THE SLOW FALL

Fuss

Old Man walks into the bookstore. Imagines the painted footmarks they used once upon a time for dance steps. He steps into each of them precisely. Brings out his magnifying glass from a careful inside pocket of his jacket. It’s over the atlases that he spends the most time looking through his circle of refracted light. For long moments that are big sacks of time that have nothing to do with minutes or hours.

Old Man walks along the painted footmarks of the dance steps on the floor. Because you never know where you’re going. Only where you’ve been. There’s safety in neither but there’s a way to walk between them.

He never talks to anyone in the bookshop. He may have come in a thousand times in the last few years he’s been living at the nearby Sacred Heart Mission, but he doesn’t know the names of anyone who works in the store. Doesn’t know their faces because he never looks at any of them.

It’s been a long time since anyone knew his name. And maybe he’s not so sure himself these days. It’s not about forgetting the words. More about it not mattering. What mattered anymore was a difficult thing to determine. You were either on the ground or in the air. Either it was a desperate thing you hung on to with everything you had, or it was something you couldn’t even see.

The people who named him are long dead. The people who knew him, also buried in the ground. There was a time where he bet his life every day on this one thing, sometimes many times in the same day before it was done with. He didn’t know what it was now. Something to do with being in the air and wearing a silver eagle over his heart. Something to do with having mates and family you didn’t want to let down. But then there was the ground and all these painted-on dance steps he had to be careful to place his feet into.

Old Man stands above the broad clean pages of an atlas. He rarely turns the pages. He finds the right distance on the magnifying glass and looks at the shapes and colours of the continents and rivers, islands and oceans, the small printed words and numbers. Into his sack he takes all these moments. Never filling it like he did his life with minutes and hours. Into the sack everything can get thrown and forgotten. Things like the air burning in waves of clear fire, choking with the smell of burning skin and hair and voices, and all those countless dull-gleam-metal bombs; endlessly falling pop-pop-pop pop-pop …

He looks through his circle of glass. Feels all of it going into the sack. All the fuss.

Fug

Old Man begins to wake up. But he won’t finish before it’s time to go to bed again in the evening. All around him men are beginning to move; the shuffle-shuffle of their dragged feet along the wooden floorboards outside his room. In the bed opposite him, the man squeaks as he turns over from one side to another. As though the rusty springs are within the stained thin mattress of Dunn’s body. Both of the old men becoming identical as they get older.

Dunn will rise from his bed willingly, though. That’s one difference. Dunn doesn’t want to lie in his bed all day listening to the men walk up and down the wooden floorboards in the long corridor outside. Dunn doesn’t want to look up at the ceiling and watch the watermarks turn into clouds and the clouds turn into spooled-up years. Old Dunn wants to shuffle out of this small room and its stink as soon as he manages to open his eyes. But our Old Man wants the fug. Wants it to suffocate him in its sweaty stink.

He’s been awake since about three in the morning. He doesn’t really sleep. By the time evening rolls around again he’ll be ready to give it another go, but all he finds is an hour or two of genuine unconsciousness. The rest of the time he’s drifting somewhere in his skull. Never really gone. Never really awake. And he so wishes he could sleep. That he could awaken.

They come for him and force him out of bed. It’s either Sharon or Brian or Alan or Karen. Always one of those. If it’s Brian, he’ll force the Old Man to shave. If it’s one of the women they’ll shave his face for him. If it’s Alan, he won’t care. Alan will grab a fistful of his pyjama top at the shoulder and haul him to his feet.’

‘You gotta keep going until you stop, Old Man. Understand? There’s no fucking exit. There’s just a drop.’

‘I know the drop,’ Old Man wants to say, but Alan always acts as though he’s got better things to do than listen to what he calls ‘ramblings’. Old Man nevertheless wishes he could tell Alan, ‘I used to live in the clouds. I used to like to think of myself as an angel of death. I heard Zeus had thunderbolts. And Apollo had arrows fired from the sun. I had bombs as big as full-grown babies. Bombs as big as children laid out for sleep. And I didn’t blink when I let them rain down onto the towns and cities of Germany. Down there you could see soccer fields and schools, churches and graveyards, and factories, hospitals, museums and theatres, bridges and regular houses, neighbourhoods full of houses, houses and houses, and I didn’t blink. Because it wasn’t me. It was an angel of annihilation. An exterminating Gabriel. I felt God whispering through my veins. A clear blue anger like something from a blowtorch. For years like that. I lived in the clouds like a blue angel.’

‘Mumble all the fuck you want, Old Man, but we’ve got to get you out of this room.’ He’d pull the pyjama top off the Old Man without bothering with the buttons. He’d grab a shirt that stank from old Dunn. Wouldn’t see a difference. Pull that down over his head. Yank his arms through as though they were the small limbs of a boy. But roughly, like a father let down by a useless son, sorely disappointed with everything he’s done.

