THE OPTOMETRIST DOESN’T MAKE A FUSS about the replacement charts. She asks Jovan to get rid of them. Specifically, she asks for the pile of them to be incinerated. He nods, says “no problem.”
The optometrist is a woman getting old quietly as much as gracefully. She doesn’t colour the silver streaks through her black, shoulder-length hair. There is a drift to the way she moves around her self-contained office. A delicate and precise focus about how she puts her hands to the equipment within it. Her patients come and go without disturbing anything. Without the usual troubles that they carry with them into the rest of the hospital.
It isn’t the kind of work a dentist does, which is all gums and pain, clamps and drills, blood and spit. The only thing that ever needs to touch a person is the bridge piece of the Optical Refractor, the immense apparatus she swings around her calmly seated patients. She asks a gentle question with the slightest click of her gears and dials. “Worse or better?” are words she uses hundreds of times every week, and she enjoys their simplicity. The basic, clear improvement of someone’s vision. “Sharper or fuzzier?”
The Cogito eye charts have no place in her world.
They are almost identical to the actual eye charts and striking from a technical point of view. The numbers along the sides the optometrist uses to gauge visual acuity, the card that it is printed on, rather than thin paper. Even the made in USA at the bottom. It doesn’t matter because she knows they are wrong instantly. Every single random letter on each eye chart she can recite by heart. Has been doing so for thirty years already.
Her name is Miss Richards. She is known as such by everyone from Jovan to the Chief of Medicine. Miss Richards smiles at most of the hospital staff when she passes them in the halls, and mostly they smile back. She doesn’t think about who it might have been, of these people passing her daily—one of them going to such an effort to create fake eye charts. Miss Richards knows it isn’t a message for her. She thinks it’s more or less random.
There’s a large bin outside her office and it’s emptied every day. Jovan wonders why Miss Richards didn’t dispose of the charts herself, as he takes them away. Instead, she uses the word “incinerate” twice, as though it’s not enough that they be thrown away. They had to be incinerated.
—
JOVAN PUTS UP one of the modified eye charts on the inside of his locker door and stares at it as he changes into his overalls. He understands the Latin, it takes him a while longer to work out the anagrams in plain English. For one thing he’d never heard of an ogre (the OED tells him it is a man-eating giant) and didn’t know what gore meant initially, though he’d seen enough to know the difference between it and a bloody wound.
Another janitor, called Bill, tells him he’s the only man he’s ever seen study for an eye test and then laughs as if that’s about the best joke he’s heard all year. He repeats it every time he comes into the change rooms and guffaws. Elaborates by asking Jovan if he also studies for breath tests when he’s driving home. And he must be studied up by now for a blood test. Or has he prepared sufficiently to go into the staff cafeteria today and see if the new lunch menu passes the taste test? Does he think that if he goes to watch Australia play South Africa in the cricket that he’ll pass that test? Jovan isn’t sure what he’s talking about. It’s getting more and more absurd. Jovan doesn’t take the eye chart down from his locker door.
The rest of the eye charts are at the bottom of his locker, beneath his sneakers. Almost all the eye charts are the same. There is one that wasn’t the Cogito. It repeated itself a number of different ways, reading in disorientating upside-down letters with this message:
Do You know Me
Do You know
Do You
Do
I
Jovan closes his locker. There’s a space in his life these messages fill. It isn’t that he thinks they’re profound. He finds them interesting. It’s a shame they have been made by a madman, because that worries Jovan—having these insane messages floating around in his head.
The right thing to do is what the optometrist has done. Ignore these messages as though they are the million and one words leaping out at everyone, from every angle, countless times every day. The advertising, graffiti, brand names of clothes, newspaper headlines, all the bare-knuckled words that keep hitting with as much force as can be mustered by the cunning of their multitudinous authors.
Jovan isn’t doing that. He’s wondering why a man would say that he thinks and therefore he knows he’s not alive. When the graffitist wrote I Go Cog, was he saying that any kind of thought made him a gear in the greater machinery of language, that he himself didn’t own? Within the apparatus of the Optical Refractor itself, unable to simply be, because he can’t see without the words that had been flooding through his mind from numberless sources, since before he’d even conceived of a self who might express being as idea.
Jovan knows he’s overthinking it. Who knows what goes through a madman’s head? Who’d want to? Jovan knows about Gore and about the Ogre. He also understands that when it comes to being alive, to feeling it, thinking doesn’t mean shit.
He yearns to be the same as Miss Richards, with her headphones plugged into her ears, her book before her eyes, ignoring as much of the clamouring world as she possibly can. He contemplates the image of her doing that, swaying in the rapidly moving train, as it shudders through graffiti-ridden tunnels and overpasses, splashed-out images from billboards and signs, swaying her head ever so slightly as the bodies in motion and voices in chattering profusion pass over the clear reflective surfaces of her indifference.
He sees her doing that in the cafeteria often enough, sitting over her meal, placidly munching away on the wholesome home-cooked food she always brings along with her, plugged into her music, and her own chosen words screening her face, and she seems so self-contained and unstained. Until he realises that he himself has been that way long enough. That he’s his own version of a sealed jar, and that maybe this is the first time in years he has felt himself being twisted open.
