Like a whisper in the feathers there, in the wings’
Great wind, like a whirring of words, but I could not
Say the shape of them.
W.S. Merwin, ‘The Annunciation’
It’s a silence that overrides all others. It’s as if the whole room is on mute; no, the opposite: as if the volume is up so high that you can no longer hear it, it’s become a bone-splitting unfathomable fuzz. He’s not sure if he’s in a dream; he’s fairly sure he isn’t. There’s a dull ache separating his body from the rest of the room. He’s not sure, yet, what the room is. It could be a scrubbed-clean kitchen with a white table in the centre. Or it could be a sparsely furnished, chalky-walled granny flat. It could be the void of a courtyard in the centre of an office block. It could even be an empty school quadrangle, a chip packet wafting over the asphalt, or a silent ravine on the journey home from work. He knows it isn’t any of those places. He knows where he is; it’s on the tip of his mind, but there’s a smooth surface between himself and that knowledge.
There are bodies in the room with him. In the other beds, he can sense a series of broken-winged humans. Other figures float past, coming in and out of focus. Their mouths open and close, but what they’re saying can’t be heard over the humming silence. They tuck and untuck the starchy white sheets that pin him to the bed. Once, one of the figures moves to the edge of the room and lets in a sudden flood of light. It cuts across the face of the man in the bed opposite him. He’s sleeping; he has a grotesque, frightened expression, a twisted frown. For the next stretch of time (An afternoon? A lifetime?) he watches the light deaden over the frightened man’s face.
A woman and a girl appear. He knows who they are. The woman’s face is flat, like she’s wearing a veil. The girl is scared. He wants to comfort her but he can’t work out how to get out of the bed. The woman and the girl sit on two porcelain chairs that are next to the bed. There is some half-hearted opening and closing of mouths. He knows he’s supposed to do something. The girl has a large book on her lap: her hands are like mittens, or paws, resting on top. Between her paws the cover image of the book comes into focus: a black bird flying over a white sky. The woman’s mouth moves. The girl doesn’t speak.
Or maybe he isn’t in the bed. Maybe he’s under the pale light of a desk lamp, looking at his computer screen, swivelling in his chair. It’s a windy night. A gush of air shakes the window frame; through the window he can see the leaves of the eucalypt in the backyard glinting as the air reverberates through them.
He’s transcribing a list he’s taken from the internet. He has a stack of paper to write on. It’s that kind of paper they used to use (Fifteen years ago? Twenty years ago?) for printers, the type bordered by strips of perforated circles. Each page is attached to the last; the ream comes out of the box in one long zigzagging ribbon. He’s writing the words on the paper in black texta. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this; he knows exactly why he’s doing this.
He writes:
The Alaotra grebe (Tachybaptus rufolavatus), a duck-like bird with a yellow face and black cowl, was formerly found in Lake Alaotra in central Madagascar. The introduction of predatory fish and human poaching are believed to be the primary causes of its extinction. It was officially declared extinct in 2010.
He writes:
The Atitlán grebe (Podilymbus gigas) was declared extinct in 1989. Endemic to Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala, it was similar to the pied-billed grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) but with a reduced wingspan and flightless. Extinction was due to a variety of factors: introduced fish, reed-cutting, tourism development, lowered lake levels after the 1976 earthquake and even political unrest. The murder of the park ranger during the coup of 1982 significantly hampered conservation efforts.
The Aldabra brush-warbler (Nesillas aldabrana) had pale feathers on its slender frame, with short wings and a long, pointed tail. It was threatened by habitat alteration by introduced species, such as rats, cats and goats. It was last sighted in 1983, and searches in 1986 confirmed its extinction.
Running his finger down the long list on the screen, there are some names he doesn’t recognise: the Niceforo brown pintail (Anas georgica niceforoi), the Laysan honeycreeper (Himatione sanguinea), the slender-billed grackle (Quiscalus palustris). Others are more familiar: the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), the great auk (Alca impennis), the slender moa (Dinornis torosus). The last name on the list is the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), but he knows that there were birds before this. And, of course, there will always be birds to come.
He doesn’t know what to do with this list of vanished birds. He has a desire to shred his ream of outdated paper or to scrunch it up and shove it into the recycling bin. He also has a desire to read it all out aloud, like a mantra or a eulogy. The Latin words form in his mouth. There’s a certain rhythm to the incantation; he can feel the tap of it thrumming against his leg. He continues to write down the information: the San Benedicto rock wren (Salpinctes obsoletus exsul), declared extinct in 1952; the laughing owl (Sceloglaux albifacies), 1950; the wake rail (Rallus wakensis), 1945. He chants out their stories; dots of his spit pixelate the computer screen. Outside the room, the wind has picked up; the eucalypt thrashes from side to side. The black mamo (Drepanis funereal), 1907; the huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), 1906; the Auckland Island merganser (Mergus australis), 1905. The air is rasping. The Bonin woodpigeon (Columba versicolor), 1889. Something is calling him on the wind. His chanting increases in volume. The O‘ahu ‘ō‘ō (Moho apicalis), 1837; the mysterious starling (Aplonis mavornata), 1774. He’s using his voice to drown out the bawling wind.
