Quipu (30 page)

“We’ll have a bloody newkyular explosion if they keep that up.”

“No, the Simulation randomizer has changed the matrix. That’s a small segment of a brain you’re seeing now.”

“Hey, this is good,” the cameraman says too loudly. Grant taps his own unencumbered ear. “Oh. Listen, see if you can get some sound for yourself. Skyhooks.”

“Shit, I should have thought of that,” Marjory says. She dashes from the room. After a moment the function hall’s acoustics come alive with thundering rock.

“They’re brains?” Grant yells

“Neurons. And neurotransmitters going back and forth between them. This is a simulation of drug action. Those people with the bright red hats represent brain chemicals like norepinephrine and acetylcholine that control messages to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.”

“What, inside your head?”

“And your body. It’s a pity we’re not down there, you can’t get the fine detail from this distance. There are codes for the different transmitters—dopamine, serotonin, GABA, the endorphins, ACTH.”

“Good Christ!” Grant turns from the window, digs into his shirt pocket for a Camel, blows horrible smoke in Joseph’s eyes. “Last time we met you were on the bludge. What have you done, a brain surgeon’s course?

“If you must know, I’ve been teaching myself Samoan.”

“Go on. Say something.”

“My pronunciation’s probably terrible.”

Grant grins. “I won’t let on.”

“E a pe a ta sisiva.” To his shame, Marjory returns at this moment. She smirks at him.

“What’s it mean?”

Joseph blushes, looks out the window at the dancers, in time to see the psychoactive drugs coming in from the outer boundaries of the mind’s fleshy world, through the blood-brain barrier, into Caroline’s poor battered brain to soothe the whirling violence of her own hopelessly fucked-up interior communications. Neat and ordered as a commercial. Hugging the cross-checked receptors beyond the synaptic cleft, the major tranquillizers block off the buzzing, eager transmitters.

The manic Skyhooks record stops dead; Lou Reed drones. Oh Jesus, she was Caroline, too.

In go the antidepressants, spinning and slowing, gripping hands together in a barrier at the vesicle source of the transmitters, norepinephrines and serotonins straggling back from their journey across the synapse, exhausted, seeking oblivion but blocked against absorption by this tricyclic wall. So away they go once more, jittering clowns juggling their messages of phoney glee across the abyss. And now their return journey is hazardous with monsters, bizarre Chinese masks a decade out of date.

“Shit, Grant,” the admiring cameraman reports, “there’s three bloody Chairman Maos down there.”

The transmitters quail, menaced by MAOs. Not a moment too soon the Marines arrive, Green Berets to inhibit these impertinent interlopers. Joseph smiles at Wagner’s lunatic contribution to the simulation schema. Who else would embody monoamine oxidase inhibitors so grossly? And the neurotransmitters are free, carrying their wretched counter-revolutionary messages across the gulf of the synapse and into the brain, into the soul, into the damaged crazy heart. If this is true, Joseph tells himself at last, if this is true, if all that jabbering Freud and Laing and Lacan is finally just the froth on the churned soup of neurotransmitters, the tread on a tire whose wheel and axle are broken from the motor, why, then Caroline was the victim of her neurochemistry after all, as are we all, nudged and pushed by peptides a few dozen or hundred atoms long, atoms made of dumb whirring quarks and their color-drunk gluons, everything skeining in a vacuum of babbling lacy rushing hiss, no tachyons, no block universe of destiny and destination, a gabble of GABA, a hawking of quarks, transmitters with no senders and receptors governed only by the clever mechanisms of inert chance. You can go anywhere in a universe like that, Joseph tells himself in a blazing rush. Caroline was right. You can get a ticket and go. Just go.

“It means
Feel like a dance?
” he tells the interviewer, balder now than in 1975 but chunkier, more macho if such a thing is possible.

“Not with you, mate.” Grant places his hand once more on Marjory’s shoulder. “Not with you.”

“Ua lapo’a le pe’a i lo le mogamoga,” Joseph mutters. “Aua tou te fa’amasino atuina ne’i fa’amasinoina outou.” He leaves them to it.

