The Book of Science and Antiquities Read online

  Cath, nodding, began to weep. I reached for her and hugged and hushed her. It was so poignant she did not want me dead or marred that I struggled myself with tears.

  “But that may not be necessary,” he hurried to say, because these days there was a third option, which started out with a smaller procedure involving mirrors and lasers, and a surgeon who could remove the carcinoma from the mucosa itself and leave the structure intact and even cauterize the Barrett’s syndrome with radio frequency and tell us if it had spread. That was step one, he told us. I mentioned I had read on the Internet that if the tumors were in Stage III or IV the prognosis was pretty dismal.

  “No need to order the flowers yet,” he assured me. “It’s good that you can eat normally and don’t have many swallowing problems yet. So let’s see what we find.”

  He wanted to send me to a colleague who could assess the state of my cancer with her esophageal cameras—she too would do it within a couple of days as a matter of urgency. She had a way with those new cameras, he said, and with her radio-frequency wand. I would need a general anesthetic. This, he said, could well be the answer for me. Though no one knew.

  Then he said in a “hey-dude-it’s-only-death!” manner, “You won an Academy Award, Mr. Apple?”

  “A long time ago,” I replied with the apparent indifference even a documentary maker should show towards a lottery like the Oscars. “A feature documentary on Vietnam.”

  Cath said nothing. She knew how uneasy I was over the death of Andy.

  “Maybe you could bring it in one day,” he said. For no one had a doctorate when it came to the movies. Everyone was a peasant. “The Oscar, I mean. Perhaps you could let me fondle it awhile.”

  It was as if death was not the fourth member of our discourse. But of course, I didn’t quite believe that myself. That was another theory of mine: that there was a chemical resistance to belief of death in us; that even in the midst of cataclysm we are convinced of survival; or at least that even in ghastly terror our money and hope is on it.

  If we were truly convinced of death, we would do nothing in life except intersperse our despair at the ferocious weight of time we would serve in our death with brief spasms of sex and alcohol. And yet, though we had not here a lasting city, we insisted on paving its streets as if we did, and we were (hence the kindness of Cath’s work) outraged when even the dying failed to answer their emails promptly.

  I was pleased that for now, though the world was old and the universe without heart, in that clean surgery office amongst glossy bas-relief images of the esophagus, Cath was seduced into believing that death held no mortgage on her own man.

  When we returned to chatting about my tumors, it was as if they were some fungus attacking the sclerophyll forests.

  * * *

  At home again—I insisted on driving—I believed it time to write to the prime minister with new energy and persuasiveness.

  The HON Roger Milland

  PRIME MINISTER

  AUSTRALIA

  Re: The Learned Lakes World Heritage Site: The Chance for a Great World Heritage Site.

  Dear Prime Minister,

  Learned Man, a set of bones waiting on a bench at an Australian Museum depository for disposal and return to his native Learned Lakes’ area north of Balranald, is 42,000 years old. Learned Woman is a set of remains nearly as old. They represent the two oldest human ritual burials we possess evidence of on earth. These enormously ancient members of the species Homo sapiens, our species, were also members of a community which inhabited the lunette of Lake Learned between 60,000 years Before the Present Era …

  I had written all this so many times, with so little effect, to so many politicians. The rhetorical flourishes and the pattern of sentences were all familiar. I had a feeling that in another time they might have an impact but that in the current political world, where the issue of the economy and worship of the market overrode all other issues, they did not compel, they did not cut ice.

  Despite the day, I had failed to make a new, compelling language. I could not therefore create a revelation in my addressee, or evoke a new urgency. I saved the file.

  The Sinner Unnameable

  STARK AND I were left at the men’s law ground. It was getting dark by now. I took a handful of dust to douse the fire.

  “No,” said Stark. “We need some light to find the shoes.”

  That brought it to me, the realness of the punishment we’d been ordered to inflict and could not avoid inflicting.

  “Stupid prick,” I said wistfully. “Clawback. Aren’t there women enough?”

  “Yes, there are women enough,” said Stark, already searching for resolve, since he was the one who had to actually kill Clawback. I was to hold the violator, like an enemy and a brother, while the duty was done.

  “Let’s fetch the shoes,” I told him. I remembered where they were kept on the low ridge behind, amongst the cone bushes glittering by the last light of the fire. There where the earless lizard had left her eggs before defying the All-Father, who turned them to stone.

  Stark was the one who got there first, though. “You remember these,” he asked me, according to the ritual. “How they give us flight?”

  “I remember them,” I said, giving the normal response.

  The shoes were hidden there, in that nest of boulders, in the place I left them after our last task. I had dug them in deep in a crevice.

  I joined Stark, and together we dug down to the fur-wrapped parcel and drew two pairs of shoes out. Stark unwrapped the skins and removed the equipment inside, which he arranged neatly before us. The strange shoes for him and me to contemplate. Because we were required to assess them. The bone canister was there too, the shinbone of a long-gone, ancient councillor. It served as a cask, and when I raised and shook it, two long slivers of red bounder shinbone fell out of the shin-cask onto the unwrapped skin. Each had hair attached to the end, the hair of a heroic man, with a gum the blood trees exuded.

