The Best Australian Stories 2010 (10 page)

*

The kids used to sleep in class sometimes and I'd tell them to wake from their dogmatic slumber. Not once in six years did any of them ask what I meant by dogmatic slumber which was just as well because I'm not sure that Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a lover of routine, knew himself when he turned up the phrase. He was talking about David Hume (1711–1776), a sweet-natured Scot with a philosophy so tart that it refused to guarantee even tomorrow's dawn. The students never got much beyond Athens, I'm afraid. Mainly Plato (428–348 BC), the man who believed only in ideals but who died of lice.

You know the old routine. You ask the kids if an exclusive car is a good car and they say yes. Then you ask them if an economical car is a good car and they say yes. Then you ask them if a reliable car is a good car and they say yes. By now they are getting weary and they want the answer or at least a punchline, which is a shame because I told them that philosophy is the art of living without answers; if you have an answer it only means your question was too small. A reliable car, an economical car and an exclusive car are all good. So what does the word good mean? Hands go up. I've got them. In 2500 years no one has been able to answer what good means. But here are six, then ten, then twelve kids who reckon they've cracked the world's most cryptic code and all it took was two shakes. They only know the answer because they haven't understood the question. I don't understand it either but at least I know I don't know. That's why I'm the teacher. Was.

*

Gloria says this is a good place. Good enough. She's worked in others and this one is okay because most of the men here are like me to the extent they have not been good with money which is the kind of sin you can wash off unlike stuff you do with your body because your body is something you can't get space from, however much it lies to you. Mostly we have done short sentences and have had trouble, so to speak, finding anything on the other side of the full stop. I started with a single room but it was tiny and next to Gloria's office and I could hear the phone ringing in the night with no hope of an answer and then a pause until the machine kicked in and soaked up the messages of men desperate for a place. I was in that room the night Anton called. I recognised his voice at once as he developed a long weary explanation of why he wanted to come back and start again from here. I supposed he was a regular but his voice was warm with confusion, almost seductive in the way it was trying to tease hope from a payphone somewhere. I could have told him that Heraclitus (540–480 BC), said that you can't step into a river twice. I could have told him Plato's version of Heraclitus said it, except one or both of them was wrong because there are some rivers that just don't move and I've been in one. When Gloria said there was a new man coming and if I wanted to move I'd have to share with him I said okay because I'd shaped his character around his voice. In reality, he nods to me occasionally but he never speaks.

*

For five years, my mother was a voice on the end of a phone. She rang at odd hours when she had permission. There was no routine to this. Nanna would bring the phone to the bed and hold it to my ear and mum would speak about the community she was part of and the discipline of body and mind and the great leader she was following and the price we had to pay for wisdom and often enough I had fallen back asleep before she got to the part about how she was doing this for both of us to free our minds and how she loved me but she had found a place where the word love needed footnotes and as she was starting on those nanna would be doing my listening for me.

*

Somebody said that the whole of philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato and I told the students that the history of podiatry was full of footnotes and only two of them laughed and besides we had to get back to English which is what we were supposed to be doing and the students were only prepared to talk about reality in abstract terms for so long. I told them that the greatest writer who ever lived never studied a word of Shakespeare at school and still did okay and they asked who I meant and I said I meant Shakespeare. We did Plato's parable of the cave with the shadows that get mistaken for reality. I put Plato's question: ‘Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?' Holy means good. Is something good in its own right or good because of its context? Does something start good or become good? Anyway, with the cave and the question of holy, they had touched the surface of two of Kant's three big issues: ‘What can I know?' and ‘What ought I do?' The other one was ‘What may I hope?' I have been thinking about that myself, living in hope of an answer.

*

When I saw Anton in the laundromat on the other side of town I wondered what he could possibly be doing. He mostly wears the same clothes, even to bed, except his shoes which line up under the sink and his jeans which he drapes over the broken central heating, so he can't have much washing. He was bent over reading the paper. When he comes home, he reads the paper in bed. The same paper. The financial pages. He must read every word, studying it, willing it to reveal something. He has never shown a flicker of recognition but I have never expected it. When he taught me I was in a group of a hundred or more.

In my final year of school, Mum returned from the community and put her belongings, what was left of them, in grocery bags on the kitchen floor. Nanna packed them away and put the kettle on and Mum said she didn't drink caffeine any more or touch meat. That was all she said. She didn't read books any more either, I discovered. There wasn't any explanation of what had happened in the community or what they had done or what the great philosopher in charge had taught except I guessed he didn't believe in caffeine or meat. Nanna got herbal stuff and arranged for Mum to see the doctor and, over the coming months, the doctor organised for Mum to have the pension until she could manage a job. Mum asked me once that year what I was going to do after school.

‘Study.'

‘That's good, darling.'

The following week she seemed to realise she hadn't asked what I was going to study.

‘Philosophy, Mum.'

She turned the rings on her fingers like she was trying to adjust the volume on life.

*

I asked the students to find their own beginning to a sentence which ends ‘… therefore I am.' Rene Descartes (1596–1650), said ‘I think therefore I am.' I told the kids that his sentence could be adjusted to include any evidence they believed would support the proposition of their own existence. The best I ever got was ‘I fart therefore I am,' a proposition which neatly rejected Descartes' division of body and soul whilst asserting something about the social contract. Then they had to try one which ended ‘… therefore I am good.' I only gave them assignments I found difficult myself. The hardest thing to do is to start a sentence which ends ‘… therefore I am not.' The best I got was ‘I farted therefore I am not.' I have learnt the answer is ‘I take therefore I am not.' I would prefer never to have found out.

