Las Vegas for Vegans (8 page)

Keith looks away from the frightened man, saying, ‘What's that honey?' as if he now needs to tend to his recumbent girlfriend. Julia has her eyes closed placidly and her mouth has formed a slightly pursed expression resembling a contented baby's. Strange dreams of the North Pole aren't an issue at the moment, apparently. He pulls up her blanket, settling it around her neck, and makes a show of tending to her womanly fears.

Keith has always disliked sleeping pills. He reaches into Julia's handbag and looks for the small plastic bottle. He pulls out a few things. Her make-up bag, diary and duty-free carton of cigarettes. Eventually, he finds the empty bottle in an outside pocket. Not even one last pill. He runs his pinkie around the inside to make sure.

He opens the diary to distract himself, leafing through the pages at random. He stops at a mention of his own name. It says: ‘Seeing Keith bark like a little dog was hilarious. It was also so terribly sad. I suppose the hypnotist had to prove a point. The incredulous patient, sneering at even the idea of hypnosis, made to get down on all fours and scamper around the office. He even sniffed at Doctor Fassbinder's bottom and that may have been the saddest thing of all. That was certainly going too far. The Doctor hadn't imagined how receptive a patient Keith would end up being. Needless to say Keith won't even consider a cigarette now. In fact, he's sure he was never a smoker. Ironically, I'm smoking again and it's only been three days since we went to see Doctor Fassbinder.'

Keith turns the pages again, this time looking for mention of Fassbinder. Another entry begins, ‘We went to see the helpful Doctor Fassbinder about Keith's sexual inadequacies …'

The lights in the plane are flickering and Keith is shaken out of the absorbing diary when there's prolonged darkness. Emergency lighting comes on. Keith looks at his sleeping girlfriend and then at her handbag and the carton of duty-free cigarettes and can't remember ever having smoked. The thought makes his throat tighten until he can barely breathe. He looks at the diary in his hands again and has no recollection of even going to see a Doctor Fassbinder, let alone barking like a little dog.

Keith unbuckles and staggers toward the back, where he can see an emergency light that he will be able to use to read more of his girlfriend's journal. The flight attendant who denied him alcohol doesn't admonish him or tell him to go back to his seat because she's sitting with a Bible in her hands and her lips are moving in avid prayer. Her eyes open to register his presence, then close again as she continues.

‘Where's the vodka?' Keith asks. ‘I don't want to disturb you but I really need a drink.'

‘Fuck off, arsehole. I'm trying to pray.'

‘I … What? Why? I don't think you're supposed to do that. Praying can cause hysteria—if passengers see a flight attendant doing it. Don't they train you for this?'

‘They can't train you to die.'

‘It's just turbulence.' Keith was barely holding onto a shelving unit fixed into the wall, from which packets of food were dropping to the floor. It was still a bit much to already be talking about death.

‘Just turbulence? Have you noticed the engines dying outside? Or noticed the way the plane has begun leaning to the side and the constant drop in altitude? Not to mention shit falling to the floor all around you.'

‘Well, yeah. That's called turbulence. Planes go through turbulence all the time. It's 2012—not 1912. Even when planes crash, there are all kinds of safety procedures in place, you know, to stop people from actually dying.'

‘Get the fuck away from me, you gormless joker.'

She closes her eyes again. Keith contemplates slapping or lifting her and shaking her by the shoulders. Amid the sudden drops and upheavals of the plane, the sickening slides left and right, the wild movements every few moments, she would barely feel it. It gives him an idea as he watches the large-breasted flight attendant pray.

When the plane sways again he falls on her. It takes a few moments before she realises it isn't an accident and by then Keith has wrestled her breasts from her shirt and bra. He has a mouthful of nipple by the time she decides to ditch her Bible in favour of a fuck. She reaches down to release Keith's penis from his pants, yet fucking mid-air is never easy, and amid the turbulence it's almost impossible.

‘The toilet. Stop, you stupid motherfucker. Stop. The toilet over there. Let's get into that cubicle. It's the only place this is possible.' It takes Keith a few long moments to understand that the flight attendant's protestations are not angry refusals. That they are forceful directions for how they might proceed to a shared goal.

