Whale Song

I felt weak when I dropped out of my internship. Like a mistake. I imagined people clucking their tongues, shaking their heads, saying, ‘I knew she couldn’t do it.’ I didn’t realise so much of it would stay with me. Things I saw, became part of, was complicit in. Doctors didn’t live as long as other people, and by the end of their careers they were followed by a line of spectres: things that were missed or should have been done, deaths unavoidable but tragic. The colour of mistakes, the colour of an accident, the colour of no cure.

When I stopped turning up to work some of my colleagues phoned to ask what the reason was, but it wasn’t singular.

It rained on the afternoon I was working on the paediatric ward. A nurse asked me to rechart nasogastric feeds for a set of twins. I assumed they were neonates and was surprised to see on their charts that they were over a year old.

‘Why are these children still being fed by an NG tube?’ I asked.

She looked to be in her mid-forties with a face that had spent many years looking after children. Her smile instantly turned.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘have you not met the twins before?’

After that I sat and read the file cover-to-cover. It was a rare example of one set of notes having been kept for two different people: two lives born of one fleshy cord. As I read, the history extended from the page and, with the same spirit of violence that it spoke to, reached out and took something from me.

Rubi and Saffire were born to a couple so young they were barely not children themselves. The notes described how the parents had struggled to care for the babies and had little outside support. Six months earlier, the mother had left the girls with their father so she could go out. When she returned the twins were in front of the TV in their bouncers and her partner was nowhere to be found. The infants were unresponsive; their arms and legs floppy. Rubi’s eyes were closed and she was grunting. Saffire’s eyes were open but looked continuously to the left, as if out the window. The mother dialled triple zero and the girls were taken away in an ambulance, where they had breathing tubes placed in their airways and drips into their small arms. Later scans showed bleeding on the brain, and broken bones.

There were old breaks too alongside the new: calluses beading bone.

That’s the thing about X-rays – they don’t lie.

Saffire was lucky to have survived, her internal injuries were so profound. There were entries from social workers and Family and Community Services. Neither parent was allowed near the children, and it was all going before the courts.

The room was quiet. The girls were in cots, side by side. Rubi sat up; she had rounded apple cheeks and her hair was clean and shiny.

‘Hello,’ I said softly as I approached, hunching forward, trying to get in Rubi’s line of vision. Her dark eyes stared at an object I couldn’t see. Saffire lay on her back. ‘Hello,’ I said again. The feeding tube went down her nose; her eyes gazed endlessly to the left and her nappy made her look small. There was a photo taped to the wall, one from before: dark-haired twins with glistening brown eyes and paired smiles. Individually the beauty of childhood happiness was striking – to have it duplicated only served as an amplifier. It was difficult to recognise the twins in the photo as the babies that were in the cots. Rubi and Saffire were now wards of the state, the problem of their identicalness solved by the asymmetry of their injuries.

I sat there for a while in the vinyl armchair, distressed by the events that had led us all there. Soon the quiet atmosphere was interrupted by a rhythmic sound. A sorrowful moaning. It was coming from Saffire; the sound of a small thing that sought shelter, a high-pitched melody, like whale song.

Outside their room, I stood at a basin and vomited. I turned the water on, cupped my hand underneath it and brought it to my eyes, and to my mouth. I swilled and spat into the sink, watched the clear water push the mess into the drain. I thought of Zed’s father then, about how he was a ghost in his own son’s life, and about what a catastrophe it was for children who, through no fault of their own, are born to neglectful or abusive parents.

I couldn’t keep going. To be fair, I’d been struggling with being a doctor since orientation week. It was the long hours, racing from one side of the hospital to the other. It was so many patients and family members asking so many questions that I never knew the answers to; it was realising six years of medical school was only the start of what was required. It was all the despair and anger and frustration, from the patients and the staff alike – rushing past like a too-close train that drowned out any small, rewarding moments and the best days. All I could hear was a hot screeching hiss. Comprehending the abuse of those twins ruptured something inside of me that had been coming apart slowly, the last threads holding myself together, and it couldn’t be unbroken.

I spent two weeks in bed and lost five kilograms after that. Dad drove to the share house in Newtown to collect me. Back in Northbridge I slept in my childhood bed, my feet hanging over the base. My mother put on Bloch’s suites for cello and piano and cooked chicken noodle soup with matzah balls. Then she made an appointment for me to see Dr Wesseling.

