Las Vegas for Vegans (21 page)

A story. In a concentration camp. A Jew sits. Middle aged. Emaciated. Alive; surviving, at least. Sitting on a bench. Does not move. Does not speak. Eyes closed like mine. Others notice him, but leave him be. And this is true. That was the way it was told to me. But I don't believe it. I mean, the next part. Maybe you will. I have other reasons for telling the story, but there was certainly a man sitting on a bench. If you close your eyes too, you will know that without question; a Jew, in a concentration camp, frail and sitting. And what he felt, I cannot feel. You cannot feel. Having tasted poison does not mean we can know what it is to die poisoned. But we all taste poison and imagine that we know something of feeling poisoned. And maybe, if we find the basement we know is there, somewhere near the snake bottom of our brains, where we were reptilian for thousands of evolutionary years, if we walk down into that dark suffocation, we'll find that everything that has happened, has happened there. But back to the bench. The story. He sits there, this nameless man. For hours. With one desire. His eyes closed, like mine. Like the blink in yours. For hours. And he falls to his side. Dead. Willed. Intended and accomplished. But I have looked and looked and I don't believe it. There is no off switch. There isn't a place to die like that. There isn't. But you can believe it. It was told to me like that. Like it was true. All I know is there was a man, sitting on a bench, in a concentration camp. His eyes closed. He wanted to live. He wanted to die. He was able to choose.

The stars are always there. It doesn't matter what we do. Closed eyes or open. Nothing can be done about it. The eternally exploding stars with all that light to burn into the impossible gulfs of empty nothing. Filling infinity all the way out. Always there. But not out and away like before, when I lived with my eyes open, but all the way inside, like cells in my blood, as though I were dreaming within the skull of God. Adrift on that pulsing life, but tethered to my bones. Dreaming that all this substance, balled up into planets and powder, was the endlessly unfolding screen. Dreaming that the exploding light across it wasn't just for images. Not just the show. It was the story, and it told me everything. It even whispered a long, long sentence that ended with me … and then whispered longer, into we. And it doesn't matter what we do. The stars are always there. Closed eyes or open. Nothing can be done about it.

I have never seen the hospital halls, but they are clear in my mind. Long and empty. No pictures. Signs glued to the walls. Information, like exits and room numbers. Mostly I hear the footfalls. The way the sound bounces around the footsteps draws the picture for me. The long ten or so metres running past my feet, beyond my door to the left. The other way it's only two metres before a bend that moves away from my feet. There's a squeak in the shoes as they go around that bend. Six metres and then double doors that swing shut. Same kind of doors down the opposite end. I can see those hospital floors, the plastic they use to make them durable and easy to clean but somehow feels soulless, and hospital perfect. I don't want to think about those long empty corridors, or the feet that draw in my mind, like the dripping of water does a cave to the ears of a bat hanging upside down. I don't want to see those long empty corridors, but I can't stop my mind filling itself with whatever useless information is available. It gets hungry. I don't know if it's like the stomach. In cases of starvation the stomach begins to eat itself.

I lie on the bed. I think. I dream. I lie on the bed.

It's a strange place—the ledge. It exists everywhere we look, and even in here, strangely enough, though the jump has now become impossible. There are these kinds of places. There's the altar, though it's only in a temple where it's literally a place called an altar. But an altar can be anywhere. A roadside toilet, in the middle of nowhere. Shit stains on broken ceramic do not make it impossible. Do not take it beyond the reach of divinity, not for the grime-lined palms pressed together or those other colourless spectrums of light. For a ledge you need little more than a power socket and a fork. For me it was a handful of pills. Too many. Enough to vomit, and not die. Too many to come out conscious. The one thing I hadn't expected. It was out or back in, but not this life on the ledge. But I come to think, is the ledge another kind of altar? What did I believe? Was it black oil, the sump of the machine of this world, airless, and bottomless, steel encased, where even bacteria drown? Or it was an airless leap into a blue sky and for a moment I could be a cloud and then just more empty blue air? Or was it light? Perhaps light in fields of colour beyond the uses of colour that an iris bends them to. Maybe energy beyond heat and hunger, beyond the bone-filled body and its blood, the word-filled brain and its thought. The ledge or the altar? And I've never been able to figure out which. Is there a choice here as well?

