By the Obsidian Sea

Prologue

There are few things that matter in life, yet they matter more because they are few, and matter more than a few words can illustrate—but that’s not to deny trying.

So, in trying, begin where the story begins, at the outcome, inside the mind of the storyteller who is neither at the beginning nor the end of the story but remembers the stark light of mid-day desert sun sending eddies of swollen air to make the prickles of green and brown tussock and spinifex shiver, as the long train made its way across the widening desert. He remembers counting the miles on the white stones erected at the side of the rail. At every five miles he proudly mouths the distance as if to an audience. The journey seems to have lasted for, at that point, his whole nine years of life, as if the desert never yielded to the oceans, as if he would be counting the miles in his doom when the desert had swallowed him in its dusty mouth. At that point he doesn’t think about it like the storyteller, instead he feels all around him the obliterating essence of time’s grand endlessness and cowers into the shadow of the train seat, happy to be cool, not standing in the heat like the burnt salt bush or the solitary ghost-gum standing stuck like a broken man’s surely bones in the graven ground. The storyteller tells a new story now, for his memory’s lack and because that experience’s uniqueness has passed. He is in his new uniqueness, remembering a link and a certain will that knows the reason for the link which stands too huge outside consciousness to be understood. These, then, are the storyteller’s tools as he recreates the steel and swerve of the adjoining platform between carriages as if he were there, even now, though lifetimes had passed beneath the platform of his memory. The link between the nine year old observing the clickity-clack booming bluntly into the stark wilderness and that moment as the storyteller, as he stares into the days coming, whatever its meaning, inevitably points the storyteller back to where he stands waiting between the stations, clueless as a cobweb of the presence of the spider, or the prey. In the storyteller’s present thoughts the train seems to call out in a faded voice,

Some days are full of mirth

Some days, of wonder,

When I come again to birth

I shall be up, not under.

Some days are full of grief

Some days, surrender

When I come again to death

I’ll not begin nor end there.

Some thoughts are shared, some are barren, some come between thinkers; most drift off into the dusty red haze on the borders of the seen horizons of the desert. Where thoughts have been, nothing remains but the cold, bold rock of reality, the track arching on, the cool open sky winking back in pips of light as the night blossoms. Thoughts shared between the boy, curious to sleeplessness, enchanted by the metal rhythm amplified by the mysterious shapelessness of passing countryside, hooded by the spirits of the night and the storyteller, the man hunched over an ancient memory, are thoughts relieved of pain, or rancour, or boredom, revised to suit the present judgment, to find the link.

PART 1

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Chapter 1

The Wounded King Returns Home

She went to Lebanon to marry. They do that, sleek, slinky, Lucy, clasps the brit, shows Danielle the trick, water pours effortlessly in a single stream down her open throat, gives her the glass jug.

Seems silly. Damn! Spilling water trickles into the cup of her breast plate.

Silly?

Lebo guys live here too. Pushing the brit away, tensing, Lucy closing eyes sees the pleading Mother Mary. Sun catches drips hanging on Danielle’s lips.

They do it for their mum

And Dad, I bet. Danielle sniffs, disgusted at seventeen watching Dad make Bob kneel crying, his eyes streaked with nose blood; then at twenty picking Bob’s baby from his frustrated hands, his eyes pale with fear. She reaches for parsley dried to the table, scratching it off.

Lucy, I can kind of understand, you know, about how she could do it even though I wouldn’t. I’d marry for love.

If you marry for love it might fail and you’re left with memories. Marry for money and if it fails, you get paid Lucy smiles as she talks, not believing.

What if it works?

C’mon, marry for love, marry for sex, what’s the difference? The love is the sex, when that goes might as well have nothing, so it’s better to have money.

Danielle stares. The blue light filtering through shades over the windows drops in intensity. Thirsty, she reaches for the brit, gotta try again, splashing water cascades over her chin and touches the soft plate of her breast. Flocking fingers careens the drops over the table. She points to the glass spout,

This makes the water come out too fast.

I can do it, you don’t let your lips touch the tip. It’s hygienic that way.

Gives your face a wash too Her glittering smile sparkles in Danielle’s eyes tickling Lucy’s love bone. The front door opens and Lucy’s family pour in from out of the rain. Zeus, her father, helped by Charlotte, her eldest sister, limps to the family room couch where he slumps.

My Dad’s home Lucy whispers to Danielle and they separate incandescently to their different worlds. Lucy’s Mother Justine holds Zeus near his newly bound chest wound. She intones hoarsely in Arabic,

The couch, I set it up. Careful! Yulla! Not so rough Lucy, careful of his heart.