‘What about a blow job?' Keith asks when they enter the cubicle.

‘Selfish dumbshit bastard.' She lifts her skirt and yanks down her stockings and underwear. ‘I want to fuck. Get your dick out.'

Keith feels like asking the flight attendant to moderate her language, or to at least point out that there is, in fact, an emotional element to sex even for men, however eager to fuck. Getting a proper hard-on during this kind of turbulence would challenge a porn star. Flying into the mouth of this type of abuse, so to speak, makes it still less inviting. Dropping trou, he is surprised by the enormity of his erection. He hadn't been surprised that Julia mentioned his problems in her journal and the current proud state of his penis is a testament to Doctor Fassbinder's medical proficiency.

The flight attendant pulls Keith towards her with a good grip of his penis and scooches onto the small sink in the cubicle. When Keith establishes some kind of stability—using his arms and legs to brace himself in a space that felt as if it were in the process of imploding—she levers herself onto him.

Keith isn't a great lover. His previous experience had always been with women who'd agreed to live with him, and the sex was more a part of a general agreement of the accepted relationship. The flight attendant was a different breed of woman. If women were birds, then he'd only ever fed crumbs to pigeons. And if he'd had the pleasure of stroking a cocky below its thrumming neck, saying stupid things like ‘Who's a lucky bird then?', the flight attendant is a fierce creature of talons diving a hundred metres from the thin air to tear apart a scrambling field mouse.

She is able to move her whole body from the point of contact it makes with his penis, and using it as a fulcrum, both of them rotate and sway and rock and jerk and thrust, and slowly move in coordinated millimetres and milliseconds of sashaying shifts, and then longer and harder with a menacing speed, until he feels she will tear him away at the root.

Judicious use of pain, both with the nails in his back and her teeth on his lips, heels in his hips, expertly keep him from his usual eager explosion, until he is so desperate for release that all he can do is stare towards the ceiling, blindly trying to find a way to blink through an ecstasy of pain. It's only when she has found her final pleasure that she allows him release—the field mouse carried up high into the air and torn apart to reveal a cosmos of stars in the spill of blood from his small trembling heart.

All the lights have been extinguished and the cubicle is tumbling over and over as if it were a can thrown from the window of a truck that is rocketing out from a road high up in the mountains. When the toilet cubicle finally comes to a stop, the flight attendant is a crumpled cushion of blood and bones below him. A tragic shape of a woman, one eye closed and one open and bright green, with a name tag on her shoulder reading ‘Grace'.

The door had peeled open at its top, though the cubicle is now lying on its side. It takes Keith a few minutes of kicking to get enough space to crawl through.

It's only after he's out that the pain in his side becomes more than an annoying sensation of numbness, intermittently feeling swollen and hot with pain. When he lifts his shirt, he finds that the flesh is getting dark. He's seen enough films to know it's the result of internal bleeding.

Keith has been blinking and sitting on a floating piece of the plane's wreckage but it begins to sink. When he goes under the cold water of the Pacific Ocean, he wakes from a daze as deep as the darkest dream he's ever had. He paddles and looks for something else to hold onto. Bodies bob and sway around him in the black water. There are many other things floating across the surface. Bottles and packets of food. Various plastics and personal effects belonging to the passengers.

The sea is placid and it's becoming a lovely day as the early morning succeeds the evening's storm. The immense dark cloud moves away from him and the floating debris, still flashing with lightning on the horizon. More of the wreckage sinks and the quiet passengers drift further apart.

The water isn't so cold as to be unpleasant and it cools the pain in Keith's kidney. He removes the yellow floatation jacket from one of the corpses and thinks of Julia. It's unlikely she's survived. He begins swimming around, becoming desperate as fear finally begins to trickle into his heart.

Not once during the whole event did he feel any real anxiety. Since he's always been petrified of the thought of flight (just as bad as Julia, he now recalls), it strikes Keith as being attributable only to the arts of Doctor Fassbinder that during the crash he was distracted by other things. Keith blinks at the idea that a man could go to his death more than half asleep. That he need not ever be fully awake before he is utterly and permanently asleep.