Alan would say, ‘I’ll crack open that window one day with a crowbar, or I’ll throw a chair through it. The air in here tastes like a fart and you’re just going to suffocate if you don’t get pushed out the fucking door. Come on, Old Man. There’s breakfast waiting for ya. Your favourite, too. Rice Bubbles.’ Alan’s best joke. The kind of joke not meant to raise a laugh. Not even a chuckle. Old Man wondered what you call a joke like that. Something that was never even intended to be what it was.

Today Alan doesn’t come for him. Neither does Karen or Sharon or Brian. They’ve forgotten him. So he stays in bed the whole day. A final day of summer in autumn. Hot and empty blue out there beyond a window that hasn’t been open in decades. Looking up at the water stains in the ceiling. Seeing them turn into clouds and then into something else. Dying in the fug.

Fume

Old Man is adrift. Most only linger a few moments after the body fails. Some for days. A few for a week or two. But none over forty days, and yet here’s the Old Man still rambling through the trees, rummaging amongst the birds, as though he’ll never have to move on. And it’s already been almost forty days since he died.

Maybe it’s because when he was alive he spent so much of his life in the air that this now feels like his natural element. Maybe because he’s enjoying the lightness outside his skull. The clean open sky. The free air, when breathing is no longer an issue. Perhaps it’s because now, set loose of bones and blood, he’s no longer heavy with old death; decades gone by dying.

He’s seen the grave they gave him. A nice little plot with a plaque amid the other war veterans. Always good to have that mark of respect a war grave imparts, even if no-one comes to the funeral and nobody looks at it other than to mark the general accretion of such grave markers. Rank and name meaningless now. Surrounded by strangers dead and gone for half a century already. ‘Frederick Tobias Ford’ was what the plaque said. There are some dates as well. But he’s moving on the tides of air again.

Sifting through eucalypt fragrances.

Mingling with swirling, redolent freshly cut grass.

At a nearby funeral there’s a young man being buried. A nineteen-year-old who fell asleep at the wheel on the drive from Geelong to Melbourne. Already gone, up and away, not even tugged back to Earth by tears or prayers. Roses thrown on the coffin in a mangled pattern of green and blood-drop red. Rocky crumbles of earth on polished wood in small shovelfuls. A priest chanting a Catholic prayer while a mother begins to wail.

There’s a little girl who’s walked away from the black gathering and the crying that wouldn’t stop and made all the adults seem like wounded animals at a hole in the ground where they had dug something up.

She walks on past graves and the flowers placed on the humps of earth. Some beginning to grow a few sprigs of grass; some mounds thickly carpeted with green already.

He follows her through a neighbouring stand of trees, unnoticed as she leaves her brother’s funeral, and down a hill into a meadow of forgotten flowers. He watches her look around and stop. He comes close enough to breathe her in. Still the smell of a baby somewhere in her hair.

He surrounds her as though he could enter her little chest on her small breaths of air but she skips out across the grass and flowers, tracking a moving bee. Watching the bee as it pauses at one flower, and then another. She watches it with a half-formed smile on her little face, utterly immersed in the oblivion of play. Watching the bee and then moving closer with a skip and a jump to put her hands around it. Not to hurt it— but a moment later her eyes grow large and her mouth opens and then her face collapses and squeezes shut. She releases the insect but its stinger dangles from her palm.

He doesn’t follow her away from the meadow. He feels himself begin to spread out amongst the leaves of grass and the leaves in the trees surrounding this overlooked garden near the graveyard.

For him there will be no other destination. A life lived dispersed amid the fuss of the world. Buried into sacks of time not his own. Suffocated by the airless rooms he never chose to live in, but nevertheless did. Always coming upon himself like a thing found in a forgotten basement. Discarded after use, decades ago.

He hadn’t thought about any of this because it had gone into a sack with the rest of his life, but it had all risen from his bones like he’d been hit with an atomic wave not quite strong enough to kill. Enough though to fan the fumes in his head for the sixty years he’d lived on past the bombing. Until all he could do was fume.

He lies on the ground and watches the leaves falling from above. The quiet leaves moving through the air. He thinks about those towns and cities that were left blackened and broken and bashed down into ash. The slow death of those leaves falls across the grass. He thinks about daughters and sons with their mothers, eyes squeezed shut beneath their kitchen tables or their beds, with hands over heads, or just huddled together in knots in their family homes. All those people unseen, unwitnessed, living and dying in his memory. Old Man watches the leaves falling from the trees above and lets all of his ashes blow away.

Old Man remembers less and less now. Less and less the slow fall of bombs from the clear sky above.

Spreading out now across the grass and the soil it sprouted from. The fumes lift. Cleaned out, he sighs away the last of those immense blue skies and those angelic white clouds and settles into the ground. Settles into the soil. Feels the quietly growing grass nudging through. Forgets the wide blue immensity of that freedom above. Forgets what it was to fly.