Our family doctor was more than seventy now. He had cared for our family for over thirty years. He had weighed me as an infant, plotted my height on a grid. He diagnosed me with chickenpox and let me take a week off school. He prescribed strawberry-flavoured penicillin for ear infections and vaccinated me before I went overseas for the first time. He knew small details about my life, but he had never seen me like this.

My mother sat me in a chair in his office and then she left the room. I told Dr Wesseling everything; I started with the dread that built on the way to work and how looking at my roster brought on nausea. After a while I moved on to the colour of the rain on the day I met the twins. Then I spoke about the way Saffire’s eyes were permanently turned to the left, and how Rubi was twice her size and that they weren’t identical anymore. My mouth just kept talking. I described the restlessness of something angry inside me. I told him I feared falling asleep, how I lay in bed trying not to cry. If I did fall asleep, a few hours later I would often wake up with my arms shaking, screaming: on the stairs, in the kitchen, and once outside in the yard. I said I didn’t know what was wrong with me but I was sure I didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.

Dr Wesseling listened with the gentle patience of a man who had listened for most of his life. He told me that for many doctors, internship was the hardest year of their lives, and that practising medicine was a great privilege that was coupled with a degree of melancholy. He said I needed take some time out now but that I should not walk away from being a doctor.

‘What you’re describing is burnout, and night terrors,’ he said. ‘I can give you something that will help you sleep, to be used for a short time,’ and he wrote me a prescription in black fountain pen.

‘It may also help you to try and write things down,’ he added, as he looked up and faced me. ‘I know I do.’

‘What kinds of things?’ I asked.

‘Those experiences that you find hard to forget about.’

A few months later I unsuspectingly opened a newspaper and found the story had hit the lay press. The father’s face stared out from the page. He was remarkable only for his banality; he looked like any of a number of young men on the street, but he wasn’t.

It was the hospital’s last lesson for me: there were people who woke to examine their scars after surgery, who complained to me that they looked like monsters, but here the reverse was true: there were monsters that looked like people.

~

The evening after I saw Jonathan’s wife in the foyer, I lugged bags of shopping home to my apartment in Coogee and slid the brass key in the lock of the front door. It was nearly eight-thirty pm and a hold-up with the flow cytometer meant that I’d got home late. I couldn’t be bothered to cook. I emptied a can of tomato soup into a bowl and microwaved it, then I ate it with buttered toast and a glass of wine.

My mobile phone next to my bed rang at eleven pm; the flashing screen illuminated the room. It was Elijah, and he sounded almost in tears.

‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘The exhibition. I’m out of time.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked as I thought about sleep.

It was Wednesday, and the show opened on Friday night.

‘The last part of the installation – I can’t finish it.’

‘Well … is there enough without it?’

‘No, I’m not putting the other pieces in without this one.’

A long silence emitted from my phone. The line was clear, with no echo or static.

‘Will you help me?’ Elijah asked.

‘I can’t, Elijah, I’m in bed. I have an early start tomorrow.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he pleaded, ‘this is the best bit – it’s all meaningless without it.’

I just had to think of a way to get Elijah off the phone and then I could turn it off.

I arrived at Elijah’s terrace in Darlinghurst close to midnight. The house had three storeys and my brother had converted the attic into a bedroom-studio. He was sitting in the middle of his room holding a pair of sewing scissors, surrounded by paper. Most of the sheets were A3 size but some were larger. Elijah was cutting rounded shapes out of the paper, looking at them and then putting them to one side.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘It’s not working.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

As I sat on the edge of his bed I saw reams of stacked paper. All different brands and thicknesses in various shades of white.

Elijah must have been awake for days. He was unshaven and I could smell his oily hair. He wore navy tracksuit pants and an old surf-brand T-shirt I hadn’t seen for years.

I pushed aside some paper on the floor and moved next to him. ‘Tell me what I can do.’

He explained he needed paper shapes, many, and they were to look organic. They needed to be big enough to have something projected onto them, not small like confetti. When they fell, they had to float down and not catch an edge.

As he explained, his voice quickened, he jumped to his feet and gesticulated; he punctuated his sentences by launching some of the cut paper into the air and we watched to see where it would land. For an instant, I felt something that resembled fear. But shortly after I recognised Elijah’s exhaustion. If I helped him to finish this, then maybe we could both get some rest.

When we were small Cate lived in a house with a giant tree out the back and underneath it was a trampoline. In autumn, the seeds on the tree would fall, only they weren’t like normal pods: they were wrapped in a capsule that had a wing-like attachment. As the pips dropped they fluttered to the ground in wide spirals. Cate said it was one way the tree helped to spread its seeds. We used to lie on her trampoline and watch them flutter down over us: tiny helicopters, dragonflies.

