The Beginner's Guide to Living (19 page)

*   *   *

Dream.

My mother floating in a lake, face to the moon. Her hair is long and fanned out around her head, her body white. I want to touch her. I try to call her name but she doesn't hear; nothing comes out of my mouth. The water is dark but the moon makes a path of light across the lake that reaches to my feet. As I watch her, my mother turns her head to me, her face serene. I step out onto the water and walk toward my mother. I am almost with her, not far now. And when I reach her, I know she will show me that beneath the water it is possible to breathe.

SLEEPWALKING

T
HE FIRST THING
I
SEE
when I open my eyes is the mist off the water, birds slicing through it, their paths visible as it shifts.

I need some breakfast. Over by the tent, Saul's already got the cooker going. I stretch my legs under the blanket, feel the stiffness of them, the ferns flat beneath my body.

“Morning. How were the mosquitoes?”

“Vicious,” I say, scratching my cheek. I go over to my pack. Inside there's a squashed baguette that looks as if it's been used to beat off a mad bull.

“I've got some muesli,” Saul says. “What else have you got in there?”

I pull out a bag of mini chocolate bars, two bananas, an apple, and a can of baked beans. The copy of
Foucault for Beginners
with a cartoon of a guy wearing glasses on the front.

“Bit of light reading, huh?” Saul opens the package of muesli and pours some into a bowl, some into the cup he's been lending me. My all-purpose cup. A finch flits in a fern tree next to the tent, the light through the fronds reminding me of that green bottle, doing acid, being with Cherry. Taryn's eyes.

“So, tell me more about Sartre. This woman I met on a bus talked about him.”

“A lot of stories start with somebody on a bus.” Saul points his spoon at me. “When I first read Sartre I remember thinking, isn't it comforting that all this is random? That no God, no force, created this mess on purpose.”

“I guess.”

“And why should I feel anxious about my own nonexistence? Do I get all worked up when the mist on the lake disappears? My life only has value because I give it value. If I realize this, really believe it in my gut”—Saul slaps himself on the stomach—“then there can be no anxiety. Anxiety is an illogical response to the meaninglessness of life.”

“Are you always like this over breakfast?”

“No.” He laughs. “My family would run a mile. So what do you think?”

I steady myself on my log—I'm not perfectly balanced and it takes a bit of effort not to fall off. “Makes you feel a bit stupid.”

“Why?”

“For ever worrying about anything at all.”

“Sure. But then we do have to live in the world and give meaning to things.”

I think of Mom, Taryn, her face when she kisses me. Things I know about love.

He looks up at me. “For example, it makes no sense to love someone who will die, but no matter how much we try, we still cling to the thing that suggests meaning. In the end, it's all about finding a way to live.”

“Oh, well that's easy.”

Saul puts his bowl on the ground. Ants climb into the leftover milk. The finch is still hanging around. “That's why I come here. Keep the bullshit detector running, and once a year take stock, question whether I'm living blindly, following the pack. Heidegger got me onto that.”

“Never heard of him,” I say, moving over to the edge of the lake.

“Of course, I still mess up,” he laughs, “but once you start living authentically it's like waking up from a long sleep. If you see a lot of people as sleepwalkers, it helps you understand why they act like they do.”

There's an arrogance in what he's saying that makes me shift on my feet. “You seem pretty sure of yourself.”

“I've given it a bit of thought. Look, we all enjoy deception, it's a comfortable way to be, but, in the end, is it really? Aren't there always little voices saying, You're kidding yourself, there's more to life than this”?

His theory sounds like
less
rather than
more
. “My little voices have escalated to a shout lately.”

“A death will do that.” He looks sideways at me. “To some.”

I've had about enough of his bullshit. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just that some people take things harder than others.”

God, he's so brutal. If he's so sure of himself, why's he still going bush to work it all out? Isn't he a bit old for that? “Yeah, well, maybe some of us have a heart.”