Spilled prayers. Like puddles of milk at our feet. Walk around my body with slapping sounds. Smells sour in the mornings. But I don't believe in ears up above. All we can know is the stars. And don't they torture the small space of a skull with the relentless opening of infinity. We're better at closing. All alone in the universe, we invented fences. We talk across them always. Fences of teeth. Fences of bone, draped over with flesh, and then dressed in fabrics and leathers and bits of plastic and metal, but fences—still fences. And I can't help the spilt milk. I wait for the sounds of feet. If I could open my eyes the floor would figure out the equation of all these divisions. Maybe with eyes closed, it's better. Milk footprints crossing, into each and over, mapping out lines of trajectories from door to bed, and window, from the chair beside my bed, to a chart on the wall, machines on the other side of my bed, to the door again, leaving alone only the corners. Stepping into each other and through like the marks of restless spirits dancing with partners they never see in their own deaths, unsighted by fences and deafened by a music life makes in heartbeats and blood, breath and air, in the rattle and scrape of bones and skin. And so I spill and see it. I pray without the press of palms, and want you to hear me. The stars don't listen, but they know the truth. We have the ears. We know the spirits dancing across our floors are not dead, blind or deaf. The space of the skull is infinite. It is turned inside out. Filled with stars. They spill their prayers through us. Everything else moves, but I can listen.

I lie on the bed. I think. I dream. I lie on the bed.

There's a clock on the wall. I never know the time. But it ticks. The flat sound of worn grooves in a cheap clock. I wake up hearing it. It keeps me from sleeping. Forgetting it for periods of time is like some bliss I do not deserve. A reprieve of forgetfulness. But it never leaves me. Never stops its torment. For a while, maybe it was as long as a week, its battery ran out. I forgot all about it. But when the battery was replaced it was worse. And it will not recede now. I hear it ticking all the time. The flat sound of worn grooves in a cheap clock.

Outside there's the sound of birdsong. I forget the birds. I forget the ways they splinter out their diamond sounds through the crystal-clean air. How they open my spaces and reveal the vast canyons of dreams and forests of thought that have always belonged to a world more than a mind. Birdsong that reminds me to explore and wander and drift and allow it all to open and unravel. To unfold and uncrease and unblink in the darkness of the skull, and see where it leads. How it always returns to calling for the rising sun over the horizon and the blue freedom of the air we breathe. I forget the birds, and when I remember them, I want to keep them and fill myself with their singing. But I can't help it. I start listening to the worn-out grooves of that hospital clock instead.

End of one. One connects like a game of dominoes to You. You will move on through an open window as easily as a fly. A fly must know a torment a man can never imagine with a closed window, where it will die on a windowsill in driedout exhaustion, never being able to understand the nature of the invisible. Invisible to our eyes is how there never was a beginning of an end. End of one. One connects like a game of dominoes to you. You at the end.

I lie in bed and breathe. I sweat and I don't know why. I feel it in the wet of my clothes. The dampness on my chest. Life goes by in trickles as much as streams. As much a drip as a storm. We know oceans, but it's not true for our bodies. Water should be salt-free. Clean and clear. But there are puddles in the concrete only dogs drink from. It pools by the roadside for cars to spray through. Rusting drainpipes and roof gutters choked with leaves. Sewers below running with chthonic reflections. Water moans as much as it chortles. And what's true for bodies isn't true for souls. Who knows but that the salt in us is the only thing divine. Some trace element of the ocean. There's what we were before arms and legs. Before the taste of water, clean and clear. Where salt was always in the mouth and almost sweet, not something we excrete through our skin and call sweat. Because there's ocean in everything that crawls away over land. There's time in trickles as much as streams, and there's time that is salt. I lie in bed and sweat.

