Sea of Vapours

After my tryst with Jonathan I contacted Macquarie Institute’s HR department to suspend my research. I couldn’t face seeing him at work or having more conversations about Elijah’s disappearance with people who hardly knew my brother. The administrator who emailed me back told me she would place my candidature on extended family leave, given the circumstances. She also told me to email Professor Olsen separately, when I was ready, to discuss any potential return to study, or if I decided at any stage to quit altogether.

I thought about emailing Professor Olsen a few times; I couldn’t figure out how to start the message, or what to put in it, or how to end it. I was overwhelmed by the loss of Elijah, the line I’d crossed with Jonathan, and the thought that maybe the common factor in my flailing career status was me.

So I never did. I never felt ready.

Back at Terrace Books, I knew I would have to speak to Hyun eventually.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey.’ His voice was flat and emptied, unlike every other time I’d spoken to him.

‘I brought that CD back.’

‘You can leave it on the counter.’

When he talked, he didn’t look me in the eye or stop putting books back on the shelf.

So, I’d been wrong. He wasn’t always charismatic and warm; I’d hurt him. I followed him between the stacks as he worked, given he wasn’t going to pause for me.

‘Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t make the other night. I should’ve called you. I’m—’ I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. ‘I’m kind of going through some … stuff right now.’ He didn’t have to believe me, but I saw from his face that he did.

‘Whatever,’ he said and pushed past me.

When he left, I saw we were in the children’s book section. I recognised some titles that had been read to me when I sat in my mother’s lap, her arms embracing me as they held the book open, my ear pressed into her chest, listening to her read to me through her body.

Interesting that we learn how to use words and love at the same age.

Those stories created whole worlds inside of me; I remembered those times: they were far away and long before she and I disappointed each other.

I realised as I stood there that I might in fact be like my mother after all, but only in ways I did not want to be.

After a while Hyun returned. ‘I kept this aside for you.’

The book had a red cover and a photograph of a man riding a horse printed in black. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

‘Thanks,’ I said. I hoped he would stop working for a moment, or say something else, but at least we’d spoken.

I looked through the Ondaatje collection; Hyun must’ve noticed I was spending longer in the poetry section.

I’d started to read more to distract myself from the fact that Elijah was missing. I started in all the places I was used to looking, like newspaper and magazine articles about people who’d gone missing. I read all the data on first episodes of psychosis and what proportion of people recuperated and what proportion went on to be diagnosed with a more chronic mental illness. None of the things I read made me feel better or more connected to the world.

I’d stumbled into the poetry section of the bookshop by accident. I hadn’t really enjoyed the poets on the syllabus back in school. It was different reading verse now, on my own. I found stanzas that somehow made me feel even sadder than I already was: language that reached out from the parchment and hit me in the stomach, leaving me winded. It took me by surprise when that happened – the power of so few phrases and blank paper. As if the strength of letters were inversely proportional to how many of them were on the page.

Some days a single word felled me.

I sat down where I was and opened the book. I sank into letters, the gaps between and around them. There were whole universes in the white space.

I cried into these poems; my tears left blots on the typeface.

~

I was twenty-three the second time it felt like the world was ending. Summer passed and the days got shorter; on the first Sunday in April the clocks went back.

The peak tourist season in Hawks Nest had passed, and many of the older rental properties would be vacant for some weeks. Real-estate agents took the opportunity to conduct property inspections along the peninsula. That was how Elijah’s body was found. Five months, one week and two days since the footage was taken in the service station. He was uncovered in a house in the same street as Grandad’s house, four doors down. The agent said he thought a possum might have died in the roof because of the smell of decay. He found Elijah in bed, face down in the second bedroom.

When Dad told me this his voice sounded tinny: as if it was being transmitted from a walkie-talkie; as if I sat in a space station and was receiving news from a far-away mission. My brain was unable to process the information in a regular fashion.

Elijah must have been confused to go to that house; it had no significance to us. We didn’t know the owners and had never even been there to collect a knocked cricket ball. My brother had become an erratic protagonist in a story with the wrong ending. I was scrambling behind him, clutching at narrative, trying to assign meaning where there was none.

Dad wouldn’t let me see him: he said that I had to remember him how he was. I wasn’t sure which version he meant. When he played forts with me when he was nine, or when he performed cello at eighteen? At twenty-six, surrounded by admirers at his exhibition? The space in his gum where the tooth used to be; the smell of unwashed skin. The look in his eyes towards the end. So many Elijahs.

We were told that the police had referred Elijah’s death to the coroner, and that his body had been taken for a post-mortem. The thought of my brother on a steel autopsy bed provided a long-awaited closure and no relief.