You look great dad intones Mary, the second oldest, holding both his hands, eyes squinting.

Yea Dad answers Lucy unsurely from the kitchen, imagining fingers gently stroking the stitches, ashamed for wanting to pull them apart. Thud, and Zeus lets go his broken arrows, his sacred lightning bolts and time, to play with the idea of death, falls into the couch and sleeps.

Shhh, all you, go to the kitchen. Where were you Lucy? I thought you might come meet your Dad today said Justine resolutely.

I told Dad I wouldn’t come, Mum Lucy answers, smacking her thigh with the outward palm of adolescent frustration. Justine thrusts her eyes upward as if she will never understand the naivety of youth.

You are silly, bint muttering Gypsy Arabic loud enough to hear. Hers arms sweep frustration in waves across clean marble tiles, the neatly stacked dishes, to settle in her room like an evil presence.

Get his Jadra, it’s in the fridge, in the fridge. Lucy, obeying, clips the corner of the bench, her finger numbing before the pot cracks open on the floor’s slipperiness.

Shit Mum, I’ll clean it. Look, I hurt my finger points her injury at Justine’s heart.

Just be quiet, he’s just had heart surgery, Lucy, he needs quiet.

I know, I know, why do you think I’m gonna be noisy? raising her tone to pitch just below insolence, her shadow dressed in cat-woman lycra.

Justine sends prayers to stave off puberty’s cynicisms, she sees her days of settling ahead and feels patient. Chasing Lucy’s shadow around the back yard with a large stick-like piece of her pride, belting, belting, till she loves her, till she cries for him, her husband, Lucy your father, he’s your father. Justine unpacks for dinner wishing for her duties embalming and the gentle reading hour before sleep’s grace. Why did that man die just as we arrived at St Johns, what did God mean? Turns the television on to A.R.T. TV crackles to life. Justine shuts her eyes. The widening vale of truth dawns frighteningly. A black sun appears, radiating fear and love.

Chapter 2

Selling the soul

Most often, I let my head surrender to sleep before my mind. At times of intense activity, I surrender to the deeper worlds to catch my soul’s breath, sojourning to the quiet of work aboard the last carriage of the city train. Sleep, the privilege of forgetfulness, is yet transient and unfulfilling in dreamlessness. I wake as always as the train enters the blue-lit subway station and regain full awareness of the movement, the smells, the faces and spaces around me as I drift to working life’s sanctuary, all too brief a sanctuary.

I awake fully when confronted by the intimacy entrusted to the professional at the point of sale. I would have chosen instead, to sit like Psyche on the point of a rock above a swirling sea to look for the messenger’s touch, the fickle phantom of deliberate persuasion embroiled in the casting of consciousness. At the point of sale the magician is the eye, the swivel of mouth and tongue to the preferred syllable, the mascot of truth in exchange. I am not notable in any way but in keeping my knowledge from the ears of those it could harm. I laugh at the thought—a quiet cave set in the Himalayas, deep and cold, holding Milerepa tongueless as the trickle of ensconced mimics, those visitors, gives way to the empty hours of contemplative aloneness. They talk for me, he mutters but the thought is not a perception, is not a joy, but a wordless link to a vague understated smile set in the cave of his eyes.

I would be Milerepa, the guru, not the magician, but for the point of sale. I would heave up no mountain but sit whilst the city shifted from morning to day. I welcome no mimic, nor the wind, and sell the product of my mind. I pity no person nor disaster, ruin nor disgrace, and hold, against the undeniable truth, my tongue of mirth to reach the point of sale. I keep the quiet moments as sacred as the moment I was shown the voluminous erection of infatuation at the onset of puberty. Here, on the train, I am free to regain the Milerepa’s pose, the happy Buddha stretching naked arms to embrace his waking sleep. As the moment of exchange moves objects from possession to memory, the gentle pushing of the train’s motion that rolls my body into enchanted stillness, moves memory from possession. Each brings change yet changes nothing and so I drift between them, my mind dancing like the splayed-arm bobbing of a playful child. I give nearly every waking action over to the direction of my family’s survival, but we live well, basking in the sunlight of peace. Perhaps change has already come. Though war drums a distant requiem in some far off desert, I am content to limit my concerns to the tiny infraction of the human battle against nature given me. The struggle to improve my own nature seems as small a problem as to be insignificant, but connected somehow to the general rumblings of tanks and bombers plundering the plains of the third world in equal insignificance.