He doesn't call after me as I go up the hill to a place in the sun dwarfed by the trees. As I flop in a nest of bark far from the tent, a fly goes past, twice, three times, almost smacks into my head, the sound it makes disproportionate to its size, and I know if it crosses me again I'll catch it. Squash the little bastard so flat he'll wish he'd never even been a thought.

*   *   *

Saul is so frigging logical. I remember Taryn saying that about me once. I can follow it, his line of reasoning, that there is only the significance we give to things. That nothing has any built-in meaning that can't be argued away. Not even love. All is empty, that's what the Buddhists would say, and I guess you have two options: Western anxiety or Eastern bliss. Nice thought. If only it were a matter of choice.

I've been anxious, there's no doubt about that, so crushingly anxious that sometimes I can barely breathe, unlike Saul. But I bet he's probably as scared as anybody else. Bet if he found out he had cancer his theories would fold before his speculating eyes.

Below, the lake is deceptively still. I try to imagine it as a pool of wisdom, but I know there's no wading around the edges, not for me. I'd have to dive in, sink or swim. That's my way. And this lake could swallow me up, I could be consumed by ideas, other people's, my own, one more drop in the thought ocean, swirling around with all the others.

The lake shimmers and grows, is all around me. I am it. I am the trees that lean into its depths, the sunlight on its surface, but it's not beautiful, like what Huxley saw when he was on drugs, and it's not frightening, it just is. I focus on a bright green leaf, rotating, the flash of a blue wren, Saul sitting by his tent. But I am alone, again. I will die alone and I see it before me like a great endless falling.

Was it like that for Mom?

God, I miss her. I feel it in my gut, a rip, a tearing in half as I drop, steady myself against the ground, and throw up everything, my ribs coiling with the violence of it, until all that's left are long strings of spit and this retching that won't give up. She's not coming back. Ever. Nothing I say or do or read can change that. But she is close now, I sense her, closer than she's been since her death, maybe more than in life.

The retching turns to shaking. I'm so cold. And then it rises up from inside me, as if it's being pulled out by a rope, a great unraveling, a snake leaching my guts, and I start to cough, the blood banging away inside my head. I see the small, shut-off boy in me, standing by her graveside, and I begin to sob, my hands ripping at the dirt, at leaves. I scratch a fragment of green glass that looks like part of the neck of a bottle. I pull the shard loose and hold it up to the light. Its edge is worn but I know it will cut if I ask it to.

I am still now. A dead leaf lands beside my knee.

*   *   *

I press the glass against my wrist. A drop of blood travels along the edge and slips to the ground. I admire the shine of it, the red of plums. It's all about metering out the pain. I know how this works. A little deeper, millimeters, that's all it takes, like the stopping up of breath.

The drops multiply and unite. I notice the pain now, but it is confined to my wrist. It's not like grief. There's something cheap about it. This is my blood, my life, but as I watch it soak into the ground, I know that all I want is to remember how to live.

*   *   *

Memory.

Me, coming in the front door after school, Mom standing in front of the hall mirror, her hand on her left breast. As she turns toward me, I see fear in her face. A tear runs the length of her cheek. It is one week before her death.

*   *   *

I scramble down the bank and hurl the piece of glass into the lake, dip my wrist in the dark water and rinse the sleeve of my shirt. The blood leaves a gray stain. There are bits of spew on my sneakers, which I clean off with leaves, but I can't get rid of the smell. My ribs ache and the sun is warm on my spine. I check my wrist but the blood is already starting to congeal. A bird skims across the surface of the lake.

I make my way through the bush back to the tent, my legs still a bit shaky. Saul's frowning as I come down. “You okay?”

He must've heard me up there losing it, and for a second I almost confess what happened, but he's not the right person to tell. “I'm fine.”

“Listen, I'm sorry…”

“Don't worry about it.”

His eyes fall on my wrist poking out from under my wet sleeve. “You sure you're okay?”