A DOG’S WIFE

…one

On the evening of our last day together, Spot and I ventured into Puerto Rican midtown. Drugs dealers conveyed their wares and their opinions to others of their kind on every corner. One in every four of these corners held a dilapidated French restaurant striving to sustain identity and solvency. Young men struggled past us under the load of their gigantic quadraphonic portable sound systems. Spot danced with pleasure; this milieu was not alien to his roots. It pleased him to strut beside me, a streetwise kelpie in Hell’s Kitchen.

“Ghetto blasters,” he told me, as one kid bopped past in a drench of Hispanic pop. It was a phrase I had never heard before. The acoustic values were sensational. “Third world briefcase,” he said, with a yip of amusement. The Walkman craze had not breached the
barrio;
it came to me that these unfortunates genuinely needed the joint benefits of conspicuous consumption and enhanced personal presence. A news report roared in our ears, simulcast from two swarthy youths passing us in opposite directions, creating a disturbing illusion of dopplered spin.

Whining abruptly, Spot crouched with his ears pricked, swinging his head from side to side in a manner which recalled (I say with some shame) the mascot on His Master’s Voice recordings.

“Los astronautas Joe Engle y Richard Truly visitaron ayer el trasbordador espacial
Columbia
y dijeron que todo luce ‘bellisimo’ y en perfecto estado para el lanza miento de mañana,” the reporter said rapidly, “siempre que el tiempo lo permita.”

1983: punctuated equilibrium

Joseph takes the slow elevator, puts his life in risk crossing Queen’s Road. At ground level Melbourne is disgusting. Early summer tawdry, old
Herald
s blowing along the gutter, a miasma of stoned gloom seeping from Fitzroy Street with its hundred child prostitutes, its five hundred hapless twitching junkies, its drab poets and drunks and dreary fuck movies and greasy souvlakia joints and the flat sea at the end of it. Just go.

At the edge of the oval he watches, sun crushing down in his eyes, as Ray’s astonishing simulation segues through its modes, its holonistic transforms. The hike dancers are glazed with sweat but some impulse keeps them there, some intuition of a primal order in things. Joseph’s admiration for the wit, even the splendor of the strange game cannot disguise from him his final severance. Now the core dancers have become
B
lymphocytes, primary genetic source of antibody resistance to invasion. Funny how that theme comes up over and over. Viral intruders surge in, each with its antennae, its color coding of antigen proteins. Now they clash, they do one another cruel damage, and at last the sinister doomed mating is consummated, a single fated stochastic lethal romance between antigen and antibody, the antibody one of a million variants laid up in advance by a lottery of internal genetic shuffling, and now the victorious antibody clones its own message, defender of faith and home, and transmits itself a hundredfold, in symbol at least on this tired plot of grass, a thousand, a millionfold, a carnivorous beast of hungry proteins unleashed by host against dying overwhelmed invader.

And the randomizer clicks; the drooping dancers reach for Cokes, for rolls thick with rancid ham, fatty burgers and souvlakia dripping with yoghurt, lukewarm water in plastic jugs, anything to keep them to the simulation under the sun. Already, barely refreshed, they are into a new and higher level of the life spiral, the contest of the genes, selfish and altruistic, shuffling their cards in a game of stable Mendelian strategies, the theory of games worked out in a dance of murder and parish-pump sociality, God damn, the swinging equilibrium between dove and hawk, strategies vying and falling in their embodied genes and genes in their embodied bodies, levels on levels, holons out of holons, retaliators gentle as doves unless attacked, then brutal as hawks, bullies passing themselves as hawks but fading at the test, the scientist of genes, the venture capitalist of genes, the prober-retaliator…How much of this makes sense to the watchers, let alone the viewers who’ll get five minutes if they’re lucky on
Four Corners
or
Sunday Magazine
or
60 Minutes
or whoever bloody Grant Moore is pulling his fifty thousand bucks from these days, and all they’ll make of it is a bunch of stupid bastards who waste their time with that bloody stupid elitist Mensa rubbish.

Marjory’s scent reaches him as her arms go around his waist from behind. “I think it’s just about over.”

“Yes.” He touches her hand, squeezes her fingers lightly. “Ray should be tickled pink, it’s gone off beautifully.”

She releases him, stands at his side leaning on the wooden fence. Music blows across the flattened grass. The sound system down here is not nearly as effective as the acoustics in the function room. “What did it mean, Joseph?”