Jovan knows that the optometrist might be nothing as he imagines. She rarely speaks, so he finds himself looking for clues. Dr. Graffito is nothing but clues and yet Jovan can’t imagine him walking around the hospital, caring for patients.
As he lifts a mop off its hook on the wall and rinses out a filthy bucket, he wonders if people might be little more than products of their professions. Mr. X-Ray drives home and feels the crush in the screech of brakes a hundred metres away and lives with the intimacy of loved ones being smashed and broken. The optometrist’s world gets dimmer and darker, filled with more and more of the indecipherable all around her. For Jovan, now and until death, a janitor (a “cleaner” as they say in this country) there will be nothing other than deepening waste and grime. Perhaps that’s the reason he never puts his thoughts down on paper anymore. And yet what kind of person burns words into plates, cuts letters into cadavers, paints messages in stairwells almost no one uses, carefully creates eye charts? Dr. Graffito passes people in the corridors, smiling and saying hello.
Jovan walks down to the delivery room. Pushes his mop and bucket along, leaving the sharp smell of cleaning product along the halls of the hospital. The grid pattern on the plastic floors is three tones of a comforting grey. He’s already been warned what’s awaiting him in the birthing room. It seems a kind of medieval event, yet some women still die in childbirth, bleeding out through a birthing wound. He dwells on the grid pattern of broad, grey rectangular shapes. Squares also cut into the ceiling. Pictures along the walls. Photographs of the many happy mothers who have come through these same corridors. Their offspring as well, not even babies yet. They could hardly be called infants. Exorcised embryos. New, trembling, half-blown balloons of life.
A gory entry to the world for someone, whatever you wanted to call it, in the birthing room. Blood and faecal matter on the floor below the table. A silver bucket kicked over in the desperate panic of a dying mother. This is what Dr. Graffito means by gore. Many of the clean soft white towels and sheets not now clean or white. Bundles of paper towelling scattered across the ground in wet, brown-red splotches.
A devastated nurse bustles past Jovan, leaving the room with an air of evacuation and disaster. It’s odd to see a professional nurse so affected that she’s scrambling to get somewhere quick, some place to release her sobs into weeping. It reminds him of the time he saw a policeman crying. A world-weary cop, with perhaps twenty years of investigating theft, murder, and rape—in uniform and standing on a busy street—crying. Tears and an open mouth. Outside a newsstand in Sarajevo with the headline in his hands declaring war.
Two clocks on the wall. One the time in the outside world beyond this windowless room and the other the time in this room. Stopped at sixteen hours and twenty minutes. A long fight, particularly if you weighed each of those minutes for what they were. Not at all the same kinds of minutes as those that passed when waiting for a train at a station. Not those passing through the night as you slept.
There’s an armchair beside the birthing bed and its pillows. The space about the distance of two hands reaching out to grip and grapple. There’s blood on that chair too. It would need to be cleaned after the floor was done. It has the kind of heavy-wearing material made to deal with human blood and other stains.
Jovan raises and releases the mop, watching for the right amount of steam and foam. He places his foot on the pedal to squeeze out the water he doesn’t need. Brings out the mop and pushes it through the mess of this birth.
There is an entry. There is an exit. There is the escape of cold pierced skin. There is the seal of flushed flesh. Never to remember that first crowning coming into light. Never to know that last drawing away. There is the long loving sigh of the in-between…
“What are you thinking?” the dentist asks him, closing the door behind her. Locking it. The blood on the floor has gone a bright red again, mixing with his foamy water. It is diffused and easily ignored.
“You’d have to call that a profound light in your eye,” Tammie Ashford says with a mocking tone, that doesn’t quite mock. As though she’s willing to accept that he’s capable of deep thought, if she was able to acknowledge that he had any thoughts at all. She often speaks to him as to her own imagination—a tool for her sexual fantasies. She leaves her heels at the door and walks to him barefooted across the wet floor.
“There’s something about you with that mop in your hands, the way you wield it like a weapon, the blood at your feet.” She stands before him. Close. Doesn’t touch. “We’ve got to get you out of those overalls. These mundane overalls.” She tugs at his shoulder strap. She perches on the birthing bed. Pulls back her skirt.
She’s a pretty woman. It surprises Jovan that she acts this way. Beauty doesn’t need to behave like this. And yet it was because of it. Her bare feet had been placed in the watery blood, and now her heels drip with it. Jovan gets a towel to clean her feet and wishes he could leave it at that. That he could close her legs and plant a chaste kiss on her misguided forehead.
He could imagine how all this mixed in the hungry imagination of Tammie Ashford and worked closer to the bone, tearing open her anaesthetised layers of mind to get to a core of pulsing life, where she could feel something primal and actual. Her lips pull away from her bright white teeth.
He asks, “This word. Ogre? Do you know what means?”
