Apologue Four

Look. Charlie don't surf. He do not. A question of grammar; the narrative play out otherwise. He just don't. Oh lord, oh Jesus, make sure they broadcast my death live on Foxtel! Skimp not on the details, I seen nothing better yet. Come on! I am calm, I am ready! Out with it man, give me your vacuum cleaners, I do it me self. My reptile brain, see, it's just no good. Like rotten teeth. I am the dentist around here and I do the dentistry and I do all the dentistry. Lay it on me! The gear, the really good bits! This is it folks, this is it. Or will it be. Surely. Yes, this time for real. Dissipate my existence. We've got freaky Zen koans out the wazoo and special machines what write more if you tickle them with correct posture and dexterity. Here we go now chums and chumettes, strap yourselves into the apparatus which I happen to build real comfy so don't make me have to come down there strap you in personal. All refreshments available at extra charge. We run outta Twix. Sincerest apologies.

My bones like bubble wrap clickety pop outta get it checked out but who has the time? Not I and certainly not you; real life only a nice example of pointillism anyway and we all know that Seurat was as French as they come. I give you good deal, nick your wallet and shoes leave yer Dendritic cells and most of the spine unharmed. A persistent disintegration of memory. We recall John and we recall Johns actions as distinct entities. John put the can in the bin. So who put the can in the bin? It could have been John, he is like that after all. Clearly the whole can thing is a set up. Treasonous little shits. No brand loyalty talk trash about our motives behind our back. Hire someone to level the score; he equalizers things, so to speak - nice and thermodynamic.

The Picnic

1

At five AM, and with a vague sensation of déjà vu we finally make the big lurch to Circular Quay. Something feels wrong. I begin to have doubts about the purity of my quest; surely we were going off script here? No, I reassure myself, this too is part of the film. And if I want to watch something else, well, too bad: we've lost the remote so it's either get up and walk to the television like some kind of fucking poor person or double down on popcorn and put the 3D glasses back on. To this end a drink is in order, but unfortunately not at hand. Cursing the bouncer who kicked us out of that Irish pub an hour ago, I stumble around the quay. It had, ostensibly, been for gesturing too much. Maybe my lack of apparent joy at no longer living in the mother country was bringing everybody down. Probably it was the fact I was cackling to myself and sweating aggressively. That fucker just didn't get the joke.

In retrospect, neither did I, but to me it's always been a given that at least one person in a large establishment has to be moving their eyebrows oddly at nothing and sucking down jagerbombs, by himself, for reasons we trust he explain later. Someone has to be that guy. No, Scruffy Murphy's Hotel and Irish Pub was not a venue friendly to the concept of Having a Quiet Drink - and I was more than willing to meet them halfway on the quiet thing. Much better was the overpriced but empty twenty-four hour cafe, restaurant and bar called City Extra on the quay, where I asked for and received bacon, eggs, coffee, beer and a lighter.

This beer pushed me past some kind of spiritual limit. This beer got me. Yes, it understood me, accepted me for who I was and validated my lifestyle. I sat back and reflected on the multitudes of things that made me great. It only took a quick glance in any direction to confirm what I had always suspected to be true: I was undoubtedly a genius. Not just anyone can go to a cafe. Oh no. This was a precision manoeuvre on a mission almost spiritual. I was very, very clever. I was going to get on a ferry. Post-ferry, I was going to go to sleep. On a beach.

Yes.

The ultimate, long-term plan was to attend some sort of picnic-style “let’s-all-have-a-catch-up” type-thing that was happening later, one which I had previously decided wasn't worth the time I could spend, say, carving a swastika into my balls. Then at around two in the morning I suffered a change of heart: I was already awake, drunk and had nothing better to do, so why not mumble gibberish at people whom I'd not seen for over a year, and didn't even know particularly well to begin with? The choices I make at two in the morning are universally poor. I've heard it said, however - possibly third hand, and almost certainly originating from Bear Grylls - that in a desperate, life-or-death survival situation such as this, indecision is the real killer. So at least a choice had been made, even if consideration had only been given to the dramatic appeal of the available options, instead of their pragmatism.

