Quipu (22 page)

With a crash the bedroom door flies open. Don the Red puts his beard around the jamb.

“Get your clothes on, mate. I’ve got the van out the back.”

Ray is not delighted to see him. Don the Red sees himself as Australia’s Che Guevara. On weekends he practises with his automatic rifle in the hills. Like Che, he suffers from chest conditions; it is a link he cherishes.

“Seen Marj?”

“They were coming back from the food co-op. I brought them round, they’re stashing the veggies away.”

Ray climbs unsteadily into his underpants. “Lodged your route?” Protest organizers have an informal arrangement with the authorities. They present tight advance route-schedules to the City Council and the police. It helps minimize stupidities on both sides.

Don follows him to the bathroom door. “The obstructionist bastards are still quibbling. We’ve changed the route.”

“You’re not going straight to Hyde Park?”

“No way. We’re going through the Cross to Rose Bay, to the American Embassy.”

Oh, wonderful. Hold a demo in the middle of the red light district. Good thinking, Don.

“I thought the idea was to show the flag in town, attract ordinary people to join in.”

“Just as many ordinary people in the Cross, mate. The media’ll love it, sex and riots.”

“Do you think the permit’ll come through?”

“Not much they can do except deploy the pigs along the gutters. Oh, it’ll be a nice clean useless little ritual.”

Ray looks up at him, face dripping, eyebrows raised.

“Wait until you see what I’ve got in the bus, baby.” Don laughs and goes back into the kitchen.

Ray towels and dresses, suspicious and angry. As he’s pulling on his boots Marjory skips in, gives him a hug. “Hi. Still smashed?”

“I’m all right.” She blinks at his tone. “Marj, what’s he got out there?”

She’s startled. “Placards, bike helmets, loud hailers, a box of marbles, you know.” Lines crease between her eyes. “I know you don’t like marbles, Ray, but it’s better than getting trodden on by horses.”

“It’s one way to guarantee that someone gets trodden on, even if it’s someone else.” He brushes past her into the kitchen. Jan is mixing a spicy salad. It curdles the saliva at the back of his tongue. Peter slices ham, looking unhappy as Don harangues him.

Jan is jolly, a kid looking forward to a picnic. “Good evening, O Lochinvar. Marj has told all about your brush with the fascist olds.”

Ray ignores her, as he usually does. “What’s it going to be, Don? A Lee Harvey Oswald? They got him too, you might recall.”

Don grimaces, excited and contemptuous. “It’s going to be beautiful, baby. Direct action, revolutionary force. The time has come. We’ve played their game too long on their terms.” Don has not read Marcuse for nothing. “Demonstrations,” he explains, “are just another assimilated ritual. Just one more reinforcer of what a tolerant democracy we enjoy. It’s time for violent dissent, baby, muscle in the message.”

“
Plastique
, Don?” Ray is so furious he can barely speak. “Napalm? Are you planning to napalm a traffic cop? That’d be very colorful on telly, don’t you think?”

Peter, clearly uneasy, says, “Actually I agree with Ray. Sporadic violence is adventurist, Don, it’s unmarxist. Demonstrations are meant to change the consciousness of the masses through their praxis. I mean, we’re trying to elicit sympathy. We want to show them how many people are against the war. Violence from us just produces backlash. Fascist reaction.”

Don’s eyes roll. “What are ya, a fuckin’ media executive? Democracy’s a sham. They’ve all been conditioned by the fascists who own the Press and the armies and the churches. The only way we can reach them is
by
violence. We have to give them a piece of what their bloody so-called democratic government is doing in Vietnam.”

They’ve all trailed Ray out to where the van is parked. He climbs in the back as Don’s exposition continues and starts shoveling through the hardware. One styrofoam cooler holds red glass containers filled with murky liquid, evidently under pressure. Another has similar bottles coded with green. Ray tugs one out, raises it to eye level. It is heavy and very cold. Don jumps in beside him. “Jesus, have a care,” he yells. “If you smash two of those bottles together in here—”

Ray grabs his sweatshirt front without replacing the green container. “What is it, Don?”