“What?” She really doesn’t hear him, but the heavy words spoken with his crude accent struggle through. “A monster, I suppose,” she says, watching his immense hands clean her small feet, the pulse at her throat beginning to visibly beat. She places both hands around his neck, his head, her fingers through his hair. Tries to pull his head down. He won’t bend. Won’t do that; not for her. She grits her teeth and feels an impulse to tear out his eyes, to reach into his mouth and pull his tongue out—some impossible act of destruction.
“Monster yes. What kind?” he asks.
Again the words are slow and heavy. Her blood is so loud. Her heart is so fucking desperate. She has to watch his lips move to hear him.
“I don’t know. Some type of monster.” Opens herself up to grind naked and raw against the hard fabric of his dark blue work clothes.
“He is the giant. Eating human meat. You did not know this?”
“All monsters eat people. Wouldn’t be much of a monster if it didn’t.” Wanting more of his stupid words to fill her mouth, his brutal rock-crushing hands to reach inside her and ease her heart out for a bite from his crooked teeth, yellow in a slight diastema. She leans her head back, becoming breathless. “You should know, some of us taste good.”
Jovan looks down, standing in the blood he’s supposed to be cleaning, and feels revolted—impelled by his body. He allows her hands to pop open the front of his overalls, button by button. Her hungry mouth reaches up for his neck. Her teeth, perfect and white. Breath beginning to rush and moan. There’s anger in the hand that takes hold of the back of her hair and pulls her head away, and hunger in the mouth that comes down on that clean smooth pale skin rushing through with moaning blood.
She pushes him away as he gets close, and drops her feet to the floor, turns around and has him enter her another way. A different kind of revulsion now, blistering with heat breaking through them both, rippling fevers of violent energy. Leaving them barely able to stand. Out of breath. Out of thoughts or words. Out of everything and now just dead for a few seconds.
One of the two clocks ticks out into the room. They begin to move in silence and then to the sound of their recovered breathing. Jovan doesn’t know why but he tells her the word “vampire” originally came from the Serbs. It’s true, yet she looks at him as if she should have been gone five minutes ago and this little bit of trivia is more than a waste of time.
“Why do you always feel compelled to talk after fucking?” He doesn’t respond. “Isn’t fucking enough for you?” He shrugs into his overalls. She refastens her bra. She fixes her hair. She straightens her shirt. Flattens her dress. She says, “He came from Transylvania, didn’t he?”
Jovan has finished dressing. Moves towards his mop again. “Dracula is not same thing. This is one story by the Irish man.” She gives him a shake of the head that should vaporise him and all his words as sudden sunlight for the damned in this windowless room. Leaves without saying another word. Light and ready to live again.
That revulsion grows stronger in Jovan after Tammie is gone. So much of what happens shouldn’t happen. There is a kind of helplessness that we learn, he thinks. A helplessness that is bred into us from the very earliest moments of our lives and the world goes on happening in ways that it should or shouldn’t. There is an illusion of a clean bright room where it is all laid out for us and we get to make our choices, say “yes, this will be good,” or say “no, I do not want to do that.” The room these choices present themselves in is windowless; airless and without light. With more than one clock on the wall the one for the outside world hardly matters. The other clicks on beyond twenty-four hours into calculations that can’t be understood anymore. The tick, part of a cacophony of clicking, as though this room is full of watches and timepieces and grandfather clocks with swinging metal pendulums and cuckoo-clocks with opening doors and a helpless little yellow bird, popping out and announcing, “do this” and “do that.”
He pushes his mop. He picks up his bucket. He lets the water run down a sink. Washes down the foam. Thinks about the pain in his jaw. Locates the fear somewhere in his stomach, almost nothing at all now. He knows that’s not true. It wants to rise and fill his chest with black feathers, desperate to lift the top of his head off with screeching released in full-throated screams.
Clean virginal snow, a disguise for the Blue Sky, in love with its floating White Angels, draped over the everything below of Shambling Feet, burying all in the heavy Broken Beneath.
He has been overcome before. No matter how much time passes he knows it is there, that it will descend and lay a heavy blanket of suffocation over him again. He has tried to think his way out. He has tried to allow it to wash away; ease it through to nothing. It persists, perches on a cornice of his brain, glaring down on his mind like a gargoyle. A different kind of monster. Not a flesh-eater at least. This one, a devourer of peace and soul, memories, sleep, and dreams.
There was another time he saw blood on the floor. He saw it cleaned away with mops. Something else to be washed away. He’d watched the way it was done with a clear simple expression that looked at it all and understood it and cleaned it away, as if what needed to be done could be accepted and it could be carried without crushing the soul or mutilating the mind.
The same eyes that came to his low metal cot and the same hands that removed his pyjamas and cleaned the bloody diarrhoea from his helpless legs and trembling spine, and smiled at him afterwards as if there was nothing in the world to be ashamed of in any of this.
A nurse with a name: Dragana Mihailovich. A mother of three dead boys. One daughter, alive and safely in London, who sent her letters every day. Which Dragana couldn’t get because they went to her address in Sarajevo. They were waiting for her, those messages. She knew that. A Muslim neighbour collected her mail, and when it was possible would send another parcel of messages on to Dragana, at the ever-moving camp. There were pictures in those letters, of her grandchildren, and there were those delightful, painful glimpses, resemblances to her brave, lost sons.
