TRUTH 4: WHERE IS THE EARTH? 1 page

When I stare at things or hear things, I think there might be some kind of beauty to them. I mean the little things, the way we make it through the day, experiencing pleasure. Trees in streets or a small bird flittering around the garden, paint flaking from the kitchen windowpane, dust motes in sunlight, the wind through poplars, the tram bell signaling departure. I’m alert, you might say, to the beauty of these things, the local nuances that bring life alive.

But all there is, is sadness.

If there’s enough heroin in my blood, the world gives me comfort. If there’s not enough, it makes me sad. Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.

I am so far removed, from everything, that I can’t even cry. There’s a chasm between me, where I am, and the world I am in. The world I move my feet through. The atmosphere I breathe is like golden syrup, twenty-seven atmospheres thick. I’m wading through the world, consumed with … consumed. And I’m wading through the swamp that my body has become.

Track marks. What a beautiful expression. Trail marks. I am blazing new trails all over my body in the search for virgin rivers that will carry me home to glacial happiness, to Arctic oceans of narcosis. Carry the heroin home to me. Open my blood to receive the heroin.

But I dredge the rivers with my giant harpoon until they wither and die. Gouge the rivers into rubble.

My head is throbbing. The room feels stuffy. I move the two-bar heater away from me. My arm has come up puffy and red. The red is like a rash but it’s just a reaction from the needle. Or the dope maybe. Or the cut. Let’s face it, I don’t know what I’m talking about.

My feet are two bricks; there is no sensation of flexibility down there. Holes everywhere. I can’t move my toes. I can’t fully straighten my arm. It will go away but it’s never pleasant. Today I found a vein on the ball of my foot. Hooray. As each vein collapses I have to look for smaller and smaller ones. A vicious circle forms: the size of the needle rips apart the tiny veins after one or two hits, setting in motion the search for other (smaller) veins, which in turn are damaged.

So I miss a lot now. So that’s why everything is fucked-up. I am swollen like a balloon though I feel like a block of cement. And nothing like a vein, not even a telltale rise of the skin, in sight. This is not a weather forecast. Nonetheless I feel the outlook is bleak.

In the end I won’t have veins, just some kind of trickle system, my tired blood spreading itself through tissue and skin, around bone loosened from cartilage, drip drip drip into calcified cavities.

Lord Lord I am tired.

But I have to ignore that, and hardly sleep, and scar my brain even in dreams, and wake up again tomorrow. Still, how can I think of the future when I can’t even think of the past or today?

There is nothing I can do from the moment I wake up but consider the obtaining of money or smack.

Really, on heroin, even when you’re sleeping you’re running.

And I would fuck the whole world if I could. Fuck it up I mean. Fuck it up and take its cash. The world is cashed up, so why not me?

Most of the day I have to deal with the fact of my habit. It’s a brutal kind of dealing-with, and for every hundred units of time, it takes up ninety-nine. But every now and then, even during bad times, I get a glimpse of a state where the mind is free to roam through spaces greater than what the body knows.

Waking up with leg cramps, it is possible to envision a plane of such endless proportions that every atom contains specific scenes of interest. Stone pillars crumble. This takes place over centuries. You have that much time. Follow the path of an eagle, wings spread wide, as it traces in an infinitesimal rate of curvature a swoop of beauty so painful it takes your breath away.

The eagle’s eyes can hone in on a speck of dust: not forever, but for a very long time. Here is the mote growing larger and larger.

The eagle is the perfect hunter. One atom will sustain him.

It is possible to follow this thought into others (emulating, with some grace, the path of the eagle), even when stomach cramps come on. For a while, in the gray between sleeping and waking, for seconds, or even a minute, it can feel okay to be alive. And then you wake, properly.

And it all comes rushing back. You ask the question, Who am I? and the answer is always the same. I am nothing but need. I will hate today like every other day. It’s so hard to experience beauty when it all stands in contrast to a greater unbeauty.

Candy is beside me, drenched in sweat. She’s breathing gently, long slow breaths. I imagine her soul going in and out: wanting to leave, wanting to come back, wanting to leave, wanting to come back. The day will soon harden into what we need to do. But for now we have each other.

