The Book of Science and Antiquities Page 4
None of the cancer blogs made for happy reading. Most of them had not been written by the sufferers, but by those who observed a harsh decline in father or spouse. I learned that by the time you noticed the symptoms—the digestive problems, the pain, the heartburn, the vomiting of blood, the episodes of choking, the exhaustion, and the loss of weight—your adenocarcinomas, the kind of tumors that grow in the lining of the esophagus, had probably already invaded lymph nodes and made strategic claims on other organs. In these accounts, gross discomfort turned quickly to appalling pain. There were tales of throw-of-the-dice chemotherapy and radiation, and of operations to remove the esophagus and form a new ersatz one from stomach tissue, leading to the chance of a permanent state of fragility and ill health.
There will be a time, I thought, dizzied, when in the universe of atoms I too will have been gone for forty-two thousand years. And as the nuns of my childhood would have said, “Eternity will have just begun.”
At the time of the diagnosis I wanted to tell my friend Peter Jorgensen, who was more ancient than me. Eighty-six years of age and his Scandinavian hair a firm thatch still on his head. He could have passed for the champion of antique bodies. In the gentlest and least hubristic way, Jorgensen was somewhere between a seer, a remaining living brother, a Dutch uncle, and a man who seemed, like Learned Man, to gaze calmly on the limitless sea of death. And though I was not gripped by fear, that still seemed a nifty trick and I wanted to be near it.
The relationship between these descendants of two ancient people—Learned and Jorgensen—was fraught; the discovery, like the discovery of our own clan at birth, was a blessing and a curse, but in any case inescapable. Jorgensen and I had spent so long fussing together over remains rendered holy by passage of time, by the effort their people had put into their burial, and by our quest to convince politicians to have Learned Man’s remains brought back to his country. And because there was such composure in those ancient bones, I had looked at them and thought, Oh death, where is thy sting? Maybe that was the sort of message I wanted reiterated by Jorgensen.
“Are you busy, Peter?” I asked when I got through. I didn’t know if I would actually tell him my news of the day.
“Not hugely. I’m filling in teaching grad students for a friend. They’re so … young. So blatantly young. These blokes and damsels!”
“Yes,” I agreed. “ ‘Blatant’ is the word.”
“I’m going to Canberra to talk about Learned to a new crop of Heritage and Environment people,” he said.
Sturdy lad, I thought. Eighty-six years of age, but a boy from the bush—one of those three-mile-walk-to-school kids. And still, at his age, well and truly up to a schlep to Canberra. “I’ll take my wife,” he assured me. I believed she was a little younger than him, a sylph of seventy-eight.
I had come to love this man, for whom the effect of weather on ancient lake sediments had a poetic and humane resonance. He was still active in the International Union of Quaternary Research. But in a parallel world he might well have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. “I sing the Pleistocene Époque” could have been one of his songs. “The cold nights of 41,000 BP, and those who woke that morning, before the months had our names, /And cried, ‘The world is old. We must repair it with a song.’ ” That’s the sort of thing he would have written.
“Are you well, Shelby?” he asked as if he might suspect I was not.
I took in the luscious sky above the spider bushes and Banksia serrata that lay in my path. “Yes,” I lied, though was it a lie when I felt so alive? “How about you?”
“My doctor’s told me to give up white wine,” he said. “It pains me that we’ve been writing to ministers, state and federal, for decades to no avail, Shelby. I sometimes fear you and I will be buried before Learned Man goes home.”
That chilled me a second.
He told me again, “They’re insisting I give up wine.”
“I think my highly technical second opinion on that, Peter, is to tell them to get fucked!” I replied, though I could not deny that boozing had made my mucosa prone to what had now befallen it. I remembered my ninety-two-year-old father’s response to doctors who were advising wariness and new habits of care. “How old and bored do you bloody well want me to be?” he challenged one physician. Yet at the same time he knew ninety-two years wasn’t enough. A breath.
There was a chuckle over the phone. “I like your second opinion,” he said.