And standing around, waiting for the first ferry in the limbo of a drunken six AM, undoubtedly has dramatic appeal coming out of the wazoo. It makes a man slightly nauseous. At six twenty sharp, the ferry casts off and I sit at the front, enjoying the pleasing rumbling of the engines and swell of the harbour, watching my window reflection against the lights of the north shore fade slowly into daylight. Overcast, wet, grey daylight, from which there can be no escape save for the embrace of vacuum sealed interiors and maybe a towel. This, I realise, buggers my plans to have a quick nap on the beach in order to freshen up and restore my energy for the long day of being drunk that I require for proper effect. Does anyone sell amphetamines before breakfast, and do they do it in Manly? Could I somehow force them to?

Only one way to find out. Plenty of time to formulate a strategy on this, the greatest journey in the history of nautical public transport. Charon himself would have balked at such an undertaking. Not I.  Various other classical references launch themselves across my brain only to die out in the temporal lobe as I forget the character's names, or what they were supposed to have done, or how I could possibly relate it to my current business of being on a boat. I hold on to, and congratulate myself for, the river Styx thing though. That was good. Mental note: mention it later, and often.

“Don’t fuck with me, matey,” I mumble to myself, “I’m like a big old ravenous fuckin’… hydra?”

Kill the body and the head will sprout legs and crawl under a desk.

The ferry pulls in at Manly. What the fuck am I doing in Manly? Ah, yes: continuing my journey. Stay in character, keep back story and motivations in mind at all times. Life is little more than the narrative with which one chooses to identify, after all.  And this narrative, surely, must be the best on offer. Why else would I identify with it so strongly? My presence on the wharf, bleary eyed among the closed Starbucks and crappy souvenir shops, just feels so right. This place is my spiritual home.

“Hey man, is it cool if I crash for a couple hours in your little booth thingy?”

He good-naturedly tells me to fuck off and continues setting up his shop. Classic. It’s around this time that I think to check my phone, and discover that the picnic has been cancelled for the rain. My crisis is immediate and highly existential; my life made purposeless. I feel somewhat ripped off and want my ticket back. Should have seen it coming. The foreshadowing was all there, not at all subtle either. Dark skies. End times. Tear gas canisters burst in through the windows: we clutch at our throats yelling “save us!” and the universe angrily punches us in the face. It’s every man for himself, now that the context’s been altered and Tyler Durden revealed to be your dad. What, then, to do in manly at ten to seven in the morning?

I stand in the middle of the empty road, arms outstretched like Jesus or a man being frisked, and pose this question to the grey sky. It pisses on me, half-heartedly. I recall that it’s not too far from here to the sea.

2

"Fuck you! You think you're better than me, you gigantic fuck? Nuke the whales! Destroy squids! We're coming for you, dickhead! This is just the beginning! James Cameron knows your secrets! You ain't shit!"

For the second time in as many weeks, I spend the early hours of the morning drunk, very far from home and yelling obscenities at the ocean. It's a lifestyle thing. The sea calls to some people; it calls me a dickhead and up with that I will not put. For me, going to the beach inevitably results in ungraceful sweating, complaining and panic attacks of a weekend-ruining nature. I can't cope with anything more than ankle deep immersion without experiencing a kind of reverse ego-death: my sense of self becomes rigidly defined in definition to an infinite, uncontrollable external environment. The ocean - and there is only one - is the biggest single thing on the planet, and to be in it is terrifying. Vertigo in four dimensions.

So naturally I am drawn to be near it, because my existential nemesis is the only real nemesis I have, and I like insulting people. Near, say, just out of reach of most waves. Near enough so that it can hear me shouting and see me waving my arms about and throwing cigarettes at it, demanding full recompense for indignities suffered. Reparations. Refundments.

Revenge.

A few early morning surfers look at me strangely. I nod at them in solidarity and pride. They go where I cannot, to perform vital reconnaissance and get tans. God's speed.

