecumenical Service. This happy event is scheduled to take place at the university where Ray looks inside computers for the secrets of artificial intelligence. Joseph's mind drifts to lewd images of Marjory. A burning brand of curried fowl retracts his mind to Ray's new understanding of the human if not indeed the cosmic condition.

 

[bq]I am a born-again Christian.

I know the truth about the universe, the sublime truth that creation is the planned and loving work of an eternal and all-powerful Lord.

This truth has set me free, as truth must, from the snares and delusions that surround me, has liberated me from unsatisfying rationalizations.

The truth is that the world is more than an accident. It is more than a breeding place of animals, no matter how lofty their natural estate.

The truth is that humans are more than animals that are born and die and vanish forever and must live their meager lives in a frantic race for self-gratification before death steals the sweetness of experience forever away from them.

The truth is that men and women are more than social insects or hairless primates, however moral, however scientifically and socially enlightened. For we are made more than the material world about us, made with the capacity to escape corruption, made with the potential to become one with the Maker.

I know that God, in Their eternal and infinite generosity, has desired to share Their own happiness with others, and has created humans for that purpose.

I know that Jesus Christ, the second Person of that Trinity, came into this universe and gave us the opportunity to become part of Himself, to enter and share the divine life of our creator.

I know that I am part of that great fellowship, part of Christ, part of the God-head, and that the basic force in the universe is Love, for it was from Love that the universe came and it is by love that we shall each be fulfilled.

Nor is this knowledge simply that of faith. God has given those of us fortunate enough to attend this university intelligence beyond that of most of our fellows, and They expect us to use it in the crucial business of saving our souls. It is no good crying for the simple faith of the peasant. What we must learn from the simple is not intellectual simplicity but humility, abjectness to the will of God.

Truth and its pursuit are part of the very fabric of humanity. We can only love what we know, and we can only know what we learn. Yet, lest our life of faith become too academic, too abstract, we must remember that our ultimate aim is not merely to know truth, but to love and become it. [/bq]

 

Joseph begins to laugh. He gets curry all over his face. Throttling back, he pays for his meal and returns to the temple. The old man from Calcutta lies asleep on his completed bed. Joseph sits in the doorway to the sleeping room and scrutinizes Finlay's piece again from the beginning, by the light of the bulb on the outside wall. He can not control himself. He begins to laugh helplessly again. When the Indian rolls over, stirring, he gets up and moves outside.

"What are you reading?" The two children hold hands.

"A qui—" Joseph says, and stops. "A magazine."

"It is a funny magazine?"

"Funny, yes."

"Give me the magazine."

Joseph hands the quipu to the girl who scans it intently in the light. Her little sister solemnly regards Joseph.

"It is too hard, lah."

The document is returned.

"You speak good English."

"Also Punjabi and Malay."

"And your sister?"

"She learns."

"Learning is good," Joseph tells them.

The little girl says, "Give me paper."

Joseph passes her Finlay's credo, which she examines studiously upside down.

"Now give me back the paper," he says.

The girl prolongs her scrutiny of the inverted pages, running her finger along the lines.

Joseph tries again. "When you said, 'Give me the paper,' I gave it to you. Now when I say, 'Give the paper back,' you must give it to me."

Evidently a stranger to situational learning, the little girl runs off without warning into the garden, holding the quipu above her head. Her sister, casting Joseph a look of suffering, gives chase.

Propped in the temple doorway, Joseph watches the two children chase each other around the darkened garden.

At his back, the man from Calcutta snores on his bed of rope

 

[bq]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13prof.html

 

At 20, [Terry Tao] finished his Ph.D. Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius" award that comes with a half-million dollars and no strings . . .

The Taos had different challenges in raising their other two sons, although all three excelled in math. Trevor, two years younger than Terry, is autistic with top-level chess skills and the musical savant gift to play back on the piano a musical piece—even one played by an entire orchestra—after hearing it just once. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works for the Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia.

The youngest, Nigel, told his father that he was "not another Terry," and his parents let him learn at a less accelerated pace. Nigel, with degrees in economics, math and computer science, now works as a computer engineer for Google Australia.

 

"Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime," by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, March 13, 2007[/bq]

 

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