After a few weeks I snooped inside Dad’s desk and found the coroner’s report, full of the things I was being protected from. How Elijah died. The document detailed how he was found: lying prone, his face in the pillow, under the covers. It logged the empty bottle of bourbon and listed the containers of medications found on the nightstand beside him, quantifying the empty packets of pills and small white jars. Oxycontin. Panadeine Forte. Diazepam. And the matching drug levels in his tissues. Then he choked on his own vomit. I read it all quickly before anyone knew I had found it.

‘Was it suicide?’ I asked Dad later, after he had picked me up from Coogee and drove me back to Northbridge. I had decided to move back in with him for a while. It was raining and we both looked out the front windscreen.

‘Well, it’s difficult,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was no note.’

That was absurd to me: either he was trying to end his life or not. Could a single page of writing transform transgression into self-harm? What constituted a note? A few lines? A single sentence? How many words would make it definitive? I thought back to the last postcard he sent. Don’t forget who we were. Was that a note?

If it wasn’t intentional, how could it be defined? As misadventure?

I didn’t have the courage to tell Dad that among his tablets were the ones meant for me. Forty-nine to be exact. Could he hold them all in one hand? Forty-nine blue moons, each contributing to his eclipse. How could I tell my father that at least some part of this was my fault?

~

‘I heard about what happened. I can’t believe it.’

It was Cate. When her name lit up on my mobile screen my thumb had swiped to answer it in a microsecond and it felt like a homecoming. I couldn’t even remember the last time she had called me.

‘I need you to say it,’ I said.

‘Say what?’

‘What you heard.’

‘Well, my mum called, and I guess she’d spoken to yours. She told me they found Elijah, in bed, in Hawks Nest … and, you know … that he’s dead.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘he’s dead.’ He didn’t feel dead to me until just then, until I’d heard it from my oldest friend.

‘Fuck,’ Cate said, ‘this is so shit.’ Funny that there are so many words, so much language, but in the most complex times we reached for the simplest options, the ones that were base and flexible, casual and non-specific; they slipped into our hands like shivs and allowed us to move forward with false courage.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it is. It’s so shit.’

‘So, what happens now?’

‘I don’t know. We’re still waiting for his body to be returned to us. I guess we’ll have to plan the funeral.’

After that we talked for over an hour and when I hung up the edge of my ear was hot and I felt lighter. I resolved to try never to become estranged from Cate again; I saw our friendship in a new way, as a fragile living thing like a sapling, not to be neglected.

~

‘He must be buried in the ground.’ Rebekah. She came back to argue about what to do with Elijah’s body. Dad suggested having him cremated and poured into the ocean. I imagined the sea at dusk, a million specks of ash settling on its surface. Rebekah refused.

‘Where would we bury him?’ Dad asked, exhausted.

Rebekah wanted him next to Nonna, in the Jewish section of the cemetery.

‘I am a Jew. Therefore, my son is a Jew.’ She said this by way of explanation, as if introducing herself to us for the first time, as if somehow Elijah and she were part of a family that Dad and I were not.

Grief, a worn tendon hammer, knocking on connective tissue, summoning our petty and primal instincts, which kicked through our more sophisticated, constructed selves.

‘It would be nice to have him closer to home, somewhere we could be with him every day,’ Dad said.

I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb, listening to their argument. I leant against the archway of my own guilt. I hadn’t told Rebekah or Dad about the tablets I’d given Elijah that had wound up in his terminal cocktail. I’d swallowed the truth of my poor decision down to a place that made me mortified.

Inside I agreed with Dad but no one asked my opinion, and because of my terrible miscalculations I didn’t feel entitled to one.

Rebekah shook her head.

~

Serey phoned me.

‘I thought you should know,’ she said, ‘they published your work without you.’

‘What?’

Serey told me that after I went on leave Jonathan convinced Professor Olsen to assign my gene to him and hire a research assistant. They repeated everything I had done, confirmed and extended the experiments and published the findings in Nature Genetics.

‘Your name’s not even on the paper,’ Serey said bluntly, but I could tell she felt bad for me.

After our conversation I went online. It was the lead story on the journal website. The article was laid out with high-resolution colour images of neurons. I scrolled down and saw all my work and ideas. There were even some pictures of glowing green neurons with their dendrites chopped off that I was sure I’d captured. Bough1. They’d used my designation, but my name was nowhere to be seen.

I was beside the images, behind Jonathan’s name, between the sheets, erased.

The truth about you

You were always bigger and better than me.

You had Nonno’s skin.

I could tell by your voice if you were smiling. If we were on the phone the words escaped from your mouth from behind your molars and had a different quality; they weighed less and moved faster through the air.

You were a musician and an artist.

Our mother loved playing the cello with you more than life itself.

I’m sorry for my envy.

No matter what you did, what you became, I love/d you.