The revolutionary strikes away Ray’s grip but it is plain that he does not wish to fight in the back of the van. He jumps down into the long green grass. “Cool it, man.” He rubs at his upper arm. “If you insist on the details, it’s a CNS cholinesterase inhibitor in binary form.”

Ray puts the bottle down very carefully. “Nerve gas,” he says. “Oh you fucking fuckwits.”

“That’s just labeling,” Peter tells him. “You’re being superstitious. It’s non-toxic. Mix the two fluids together and you get a light suspension of vapors that absorb through the moist membranes. We’ll be all right, you just need a filter mask and we’ve got half the Chem labs’ supplies in the vans.”

“Christ,” Marjory whispers.

“Bern and I made it in the labs,” Don says. “It’ll have the pigs puking their guts out. We’ll keep it in reserve till the last moment, then take over the Embassy while everyone’s running round like headless chooks. Once they see we mean business, people will—”

Without having the faintest premonition of his own impulse, the muscles and sinews in his arm driven by central nervous system chemical transmitters originating in some deep center of his limbic system, Ray lashes out and belts Don heavily in the gut. With a numb fist he does it again, then chops hard on the side of the man’s neck as he falls forward. His hand feels swollen. Physical violence is hardly his forté: the jolt of the blows is painful and exhilarating, a revelation.

Marjory hesitates, then squats beside the unconscious man. Ray slams the back of the van shut. “I’ll park it round at your parents’ place,” he tells her quietly.

“Maybe we’d better leave just the bottles there. Bern and the other organisers’ll be looking for the van. They need the hailers and the helmets, Ray.”

“They’ll have to do without.”

Jan and Peter are on their knees in the grass beside the prone Don, silent in a kind of unbelieving shock. Don starts to come round. He groans, touches his bruised neck, twists his head around. “I think something’s dislocated.” His eyes dart in outrage and betrayal.

“Listen, you crazy bastard.” Ray helps him to his feet, teeth clenched. “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you tin-pot Lenin? Haven’t you got the faintest idea about social feedbacks? Do you really want to trigger off a goddamned pogrom?”

“Oh, leave him alone.” He looks up to the reproach in Peter’s face, in Jan’s. Marjory glances away, her hands working together.

Jan stares at him. “At least he’s not just all talk. At least he was trying to
do
something.”

“You’re all mad,” Ray says, walking away from them. “You’re all bloody insane.”

He starts the van and backs it out into the narrow, cobbled laneway. Marjory has remained with the others. He feels nauseated, and hungry, and alone.

1970: the poetics of science

Armidale Madhouse

23 June 70

broccoli

My sympathies. Still, with the odious household throng routed things can only look up. I wish you well for your exams. Take heart. Surely you must be among the few who’ve bearded the Great Tradition in its den and got away unscarred.

The SQUID is up and in detecting mode, but now we have to debug the extraneous shit that flies through the air and the ground and from the inherent radioactive isotopes in our damn clothes and fingers. Calibration and collimation. The computer will have to create a profile of all this background noise before it can look for the little splurts of tachyons with the exact cross-section we predict. Needles and haystacks, you know. Meanwhile I dine on pale slop and hope that edgy Tom doesn’t decide to rid himself of my presence by poisoning me at table. Nothing new. Did I mention that I saw Antony’s ex lady friend Francine just before I came up here? I had brief lascivious fantasies of sharing my bed with her (fat bum or not—see, I remember these snide asides), but she declined to stay overnight.

I’ve been considering what is called the lure of the limerick. Herewith, some instances:

A clever-dick fucker named Fisk

had a pelvis astoundingly brisk.

So fast was his action

The Fitzgerald contraction

foreshortened his dick to a disk.

(An Einsteinian conceit. All will be made clear in my quipu contribution on tachyons and relativity Real Soon Now.)

Here’s one for Paul and Tom and the gang in the Puce Room (I laughed so hard at this that I caused a false reading on our printer):

Said the limp-wristed Sheik of Algiers

to his harem assembled, “My dears,

you may think it odd o’ me

but I weary of sodomy;

so tonight’s for you ladies.” (Loud cheers.)