A human being is made. Made by the world. And made to go on, even after these kinds of losses. She must have been speaking more for herself than for Jovan, drifting as he was, closer to death by the hour. He can’t remember her voice anymore. He remembers her form, the permanent hunch in her shoulders like she wanted to be closer to the ground. As though there was nothing in the world above the shoulders she could possibly be interested in. Huge breasts as if she could have breastfed grown men. The way she wore black instead of nurse-white, saying white was a luxury this part of the world couldn’t afford. She always carried a whiff of bleach. She talked as she cleaned him. Basic words that were anything but simple. Saying that the course of human evolution was a blind walk, through a long, long cave, littered with human bones that we stumbled across; that we kept walking over, thinking that we would reach the end of the long tunnel—eventually we will all sit. “Don’t worry my darling,” she said. We will rest and let ourselves part at the ribs, unfold our vertebrae, and let our skulls roll along at the feet of those continuing to move along to the end of the tunnel. He can’t remember what she said and he knows these weren’t her words. Only that refrain, “don’t worry my darling” remained distinct. Something she must have said to her sons countless times as she raised them from their cradles, and went on saying until all meaning had been exhausted and the words barely meant anything and she could say them to the sick and wounded she cared for without payment or thanks—to Jovan and the rest of the patients she didn’t need names for. “Don’t worry my darling,” she murmured, as she adjusted Jovan’s limbs from contorted positions and lifted his blanket to his chin when he shivered. A hand on his forehead. Even the end of the world was a part of human evolution, “Don’t worry my darling.”
The water finished gurgling down the drain minutes ago. Whistling along the corridor outside pulls him out of his reverie. The footsteps come and go, the happy tune with them. Jovan washes his hands. Washes his face. Can still smell Tammie’s perfume on himself as he walks out of the clean birthing room. Looks into his mind for some poetry. Finds none. Nothing but the fluttering feel of glossy black feathers rising ruthlessly through his intestines.
—
AN ELDERLY PATIENT comes in Tuesday morning to see Miss Richards. While she runs him through the usual lenses to cope with deteriorating vision, he complains about letters appearing before his eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of it. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe because Mr. Donaldson has difficulty explaining things at times. She tells him anxiety, or various emotional states, can affect how well the eyes worked. So they can reschedule and he won’t be charged for this appointment. He leaves mumbling about that damned contraption of hers doing diabolical things to his head.
Miss Richards sits in the chair and swings the Optical Refractor around to look through his last lens. There’s a letter scratched into the lens itself. A very small, very precise letter T in the middle of the glass. She swings the machine around. Finds the next lens in the series has a letter also scratched into the lens—a capital R. Scratched isn’t the right word. Engraved is better. They are exact. It is the same blockish font as the Snellen eye charts she used. When she lines up all the lenses on her small desk she finds the message reads:
TEST TO DESTRUCTION
It is a term used in medicine. Manufacturers use it more commonly. If they develop a new design for something, perhaps a brake pad, they need to work out what its response to the stress of its function is. The way to test full tolerance is a test to destruction. So she knows what it means though she has no idea what this vandal wanted to say by it. She throws those lenses away. Checks all her other lenses. Finds nothing else. Miss Richards orders replacements and arranges for new locks to be put on her doors.
The first thing she does the next few mornings, when she comes in, is check her charts. Goes through all her lenses carefully. Sometimes more than once a day. She calls Jovan to make sure the eye charts were incinerated.
—
JOVAN ENJOYS READING the local rags more than the proper newspapers. He is amazed that someone has caught a massive barracouta off Frankston Pier. Every time he’s walked up and down it, the fishermen, with their three or four rods each, seem so hopelessly fishless—sitting forlornly against the wooden railing with lines slack in the shiftless waters.
Last week on the front page there was a picture of a tall, lanky youth, with a stretched out, crooked smile—his two-metre-long barracouta beneath it. Jovan examines his smile in this newspaper image and wonders what it was about the big fish that made William Hay feel so joyous. He’d merely cast a hook in the water. A fish had sniffed out the little bit of bait and thought it could eat it. Fell for the deception. Was William Hay a man happy because his little trick had paid off so handsomely, or was there a larger feeling of cosmic blessing he felt on Frankston Pier?
This week the local rag had a picture of the watercooler near radiology with the tape Jovan had put around it and the senseless words above the image: Origin of the Species.
Jovan reads the article. An interview with a local psychologist and Frankston-based writer who is good for a few quotes as well as the appearance of some solid research done.
David Dickens opined that from what he’d been shown of the graffitist currently pestering the Sandringham Hospital there was a frustrated artist at work in all of it. He also stated that this should not be underestimated as a cause of the mental illness widespread in our society.
Jovan folds the paper up again. His break is almost over. He spends the last few minutes thinking about the young man who caught a big fish. A barracouta resembles a small dinosaur. It’s strangely long and thin and its jaws have miniature alligator teeth. Jovan had never been fishing but he would enjoy catching an Australian barracouta from Frankston Pier—when it dangled from a line held in his outstretched arm, still alive and flapping.