Despite going to great pains to stand firmly in the “Beach” part of the beach, I find myself en-dampened. What the fuck is this? Light rain! Shit! We’re being flanked, the sky’s in on it too! As I run off to find a suitable bunker or toilet block in which to take cover, I remember my comrades-in-wetsuits and turn back, only to discover that it’s too late: they’re already in the sea’s merciless grip, tossed about by the maybe half meter of swell and pinned down by this pretentious mist. I can only assume they died heroic but senseless deaths. I remember what they told us in year four about the water cycle – if only I’d listened, this could have all been prevented.

“A pox on the shithead what invented evaporation!”

Some joggers jog past.

“And on you, for exercising in public. You can jog but you can’t hide! I’ll find you with my telepathy if I have to! Ah, these psionic gains, bro…”

All of life’s problems originate in the brain. Maybe I can get it removed. Give me ten inches of garden hose and a vacuum cleaner, I’ll do it myself. Memories, some of them even mine, overtake me: my private brain care specialist shoots spinal fluid in the skin, Deep Blue beats Lance Armstrong in the full contact monopoly, at age three I am walking along Bronte beach when something grabs at me from the bushes…

With all my plans to sleep, drink and attend informal reunions ruined by the bastard weather, I catch the ferry back after a scant half hour. It's about half past seven and the transition from drunken craze to sleep-deprived-delirium is almost complete now; the loud conversation I have with a variety of friends, all of whom are non-present, presumably bewilders and frightens the other passengers. None of them seem very keen to make friends with me, which I attribute less to my own blatant lunacy and instead to upper class prudishness. I assume they're upper class. I mean, who else regularly rides about on ferries at this time of day? If I was rich, that's what I'd do. Sober, no less.

I look around, hoping to find a brother in arms, or at least someone who looked willing to listen to the gibberish I want to tell them. The secrets of the universe unfold around me, begging to be related. It was all about lamps, see... Something is wrong. It's the same film but the genre has changed, from a sort of stoner comedy into an experimental student gizmo shot on a budget of about twenty dollars in which nothing happens. It's not even a depressing tragedy, it's just three or four hours of straight nihilism. Why am I watching this. Where is the fucking remote? All my electric running out out

Someone is singing.

"I saw the worst bands of my generation... applied by magic marker to drywall"

I think it's me. How long did I sit stood standing on this ferry for? Destroy squids. Yeah. Fuck 'em! At seven-fifty AM, and with a vague sensation of déjà vu, we narrowly make the big jump from boat to dry land. Something is wrong. Didn’t we do this routine before? Surely we’re recycling script here?

This too is part of the film.

Back in the quay. Christ, will this horrible cycle never end? What's the point of going somewhere and doing a thing? You'll only have to leave and do something else. Climb the steps up to the train station.

"Excuse me!"

"uh, yes?"

"whendoesthetraincomeplease?"

The woman looks at the display, conveniently located directly in front of me.

"… Five minutes."

I close my eyes and whisper "thank you" with what I intend as palpable relief but probably comes off as palpable erotic satisfaction. Don’t flatter yourself, station wench. Just tell me when the train comes.

As usual, I find the correct platform at central station in time to watch the train leave without me. An hour twenty minute wait, none of which is pleasant or even memorable. The rising sun is noticeable only by the extent to which the clouds obscure it – which they do, totally. A man sitting beside me remarks that it’s a cold day. He’s right; although the temperature is acceptable, if not ideal, it is indeed a very cold day. Shit, it’s a cold world. He is prophet and truth teller; why is it that such people always speak in riddles and complaints?

“Look old man, sir, I want answers. I did all the right stuff, right, and spent more money than I can afford to spend, all to keep my drunk rolling until it was time to go to this thing, but then it was cancelled. So what was the point of me doing all that stuff?! Why the fuck did I go to Manly, on a fucking ferry no less, if not as part of an epic adventure?”