  But first it was my duty to raise the two needles of bone from the shin-cask as we sang death into them. Stark then went a little aside, shitted, and drew both thin bones through his fresh shit.

  “That’s necessary only if a death from ailing is intended. Whereas we will lower a sliver from his neck into his heart,” I argued, a little annoyed at the delay.

  “Well,” Stark said. “It can’t do much harm to make sure of things.”

  The two slivers of bounder bone, nearly as long as my forearm, stank a little now as, reassuring the Gray Bounder Man and the All-Father, I reinserted them in the old shin-cask and wrapped it again in the dusty furs.

  “The shoes,” Stark insisted again.

  I contemplated the two pairs of shoes, revealing them fully with a few more unfoldings of the furs. Feathers from the great walking bird bound solid by the blood and hair and incantations of initiated men. We did not know how they were made—it was a secret of a certain family. We did not understand the mystery of how they traversed the earth for men tasked as we were. Though made of such flimsy matter—feathers, hair, and blood—they never fell apart. Between the two pairs stood a large wad of thornbud pulp, thickened with ash to make it chewable. In the shoes and with the help of the thornbud pulp, we could fly. We could really fly. Speed and enhanced wisdom—that’s what lay before Stark and me.

  Each of us carried a pair of shoes, wrapped in hide, on the belt we wore at chest level. I carried the wrapped shinbone in my hands, but Stark had the thornbud pulp in a netting pouch, as was his right as the chief actor.

  It was a cold afternoon by the time we reassumed our furs and went off down into the flatland again, which the early moon came up on soon, and silvered. We waited, but not long enough for Clawback to visit the girl from the Earless Lizard clan. We put on our shoes. Then we skirted the town quickly, leaving no, or else only unreadable, footprints on the ground, flying above the crusty earth and amongst the cone trees without being sighted or greeted or desired. Our song called for everyone except the mis
creant to be set towards a profound slumber, to be absent in soul from our passage.

  Only poor Clawback himself was the one to be roused, alerted, alarmed by our skirting the huts. We felt ourselves the echo of his urgency, and the haste of his taking to flight was like a shift of moonlight. He was away, we were now sure. He was governed by fear and there would be no unholy desire in him. He had running to do.

  We loped as yet to let him get into country far from any witness. Our track was amongst blue bushes and under the tall branches of spearleaf trees. We skimmed the earth in our shoes of air, hair, blood, and feathers, our tracks unseeable by the inhabitants of earth. Seen only by the expectant Heroes.

  * * *

  When we were young, and due to become men, Stark and I had each been abandoned by our elders at different times, and for long periods, far away and without directions. In my case, they left me by a crooked tree in the firewood country. This was towards the Nightside. Until my induction into manhood we had never been there, nor was it noted or praised in any song we had heard, and so it was off the map of our childhoods. It was the land of nowhere, where brush was sparsely set in ground of black, moldy earth and yellow, icy clay. It was clearly land designed to be prized by no man. There was the stonewood tree and, spaced like the wraiths they were, two others of that kind, which said to us that they were the hard presences of an unyielding region. Here there were no women to find grain, no one else to make fire, no old man to sniff out the cavities of water or to point to the humpbacked movement of bounders on the horizon. The bushes were not the bushes of our accustomed tubers, the ones women dug up to grace our meat.

  Nor, I could tell at once, were the spirits of this earth known to me. Once I was there, I could not remember having been brought. It seemed I had been stupefied with gum and spirited by my elders, my betters, the knowers of the earth and of my crass, untaught condition. As well, the light in that place seemed soiled, unfit for enterprise and endeavor and enlightenment and any access of wisdom. That light hung on my eyes heavily, like an ache, yet I was supposed to bestir myself and put myself in the way of whatever mysteries and challenges this place, this fallen earth, could present to me. Implanted in my mind too was that I would be here for a moon’s phase or longer, until the old men chose to come back for me. And for all those days and nights I would not be permitted to return home, even if I knew the way, or to surrender myself up—my elders and betters expected me to be more robust of head and heart and soul than that. When they came back to rescue me, they expected to see new wisdom in me, and not a longing for the usual world in my eyes. They expected to see that I had grown stronger off this haunted and unnourishing place.

  I wore white pigment all the time, so that I was alert to ill will and ghosts and managed to look prohibitive. In terms of keeping myself alive, I lived two days off a sinewy and flavorless old lizard. I baked sour, thin tubers on the fire. I speared a lean bounder of the kind we would not bother with at the Lake country. It seemed apparent to me that the bounders sent their aged males into this country to die.

  I spread smoke around my resting place at night so that I sat in what I hoped was a protected circle. But spirits with black souls harangued me all night, prattling to each other as I tried to sleep. They knew me well—I heard them recounting sentiments of mine that I kept secret from everyone else. They had the complete log of all my foolishness as a child, and they ran through it without relenting all night. I felt my body changing under their haranguing. I felt my own sinews stretch and creak. The voice of one spirit I got quite used to. Its voice was in the yellow sky but in my head as well, and it was not excluded by the smoking of my space around the old stonewood tree.