“The Samoan?” He looks her in the eye. “An old proverb.
A flying-fox is bigger than a cockroach.
”

“Oh.” She blinks, looks across the field, waves to her husband as he comes toward them from the middle of the oval. The simulation has finished. Hikes wander off in twos and threes, picking up their trash, their discarded clothing. The field is littered with fragments of color coding. “That’s a big step for a man from Brunswick.”

“Have to go sometime, lovely.”

“Yes.” She turns and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. “We’ll give you a big send-off. And the other bit?”

“What?” Joseph is confused. From the corner of his eye he sees Ray Finlay’s frown, his slow smile.

“It couldn’t all have been about cockroaches, they’d spend the whole day talking.”

“I can’t tell you, it’d excite Ray’s Christianity.”

“Whisper it in my ear.”

Joseph whispers it in her ear. “
The greatest of these is love
.”

A DOG’S WIFE

…lift-off

My breast became suffused with awful foreboding. I had seen that look in Spot’s eye before, under a dust of stars hurled into heaven with a mad jeweler’s abandon.

“Space,” he cried. “Boojum, the final frontier.”

“Please don’t call me that,” I begged him, down on my knees on the broken, urine-dank sidewalk, arms about his straining neck. “If you must employ a diminutive, I much prefer ‘Jinny’.”

“The spirit bloweth whither it listeth,” said my husband, as he quivered and shivered in the epiphany of his hunger, and I knew that I had lost him at last, lost him to the call of the wild.

caroline’s flight

Late spring, her jet roaring into the bright afternoon, nearly summer, rising, turning above the undisturbed bottle-green landlocked harbor waters, long white ribs of surf seaward of the heads.

In her seat, next to Lanie, she grins.

Look at the bloody roofs.

Yeah.

The plain of domesticity yields to the Blue Mountains, to the endless primary yellows and reds. Hour after hour. They hang in the long bright padded aluminum tube reading
Time
and drinking free brandies and tonic. The dinner trolley reaches them.

Plastic food, Caroline says, gagging.

This isn’t the Town House, my dear.

She trances out, looking down ten thousand meters for the unknown land of her birth.

Hey, it’s gone.

That’s the Timor Sea, Lanie tells her.

Its white streaks.

And clouds, the day’s first.

In the gathering twilight Java is dark green. Abrupt, between cloud banks. The engines drop an octave. The long glide to the sweating Singapore night.

In the taxi they sit half dazed, watching the bicycles, the towering blocks of flats Band-Aided with washing, the milling Chinese and Malay faces. Crazy with his horn, their driver brakes and surges through the crowds. They zip inches from bird-thin Chinese in tattered singlets perched over bowls of soup at street stalls. Cauldron steam glows incandescent under the pressure lamps.

Christ, it’s humid.

It
is
the tropics, you know.

At the dark end of a minor street they stop. Four shillings each a night, they’ve been told by the student travel agent. The Chinese hotel is clean, simple, proof of the paranoid righteousness of Lee Kwan Yew’s capitalist utopia.

While Lanie goes to the lavatory down the hall, empty Caroline fishes a leather pouch from her waist. Passport, health certificate, book of traveler’s checks. Photograph.

Joseph sits at his desk, indoors, at night, his typewriter pushed to one side, playing with one of his cats. Kitten, really. Caroline shifts the photograph into better light. Her arm still aches from the cholera shots. The kitten sits on an open book, blurring a paw at Joseph’s admonitory finger. Half in darkness, half in light, his lips smile with mock rebuke at the animal. In her mouth and stomach, Caroline tastes tangible loneliness.

Hungry?

Not really.

Still, Lanie insists, we should have a look at things

Hand in hand they take the high, cluttered pavement past shuttered shop fronts and tiled walls until the way is blocked by a pile of bicycles, a mother feeding her baby. Instead of a gutter, they must jump a two-meter-deep trench. Dodge trishaws, motor bikes, pass plaited bamboo garbage bins, to the brighter end of the street.

Noodles?

Okay.

There are two street stalls.

We could sit in the café.

Fans like plane propellers turn slowly over circular marble tables. In one corner a fire burns in an earthenware pot, and over it in a shallow iron bowl a fat Chinese woman turns and mixes fragrant alien food. A few customers sit here already, staring without seeing at the besuited politicians on the walls, listening without hearing to the radio and the street noise.