A woman, clumsy and fuzzy-headed, comes in from another room in the house. He gasps, as if he’s suffocating, or drowning. It takes a while for him to decipher the words coming out of her mouth. She says she can’t have another night of this, please, you’re starting to upset—
His gasps turn to sobs. The chair swivels away when she tries to put her arms around him. He can’t stop sobbing.
Or maybe he isn’t crying in the middle of the night, trying to ignore the rattling window. Maybe he’s blinking at another computer screen, as he takes another capsule for the ache that’s murmuring behind his eyes. The atmosphere in the office is listless. If he chose to listen, he’d hear hushed conversations in the corridor. It’s been two days since his colleague’s broken body was taken to the hospital. No, longer than that. (Three weeks? Six months?) The whispers say he’s doing well, he’s paralysed, he’ll be coming back, he’s going to be fine. The words aspirate the walls of the corridor like Spray n’ Wipe, cleaning away the frantic rushing towards the stationery cupboard, the cries and the shrieks when they wrenched the door open and looked down into the courtyard below.
The door to the stationery cupboard is closed now. The ratty collection of newspaper clippings has been peeled off.
A well-dressed woman returns from visiting hours at intensive care. She’s a reduced figure: still implacable, still sharp, but smaller, paler. No one has the energy to blame her; no one talks about the moment when she comforted the broken body in the courtyard. She’s not culpable. She nods at him in the corridor, and once she leans over the conference table in a meeting and lets her ivory hand slip over his. The air conditioning emanates a throbbing kind of silence.
As he passes the closed door, he thinks he can hear something, or someone, humming tunelessly behind it. He feels his ribcage tightening.
Eventually he and a colleague decide to open the stationery door. He knows that this happened sooner rather than later, that an office can’t run without stationery indefinitely, that professional cleaners were called in to wash it all away, swiftly and efficiently. But this isn’t how he remembers it. He must have dreamt it. He doesn’t think he dreamt it. The metal handle turns stiffly and the weight of the door pushes back. He and his colleague shoulder the door open. Papers, reams and reams of photocopying paper, have been blocking the sweep of the door. There’s an audible reek: sweet, like a piece of uncooked chicken left too long in the fridge. He blinks into the sunlight. The glass in the window is still jagged, the wind skirls through the gap. Feathers have attached themselves to the sharp edges of the glass. The colleague says that birds must have broken in and he now sees the evidence of this: not just the feathers, but the white liquid splodges over the envelopes and the manila folders, and the leaves and twigs in the corner, intertwined with strips of paper and Post-it notes. He breathes in the mess. The image is both beautiful and appalling. It’s wild and raw and claustrophobic. His colleague doesn’t know where they’re going to begin to clean this mess up. His hand is sticky from the birdshit.
There’s a curling rush of wind coming through the window. As it flows over the glass, it whistles.
His colleague nudges a cardboard box on a high shelf and tilts its contents. It’s a box of that paper they used to use for printers. The paper slinkies to the floor in one long ribbon.
The wind doesn’t sound like wind. It sounds like music. He can feel the friction of it against his skin.
He folds up the paper and lifts it back into the cardboard box. His colleague makes a joke about obsolescence.
As he hefts the box out of the cupboard he steps on something. The crack of it creaks like bone. When he goes to scrape it off in the bathroom he discovers that it was a tiny egg. The shell is white and brittle.
Or maybe he’s not in a toilet cubicle, holding back a sob and trying not to listen to the wind calling. Maybe he’s driving home, or walking the dog, or carrying a baby in his arms, or shaking hands after a successful interview, or listening to a woman asking him if he’d marry her. Maybe he’s climbing the stairs in a university library.
Figures ghost past. It’s not a dream; he’s fairly certain it’s not a dream. He’s in the first year of his degree. He’s a young man. He doesn’t think of himself in those terms; he doesn’t think of himself in any way if he can help it. He keeps moving upwards. In the distance, beneath him, at the bottom of the stairwell, he can hear something: a kind of music, a sort-of song. Maybe it’s wafting in from the library lawn, a local band shrieking over the dozing students. Maybe it’s coming from another source. He quickens his pace up the stairs.
He knows he’s on the fly—he’s allowing himself to articulate that thought—he knows he’s fleeing from the house he grew up in. He’s eaten his last meal at the marble table, he’s no longer avoiding eye contact with the mausoleum of a man on the other side.