  “Who put you here?” the voice would ask. It was a man’s voice, older than mine, though not as old as the initiators.

  “It was the old men and they know what they’re doing,” I told it. But in all those comfortless days, I wondered if they did know.

  “You were just born with a mucked-up foot, that’s all. They made the wrong judgment on you. Now they’re getting you ready for things you aren’t fit for. You shouldn’t be here. You’re a lost child in this place.”

  “We’ll see,” I answered.

  “It is a terrible thing to be judged as being ready for talents that are above anything you can manage,” this voice told me. “You have been judged as being one thing, but you’re another thing, a plainer thing. Do you want to fly? Do you want to curse the criminal and stop his breath with a poisoned bone? There is plain hunting, the ordinary duty of plain men who can dwell on the surface of the earth, and lie at night with their wives, and are never jerked up all at once amongst the stars. That’s the proper life for man. That is certainly enough for you. You don’t want to be here, with me chattering in your ear.”

  The thing is that this voice questioned me every hour of the day, leaving off only if I went to look for water and somewhat during my hunt and my shitting.

  Once I felled a lush, plump hen with a throwing stick—good fortune on my part. It was a rare gift, and my companion voice said at that stage, “All right, I’ll let you eat it. That’s only fair.”

  With nightfall then, the voices and their hubbub increased, until I thought that I might become as mad as old Lightning, who was famed for never recovering his real mind from his own experience of being made a man. The ghost voices of the wasteland had followed him back into his life by the Lake. So I knew the ghost voice was lying. I would either come out of this wasteland as myself, or else as a broken image of myself. There were no pleasant, middle choices such as the ghost offered me.

  But over bitter days I did grow thin and light-headed with sleeplessness from countering his arguments and those of other tempters.

  Amongst these others, above all, was a woman of startling darkness of eye and gourd breasts who slouched beyond the little circle I had cleansed with smoke. She commented on my manliness, which was still healing after the cutting rites, and which could not be touched in case the most excruciating, bitter seed gushed out of it and poisoned the earth. Yet she was awfully languid, this woman, a terrible and desirable taunter. I could have raged on top of her like a whimpering child-man. I could have accepted the apportioned pain and the easy ecstasy. For all those nights upon nights I wanted her, and she spoke to me ceaselessly it seemed. Despite the distraction, I might fall asleep for a little time, but her voice would insinuate itself again before a tenth part of the night was gone. I would see her move temptingly beyond the reach of the failing fire, separating her thighs with her hands, leaning back into the night to allow me to see her sweet parts, though in her case I knew them to be the gateway to madness. Not that that seemed to matter much. I was willing to lose my mind and all its judgment, all the judgment the elders had perceived in me to this point, all the judgment I was meant to acquire.

  “The old men who put you here—they lie between young legs tonight. Yet they magicked you here, to this cold place. They say they’ll take you back, but why would they want you to be close to the young girls that are in their gift? Why would they want you near the ones that were betrothed to them before birth, that they give away like adornments? Why would they want you back when they require all the young women for their own warmth?”

  And with that she stroked her inner thigh to let me know she was there and could be touched and had warmth and possessed, for a ghost, a terrible substance.

  It would have been easy at noontide to reject her, and to disbelieve her version of things at night, if one had slept under furs in a comfortable habitation within the ambit of fire warmth. But without sleep, warmth, the conversation of living, daily creatures, without an earth of robust beasts, without men and women striding the line between the dunes and the Lake, and with a throbbing, healing man-plant agonizing for her and for its own sake between my thighs, it was easy to yield then, and give oneself up forever to those yellow claypans and this bitter, gorgeous ghost woman. Had I given her my seed, it would have spilt out of the sliced se
am of my man-root and tainted the earth further as undue seed does. If I had entered her, I would have ended up forever in a middle place between the harshness of that punishing country and the wished-for fuller life of return to the people. I would not then know whether I was man or spirit, alive or dead. I would be caught howling in between clouds of a false heaven and the surface of an uninhabitable earth. That is, I would turn mad.

  The Harvest of Eyes

  IN THE EARLY to mid-1960s, I acquired a belated university degree in modern history. My earlier youth, after high school, had been spent as an insurance clerk, earning money for rent and film stock, and hanging around the Sydney Film Society, where I showed my occasional weekend-made documentaries. In any case, not long after obtaining my degree, I set out for the Northern Territory with my slightly younger university friend, Andy, and his tall girlfriend, Denise, a handy stills photographer.

  Andy and I were barely cameramen but thought of ourselves as documentary makers. We had been bowled over by the New Wave films. We had watched all the classic documentaries, but had been most taken with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and that other great study of a day in the life of a city, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer. We were trying to be Rouch and Morin and remain friends. Andy had an Arriflex 16 he had bought with an inheritance. I had a portable Ariel camera like the French filmmakers themselves. So Andy and I did a deal that we would make cinema verité together, shooting with our separate and distinctive cameras and styles. Roughly, he would shoot the broader and more authoritative footage, and I would shoot intimately and even let things wobble and blur, and then we’d edit it up, the best of both. It worked so well at first that we thought we were geniuses. And we promised each other we could make important documentaries in half the time and with twice the creativity of other filmmakers.