We run a bath. In the faint phosphorescent light of the storm, we submerge ourselves to our necks and our legs intertwine. Nothing could ever be this close. Everything is the best, or else, “I can’t go on living like this. Oh God, it’s all such a mess.” We stroke each other softly and feel entirely dislocated from the earth, which has never existed.

CATS

There was so much wretchedness. There were so few veins. There was so little of us left. Eventually we went on methadone. Exhaustion might have been a factor. Desire for change? I guess so. Anyway, it seemed easier to drink half a cup of sweet yellow syrup every twenty-four hours than to spend seven hours a day searching for veins. So we got on a government program, for $21 a week each. We saw a doctor once every two weeks, gave a urine sample once a month. We picked up our dose every morning, and for the rest of the day we had oodles of time. What were the effects of methadone? It felt like we felt nothing. The dominant thing was the absence of the craving for heroin.

It was certainly a change. It was a tough adjustment in the beginning, after all that Yellow Jesus, but after a couple of months the methadone worked as a dull pleasantness that moved us along through our days. The relief that descended on us after heroin was like the eerie silence after a storm.

They say the Nazis invented methadone. On methadone we became obsessed with the desire to breed a race of master cats. Perhaps there is a link there somewhere.

First there was Willy, the stray we’d adopted whose cat food had made me vomit when we were living in Port Melbourne. She’d come with us to the Alexandra Avenue flat, all the time the cooking was happening. Eventually at Alexandra Avenue our landlady had brought to our attention the seven-hundred-dollar excess water bill that the council had hit her with. I assured her we used no more water than normal domestic consumption—showers, toilet, dishes—but I knew it was the vacuum aspirator, attached to the kitchen tap and turned on full blast for an hour or two a day. She was muttering about getting plumbers in to check for leaks. We let our healthy resentment build for a few weeks, then did yet another midnight flit, this time to a run-down flat we found above a shop in Albert Park.

The first day of the methadone program was the last day at Alexandra Avenue. The next day, the first day at Albert Park, was the day Willy gave birth to the kittens. We felt a certain symbolism in operation here, and settled into those first slow months to enjoy our new life with our family of cats. There was Tiger Tom, Coco, Mavis, Barney, and a couple of others we gave away. Coco stood out: jet black and long-haired in a litter of short-haired alley cats.

Half a year passed. In the back streets of Albert Park we saw an enormous and sleek black Siamese tom. Muscular, ferocious, half mad and half feral, in a rhinestone-studded necklace. We didn’t really want to have him, but we decided we certainly wanted to mate him with Coco. For the aesthetics of the thing.

The cat seemed to hang around a recently vacated house we’d been checking out for break-and-enter value. A For Sale sign had SOLD slapped over it. The cat howled in the overbearing and neurotic way of Siamese, but never came close for long.

In an act of intuitive, methadone-fueled brilliance, we called the real estate agent, hoping to locate the cat’s owner. We told the receptionist about our mating plan. Our story was so bizarre she believed us and gave us the new number of the previous owner.

We called him and told him we wanted to mate his cat with our cat. Not only did he not seem surprised, he told us he no longer wanted the cat, had in fact left it after he moved out, and would we like to take it?

Nothing ever seemed strange in our world, which was essentially by now a mindscape that had evolved in a Bavarian lab. We were delighted, after our initial surprise. The owner offered to come and catch the cat. He brought the psychotic thing over in the biggest cat cage I’d ever seen. The cage looked like it might have once been used for trapping small mountain lions and pumas, or maybe even feral pigs.

The cat paced relentlessly back and forward in its wire box, sniffing the air in our lounge room with the hard glint of primal stupidity in its eyes.

The owner was fully weird. No other way to describe him. His name was Darrell. He was about forty, with a graying crew cut and bottle-lens glasses. Muscular and wiry like his cat. He wore tight black jeans and a tight black Bonds T-shirt. His arms were covered with what might have been prison tattoos. Maybe not. But he had the puffed-up strut of someone who’d done time at some time or other.