*

I have work three days a week helping in the kitchen, which suits me because the kitchen people are allowed back at about two and everyone else has to stay out till four. The idea is that we are supposed to be doing something for ourselves during the day, looking for work, doing a course, getting a flat. Some of the men deliver papers and catalogues, some go into the city and look around, some read the paper right through. Always the money pages. There's plenty of time. Most weeks, somebody gets done for shoplifting. Anton gets back at 5.30, right in time to eat, then sits in front of the news. Some of the men watch four news bulletins every night. It keeps the world behind glass. Gloria deals with residents' personal issues between four and five. She leaves at five. She has kids, I think, or her partner does. She knows everything about us but is private about herself. She discusses our cases on the phone in her room, which you can hear in the hall and the kitchen, but she steps into the front yard when it's personal. She turns her back to the Victorian façade of the house and gestures with her free arm like she is conducting the traffic on the highway on the other side of the fence.

The place used to be a mansion and there are still traces of its former glory: a ceiling cornice beside a smoke detector, a lead-light panel behind a fire extinguisher, a heavy oak door under a plastic sign about evacuation procedures. There's a sheltered portico at the front, around the old grand entrance that isn't used much because it was easier to make a reception area near the side entrance. The men sit here after dinner and smoke and talk. They always discuss money. Somebody always has a new plan to get rich, a new way to beat the system, a better way to swing the odds, something so piss easy that they could never get caught. They've had all day to think about it.

Once a week, we get a free public transport ticket, supposedly to help us move on in life. Nobody is supposed to be here more than four months. I mostly use the ticket to ride around the suburbs, to be a tourist in my own town. Other days, I go to the library and read a bit and watch the people getting frustrated with the photocopier and others getting the sleep I don't get at night. I always look through the old books that are being sold: fifty cents for hardcovers and twenty cents for paperbacks. A few weeks ago, they started selling off their set of the Great Books of the World from the reference section. Some of them looked like they had never been opened. The librarian told me that the texts of all the classics were available online and that people preferred to access them that way because they could search for a word or a phrase more easily. Besides, they needed the shelf space. So, every day I started taking home two or three dollars' worth of Plato or Aristotle or Spinoza or Hegel or Nietzsche, and stored them under my bed with my bags. Nobody else was buying them and there were always more when I went back. Once I woke in the middle of the night and found Anton looking through a volume but I couldn't tell which one; he had pegged the vertical blinds with a peg and was reading by the streetlight on the other side of the fence.

*

My first year at uni, I enrolled in the survey course, ‘The Great Philosophers,' run by Anton Barnard (1951–). The lectures ended late, 7 p.m., because the course was popular with part-timers and mature-age students who could only get there after work and this meant there wasn't much social side to the course which suited me at the time. I enjoyed Barnard's style; he hardly seemed to notice the students. His back bent across the overhead projector when he wanted to emphasise a point like he was pulling at something in his garden. Often enough, at least once a session, he put up blank transparencies. ‘This is the bit where you have to think for yourself,' he said and left it at that. Some of the students looked at their watches and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. They already had long days and just wanted answers to write down.

It was on my way home after one of Anton's lectures that I noticed Mum behind the large plate-glass windows of the pub near our station. She wasn't a drinker so I wondered what she was doing. I went in far enough to see she was playing the gaming machines. Her back was straight, her head was still.

*

Both Anton's case and mine made the papers. For Anton, it was the humiliation of being one of the most intelligent people in the country and having to get somebody to explain on his behalf that he had an addiction to gambling; that he had stolen money from the Philosophical Society and from the university to support his illness. Indeed, his methods for embezzling from the university were ingenious; he had thought his way through a labyrinth to get the money his habit craved. My story was not so glamorous. I was the teacher whose students were raising money for a trip to Greece, to Athens, to the cradle of thought. I stole that money. I stole from the wallets and purses of colleagues. I stole from the canteen. People knew for ages before they did anything; by that stage it was thousands. It all went to Mum. I supported her. It wasn't that the machines made her happy, far from it. But I knew that sitting in front of the machine was the only place she could stop being without dying. It gave her relief from whatever the hunger was that made her knock on the door of any crazed person with a big idea to sell. She had lived in half a dozen communities, fallen pregnant in one, been seduced by a list of gurus, at least morally. I paid for her to have a more ordinary form of insanity. It cost.

*

After dinner, Anton comes out to the portico in front of the house. I have never seen him here before. He has helped himself to the volume of Wittgenstein from the stack of Great Books under my bed. He has marked a page and, on the page, he has marked a line in pencil. He hands it to me but doesn't say anything. It is the last line of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.'

He nods.

‘Good, eh?'

I approve.

‘Yes, good.'

Readings and Writings

Outside

Michael Sala

In the morning you get out of bed and place your hands against the glass. Damp forms around your fingers as you stare at the houses and trees leaning out of the fog at the end of the street. When you sleep, the sea rises and presses against your window. With daylight it retreats. The blanket's warmth lifts from your skin and soon it will be gone. Your brother's breath rises and falls at your back. The clock in the hallway sounds like his heart.