“I’m going to write to the prime minister again,” I told Peter, like a man with decades at his disposal. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
* * *
It was clear that Learned Man, from his repository shelf in Canberra, had reached out to me and become something I wanted to discuss on this significant day, the beginning of the great passage I knew I was on. Well, he was a Time Lord who had consumed millennia, and still lay tranquil and with dignity, his hands on his thighs. Like the poet Shelley, he was not only half in love with easeful death, but had eaten its grim provender three times a day for tens of millennia, and was still undefeated. Maybe the dream of seeing Learned Man return to his home and reassume his country would make the prospect of death more tolerable for me and somehow dent the thoroughness of what it did to us. The gagging, the starvation, the vomiting, and the pain recounted in the online confessions of the sufferers’ relatives meant that when it came to the day of departing, there would be no such thing as “easeful death,” or merely denting death’s surface or lying tranquilly thereafter.
I said a routine goodbye to Jorgensen.
The sea or the vast southwards-running harbor of Sydney were never far away anywhere on this walk. In fact, the ground I walked on was elevated sea bottom, sand that had once renounced the sea and risen under pressure to become headland. I went home through a hanging swamp, a sea-pond elevated above the sea and squawling with frogs. Amongst its winter-moist grasses I heard them warn each other of my approach. And then fall silent. The bushes and grass trees ran away up a rise I needed to climb to get home.
I jogged up it.
The End of the Wrestling
AS A CROWD assembles for the feasting that is to come, I cannot hope to find out from Baldy what his gaze meant. And when the councillor calls an end to the wrestling, Redder lopes towards our clan and I greet him shoulder to shoulder. Young people and children are still milling around the wrestlers.
“You did some mighty work,” I tell Redder, though half my mind is still on Baldy.
“I did some work,” Redder agrees with an askew smile, and as if it has just occurred to him that he did. His eyes, in the size of his pupils, still carry signs of the purpleberry plant that, mixed with ash of the wattle tree, enlarges strength and endurance. Though young, he was allowed to chew it during the wrestling. He is still full of its effect, and for a tired man has much purpose, for purple gum makes it easy to see purpose in every direction.
As a child Redder was always much taken by what befell my Son Unnameable, though he seems to be less weighed by that horrid event these days. I always had the sense that his plain conversation had a secret space in it, as if he had something to say about his kinsman’s death that would give me the power to see it in a new way but he did not have the means to frame it. His smile slews into a grin that says something simple now, “The earth’s restored and now I can get up to some fun.” Tonight, girls might contest for him.
* * *
The three-quarter moon is on the Morningside of the night sky. Girly and I lie entwined in the cold. We are awake to each other in a way, but we are not awake to the world. Tiny icicles have grown on the hairs of the fur skins we are covered by. Indeed, waking now and then, I brush my hand across the surface of our skins and am somehow delighted to find that they are frozen upright, and yet we, close and tangled beneath the furs, are safe from the cold kiss of the air around.
Such a point of the night is time for gratitude to those who gave us all we have, and this sharp impulse to be thankful is more commo
n to me now than when I was young. It is what the old do before they leave. They … we … praise. Girly, my blood-warm wife, snuffles. She snuffles, indeed, in a way that foretells her appetite for the day to come, her impatience with the state of repose that has overcome her after a day of feasting on the great bounder and accompanying treats. She is already preparing herself, without knowing it, to speak. I know her nature. She is preparing to sing in the day, to spread her body from its raw core at dawn and yell with satisfaction. How I love her I cannot say, but the idea of her causes laughter to rise in me, and what there is of sap to rise too. I first saw her when she was a girl, and with her stringent aunts beside her and rejoicing in her, by the fire of the Small Lightning clan. I saw her dance after she had first bled and she looked at Baldy. She is impudent by nature, and I have always welcomed a measure of insolence in women. Such women have the sureness to give themselves to their husband and their children, they have no reserve.