I guessed he was not a junkie and never had been. Not my kind of junkie anyway. Not smack. I got the feeling his problem was speed. The creepy, off-center, hairs-on-the-neck feeling you get trying to talk with someone locked into a mean amphetamine habit. Different velocities. Especially from where we were, in the methadone crèche.

It was the old cliché. He was just like his cat. Or the cat was just like him. Darrell told us the cat’s name was Sam.

Sam emerged tentatively from the cat box, all the while delivering his endless and plaintive monologue of Siamese craziness. He had the biggest balls I’d ever seen.

He sniffed around the room, checking things out in widening concentric circles. Taking his time. Next thing, he sidled arse backward to the couch leg, like a ham actor building up dramatic tension, and sprayed.

“Oh shit!”

We lunged for him. This put him into a seriously confused panic and he took off up the hallway. The flat stank with the acrid odor, which seemed in those first few seconds to be spreading through the rooms at supersonic speed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Darrell said. “He’s just establishing himself, that’s all.”

Within a month we would be so numbed by this smell that only the acute embarrassment of visitors would continue to remind us we had a problem.

But Sam seemed pretty happy. Or at least, not unhappy in the primordial depths of his sharklike brain. It was not the case for all the cats.

The arrival of Sam overturned Barney’s world, for instance. Barney had been desexed—on methadone we got it together to do things like that. If Barney was human he would have been just like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island. He was pretty laid back. Big fish in a small pond. Protector of the brood in our neck of the woods. Only months earlier, Barney and Coco, fluffily cartwheeling down the hallway, had been as inseparable as twins could be.

But after Sam, Barney was never really the same again. He lost his innocent confidence. It seemed to be replaced with various pathetic forms of insecurity, uncertainty, and trepidation.

After Sam’s arrival, even tiny Mavis, the forgotten sister, desexed due to lack of potential, started having the odd shot at Barney. She would land him a hisser across the gob. He would scurry out the cat door with a wounded frown and disappear into the back alleys, to find solace in the garbage.

The mating program was fairly simple to organize.

I built a huge cat cage from chicken wire and two-by-fours and we kept Sam in it the first couple of days. This is the sort of thing you build on methadone: suddenly released from certain pressing necessities, you find there’s no more need for endless plotting and scamming and rushing, and a senselessly vast amount of time seems to stretch before you. We kept the cat cage in the lounge room. I built the cat door too. These are the two things I’ve built in my life.

Coco was growing up. She’d been getting wet and mucousy down there, licking herself between the legs, so we knew things were beginning to happen.

On the third day we brought Coco into the room. She knew something big was going on. She was all radar ears and wide eyes and she looked a strange mixture of spooked and skittish.

She took her time. She reveled in the great luxury of checking Sam out behind the cage. She did a few languorous circles around it, then lay down and watched him. Sam was padding up and down like a lion in a circus. He was wailing over and over like some fucked-up pacer in a psych ward. It got to you after a while. But there were signals going on here that Candy and I, or any other humans for that matter, couldn’t possibly pick up. The more Sam was doing this, the calmer Coco became.

Finally I got up from the couch and walked over to the cage and opened the latch. Coco was just lying there watching me do this, her ears twitching like tiny wings as she heard the noise of the clasp flick back. Sam watched my hands open the door and he went quiet.

With an effortless leap he was out of the cage. Coco jumped up like she didn’t know what to do with herself. She turned in a circle, flicking her tail, then let herself fall to the carpet with a thump of abandon. Her tail whacked the floor, backward and forward in a butterfly pattern, and she began to purr.

Sam began purring too. He walked across the floor and his muscles were snapping tightly. A ripple ran down his fur like a breeze moving through a field of grass. His long face moved in to sniff her backside.

Coco jumped up and hissed and struck out at him. Sam made a halfhearted attempt at a feint. Coco turned another circle and plonked down. This time Sam came up to her face. They sniffed noses, then she hissed again and backed off. Her tail kept flicking up like the cat that gets chased by that skunk Pepe in the cartoon.