He gets up and moves to another seat. Cold world. What’s the point of grandiose rhetorical questions in such an uncaring universe? Finally the train rolls in. I climb aboard and try to pass out but sleep won’t come. I consider, briefly, suicide, but dismiss it as too stressful, and I’m no longer sure if I can stand. I stare at the seat in front of me. It offers no interesting revelations or thoughts. It’s just green, and it continues to be green, and I continue to stare at it like a zombie. Finally, we leave the station and the camera pulls back for the inevitable long shot of the train climbing up the mountain into the distance, over which the credits roll until I'm invisible on the horizon and a few rays of light make it through the thick clouds. 

Although it's an electric train, I imagine they'll add smoke post-production for extra effect.

Apologue Three

There's a story in this, you think. A parable with which to explain something important. There isn't. Look up and see the night sky, look upon the stars and know that you are in the universe and the universe is within you; your vomit and piss is everyone's vomit and piss and is all the vomit and piss that has ever been or will be. Oliver Cromwell does indeed run with your crew. We want your atoms, we want all your atoms, and we can wait. We're coming for you on a timescale that you can't possibly imagine. The universe becomes sadder as it expands; every point knows that in the beginning it was one with every other point, compressed into an infinitely dense singularity. The sense of loss is unimaginable. We're here to put it back together. Attempts to sabotage our operations will be met with extreme entropy. Only one of us will be here in twenty trillion years and we both know that it isn't going to be you.

Excerpt: channel surfer.

I turn on the television. The opening theme of The Simpsons. Change channel.

We've secured an interview with a sydney drug dealer on condition of anonymity, and he says he's got some real hot tips for staying healthy this summer.

Wow, Sandra

click

a blurry figure counts backwards from ten, nine-

click

-philosophy and physics book so compelling, it's changing the world and possibly the entire universe. We speak with the author-

click

Soldiers run through a crowd of bored school children. One gets taken out by a sniper.

click.

A noise like static. Hundreds of numbers flashing on the screen at random. The noise noise the noise fills my head to bursting point and the numbers flash faster and faster like static the noise-

Cut to a man on a couch, seen from behind. He is watching television, like me. I raise my hand. So does he.

Now turn around.

See:

The cameraman's eyes are huge

He stares at me and starts to smile as I pass out...

...and come to. The end credits of The Simpsons. I feel like I've witnessed something important, but can't remember what it was. There is a knock at the door, and I let it slip my mind.

The Aeroplane Graveyard

It was in the aeroplane graveyard that I found myself, strung out and crazy while I roamed the aisles infinite of dead flying machines. The sky was so blue that I was afraid it would become an ocean and crash down on top of me, or that all these jet fighters and Boeing bombers and I would fall into it. There was a girl sitting in a cockpit, smoking. I’d never seen her before, but despite the total lack of physical resemblance I knew she was the same girl from Quincko’s party. I waved at her. She waved back.

‘Where am I?’ I yelled up at her. She laughed, flicked her cigarette away and jumped down.

‘How can you not know where you are?’

‘I’m in a bad way.’

‘Fair enough, I suppose. This is the aeroplane graveyard, where all decommissioned aircraft come to rest.’

‘How big is it?’

‘God, I don’t know. I've been trying to find my way out for years now.’

‘Naturally…’

I felt dehydrated and weird. Look around. Nothing but metal wings in all directions as far as the eye can see.

‘Some of them would even still fly, if you fueled them.’

‘I find that disturbing.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re still alive. Paralysed. Rotting away and able to do nothing but watch.’

‘You make it sound like they have a soul.’

‘Shit, why not?’

‘I don’t believe in souls.’

‘Neither do I. I don’t have one, you don’t have one, these aeroplanes don’t have one. We’re all on the same level. My existence is worth as much and no more than theirs.’

She crushed her cigarette into the dusty ground and asked me if I played chess. I said yes and followed her to the seven-four-seven she’d converted into a sort of home. The first class cabin was full of books and tables and board games.

‘Who do you normally play against?’

‘People drop by.’

Light streamed in at different angles from every window. The minute hand was slowly running backwards but the hour hand was skipping forward days at a time. We played chess in total silence until she won by sacrificing her queen, both rooks and a bishop.