I would rather not be Milerepa the Sorcerer and send scud shells mushrooming over innocent towns, but I am at times, only some times. I wear the cape of the saviour in recreating thoughts of such destruction, the brands and bolts of the sorcerer piled in a trash-can gathering time. My sickle, my wicked wants, just an action away but eternally locked, despite my awareness of them, in the cold box of frigidity. Milerapa, Thor, Set or Talesin, I let venture into manifest maleficence out where my consciousness retreats into imagination, somewhere in some part of the world where I come dressed in camouflage, in khaki, running, gun—shaft, bayonet, pointed at the namelessness of fear. I am the armchair warrior in such moments, sifting through the meaningless array of cellulite depictions of war, the severed limbs, the protracted gargle of death, the long disturbed look from soldier to killer as the knife gently eases into heart. I am glad for my comfortable seat.

Chapter 3

I

Jacqueline

The storyteller remembers that same child, who, after the long journey on the train, watched the cherry blossom falling from the tree, slowly over a week, until a circle of pink shadowed the ground under its petticoat.

Jacqueline lay there, her hands above her on the grass, as flat on their back as she. He is lying flat also, grass tickling his cheek, Jacqueline tickling the inside of his palm. His special need, to chatter aimlessly, hold her fingertips and smell the rotting apricots, embrace the sun’s embrace and feel the long train’s rhythm, deep in the cavern of his nine year old soul. Jaqueline, Jaqueline, Jaqueline, all the way to puberty—and he can feel her now, casting his mind’s hook into the abysmemoric sea.

We wrestled, I remember she would pin me, poke me, and she had bobbins, small yellow dress exposing her knobbly knees, dimpled, kind of yellow glowing like her face and happy like the sun smile lying illicitly in the dust of her father’s life, my uncle, in a small un-lived room on a strawberry stained mattress, talking. And not a word remembered. My sister, Gail, hung about alone and bored. I wanted to kiss Jacqueline. I wish I had.

He still wishes he had.

Jacqueline, got too close one morning, turning sweet bitter, angry over the trifle of things above the pain of love. Flesh wrestling, we were bruising nothing; mind wrestling, and we were kittens pounced on wildly by an uncontrollable protector. Jacqueline, Jacqueline, Jaqueline, all the way to the next station.

Jean Ray, the storyteller, looks for the link in his memories to this, his present world, seeing nothing but feet expectantly tramping the narrow corridors of a long train that lacks an awareness of time.

II

Mariamne

Jean, the light; turn out the light, hurry. Mary, Jean’s matronly, meticulous, Mariamne, summoning him with refined power borne with innocent dignity. They pull the sheets over themselves and listen in the dark for their baby son, Paris, to stir; rubbing feet together before clinching flesh, drawing faces close.

He’s sleeping.

Thank God.

Yeah. both melodically giggle catching breath as Paris rustles his sheets rolling arms back to click against the cot railings.

Shhh Mary mouths and sleeps.

Jean listens to the rhythmic trickle of rain washing down the gutter near the window. The glowing presence of his eleven months old baby attaching itself to his electro-magnetic field, drowning out all other sensations, but for the rhythm of the water. As Paris pulls his blanket over his face, a soft cotton sense drifts across Ray’s lips. He tastes the sweet pungent odour of sulphur before floating between the gates of dreams.

III

Celine

What is out there now but the sickening thud of the deceased on the concrete of the world?

Forty stories above the flames blow through the windows, burning, breaking, atomising, until the sad winds take the ashen dust in their gapes and spit black paint across the soul of the city. I have often thought of running from terror until I reach that Cupid with the reckless arrow, though I have often thought him beautiful, he is cathartic, and I would capture him, bottle him, and never release him again, that unseasonable Ginn. Yet it was he who manifested Milarepa the lover.

Celine was an adolescent distraction, climbing once, the long winding stairs to the metro platform. Curls of post-pubescent gold, starched and ready for the clinch of maturity, waft stiffly over her delicate features. Her gloss-stained smile gleamed white and vulnerable. Distraction wickedly curled me up in its pathological passions until I dropped for need of her into the great ocean of emotion. She was there in my early teenage dreams, not a person, an eternal calling for lust’s dominion, for experience of Mariamne. She was there when the first hint of drought appeared. When a dusty Psunami, made of Mallee soil rushed over the shore of the city. The weather seemed curiously to punish with rain any personal desire, and how I wished for it not to that day. Although our tennis date was abandoned, the certainty of our friendship was founded on the strength of the storm, like an acknowledged writ between two Fates.