She collapsed to the ground again, arms and legs stretched, and rolled over completely from one side to the other, meowing like she was being strangled. Sam tried to move in and sniff her backside once more. There was no pause in his loud purring.

Coco jumped up again. They moved in circles around the lounge room, and the ritual got faster and faster. Sam kept following and purring loudly. His claws were making little ripping noises in the carpet.

The next thing, he pounced. He pushed his front paws down on her shoulders and slid himself along the floor. Coco froze. Her nose pointed straight ahead. She was staring at the skirting board across the other side of the room.

Sam bit into the back of her neck. She raised her backside in the air. Her tail jerked out of the way. There was no sound at all now in the room. Then the tiny shuffling of Sam’s back paws on the carpet as he moved his muscular haunches above her. He was twice her size and now he seemed even bigger.

He was having trouble keeping his balance and moving into place. His jaws stayed locked on Coco’s neck, and he started to pant through his nose.

He started thrusting and he pulled back on her neck. Her head twisted upward now. She was staring at the light globe.

Sam moved in and out of Coco, faster and faster. An unearthly wail began to emanate from Coco’s mouth. It started like a guttural growl and quickly became high-pitched and there was no break to it, just an increase in intensity. It went on and on and Sam held on tight to her throat and bucked into her. A rabbit, a piston, a muscle.

My heart was beating a little fast. Candy was beside me but I couldn’t look at her. Complicity. I felt like I was witnessing something that shouldn’t be seen.

Finally Sam pushed forward but not backward. Coco’s scream reached a peak and stopped. Sam released her neck and fell back out of her. She jumped up and shook herself. Then she sat down and stuck one hind leg straight up in the air and started licking herself down there.

Sam sat like a statue. Hardly even breathing, watching Coco’s every move.

“That was awesome,” Candy said, the words stopping in her throat.

After about a minute Coco rolled over again and started to purr, flapping her tail toward Sam. He pounced immediately and this time they didn’t do the circuit. They got straight into fucking. The same act repeated itself: the neck, the wailing, the pounding, the falling back.

And again. We watched with jaws dropped for half an hour while Sam and Coco fucked eight times. Always the same thing, short and brutal. Animals fucking. We were watching animals fucking. I had no idea what state I was in, except that it was frightening. Something primal was breaking through the methadone. That in itself was a feat. You try not to change, forever and ever, as if heroin could do that, but eventually everything changes anyway. We’d been into chemistry and here was biology.

After the eighth fuck Coco got up and sauntered away toward the back door. I followed her out. There on the veranda were Willy and Barney and Tiger Tom and Mavis. Everyone looked a little concerned, a little tense. Barney looked completely freaked. He was ready to jump off the veranda if Sam appeared.

Coco walked up to Willy, and Willy sniffed her baby’s fanny. Then Coco ran away down the stairs and Barney came up to Willy and timidly sniffed her nose. It was hard sunlight out there and my legs felt very weak.

I walked back inside and Candy was still on the couch. She was wearing a faded floral print Salvation Army shop dress. She’d hitched it up above her knees and was sitting there with her legs spread wide. Her lipstick was bloodred against her pale skin, and her long blond ponytail had come undone. For the first time in months I thought about how beautiful she was.

“Come and feel my undies,” she said.

“Sure.”

I walked across the room to her. I leaned over and placed my left hand on the back of the couch above her right shoulder, and my right hand over her cunt. The inside of her thighs felt sticky against the edges of my hand.

Her underpants were soaked. I thought about temperature. It was probably two degrees hotter down there. I scrunched it a little with the palm of my hand, and she slid her arse out to the edge of the couch and spread her legs wider. There was no real point where flesh ended and liquid began.

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s wet.”

“I’m so fucking horny,” she said. She was trying to rip my belt open and my dick was so hard it was almost hurting.

I was never really one for damaging items of underwear, for being irresponsible with clothes, but then again narcotics kept a lid on most things. My thumb pushed through the wet fabric of Candy’s undies pretty easily. Then I just took a handful and gave it an almighty heave, hard and fast. A bit like pulling a Band-Aid off. Her underpants disintegrated, all seams and frays, and I threw a handful of fabric behind me.