And I will not tell you of any of the dreams I had because I only remember the one. I was walking through the city. Walking for hours everywhere, with detail more nuanced than anything I would have noticed in life. Down Degraves Street, with people dressed in clothes all of their own choosing, eating different dishes, drinking and having their conversations like the words didn't come from my dreaming mind, suddenly knowing I needed to get somewhere within the next five minutes but it's slipped my mind where. I keep walking, hoping I'll remember, getting more and more frustrated, and worried by this inability to recall my destination. I walk out onto Flinders Street towards the corner of Swanston with an idea that if I see the clocks there on the outside of the station I'll know where I need to go. At least the time to go along with the ticking—finally. But when I get there, it starts to snow. At first flakes, and then more of it, covering everything in ice-white. Everyone going about their daily business as though this were nothing more unusual to them than to New Yorkers in winter. But I look around and I know, and then realise I'm in a dream, and that I know I'm dreaming. I look around at this world that's supposed to be the creation of my mind and I know it isn't. It's as much a part of the world as the Melbourne in which it never snows. Then I hear my alarm clock. I lean out of bed to switch it off. But I fall out of bed. There's no alarm clock and I'm in hospital. Awake.

It must have been a depression. It must have been mental illness. It must have been a loss of faith, even if I didn't believe in anything divine; didn't believe in a soul or any of those invisibles. Something that made sleep and dreams run from me like starved cattle rambling through the dust of inexplicable famine. Something that crept in with the half-bitten strawberry and champagne at euphoric meetings with clients signing their lives away, to us, for our visions of their market conquests. Something in those perfectly mapped plans for glittering futures, destinies that came wrapped in boxes with the ribbons of Empire and the skin of God. Something in those boxes. Something in the paper we spilled our promises over, our imaginations and our hunger for shared victories. Something in the complete sincerity with which we lied, and our total commitment, for years on end, to those sustaining lies. So, a depression or an illness of the mind, but I think, a loss of faith. A loss of some kind of substance. Because I could still find the ideas. I could kill with those ideas. Or I could make the helpless couch-crushed suburbanite pray for salvation with them. But it was a loss of something. Something in myself. First at work. In the lift every morning. Then in the evening as well. The round plastic numbers in their faded circles, ticking up and up like I was being raised and raised to ever higher levels, began to make me feel light-headed. The descent down and down into drowning vertigo. I stood outside the lifts and watched myself come and go, entering and leaving the booth and disappearing to reappear again most of a day later; all these people like me, ready to move into the booth as soon as I'd entered or left, to sit at my desk, to speak the same inane banter with my PA, to talk on the same phone, and to the same partners, or different ones, it didn't matter. The picture of the woman on the desk, the wife and the name, entering and leaving my bed with me, brushing her teeth in the mornings and evenings … could come back with someone else lying in her bed and barely blink. All of them, and everyone I knew, the same. Barely a blink. Looking in the mirror—it was there in that face as well. The pills in the bottle (useless pills that only managed to knock me out with a kind of throttling-hands effectiveness, when they didn't just half strangle and leave me feeling brain dead) were just as replaceable as anything else about me. Tomorrow the elevators would travel up and down with their cargo.

But all of that was yesterday.

And now everything makes sense. Everything is understood. But only in the ways it did before I got washed down the nowhere at the bottom of my skull. None of the spaces above or below open up anymore and there's little I can say for certain about any of it.

There are times, when I'm walking and when I'm driving, and when I'm eating, and when I'm waking or going to sleep, and when I'm talking, and when I'm sitting on the couch watching the tube, when I'm doing the washing, or getting the mail, when I'm pulling on socks, when I'm putting on shoes, when I turn my wrist to check my watch, and lift my sleeve to check my time, when I feel like I'd like to go back to the swirling sway of stars inside and their endless birdsong.

Maybe it's because there was a once-upon-a-time and a happily-ever-after in there. There were doors to paradise and gates to the underworld. There was substance. And there was something else.

VOICE OF THE BEE