P.S., op. cit., et al: about the Jane Austen essay, kiddo: look around you, abandon your sweet gentle illusions, that’s the way it is, babe, you are in a Sausage Machine that wants processed products. The university is not in the business of commitment and original truths. Maybe some of the science faculties but I wouldn’t bet on it—we’ve been catching a lot of dubious looks around here with our Tachyon Quest, it’s outside the standard paradigm so it doesn’t exist, and if it does it shouldn’t so it doesn’t anyway. So what can you expect in a realm like the English department that manages to lack simultaneously any empirical basis for testing and remedying its hypotheses, and any source of imagination independent of middle-class quid status quo? That degree you’re aiming at is a teaching or public service meal ticket, no more, no less—exactly like they say on the prospectus.

it’s a nasty place, the world

Joseph

the eighth photograph

Only the contingent fact that she is speaking, and the decision of the photographer, highlights Caroline in this portrait of a group of women. Her dejected face is drained of expression, color, hope. She slumps into her chair, hands folded on her lap, eyes lowered. Three women lean forward, angry and worried and speaking simultaneously. One wears overalls and no cosmetics; her long hair is pulled back tight at her nape. A second is altogether softer, fussy hair floating about her face, her limbs rounded in wool. The third is Jane, wife of Caroline’s one-time lover Alan. It is difficult to be certain of the object of Jane’s animus, but one hand reaches across her knees toward downcast Caroline like a small concerned animal. The other women form a seated circle in the room, somehow heraldic, archaic: a company of warriors paying discreet homage to one of their number wounded in a clash with the endlessly pressing foe; a tribal group seeking nurture in the earth, comforting an exhausted hunter. One of the women feeds an infant at her breast, her face turned away slightly from Caroline’s woe. Near the door, Lanie gazes with a sweet smile at the mother and her child.

the ninth photograph

It is not immediately evident that the pile of jumbled clothes and bedding is Caroline. The eye tracks aimlessly for a moment around the photograph of her room, picking out her desk, piled with books, the small pictures of birds, the colorful chair, the window of sky. An arm dangles out of the blanket, hand resting on the floorboards. Several empty bottles with their labels torn off lie nearby. The cap from one of the bottles has rolled halfway across the floor, and now rests, a small fat wheel, against one leg of the chair. Caroline’s stringy hair, among her pillows, seems no more human than a bundle of drenched wool.

the tenth photograph

On the Casualty trolley, under bright lights, comatose Caroline has been placed in the left lateral position, left arm tucked under her chest, right arm brought over, left leg extended, right knee up, crossing her bare left thigh where the stained and disheveled dress leaves her uncovered. A pillow behind her back keeps her chest expanded. The registrar, a neat handsome man in his mid twenties, indicates to the still younger intern a point of interest concerning the wash-out tube, thick as a garden hose, that rises from Caroline’s gullet, emerges through her slack mouth and drops over the side. In the trolley’s shadow, a thread of irrigating liquid laden with synthesized neural poisons falls under gravity into a plastic bucket. Beyond the trolley a flustered nurse readies an electrocardiogram monitor, one hand pushing the machine’s plug into a power point, the other holding out a handful of wires.

the eleventh photograph

On the ECT trolley, anaesthetized Caroline is stretched full length in her white cotton nightdress, feet bare. Two nurses stand at her left, one at her right. Their hands touch her lightly. They watch her toes, curled in muffled convulsion from the current that has shrilled her brain. Gooseflesh lightly covers her exposed skin. From the back of her right hand a scalp-vein needle and its narrow plastic tube loop from a blood vessel that has carried into her body Brietal to render her unconscious and Scoline to relax her muscles. The anaesthetist stands at her left shoulder, one hand lightly on her carotid artery, holding the oxygen mask to her mouth and nose. The gas rises through its rubber tube from a large black cylinder behind him. On Caroline’s right, the psychiatrist is removing the bilateral black electrodes from her scalp. They look like ear-phones, orange switches let into their dark shiny surfaces. The ECT machine is a box behind her, neat, with a green light, and several switches. Its current has passed into her head for the shortest time, less than a second. Had the photographer clicked the camera an instant earlier, the picture would show a yellow light on the machine. Caroline would be seen in electric convulsion. It would not have been a very dramatic photograph. Her body would be contracted slightly, shoulders drawn up. As it is in this shot, her face would remain half-covered by the oxygen mask, blanked in chemical sleep.