He finds Julia lolling on her back in a yellow floatation jacket of her own, which someone else must have strapped onto her while he was in the cubicle with the flight attendant. Julia looks as if she's still asleep because of the three sleeping pills, yet she can't be. Keith swims towards her, feeling heavier and heavier. He can barely move his arms.

Julia is well beyond the rest of the debris—drifting away. Nearby, he sees an inflatable raft that was automatically released from the crashing plane. There's no-one sitting within it. The bodies around Keith loll and list as they get caught on Pacific tides with Julia.

Keith struggles to get into the raft. It takes repeated efforts to swing a heavy leg over the side and to haul his wet body across. He lies there gasping when he manages to tumble inside. He rows towards his dead girlfriend. Every pull on the paddle draws a gasp of agony. Shifting from one side of the boat is even more painful so he heads towards Julia in an arc. Keith pulls her into the boat with a long groan as his side tears even further within him. There are painkillers in the raft's medical box and he takes a handful of them like M&Ms.

There's a transmitter that will send their coordinates to those who will come searching for the submerged plane. Keith activates it but he's getting so weak and dizzy he can't be sure that he's managed to press the button. The red flashing light is telling him something is wrong or perhaps it's telling him the message is being sent already. He can't keep his eyes open any longer. He pulls Julia to him.

Keith kisses her face and imagines that it is warm. Julia mumbles as he begins to float off into the darkness of the midday sky, ‘You really are such a lovely little dog.' Keith coughs. Even to his ears, it sounds like barking.

ELYSIUM ZEN

‘The world's going to change now. You can feel it in your arsehole.'

That famous voice had once carried to the back rows of the Opera House. In the empty fifty-seat theatrette we were standing in, the voice of the Patriarch filled our heads with the imminent roar of thousands—thunderstorms of applause about to break over our flashing souls.

‘Look to the skies, my brethren of the boards. Flap your arms and know you can fly. Yes you can, if you learn how to (and this has to be exact, so practise):
tweet, tweet, tweet.
Those precise sounds will unlock the heavens for you, dear friends of the lights.
Tweet, tweet, tweet.
I feel liberated just making those sounds of freedom. I wake up and blink my sky-blue eyes three times every morning as I say it—
tweet, tweet, tweet.
Because if there's one thing I know, it's that all of you dream like birds. Your heads full of feathers. I'm not talking goose down, comrades of the hyperbole. I'm talking eagle and falcon feathers. Ostrich and emu feathers. Peacock and partridge and pigeon, my allies of alliteration. Well, maybe not pigeon. You get the idea though. Heads full of feathers like a battery cage is full of chickens coming into Christmas. And the idea is freedom. We'll soar when we can put the birdsong back into the magpie. What I'm saying is this: change is coming, change is here, change has already passed us, and we're going to have to run. Will all of you go on standing there, letting the dust settle on your faces? I refuse the evidence of my eyes. Today we're going to open the cages and fly after freedom. Don't just look at me. Open those cages, you freedom-loving fucks.'

Everyone on the stage of that theatrette knew he was fucking crazy. His world-famous wife, GiGi Tickle, walked in from the wings clapping as though it was a madness to be applauded. We all understood the Patriarch meant that we were supposed to open our mouths, because they were the ‘cage doors'. And we did it, like a line of carnival clowns thirty heads long, without the benefit of face paint. GiGi Tickle carried the basket of raw eggs as though she were our high priestess, and each egg a sacred element of an initiation into the true religion of theatre. And yet we went on resembling mechanical heads, rotating back and forth, disguising our panic behind wooden faces. We held our mouths open for the mottled brown and green quail eggs, placed on each tongue by the great Patriarch of the most prestigious acting school in Australia.

Another thing everyone knew was that the mad bastard wasn't really insane at all. It's a fine line, but he knew what he was doing. The Americans didn't see the worst of him, and what they heard they put down to eccentricities and local colour. So he could still shoot off Australian stars into those celluloid constellations above the Hills, sending them blazing across the glorious smog-stacked starscapes directly into the REM of God's Californian dreams.