My jeans were down around my knees and money was spilling out and I couldn’t get my boots off, but we were doing okay. We were trying to settle the frenzy down, get untwisted and organized, when suddenly we were distracted by a loud purring at close range.

Sam had lifted his front legs onto the couch. He wanted to know what was going on. He was staring hard at Candy’s pussy and his nose was twitching back and forth like Stevie Wonder singing. He didn’t seem at all awkward about the possibility he might be intruding.

“Hang on a sec,” I said. I picked him up, carried him over to the cat cage, and dropped him in. His whole rib cage was vibrating with purring. Before I closed the lid, I lowered my hand in there. My fingers were wet from Candy’s cunt.

Sam looked almost human. He had the look I’d seen many times before, the eye-rolling bliss that comes over someone just before overdose. He strained his head up and began to smell my fingers. He wanted to lick them. I kept moving my hand away and Sam kept purring and jerking his head around after my fingers. We laughed.

I went back to the couch and we fucked, Candy sitting on top and grinding. It was good. We burst through the methadone. Her pale blue eyes turned gray and wet. She scratched my chest hard and then squeezed it. Her thighs slowed down and she shuddered a few times. Her jaw unclenched. I shuddered too and came. Her hands untensed and she fell back off me like Sam had off Coco.

She let herself drop backward to the floor, and her hair sprayed out behind her until it touched the edges of the cat cage in the middle of the room. Some blond strands fell gently through the chicken wire.

I sat there squeezing the sperm from my dick as my breath and my heart slowed down. We stared dreamily at each other, grinning.

It was a fucking nice morning and the world seemed okay. We were in love and we were on methadone and Candy wasn’t working in a brothel anymore.

Candy lay sprawled on the floor and I sat sprawled on the couch. The morning sun poured through the Venetian blinds and Candy’s head shimmered and began to disappear in the glow. The room seemed alive with dust motes. I felt suspended in time, and almost content.

Sam lay on the floor of the cat cage and played with Candy’s hair, licking it and biting it and flicking it through the octagonal holes of the chicken wire. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the slants of the sunbeams. I watched the patterns of smoke swirl and fragment. After a while Sam settled back to watching them too, as he slowly fell asleep.

“I love you, Candy,” I said.

“I feel so sad,” she said.

There was a long silence.

“What have we done?” she said.

I knew she was talking about the long stretch, all the years.

“We’ll be all right. Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be all right.”

She was right. It was so sad. It was sad that feeling sad was so rare. It was sad too that feeling happy was frightening. It only meant wanting to feel even happier. The only way to do that seemed to be heroin, and that made us so unhappy in the end. It was better to be sad, I guess.

I couldn’t see a future but I wanted to. I couldn’t see a future after methadone, without heroin. I couldn’t see a future without guilt, for what I’d done to Candy.

Here we were. After drugs, I couldn’t imagine anything but sex. I couldn’t imagine growing old. But here we were. Sam slept and Candy drifted and the sunlight moved across the room.

The morning was well on its way to becoming afternoon. We hadn’t gotten our methadone yet. We had to get moving.

Candy smoked a cigarette and we pulled a few bongs and got dressed and went out into the day. It was nice in autumn in Albert Park, on a methadone program. Everything sedate and easy to handle.

We crossed the tram lines and rode our bicycles down toward the bay and Albert our pharmacist. Albert the dispenser, who looked like Woody Allen.

Albert saw us come in and nodded hello. He went out the back to his alchemist’s cubbyhole and reappeared a minute later with two plastic cups. We drank the syrup and threw the cups in the bin and Candy bought a packet of jelly beans and I bought a honey and nougat log.

“Thanks, Albert. See you tomorrow!”

We picked up our bikes from the footpath outside Albert’s and stood there working out our plan for the rest of the day. It was the first Friday of the month, so the first thing we had to do was give a supervised urine sample at the pathology lab. That was just a block away.