An odd bit of data floats into his mind about how the early Christians didn’t use the crucifix as the central symbol of their faith. It had been the fish, a representation of the soul in the ocean of the Holy Spirit. Everyone has scraps of mythology in their minds, and it’s probably foolish to spend more than a few seconds considering them, yet he does enjoy the idea of a barracouta soul.
—
IN THE AFTERNOON Jovan carries leaking green bags of refuse from the kitchen to the skip a few metres from the back door. One breaks open and spills out onto the hot asphalt. He’s swearing at it, and at the thought that he’ll have to clean this mess up now, when he finds that a bald man has materialised behind him.
He’s watching Jovan quietly, listening to Serbian profanities. He smells of incense and wears the kind of Indian apparel you can buy in the stores that sell that incense. It’s a strange fashion some people wear in Australia. Back in Bosnia the poorest wouldn’t have worn it. Even Gypsies would have ridiculed it.
Jovan picks up the pile of bones and rice and carrot, all soaked in gravy and a variety of unknowable juices. Strides away from the man to the mini skip. He walks to the kitchen with the man following him. He washes the putrid stink off his hands, applying the pink liquid soap three times before he is satisfied. Cleans beneath his fingernails with a dishwashing brush. It’s not only the odour. It smells noxiously of the rotting chicken flesh he’d found in the mess and Jovan has been paranoid in the extreme ever since he’d suffered through food poisoning back in Bosnia. The word alone, Salmonella, feels toxic in his mouth and ears.
He shakes the water from his hands in one big wave from elbows through wrists to fingertips and looks at the man patiently waiting for Jovan to finish. The bald fellow is wearing small round glasses. He lifts his right hand as if to clear his mouth before speaking, then doesn’t get the chance to talk because Prasad, the kitchen’s chef, has stepped between them to tell Jovan to go help the delivery man bring in a large shipment of frozen meats hanging in his truck.
“Not my job,” Jovan tells him.
Prasad is dumbfounded, blinks it away, and says in a rising voice practised at throwing around orders, “Your job is what I tell you. You go and help him. Now.”
“Not my job proscription. Kitchen not my job. Hospital is my job.”
“What do you mean? The kitchen is part of the hospital.” He speaks in an accent that makes Jovan think it’s an attempt at posh English, that gets carried away with some Indian flowery vowel sounds.
“Part of this job. Not part of you,” Jovan says flatly as he shakes his hands one more time over the sink and uses a towel he keeps in his back pocket.
“What the bleeding hell are you talking about? Part of this? Part of that? Do you understand basic directions?” Prasad leans forward without moving his feet. Jovan starts towards the door and the small, pot-bellied chef is quick to dance out of his way. Jovan walks out the door with the silent man still following him.
“My name is David Dickens,” he says, as they walk towards the next cleanup request that came through on Jovan’s pager fifteen minutes ago. A woman’s waters have broken in the lobby. When Jovan hears the name he stops and turns towards him. “I’m told you’re the man to speak to regarding the graffiti. Because you’re the man that cleans it all away. And I found myself interested in the watercooler that was in the Bayside Bugle.”
“Yes, and you this psychologist they ask to understand him.” The man nods without really hearing. Intent on following a set of sentences he’s already prepared. “It seems interesting what he’s doing. I’ve been told he used his own blood to write a message on the walls of the operating room. I was interested in what the message was.”
“The dots in his blood. Maybe his blood. Maybe from somewhere else.”
“What dots?”
“After the sentence there is the dots, to say there is something more, but it is not…” Jovan taps his finger in his palm three times to indicate the trail of ellipses.
“Oh, the dots were in blood. What was the message?”
“I cannot tell you right this time. I have my job I have to do.”
“I understand,” he says, reaching out a hand to touch Jovan’s shoulder. Realising instantly it’s a mistake and dropping his outstretched arm. “I’m wondering if they tested the blood. They could still match it to a hospital employee.”
Jovan lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed to make sure they were clean as he thought about the question. “Can hospital afford this?”
“Well, yes, of course. They do blood tests all the time. Matching DNA wouldn’t be exorbitant. It’d be an expedient response to the ongoing cost of this vandalism.”
“No. This is not my question. Can hospital afford if vandal is doctor. If this doctor works here—in this hospital.” For the first time Jovan feels as though Dickens is listening to him. “Not story for small paper, asking you for answers. This for real newspapers, for radio and the television, and the patients and lawyers and judges talking for years about big money.”
“Yes, but what are they going to do? Just let it go on?”
“They ask me to clean. Maybe his blood. Maybe no.”
“He seems smart.” Dickens walks with Jovan, moving to the service entrance together, as though they were friends. “Probably too smart for that anyway,” Dickens says, as he stops at the door. “I just think it’s interesting. Anyway, thanks for your time.” Dickens offers his hand and they shake. Dickens gives him a nod and a smile before he starts to walk away.
“I want to talk to you about something you say in the article,” Jovan tells the hippy psychologist. “We talk again later.”