It took me a couple of attempts but I managed to cut out a shape that looked like the seed capsules. I stood up with it on top of Elijah’s bed.

‘How about this?’ I said.

My paper husk circled to the ground in a slow stutter before it came to rest like a butterfly.

Elijah watched intently. ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘That’s good.’

I experimented with a few more forms, a double-headed propeller and different-shaped casings. Elijah threw them into the air; some he ran down and dropped over the iron-laced balcony, watching them float to the pavement. If they performed well in the test-flight, he put them in a pile to keep and make stencils of; the others he discarded.

At four-thirty-seven am my tiredness was curled in the pit of my stomach and I couldn’t stop yawning. I’d helped Elijah make all the stencils, then we’d started making replicas of them: leafy paper dolls.

‘How many do you need?’ I asked, hoping to leave before daybreak.

Elijah looked at me with excited eyes and raised his eyebrows. ‘Lots.’

The gallery was off Crown Street in Surry Hills.

Hey. I’m nearly there. Are the parentals coming tonight? I texted Elijah.

Dad’s here. Ma’s not coming she said she ‘doesn’t understand’ installation art, he wrote back, followed by the eyeroll emoji. I laughed.

By the time I arrived, there were people wandering through. The exhibition space was divided into four areas. I looked around but I couldn’t see Elijah.

In the first section were six large landscapes from the Snowy Mountains. The photographs were oversized and in black and white. The first was of a series of alpine gums; their twisted bark made stripes in greyscale. The next two were of mountain peaks: whiteness in stark contrast to a dark sky and granite rocks. There was a shot of closed storefronts at Nuggets Crossing and one of Lake Jindabyne, its glassy top reflecting cumulus forms. Just before the door were two final pieces, one of the same snow gums from a slightly different angle; now a small amount of dawn broke through and the dark green of the leaves and muted blue of the eucalypt was visible. The last picture was another of the lake from the opposite side: daybreak illuminated the grey-green scrub and teal of the water. I realised none of the photographs were in fact monochrome, but due to the low light they’d only appeared that way.

The second section reminded me of being at the optometrist. There was an examination chair in one corner and a Snellen eye chart on a light box illuminated on the far wall. There were a series of circular lino prints that resembled the Ishihara plates used to test for red-green colour blindness. In the first the background was green bubbles, and embedded was the shape of an old farmhouse. Another showed a man with a labrador. Then the colours shifted to a red-brown mosaic, and embedded within was a woman’s face. The prints were so detailed I was sure if I were colour blind I wouldn’t have been able to see the images. On the final wall were two circles; here the ratio of red to green was more even. Tonal bands reached from one side of the frame to the other, like watermarks. I moved in closer and stared at the first and then the second but was unable to find any hidden picture. For a moment I saw the beginning of something, the handle of a shovel, a hot air balloon, the start of a bridge, but then the dots reverted to their original mosaic, a snakeskin, a cobbled road.

‘It fucks with you, doesn’t it?’ Elijah was standing behind me. He wore black pants and a charcoal shirt that needed ironing, but at least he had shaved.

‘Hey, these are really good.’

Elijah smiled and my favourite mole moved up on his right cheek, but still in his eyes I saw sadness. The long curls of his hair fell forwards over his face.

‘Yeah, well, thanks for your help the other night,’ he said.

‘Glad it all came together.’

‘Wait till you see the final room—’ He was cut off by the gallery manager who had a potential buyer for one of the pictures.

‘I’ll see you after,’ I said.

The third area had an entrance between velvet curtains. In the centre of the room was a huge flower made of deep rose material. The room was dim and intermittently a UV light flickered on to reveal intricate patterns on the petals. The flower had been stitched in white and so luminesced under the UV. I walked around the flower; I was a tiny human-bee inspecting hidden codes of art.

The final area was relatively empty apart from a sizeable overhead fishing net. The netting was covered with desiccated seaweed and faded circular floats. It swayed side to side and displaced our paper shapes, which started to fall. As they drifted, video images were projected onto them from five stations. I glimpsed patterns and drawings, a part of a film. A bottlebrush tree. Tombstones that overlooked the ocean, fish scales, red material with white polka dots. From a speaker came the sound of kids playing; they sang a playground rhyme, jumped in ropes, then there was thunder, rain and screeching. The paper shapes continued to fall onto the gallery floorboards, curled over themselves like thick cream. There was a member of the gallery staff in the corner; Elijah had told me beforehand they would help to reset the piece when needed. The paper piled up, so to walk out I had to shuffle through it, which felt like walking through ticker tape, leaf litter, or snow.

