Sunday, December 14, 2008

A Raga Called Milk and Honey

(These are excerpts. For the full story, contact Meanjin or write to me.)

…I stopped walking suddenly, my legs refusing to work in concert with the questions I now had of him, questions I knew there was no point in me asking: Justin, did they—? Who have they sent home instead? Didn’t we used to laugh at people who spoke like this, marooned in shopping centres with our parents? I turned away, half expecting him to crack up, telling me of the joke he’d mastered, so long in planning.

Most of his sentences took on that staccato pattern at first, as if he were suspended, frozen almost. The Institute had sent us a letter, telling us patients were encouraged to find their own way home. The letter said that hope was not to be abandoned, and illustrated this with a sun-drenched picture of a family lying on a picnic rug in a meadow. The children in the picture had skin the colour of whipped cream. None of them had red hair.

I took his forearm, which was cold and thin, and led him across the grass. I had faith, if not in the literature we had been sent at least in Justin, and believed that as he thawed sentences would come, and the life he had led alone across town in the building with the three stripes would unravel itself as we walked along.

But I was blank—nothing from our previous intimacy to find out how far-gone he was—You remember the time?—no mind of how to simply talk like brothers, lost but now reunited, young still, alive. How would such brothers talk? ecstatically? about everything possible? any thought that comes up? Topical things: new foods? pop trends? have you lost weight? You have lost so much weight—Could he even talk? So far, I had not heard a full coherent sentence, no acknowledgement that he even knew who I was.



I spent a lot of my youth hanging out at football games and suburban shopping centres making fun of retarded people. My friend Trav and I would take turns of being carer and patient, though I was usually the patient as I had a natural performing streak and Trav didn’t like to animate too much in public. My name was usually Sebastian and I veered between cerebral palsy and a peculiar condition of my own creation—a sloppy mixture of saliva, atrophy and barely concealed laughter. We shaped people’s sympathies into an endlessly renewable theatre that celebrated our health and good fortune. It lasted for about a year. I was found out one day walking to the milk bar, thinking how well I had the impression down, when a shabby man in his thirties looked straight into my eyes and told me a number of things about myself I hadn’t yet slowed down enough to realise. I had never since impersonated a retarded person. They fill me, these days, with a quiet sadness.

It was out of frustration, I think, that I started singing to him, on a street corner in front of an auto-parts factory as the clouds rolled in politely, one after another. I had asked enough questions to know from his responses that we would not be talking, or at least not in the way where any sense would be made of his absence. I tried to speed up the song, to sing it tunefully and beautifully, because it reminded me of Justin and was the only song that came to mind. I started singing about the cycle of the seasons, about milk and honey and gold and silver, making up words in the chorus where the tape had rendered the singer’s pipes a ship’s horn, all fog and reverb. I was singing, even though my head was blank, about Justin, and the fact we had walked some five miles and were way out of our neighbourhood, down by the docks where we were never meant to go. I have a terrible voice, but hearing me Justin stopped his twitching and grabbed my arm and made us both stop. He was beautiful when he stood still. His ginger hair was re-emerging from the colourless base of the severe crew cut he’d been given, and it matched the colour where the whites of his eyes should have been…

Originally printed in Meanjin, Volume 65, No.2, 2006 (reprinted in Cardigan Press Anthology Allnighter, also in 2006)

Recently

• • F#A#Infinity
  • A story about drones and synaesthesia and Tasmania, originally published in NY journal Ballyhoo Stories, and nominated for the 2005 Pushcart Prize. There's more.
• • A Raga Called Milk and Honey
  • Originally published in Meanjin, A Raga Called Milk and Honey is a story of a brother's return home from a mental institution, and how we sing along to ruined cassettes. There's more.
• • Into Advertising
  • Originally published in Australian/U.K. experimental writing journal Total Cardboard, this story looks at the effect of advertising on long-term mental health. There's more.