—
THEY MEET AGAIN a few hours afterwards in a café on Bluff Road. Dickens had been drinking herbal tea while he waited. He is now satisfied with glasses of water. He watches Jovan devour three different kinds of muffin and drink two cappuccinos. Jovan’s hair is wet from the shower he had after work. A feminine berry smell to the kind of shampoo he uses.
While he watches the big janitor feed, Dickens talks about what he’s mentioned in the article—how the frustrated artistic impulse lay at the root of many forms of schizophrenia, also contributing to the ever-rising instances of anxiety and depression, even in people that did not consider themselves artistic in any way.
It was due to the artistic impulse in itself being a function of imagination, and imagination being unavoidable in the human animal. Imagination wasn’t simply a reflex action of higher cognitive processing, it was the reservoir of all experiences and passions, positing within itself such speculative notions as God and Soul, even Ego, Superego, Id, and whatever other names we chose to use for its contents, including Life, Humanity, and World.
This went to say that Imagination was not a discrete function of the brain, but a fundamental explosion of everything we knew, everywhere we looked. The repression of this artistic impulse led many people into lives that continued to diminish until they collapsed in on themselves. The simple equation he put forward was that everything that cannot find expression will melt into a molten subterranean river of repression.
Expression rising from repression equals liberation. It wasn’t a way out of emotional pain. It was a way out of neurosis because it contextualised the pain. It let the imagination develop an image of psychic contents. Anything could be tolerated if it was understood. A person could develop, and imagination has always been a tool of evolution, so this was critical. The idea of the path, or course of life, was crucial if the individual was to allow the power of evolution to push him forward. There was destruction expressed as disease in anything counter-evolutionary.
Jovan presses the last bit of muffin down into the plate so it will stick to his finger, raises his hand, and eats the crumb. “Hipip-hooray,” he mutters to himself.
David Dickens continues without pause, “With a man like the graffitist that you have running amok in your hospital, we find an interesting mixture of desperation and philosophy, the waking mind and the unconscious, a desire to destroy as it seeks to be understood, a hallmark of this whole current generation—”
“A question for you,” Jovan says loudly, placing a full stop into the doctor’s mouth, because clearly Dickens could go on pleasantly theorising for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
“What if the man has this monster in the imagination?” Jovan asks. “And monster wants to come out? Into this world? He wants to live here. Making a story for him does not make him something else. He is still the monster. He still want to eat people. Monster want to be real.”
David Dickens drinks his glass of water and clears his throat as though he’s ready to launch into another psychological sermon, which might or might not answer Jovan’s question. Jovan tells David he must go home now.
“Well, I was just starting to enjoy our conversation.”
“If we fish in Frankston we catch no barracouta. Noise is good for catching nothing.”
Bewilderment passes across the psychologist’s face, as he seeks to appear understanding and to bid farewell, all at the same time. It’s an expression Jovan enjoys remembering on the drive home.
—
IN THE KITCHEN sits Jovan’s birthday cake. Something Slavko’s wife, who loves to bake, thought would be nice. Thirty-nine candles stuck in the top. It will sit there for a few days and get thrown away without comment, into the green wheelie bin outside, not the kitchen bin in the cupboard beside the stove. Those unlit candles and the unsung cake—quietly covered by household refuse.
Jovan goes to bed. He doesn’t sleep. He gets up and takes a sleeping pill. When he still doesn’t drift away, he gets up and takes another pill. He does this in half hour instalments until he is unconscious. Despite this, the night feels long and broken, hard and relentless—Suzana is waiting for him at the other end of it, saying happy birthday and kissing him for every year of his life.
And perfume, in heavy drops of redolence, filling nose and mouth. Drowning in the wake of passing love.
In the morning, Jovan buries his face in a clean face-towel in the shower, then rubs it across the back of his neck. Lets the water run across his face for long minutes as he wakes up slowly. The dream drifted in and out of his recollection, ready to disappear completely and forever. He coaxes the dream back and tries to remember some of its features. It came from something Dr. Graffito wrote.
Jovan had been asleep when Suzana started kissing him this Friday morning. She had the earlier start today. She’d pulled him from the dream—he’d fallen back into it as soon as she left him to his sleep.
A man, already half-dead, can drown in a few centimetres of love.
In the dream, he walked from house to house, through unknown suburbs looking for his wife, because he knew she was cleaning one of the homes. He walked into twenty or thirty, maybe forty different houses, knowing she had to be close from the wafts of her perfume. Every house had been cleaned yet was also empty of everything. No furniture, pictures, plates. The wardrobes without clothes. He was mystified, wondering where everyone and their belongings were. It felt epic, a search that could go on for the rest of his life, looking for his wife through the many empty houses of the suburbs. That it would go on, forever and ever, as in fairytales. He walked into an empty, antiseptically clean kitchen, and saw a spotless glass on the bench. The only bit of anything indicating domestic life he’d seen in all the houses. It still had a cardboard smell to it and it sat on a flyer—serving as a paperweight. He lifted the piece of paper. It was a welcome to his new home on this new planet. Soon to be populated and called Crumbs.