As I exited I saw work’s label:

Childhood—Elijah Donohue

Outside on the pavement I found Elijah in a heated conversation with Dad. It was dark and they were illuminated only by street lamps and light spilling out from the gallery. Dad was speaking casually but Elijah’s jaw was clenched. When I got closer to them, I could hear Dad’s words.

‘I just mean that all this drinking and smoking and late nights, it’s not good for you. You look tired and—’

‘Fucking hell!’ Elijah spat, and I flinched at how his voice shattered. ‘Where do you get off telling me how to live my life?!’

Dad’s voice remained calm. ‘I don’t mind what you do – if it’s art, that’s fine. But you need to be well to keep doing it, for your life to be sustainable.’

‘I’m not a child anymore!’ Elijah shouted before he stormed off, back in the direction of the exhibition.

Unsettled, Dad called after him, ‘Son! Son!’ and the way he looked, standing on the cold cement, made it unclear if he was calling his grown child to return or to something that was missing from the sky.

Dad left and I went back and found my brother standing in the threshold of the gallery. He was drawing in on a cigarette, blowing it outside, and was surrounded by a small crowd. There were more people waiting to speak to him, to congratulate him, to touch his arm near the elbow. It reminded me of when he played the cello. I thought about the other Elijah, fragile and on edge. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, his double life. There he was, shining again.

That’s how it was for a while; the gifts imparted on Elijah when he was born resurfaced. His talent appeared in flashes, an injured lorikeet that emerged from bushfire, scalded and squawking, one wing flapped, feathers of crimson and gold shed. It refused to go down, fighting to exist, enraged at the thought of dying without being seen.

After the exhibition closed, Elijah and I ended up drinking at a bar in Bondi. Elijah asked if he could sleep on my couch in Coogee, as it was closer than his place.

When he was settled on the lounge with a pillow and blanket I went to brush my teeth. I opened the cupboard behind the bathroom mirror and took out the new box of diazepam I’d just refilled from Dr Wesseling’s prescription. There were fifty tablets in a packet: five silver sheets each with ten. I was trying not to take them – in fact the packet had not been opened yet – but I hadn’t slept well for three nights. I was overthinking about patients again.

I finished brushing and took a sip of water; I swilled it in my mouth before I spat it out. I punched a blue tablet out of the casing and watched my reflection swallow it. Maybe that would be the last one.

I turned the lights off through the apartment. Elijah barely fit on my sofa but was asleep.

‘Do you still use these?’ In the morning Elijah walked out of my bathroom holding a rectangular piece of foil with nine blue circles imbedded. The diazepam. He leant against the doorframe holding the metallic blister pack towards me, and tilted them slightly, as if it were the pills that asked the question.

‘I’m trying not to.’

‘Do they help you sleep?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, that’s what I use them for – they help calm you down.’

‘Do you mind if I take some? I’m having trouble sleeping, with the exhibition and all.’

I knew I shouldn’t give them to my brother, but it seemed like a test for myself: could I let go of them and survive? Elijah had never asked me for meds before.

‘I guess.’

~

The Monday after unseen colour opened, I was back in the lab repeating my experiment. I grew a lawn of neurons onto slides within clear plastic flasks and bathed them in red culture media. After that I transfected them with a defunct version of my gene. This time instead of waiting five days I looked at them after three.

The darkroom was cold as I carried my fixed slides in, covered in foil to protect them from the light. I sat down at the microscope and took out the first one. The door behind me opened and, before I turned, the smell of his aftershave named him.

‘Dr Donohue, how are your results? Have you had that eureka moment yet?’ Jonathan was becoming flirtier at work. When he spoke the Ss caught on the edge of his front teeth and changed from the end of a word into a whistle; the hollow pitch travelled towards me in the dim. He sat down next to me, his chair so close I could feel the heat of his body.

‘You’re just in time, young Jonathan, to witness what could be a great moment in science,’ I answered. We played this game, as if because of my failed medical career and two extra letters in front of my name I outranked him. That charade together with the slight imperfection in Jonathan’s voice became part of a hook that drew me towards him. It made me long for him to approach me, push me against the wall and have me.

‘I’m just about to look,’ I said.

‘Have you thought much about what you’ll do after your PhD?’ Jonathan asked.

‘After?’ I asked. I couldn’t see beyond the four years.

‘There’s an information session on next week about applying for overseas postdoctoral fellowships. They’re super competitive: you have to have some big first-author papers.’

‘You’re thinking of applying?’ I asked.