And the whole of a woman, like the whole of the earth, is such as one could sing of it for lifetime upon lifetime. To know other women used to be passing recreation with me. But now the song between Girly and me seems to overflow all measure.
Could it be said that the half of my mind that does not acclaim our wholeness belongs to the matter of death? It is not true that I am in continuous awareness of myself going away, being trimmed down to the ghost and becoming accustomed with being a spirit. Death presents to me tonight in the duty I have to punish Clawback’s violations, that terrible rite that is necessary to maintain the world. Each man, emerging from his mother, inherits the world as a gift and a burden, and I am of an age to judge the exact weight of the burden. So, as I am more mindful of joy than ever, I am also mindful of duties, and the shallow laughter has been replaced by a longer and abiding laughter that is in me, but also larger than me. Laughter is a mother, laughter is the air. The sky is made for receiving laughter. And I have always been pleased to be alive in the way I am alive—in these latter days. I am appeased by the idea that I will be sung to death by someone, neighbor or hero, in love and in resentment. Someone will sing me, someone will lethally invoke my name. For all one has friends, it is the flea of malice that ends up finishing us. But singing and laughing as we wait—that is what I relish. I have never sung better, though the songs are sometimes silent. My life is burning up in a flame of praise.
Older men have told me things work this way. The night overflows with their gratitude for day. The heavens are crowded with it and praise is the track, the thread, that connects them into the great heroic lights of the sky.
And in the second half of that night, I am unexpectedly on a track to the heavens.
* * *
So, back to earth on that night. No sooner had I felt the icy spikes of fur within which Girly and I lay wrapped than I felt the familiar and not to be mistaken wrench of my soul taking me away, and my spirit slid up the tendrils of the night. It has happened thus a number of times, and is a tendency for which I was chosen. Some men have fits on the earth, and fall to the dirt and writhe in daylight with everyone to see them, perhaps betraying that they are in the power of a sorcerer from another clan or of a Power beyond that struck them but did not remove them into the sky. But my skyward tendency has nothing to do with malicious intentions exercised by some man of high degree, has nothing to do with anyone who might have got hold of a belonging of mine or something cast off, like my waste, and sung harm and fits into it. No, I know as I ascend that this is an utter gift from you, the Hero, meant for me, that it has to do with my dislocated toe, the mark an important visitor put on me, the glory and the onus. But in our furs, I lie dead in Girly’s grasp as the Gray Bounder Man calls the living me to the sky.
In heaven I see you, moving amongst stars as a person might amongst trees. I see you the Hero, Gray Bounder Man. It is as if my soul has been up there with you some time and I have just joined it. I have been walking like your brother amongst great lights while the husk of me slept on the Lake shore. Here amongst the thickets of great blaze and dazzle. Here it was in the past, amidst the shining, that I met our Son Unnameable before his birth. He sat in a bowl of curdled light, smiling at me but demanding an exit to the world of lake and heath. That time, returning to earth, I imbued Girly with him and with a great roar of joy planted him there in her kindly belly. I did not know I bred him as meat for the slicer, the great snarler of a beast with its cutting teeth and slicing thumbs.
* * *
My first boy, not my Son Unnameable, was killed by a curse that overtook his mouth when he was still young and swelled his head to a dreadful size. Afterwards, our clan marched forth with spears to face the Parrot clan, and we contested them on the ground of war until a necessary measure of blood had been shed. There is a young man of the Parrot clan who still does not walk evenly, and his gait is a tribute to my son, whose spirit I sometimes see in silvery trees on the Nightside of the Lake and whose ghost name is Son Unnameable.
And so you are waiting, Hero, on the edge of a thicket of lustrous trees, wearing the wise smile. I don’t know what you are about to tell me. From the history of other men, I know how heavy your pronouncements can sometimes be. Because you see the way of things but get no joy from it, there is certainly joy in you at the notion of things going well for your children. If it were not so, there would be no sense to things. In being born of one’s mother, or in the effort, once born, to address the world. And then, in the dying. “Father,” I tell you.