The water runs off his face. He lets the strange dream wash away as well. He wonders what Dickens would make of it. He might tell him about it when they see each other on the weekend. The doctor is coming over to see the plates in Jovan’s garage. The ones that read Masters of Destiny / Victims of Fate. Why is the planet called Crumbs, Dickens might ask, and Jovan would say that he’d heard somewhere that’s what the planets were. The crumbs of exploding stars. And the doctor might be able to infer something from that regarding how empty or abandoned Jovan felt, or how it was only people like Barracouta William Hay that had God’s good light shining down on them. Not for people like Jovan, who dwelled in some unpopulated underworld of…No, in general Jovan doesn’t have much of an appetite for psychology anymore. He has done more than his share of reading in regards to Freud, Lacan, Miller, Jung, etc, etc.
He turns the shower taps off, remembers not to turn them so tightly that Suzana will have trouble the next time she uses the shower. One of those things he forgets sometimes—turning them too tight. Creating that instant of despair for Suzana as she stands naked in the cubicle unable to budge the handles without calling him out of bed.
The dog next door is barking his head off about something. Quiet usually, thank God. Not much of a guard dog for Mister Silvers. Charlemagne saw every human being as a potential friend instead of a possible enemy. A devastating hunter of possums however, and appreciated as such by the neighbours in the vicinity, who couldn’t legally kill the protected animals—despite the fact that cute little possums got into the walls of houses and screeched at any hour of the night with the spine-chilling effect of horror-movie creatures.
The barking goes on for a while, as Jovan pushes his thoughts away from the hopelessness of the entire field of psychology for him, and the fear that all he feels on a daily basis will go on being felt in the same way for the rest of his life. He often thinks he has just enough strength to cope with a few more hours (sometimes it’s minutes or seconds) and yet the days keep coming relentlessly like those trains the other week at Slavko’s place. When he was young he might have played happily near the tracks like the cricket children. These days he feels as though he uses a rail for a pillow—always listening to the vague rumblings of oncoming annihilation.
He leans out of the cubicle and picks the towel off the open door of the vanity unit. Dries his thick black hair which silver has begun to glint through in the last year. Wipes down his torso, then his limbs, and steps out clean. Strange how little his body shows the evidence of his life. How rarely the flesh has been nicked by catastrophe. Almost no evidence in scarring outside a few abstract burn marks on his back. His stubble has gone white. It seems odd. When he shaves he becomes just another man living a quiet life in the suburbs.
He brushes his teeth, gingerly around the painful area in his jaw. Feels the fear building somewhere in the open space of his ribcage. Doesn’t have a thought or a reason attached to it. It comes and tears at his heart and lungs. He continues to brush. Spits out a little blood with his foam. Stands up and wipes his mouth with a hand towel. Can’t see it in his own face. When it fills his chest with a hundred crows, scrambling with their claws and beaks through black feathers for immediate release, even then, he can’t see it. It’s as though the past never writes itself into his features and expressions. Only that which ghosts behind the face can summon white-terror spectres and black-dread phantoms; the dead and living writhing in the muddy grave of his mind.
He puts his hand towel back on the rack. Breathes through it. Shrugs as he moves his head from the steel rail to let another train hurtle past. There is nothing those men who still have faith in the rational, as does David Dickens, could tell him about any of it. So he pushes his mind along to thoughts of Dr. Graffito and what he might do next.
Jovan looks at his reflection in the mirror. He’ll stay that way, paused before his reflection for a few moments. Jovan will not reflect on the war. Those who have suffered a breakdown, such as Jovan has, often remember events during the crisis in chaotic clouds that roil through their minds. Flashes of lightning reveal electrified horror amidst the details. The narrative sequence of Jovan’s life is not something he can lay out for himself.
The Serbs fought for Sarajevo from the hills and mountains of the surrounding Dinaric Alps. They were vilified for firing mortars into the city. For snipers taking shots at mourners at funerals. At musicians playing music for peace. At children skipping along the footpath or kicking a ball from one side of the street to the other. All of this happened. Yet this is also true: for the first time in tens of generations there are now almost no Serbs left alive in Sarajevo.
Jovan and Suzana were forced out of their homes during this civil war and then out of the university. Into a camp. Given food they thought was from the UN. It had been passed through different hands and it wasn’t clear who poisoned the food. It could have been Croats, Muslims, or Serbs.
The result was the same. Suzana didn’t eat dinner, so no poison for her. For Jovan, the worst agony of his life as he struggled to go on breathing every minute of two weeks, eventually coming through some fifteen kilos lighter. His boy and his girl, his two children, were gone before nightfall of the first day, while he was burning in hell. No one told Jovan until he stumbled out of the camp’s hospital a week after he was deemed recovered, which meant he was well enough to travel and it wouldn’t kill him.
They slowly made their way out of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia on a trailer pulled along by a farm tractor, new maybe when Tito was still a young man. They didn’t speak about their boy or their girl on the journey. They never spoke about them when they got to Belgrade. Not with each other. Suzana’s family talked and cried with them. When they left the busted, burnt remains of Yugoslavia and came to Australia as refugees, the Brakocheviches went back to the trailer behind the old diesel tractor which never moved faster than five kilometres an hour. A funeral procession of two. Never to reach its destination. Or it was two small bodies thrown into a group hole and eventually the trailer would tip two more bodies into it. What was there to talk about along the way?