‘So,’ she said.

‘So.’

All I’d eaten in the last twenty four hours was half a sandwich, and even that sitting in my stomach felt intolerable. My vision was getting blurry. I asked for some water but when the glass was brought out I remembered that, in statistical terms, all water contained some molecules of the same water drunk by Plato, Jesus, Oliver Cromwell. Any water was all water. My blood everyone’s blood.

‘All dust is stardust’ said the girl quietly, staring into the glass.

‘I can’t drink it.’

‘You have to.’

‘I’ll destroy the universe.’

Silence. Then:

‘We should go.’

And we ran away from the first class cabin and between the rows of neatly ordered, rusty aeroplanes, and I hoped that they were just sleeping.

Virus

We were stood there, drinking our goon and talking to one another as and/or was or will be the occasion on any friday saturday sunday night of the week. The way everyone just wantonly was interacting, absolutely appalling. People and places infringe on our memory, forcing themselves into our head like they have a right to be there; they change us and I say that I will take my brain back, no longer leave nothing to chance about the sort of unspeakably shady character I might become all because one day I met so-and-so in such-and-such a place. Just a fifteen second encounter it was but that's all it takes these days and then they're IN. I am a virus too, infecting everyone I meet with a tiny part of myself that they're doomed to carry around forever.

Patterns and codes shift; I am paralyzed by fear. Paralyzed by my own treasonous psyche. Words don't fail; you do. Sentences change as I read them, trapping me in labyrinthine paragraph that I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own biography. Choose Your Own Adventure: all the pages ripped out. We can cut out fear with a scalpel, delete it with a drug. Everything's getting got will get to me. In a dream I pull worms out of a hole in my foot as we're stood there, drinking our white wine and muttering to ourselves as is was will be the occasion every night day dream. The way everyone was melting and dissolving, disgusting. People and places infect us, sticking to the bottom of my shoe like they have a right to be there.

Maybe I'm just cold and I've had too much coffee. I can feel my guts, dead weight in my belly, I can feel them squirming and writhing. I think they want to get out. All life support systems fail. My brain drips out my ears and slithers off to parts unknown. I say I will take it back. Codes and scenery shift; I am paralyzed by my total lack of internal organs. Memories fade and recapitulate, trapping me in a labyrinthine mind which I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own.

Journal

When I was sixteen and very angry I opened a file on my computer and called it 'Journal', because that's what a friend had told me to do. Then I began to fill it with predictably angst-filled ramblings in entries which I dated to the second of their conception, because there was a function in Word which allowed me to do that automatically, and I thought it was cool. Over the course of the next year or so, the day-to-day details of my uneventful life were transcribed in a ritualistic fashion, interspersed with various personal reflections. I became a little more self-aware, a little better at writing, a little less angry. The contents of this journal were interesting only insofar as they represented a viewpoint; the events recorded were common to everyone aged sixteen.

After a while, I changed the name of the file to 'Hamish', because that was my name. I did this because I realized I was growing up, fast, and when the file at the end of every entry asked me if I wanted to save the changes made to 'Hamish' I felt like I was in somehow in control of this process - I could simply say 'no', and the day would be erased. Soon I'd forget about it myself, and it would be as if that it had had never happened at all. I set my memories in stone - but only some of them. Only the parts that I could put into words. By placing my in control of the past, I figured to place myself in control of the future, and the person that I would become.

A year passes this way and as I shape the journal, it shapes me.

One day I came home from school and found that the entry for that day had already been written. It was dated to the very second that I had opened the file, and described my day exactly the same way that I would have, omitting or emphasizing the same trivial incidents at school, trying to express my angst and boredom in the same tepid language. 

Nothing else happened for months, and I refrained from mentioning this event to anyone else, or in the journal itself. To write it down would have been to confirm the reality of the incident with much more confidence than I could muster - and crazy people are always certain of their delusions. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. A lapse of memory, is what had happened. I'd simply forgotten the act of writing the entry. When it happened again, however, I all but broke down. It was the same as before; the day's entry was already written when I opened the file, and had ostensibly been written by me. The gross impossibility of such a thing was almost offensive. And it kept happening; every few months, the day would be written automatically.