‘I’d love to do some training overseas, in the States. Or maybe Europe, at the Karolinska. Anyway, you should come along.’

I imagined Jonathan and me in the future, working in a Swedish lab, laughing and taking fika.

Professor Olsen joined us then in the darkroom, interrupting my thoughts and breaking the tension. I felt the weight of his stare settle on my back as I loaded the first slide onto the stage. I was thankful that with the lights off the flush on my face remained unnoticed.

Down the eye pieces was the familiar green glow of the cells, but this time something was different. The control cells were there, the body of the nerves round and plump with dendrites that branched like boughs of a tree. The cells in which I’d stopped the function of the gene were altered. The neuron bodies were shrivelled – but the most striking feature was the lack of dendrites. Those structures that connected neurons to other neurons, that allowed learning, thought and memory, were all missing, truncated as if someone had lopped them with a chainsaw.

‘Are the cells viable?’ Professor Olsen asked.

‘They’re alive,’ I said, ‘but there are no dendrites.’ I sat back in my chair and he leant over me to look down the microscope; he adjusted the fine focus.

‘These slides are immaculate,’ Professor Olsen said before he proceeded to examine my work.

‘I knew it,’ he exclaimed in a whisper under his breath, but not to me. In the artificial twilight, I saw something flicker across Jonathan’s face, like a flinch.

After Professor Olsen confirmed what I found we sat digesting the enormity of the finding.

‘This is huge,’ Professor Olsen said. The air was electric. I never wanted to leave.

Later Professor Olsen told me I needed to repeat the experiment twice more, and if I found the same thing – that when my gene was disrupted we impeded the formation of dendrites – ‘then you should name the gene’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’ve defined its purpose. At present it’s only known by an annotation. If we now know its function, you need to rename the gene to reflect that.’ Before we finished he looked at me and said in a way that was sincere, ‘You know, you really are very good at this, at the research.’

I lay awake at night running through endless possibilities, exhilarated by the thought of giving this tiny piece of the universe a name.

~

Towards the end of the month there was a research symposium and I was asked to present my work. Speakers were allowed to invite two guests each, but Dad had to have a procedure that day, so my mother came with Elijah.

‘Grub!’ Elijah called out when he saw me approaching the glass doors into the foyer.

‘Shh!’ I said. ‘Keep it down!’ It felt jarring to hear my childhood nickname there, in a place where no one else knew it. The word flew through the air like a frisbee, bounced off the pale walls, stuttered and then came to rest on the pristine carpet squares.

My brother was wearing jeans, old Vans sneakers and a collared shirt over a grey T-shirt. There was black soil under his fingernails. He stood out against the polished backdrop of the institute. The DNA statue turned slowly, catching light in its coloured panes: an oversized luminescent drill bit.

‘Your father was so sorry to miss this,’ my mother said, looking around with amazement as I joined them in the foyer and directed them to the auditorium.

‘What is he having done again?’ Elijah asked.

‘He’s got what’s called a pterygium, and it needs to be removed from his eye,’ my mother said, motioning to the corner of her right orbit.

Elijah looked to me for further explanation.

‘Oh yeah, you know how the corner of his eye always looks a bit inflamed? It’s like a soft tissue growth. I think he mentioned he was having more trouble birdwatching because if it.’

My mother shook both of her hands like a duck releasing water. ‘The birds! The birds!’ she exclaimed with exasperation.

‘What causes it?’ Elijah asked.

‘I think it’s from too much UV light,’ I said, motioning to them where to sit in the theatre.

‘The perils of living in paradise, eh?’ Elijah said, and then, ‘Hey, good luck up there.’

My presentation went smoothly and afterwards there was wine and cheese in the atrium. When I found Elijah and my mother she was pointing her hand at him; they were all up in each other’s faces. When I reached them, she had stormed off in the direction of the drinks table.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you know, Grub’s doing so well now, her life has direction. I wish you knew what you were doing with yours. I wish you’d come back to music. The usual. In case it wasn’t clear: you’re pretty much the golden child now.’

‘Oh, don’t be bitter, you had a good run,’ I chided. ‘Anyway, we both know you’re one arts award from claiming it back.’

‘Hey, who’s the guy?’ Elijah interjected, changing the subject.

‘What guy?’

‘The one who has his eyes all over you.’

‘Shhh – no one.’

‘Are you dating him?’

‘No! He’s a colleague,’ I said. ‘He’s married,’ I added, by way of explanation.

Elijah lifted his left shoulder and then let it drop. ‘Well, he’s into you.’