Jovan is an articulate man and he wants to speak to his wife. What stops him time and again isn’t the pain, it’s a feeling that talking makes it trivial. Not that it makes it real—it makes it small. The reality is clear from when they open their eyes to when they close them, perforating even that boundary almost every night. The death of their two children isn’t the erasure of two beings. It is the loss of God and the skies, it is the loss of the past and the future, of all their small-voiced words and their hearts. The only possible response is suicide. To survive they have found a way to live without response.
Jovan opened a suitcase a few weeks ago. It was the day he came home from having attempted to clean the graffiti that said The / Trojan / Flea. He’d done the best he could but the glass couldn’t be made pristine again. The outlines of the words were still faintly visible when the light boxes were illuminated. The director chose to update to more modern X-ray viewing screens.
Jovan brought out their photos. He put them in frames. He set them on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. On the fridge in the kitchen. On the mantel in the lounge. He put them into more frames and hung them on walls in rooms and halls. They didn’t talk about the pictures. Suzana kept the glass clean in all of those frames Jovan placed around their home. The two dead children within them smiling.
He was four. She was six. They died within the same hour, eight years ago. Both born in Sarajevo. Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost, and forgotten.
Jovan leans closer to the mirror. He runs a hand across the white stubble and remembers another birthday. A cake that Dejan and Ana made with the help of Grandma Radmila. Wincing on some bites because eggshell had made it into the mixture. Eating it anyway because they kept asking how he was enjoying the crunchy birthday cake they’d baked for him. Jovan takes a breath that wavers on the exhalation and tells the reflection that he won’t shave today. Leaves the wet towel on the bathroom floor.
—
IN THE LOUNGE, stuck to the front of a book he was reading last night, a note from Suzana. He lifts the book and reads: I’ve made an appointment for you with a dentist next Monday. You’re going to call in sick at the hospital that Monday. Or you can inform them now. This is not optional. I won’t listen to any more moaning. I won’t hear any more excuses. Consider yourself locked in. Consider yourself half-done with it. On another Post-it, which he won’t find until he’s reading his book at lunch, a quote from Cervantes stuck within the pages a little further along from where he’d stopped the night before: Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
He puts the book down, the note still stuck to it. He doesn’t screw it up and throw it away because she hadn’t written a note in all the time they’d been in Australia. Because he’d screwed up a million of them already. Because there was no calculating how many times she had left these kinds of notes around their flat on Pehlivanusha Street.
Post-it notes on the paper halfway through his typewriter on his desk, or on the centre of a television screen, at times a few of them, and some hanging from the screen from the day before, on the inside of the front door if it concerned something he should do before he left home, sometimes on the other side if it was the rubbish that had to be taken down, on the kettle, on the seat of the bike he’d use to ride to Uni. On the seat of the toilet or its water tank. The mirror in the bathroom if she wanted to share a quote with him:…Dame Dafina, otherworldly and radiant in a flurry of snowflakes and flames, in a mingling of Slavonian woods and heavenly constellations, saw the face of Vuk Isakovich. A quote from Migrations, by Milosh Tsernianski, a book she was reading for the fifth time. Or it was a quote from her favourite author, Ivo Andrich: You should not be afraid of human beings. I am not, only of what is inhuman in them. That one had been stuck to the book review section of the weekend newspaper, Liberation, that she knew he’d be reading as soon as he had the chance.
Anywhere she knew he would see it. Where it was unavoidable. He picks it up. The note about a dentist Monday. Folds it. Puts it into his wallet. Nods, and mumbles, “Monday. OK.” He walks into the kitchen and prepares a quick breakfast, and does not think about the birthday cake, sitting inside the fridge as though it’s a bomb. The note on the fridge says: Dinner tonight. Restaurant by the sea.
—
ON THAT SAME Friday morning, the optometrist, whom everyone calls Miss Richards, is standing at her usual train station. She hasn’t brought her customary music or book. She has a ticket still worth over a thousand dollars because it’s a yearly pass. Hallam is a small, unmanned station on the Pakenham line. The V-Rail trains never stop there. She’s seen them speed through countless times. There has been a notion on many such occasions. It has always been a small idea barely the size of a full stop in whatever she was reading. She’s read that famous novel by Tolstoy and remembers the images of a flame being blown out and a book being closed. But it’s not as easy as that. Or poetic. It is more like a pig hung from its rear legs and getting its throat cut. It is a mutilation the splintering bones of her skeleton had never prepared for. It is a demolition of her soul her imagination could never have conceived. There is no book to close. There is no candle. Such absurdly poetic images for the pages of a story.
When Miss Richards leaps off the platform at Hallam, she hits the shiny, clean steel rails and breaks bones in her wrists and knees, and then the impact of the train shatters everything else, and tears her meat into bits, and spatters her blood across the hot dry rocks of Hallam station. She is in all of those cells for an instant too long. For the briefest moment she knows what it is to come apart in millions of different directions, none of them a release or relief.