“Yes, but I should be getting home.”

“Know how to find your way back?”

“Think so. I'm usually okay with that kind of thing.”

“It's been good having you here,” he says without looking up. “Listen, there's something I wanted to tell you about. It might help.”

I shove my camera into my pack. I'm not much in the mood for advice, especially not from Saul.

“Once a year I write a letter that I never send. My wife knows about it, I keep it propped against my computer screen. She doesn't know what's in it, only to open it if I die.”

“Look, I should get going.” Saul holds out his hand. I shake it, feel those strong fingers around my thin hand, the one I haven't quite grown into. “Saul. Do you think…?”

“What?”

“Do you think we were meant to meet?”

“Sorry, don't believe in that kind of thing.”

I nod. “Thanks for the food, anyway.”

“No problem. You've got my email address?”

As I pat my bag he rests his hand on my shoulder. “That letter I mentioned—it contains a list of who and what is important in my life.”

I smile. Beside us is a lyrebird, maybe the same one, but this time it's imitating a different sound. A kookaburra's laugh.

*   *   *

The path is open before me, the air is clear. I need to run, to be a body moving fast through the world, wind in my face, heart beating in my ear. I want to spread my fingers till the skin begins to crack, throw my face to the sky and, in the presence of giants, shed my old self like a snake.

LEAP

O
N THE TRAIN THERE ARE LOTS OF PEOPLE,
seventeen down at my end of the car. The sound of metal, my body being rocked from side to side. I need to call Taryn as soon as I get home.

I open my notebook to where I started writing when Mom died. First up, the quote from
Macbeth
, followed by the questions one after the other, right up to
How many mystics does it take?
Sounds like a lightbulb joke. There's the list of aphorisms I wrote by the lake, photos glued in, a succession of notes and thoughts. The napkin with Taryn's line,
Run naked through your fears
.

And scattered around all of it are the quotes from philosophers, and a lot more poets than I would have thought. They seem split down the middle between the idea of a single truth—the same one for everybody—or a whole lot of individual truths. But which is it? So much of what is written here sounds right, small scraps of what could be true.

I flick back to the questions. There are nineteen of them, but in the game we played when we were kids, it was always twenty questions to work out the identity of a thing. Animal, mineral, vegetable. Beneath my list is a quote from Wittgenstein:
If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it
. What will my twentieth question be?

The train passes close to the cemetery. Eight stations to go till mine.

*   *   *

Adam's leaning over the kitchen counter, the bones of his shoulders fist-shaped beneath his skin. He turns around as I come in. “You've got a nerve. Dad's been shitting himself.”

“Hi, Adam,” I say, putting down my pack.

He glares at me and lowers his voice. “Don't go waking Dad, he's having a rest. He's hardly slept the last two nights.”

“I left a note.”

“Hell of a lot of use that was.”

“I'm fine, okay? Look, I have to call…”

“You're fine, but what about Dad?” Adam grabs my arm as I go past. I don't try to pull free. “You could've called him.”

“You didn't when you didn't come home for two days. Anyway, there weren't any phones where I was.”

“And where was that, then?” he asks, letting me go.

“I was up in the bush. I met this guy by a lake. His name's Saul.”

“What do I care what his name is? I've had Dad upset all weekend, going crazy. I couldn't leave him on his own. So what the hell were you doing up there anyway? Finding yourself?”

Same old Adam, and we're doing the same old thing, but this time I don't take the bait. “I needed some time to think.”

“Was that Samara's idea? Do a bit of meditating in the bush? I ran into her last week and she told me she'd been teaching you how.”

“Just the once. I wasn't very good at it.”

“So…” His body eases.

“Will?”

“Dad.”

He's scratching his head, his shirt hanging out of his trousers. “When…?”

“A few minutes ago. Sorry we woke you.”

“I'm just glad…” Outside, a bird taps at the window but Dad remains still. “I've been absent. I've been absent since your mother died, even before that, but worse since.”