I would, now, take that cupid’s arrow and see it for its point, were I not convinced that its journey is unguided, its shaft made of chaos. All that is left out there is the bitter crack of bone as shards of steel are propelled from the heart of the deceased with the power of a neutron splitting. The tramp, tramp, tramping of army boots on some desert highway. No more room for distractions. To put aside the temper of cupid’s illusionary pucker, no more room. No more time for running, though the terror has grown teeth and grunts like a razorback. No more time to stand waiting for Celine’s return of serve as the land’s blood fell upon us. Running from the empty screams of political madness, this is the shape of my body as I lie awake listening to the rustle of contortion and exertion coming from the cot next to me. All I thought then was that our time had been cut short, once again, and the promise of love had been forestalled. Never mind the muddy drops of rain, or her fear running like a shadow under her feet. The world was sorcerer casting its paranoia over innocence, sending bolts of frustration and, I, merely victim. Now the world is victim and I, Milerepa, am yet to be revealed. I study the clouds for their litany, and can no longer run for shelters of distraction.

Mary wakes. Her movement so rounded and plump, is full of the blooming of children.

Quick, Jean, my leg crimping up legs, pushing back the sheet, arching her back and holding up her leg for Jean to catch. Jean, half awake, pummels and prods the silky flesh,

Here, is that better? Gently rolling fingers over folds; she rolls back to sleep.

Thanks and the world becomes private again.

Chapter 4

Lucy

Lucy has been troubled with her school and sifts through some pamphlets left for her by Mary. Details of sumptuous gyms and copper marbled floors, grand Latinised philosophies with the promise of the classic life built on the concrete of Plato or Aristotle.

Geez—look at the size of the science labs; like I would give a shit. Mary frowns a concerted saintly furrow, look at these, they must have spent a fortune, what a waste. Flicking the brochure in distaste,

Look at the oval, wow! They sure have got the works. Why are you bothering, you can’t go there anyway, you have to work full time to afford it and you haven’t even got a job?

I’m just interested, alright. pushing the brochure away and filling in the application form for her real choice.

I’ll get in, I know it. Mary, smiling, remembers Lucy in frilly pink, a jolly tot, running cheekily to her brother who points the video camera at her jumping around with the air of tomfoolery to give a memory, to hatch her special moment of childish conceit. She also remembers Lucy knocking her head hard on walls in childish catharsis, to break her anger’s devilry. How many more memories, she mused? Lucy is full-breasted now, awake, and locked into the sexual revolution.

I’ll really try now, just you see.

Go on Lucy, I’ve yet to see, what if you get distracted?

I won’t, not this time. Lucy remembers running to another school mid-year, watching her friendships wither. She remembers losing her touch, feeling afraid to say

Take a look at my life mum.

I’ll remind you then. Mary, inconsolable, distracted by the television news and the next day,

When you hit the wall anytime this year, I’ll remind you of what you said. Deal?

Deal, eyes meet like a fist-cuffing pact, Lucy looks down first, ticks another box.

Chapter 5

Fatherhood

I

So much has happened I have barely time to keep a log. In only one year, two children. The apricots grew ripe; we climbed fences and pulled at neighbour’s branches to fill up on the orange velvet, the pure juice of summer. Now the trees are barren again. We were me and another, and then we were us, the family. My running schedule civilized me, gave me no time to sever the past, but I severed it without ceremony. A distant clickety-clack echoes somewhere in the un-spontaneous night, and the magician looks out still to vast empty spaces of the world and wonders how long before he will miss the symmetry and lose again the chance to be Milerepa. The clouds still a personal litany, more perfect messengers than any point of sale. I am father now, burdened but free, motivated but unfit, expert in the woman’s understanding without her breast-full intimacy, and when he crawls upon my chest he massages my heart so that tears drip from my soul; the beastly world yet to see, my son, my Paris.

Helen of Troy’s past, and Helens yet to be discovered and let go of, or perhaps a Joan of Arc to follow, or a Mariamne, the pure Children’s fire virgin, to fall in love with. So much has happened I have given up analysis. Contentment? No. Not enough yet to shore up insecurity, but a sufficient cornucopia spill of deep desire’s fulfilment to beat my fist at the warmongers manic party, popping corks from their bazookas, eating yellow cake and blowing their whistles as one child after another mixes their blood to the mud as their fragmented limbs cling onto those around them. I am not content