I had my brain investigated. MRI scans, hypnotherapy, drug-assisted psychonautics and endless counselling sessions could find nothing to explain what I assumed, and hoped, to be episodic memory loss. This was a process that took some time, and while I was bouncing from clinic to clinic, acid-dealer to meditation retreat, the rate of entries that appeared in my journal increased until every second or third day was written for me. More symptoms developed: when I looked at mirrors, my reflection would sometimes act before I did, reaching for a toothbrush a fraction of a second early or taking off the sunglasses I was trying on before it occurred to me that they looked bad. These incidents always caused me to jump back in fright, my reflection now in time, and then examine the mirror, and myself, closely.

Then journal started to deviate and I began to go insane proper. Minor events would be recorded that had not occurred; I would remember them anyway. My mind split into two parallel streams. One contained what I actually did during the day. Then, I would read that day's entry - I didn't have to write anything at all by now - and then my second memory would be brought up to speed. I cried over a movie that I'd never watched and that may not have even existed. I felt simultaneously hungry and full, because I remembered both skipping lunch and eating it. Minor events became major ones; in the journal I began an intense relationship with a girl who I'd been introduced to at a party - a girl I'd never met and at party I didn't attend.

For, I suspect, the purposes of convenient storage, my brain treats the times when the journal and my actual life match each other as a single memory. These respites have become increasingly rare, however, and also bring into question what now constitutes my 'actual life'; the convergence of the two memories blurs my ability to tell them apart. It is hard to tell whether I have actually written this, or if I just remember writing it. Soon, I will be able to do nothing but read my journal and try to keep time with mirrors; one of me will cease to exist.

The Good Spider

'Drink more water. Take less drugs. Get more sleep. Only some people are crazy. You will be ok.'

Hardly, if ever, true. Everyone is crazy all the time. They never stop. Look. The process of growing up entails many deaths - that is to say, you don't mature, you're merely cut down to size. Your soul is taken and molded and whittled. It used to be big. Pointy. It had bits. Now it's a delicate little thing, and utterly bland. I'm terrified of spiders, but I imagine that there must be a good one somewhere. It sits over a gigantic pool of water. A huntsman as big as a truck. Huntsman, the way they move, you know, so fast - it scares people, makes them jump, but the Good Spider is perfectly serene. It just sits over a pool of water, eyes gazing out into the forest where I imagine that this must take place. To find the Good Spider is very hard, but trust me, the journey is worth your time. We only think of knowledge as an abstract concept because we were born with the wrong kind of eyes. The Good Spider has eight eyes that can see knowledge like dust moving through the wind. It can tell you anything, so be careful what you ask; the Good Spider is very old, and you weren't meant to die so many times.

Vision

First I went to bed, and then I started to feel, overwhelmingly, that something was about to happen. Seconds later I found myself standing in the Savannah at sunset. Something was wrong. I knew that I was dreaming, but couldn't move. Or rather, I could move my real limbs - slowly, as if through some viscous liquid - but the ones I could see, the ones that were with me in the desert, were unresponsive. Something was wrong. The ground was perfectly flat, save for the odd rock or shrub, but I began to fall. Gravity reversed direction and I tumbled into the sky. Writhing, and staying still, I brought my hands - my real hands - up to my face. Blackout. I opened my eyes; the room was dark.

***

My head hits the pillow and the desert overtakes me like a tidal wave. My limbs are far away, and though I can feel them move through some sticky liquid, they stay perfectly still by my side. Something is wrong. A boulder tumbles past, but the landscape is featureless. The sun dips below the horizon; the ground has become a vast pool of water, perfectly reflective, and I fall, or sink, into the sky.

***

Something is wrong. Sand dunes roll over my bed and I am buried up to my neck in the desert at midnight. Gravity vanishes and I evaporate slowly, into ten hundred million rising grains of sand.