You put your arm around my shoulders—or the shoulders of my spirit, which imitate my body precisely without any pain in any joint. You speak to me in the echo and image and language of my body, that is. There’s kindness in that.
“Look,” you tell me. “Look, my boy. Look.” You guide me forward beneath the boughs of stars. I inhale the aromatic radiance of heaven’s trees.
“What do you want me to see?” I ask.
“I want you to look sharply on the earth. You should look hard. You have the eyes for it.”
We see a woman coming towards us. She flits amongst the forest. Clearly, she is the Hero’s wife. She is the lustrous Parrot Woman. She is gravid, round-bellied with the souls of the unborn, and she staggers awhile with her burden and resumes that birdlike, darting, skimming look and sees me with her own acute eyes. I can tell the worried appeal in her eyes is for me and not for her husband. It seems it is in my hands to help her. I sit. I feel a languor come upon me. Then she raises before me her own transparent womb as if it were a gourd, and I could see dream children enclosed. No sooner has she raised it and before I can properly contemplate it, it bursts before her parrot face, and blood obscures it from further sight just as I think I am being given time to study it and weigh its distress. No time is given, though. It is often this way. No time to arrive at wisdom. A number of dead dream children lie in an entangled, sallow, glossy lump amidst spiky grass at my feet.
“You see,” says the ancestor Hero with his eternal patience.
“I see,” I admit.
I still need time and advice about what it means. But before I have either I am hurled out of the sky and land again in Girly’s arms, yelping with the shock. “Stop dreaming!” she tells me. She knows my tendencies. And then she makes a tapping sound and opens her body to comfort me, and though I caress her and avail myself, as is the simple wisdom of things, I cannot forget or wipe away the memory of my journey in the sky and the livid reproach of the dead dream children.
* * *
Yet I begin to think I have the answer to the manifestation of Parrot Woman and the burst womb. It was very clearly a warning. Something had entered. Yet the only entrance had been that of Baldy and his party. Evil sometimes entered by plain means. But then, of course, I remembered illicit Clawback, the friend of children and the blood violator!
In the morning, after eating warmed grain Girly made, I go to the old man named Clay. He has just acquired a new wife from the same Parrot clan as the Hero’s, the ancestor’s, own spirit wife. Clay no
ds and signals me with his air of irritation to sit by his side in front of his firestones. Long ago he took me on a journey and harangued me the whole way, and in part he was meant to rail at me and in part he was made that way. There were also matters of pride involved. But if I resented him then, I no longer do.
I sit with him awhile and let the cleansing smoke from morning fires fill my nostrils, and then I say, “I think you should hold a meeting in the law place. I have had a worrying conversation with our Hero and the Wife.”
“And so?” Clay asks, as if the news lies light on him.
“Well, there is disorder. The thing was clear. I think that the punishers may need to be sent out.” I say it as if I were not one of the punishers myself. As if I do not have the deformed foot for that task.
Clay knows at once I am not talking from bile, as much as he might like to pretend I am. “Yes, all right,” he tells me softly. “I’ll gather the fellows.” His new young wife is busy at the fire. Her youngest child is pestering her as she cooks Clay’s morning grain. That infant reminds me of Clay. Wayward child, wayward father, I think.
In the waiting time, before the meeting is called, I am reminded by the taste of my meeting with Clay of the journey he and I had made when I was young. It was not to be forgotten easily, a cold journey across shallow, frozen marshes and amongst clans painted up for bitter killings. For the moment, though, we have our own bitterness to reflect on.
The men’s law ground is away through the brush, a testing walk for Clay and Sandy and the other men of their age. It is in a different corner of the earth from the place of the old women, which no man would want to enter. Thus Girly, though not quite old, has places and mysteries which are unknown to me, unknown in fact to any man. Her globe of secrets can never be owned by me, but at the height of couplings I reach for it despite myself, as she too reaches in her turn for the secret me I do not myself know.