After that we could go around to Dee Dee’s café and have some coffee and watch the cars go by and fuck around doing the crossword for a while. Maybe think about some food. Then we could go home and pull a few more cones and watch the afternoon soaps on TV. Later, when the kids’ programs began, we could go for a long slow bike ride through the flat backstreets of Albert Park and Port Melbourne.

We didn’t know there was less than eighteen months to go. We had no idea we would move to the country, and come off methadone, and try not using heroin, and go crazy, and move back to Sydney, and dribble toward good-bye. I guess there are times, in retrospect, when you can see that ignorance is bliss.

“I wonder what the kittens are going to look like,” I said, gliding beside Candy with my hands off the handlebars.

“Pretty good, I reckon,” Candy said. “Pretty beautiful.”

PART THREE The Momentum of Change“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles …”JIM HARRISON, Julip TRUTH 5: POPLARS

I remember this, Candy. One weekend we tried to go away. This is way back. We drove three hours north, to the town with the hot springs we thought would help us detox. We picked up the old man hitchhiking. He had the sad, determined air of one who had been in the concentration camps. His wife had died and he continued to return to the holiday spot that reminded him of her, of their early years in Australia, maybe even of Europe, up there in the cold mountain air two hundred kilometers from Melbourne. When we dropped him off he said, “You are good people.”

I remember—this may be the saddest memory I own—that we sat in the tiny hotel room, shivering from lack of heroin, ready for the night that lay ahead. I remember your little pill box, and how you sat on the bed and doled out so carefully our meager rations of pills. Your beautiful delicate hands. There were not enough pills to make things all right. Two little piles on the faded quilt. We gulped them down and climbed into bed and clung to each other as if only the clinging could ward off the night. We were cold and unhappy in a bed not our own.

We didn’t last too many hours up there, got itchy feet, kept thinking of Melbourne and heroin, as if Melbourne was a giant finger and we were the yo-yo attached to it. It was all we could do to make it through one day. Mud baths and hot springs no longer interested us. We reached the furthest limit of the string and spun back to the city that now contained all we knew and desired.

Almost in a straight line. On the way home, in the dying glow of a cold late autumn day, you stopped the car. An avenue of poplars stretched away to the horizon. The weird ferocity of poplars. What can I say about that afternoon? The poplars, bent double, and the roaring of the wind. Such a rush of blood to my throbbing temples. Even then, such devastation already behind us, and so much still to come.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked, though the answer was already clear.

You were silent, transported, elsewhere, another. A slight grin, despite your jangled nerves, and the unswerving purpose of someone in a trance. You pushed me into the backseat, straddled me, pulled your underpants sideways, to let me in. I held my hands at the small of your back as if your hips were the fulcrum on which all pleasure turned. Everything you did was precise and to the point. At the end your eyes closed gently and you made one tiny noise. The last thing I remember is being aware of the poplars—I could see them bending and lashing beyond your right shoulder—as my fingernails made scratches in your flesh.

We didn’t say a word. We never really felt complete, as if some disease already ate away inside, as if some source or spirit was always eluding us. Somehow we drove home without crying. Concentrating on what awaited us. Too many barriers already. This was all so long ago.

There are times love would seem to be the only word capable of describing the frightening physics of this momentum. There is desolation and then there is each other.

COUNTRY LIVING

Love. And then in a way it ended.

Splitting up was more a process than an event. We moved to the country, tried to slow things down, maybe stay out of trouble for a while.

After a while, on methadone, we didn’t look so gaunt. Some stability must have leaked into our lives. We’d stopped hassling Candy’s parents for money, and maybe they were impressed. They were hoping that this time it might be for real. All those years of false starts.

One day, out of the blue, they told Candy some old investments had come off and they were going to give her ten thousand dollars. It might have been a tax break but we weren’t about to complain. It was a sign that they trusted that methadone was a step in the right direction. When we found a cheap old farmhouse on two acres in the country, a couple of hours out of Melbourne, near where Peter and Michael lived, they gave us the ten grand and grudgingly guaranteed the small bank loan. We found a country pharmacy open seven days a week and willing to take over the methadone dispensing. We planned to reduce to zero within six months.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 585