He’s absconded to the city. He’s found himself a flat and lives on his own. He’d blanched at the idea of colleges, crammed in with all those other bodies. The flat is out the back of a brick-veneer house. A family lives in the house. A crumbly-cement ramp leads the way past the house and the Hills Hoist in the backyard. He has to nod at the family in the house if they say hello, but once he’s closed the front door, it’s just him. It’s only a room with a bathroom attached. Four white walls. A scabby kitchenette is tacked onto one wall; a narrow desk lies opposite. There’s an even narrower bed under the window. He chooses not to attach anything to the chalky walls. He cooks plain meals—two-minute noodles, eggs on toast—on the coiled stovetop. He rests his hand on the Formica counter. It feels like someone’s squeezed too much Jiff on it.
He’s enjoying the emptiness, the space of absence.
At night, though, lying in the bed, he hears the song. It’s like the family has the stereo on, or there’s a party at the end of the street. He feels his body separating from the world around him. No, the opposite of that: the air is solidifying, as if someone has made a Styrofoam mould of the granny-flat air.
It’s almost impossible to lift the Styrofoam away, or, when he does, to sneak down the lopsided path. Then he has to work out a way of loitering in the dusty space outside the lecture hall without anyone noticing. He realises he hasn’t spoken to anyone for three weeks, no, longer. (A month? A year?) He sits in tutorials like he’s a marble sculpture; he says nothing when he hands over the money to the person in the shop who sells him the two-minute noodles. He keeps his head down when he walks past the Hills Hoist.
And at night he listens to the song calling in the distance.
He goes to a lecture. He’s allowed himself to take one elective, something different from the numbers and charts he needs for his career. The elective is ‘An Introduction to English Literature’. He doesn’t know why he picked it; he knows exactly why he picked it. The lecture is on The Waste Land. He does try to read the poem, beforehand, sitting upright at the narrow desk, the book laid out in front of him, the spine pressed flat on the smooth surface. He used to know another line from Eliot, something about empty skies and anaesthesia. But the words in this poem detach from the stanzas like leaves from a tree. The lecture doesn’t help. A figure stands at the front of the asphyxiating room pronouncing a litany of sources: Shakespeare and the Fisher King and Sanskrit. The lecturer’s mouth opens and closes. He plucks the ideas and pins them down in a senseless order. They almost make sense, but there’s something missing, like they’re an unfinished sentence or a list without a heading. Late at night, as he listens to the music at the end of the street, the words unpick themselves again. They waft above the bed. The bit about the sailor, Phlebas the Phoenician. The words shape themselves into a pattern:
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.
The whispering words fall into the rhythm of the distant music.
In a tutorial, a translucent-skinned girl tells the story of To the Lighthouse. They never get to the lighthouse. The girl augments her presentation with information about the author. The shallow grey water of the Ouse. Her body was missing for three weeks. The rocks, cold and polished like marble, sewn into the pockets. The colourless girl flutters when she quotes the handwritten note left behind. At night, these words join the melody of the music, swirling like a whirlpool above him:
One afternoon he wanders past the suburban home and sees three rectangles of faded terry-towelling fabric stiffening on the Hills Hoist. The father calls out from a window at the back of the house that it’s such a glorious day, that he should really get down to the beach if he can, the water’s a bit icy, but once you’re in it’s lovely. He keeps walking up the ramp and shuts the flimsy door.
The music is coming in waves now. When the wind is blowing in the right direction, it sounds like howling.
On his way home from uni he walks past the supermarket and goes into the chemist. He uses his two-minute noodle money to buy packets of pills. He listens to the packets rustle in his pocket as he walks home.
The rustle doesn’t quite drown out the moaning music. He tries to fight against the current.
Or maybe he’s not sitting at the narrow desk, scratching words onto a white sheet of paper. Maybe he’s with his father, packing away the books from the hallway, stripping the sheets off the bed, carrying a box of clothes out the front door. The house is filled with the scent of eucalyptus and bleach. With this scent comes the neat story, eulogised by his father in the hollow church, then repeated for the days that follow. Something to say to people when there’s an empty space in the conversation, when people’s hands go to their mouths after a faux pas. Something to say to yourself as you’re walking to school; something to fold away and put at the bottom of your suitcase when you’re flying the coop. This was my mother. Her habitat was limited to a darkened room in a suburban house in inland New South Wales, Australia. Her existence was primarily sedentary. The introduction of cancerous cells into her breast, lungs and bones are believed to be the primary causes of her extinction. He thinks he can take this story to the city with him and it will all be all right. He convinces himself that this is enough.
He knows it isn’t enough. He knows that this is a story he’s telling to protect himself. A cover story, like a list of names and dates to paper over the real experience. The passenger pigeon population dropping from three billion to one in the space of seventy years: one corpse lying rigid at the bottom of her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. Or a sailor on Eldey Island in 1844, crushing the last great auk egg into the ground with his boot. Even these are stories, ways of cleaning up the moment of disappearance, like stuffing a dodo and placing it on display behind glass, as if it still matters. They’re not real. They’re not what it’s like to really face the music.
Where he really is, is in a hospital waiting room. He’s a boy: he’ll always think of himself like that. His father has finished his sentence. He listens even as he tries to drown it out. His head hinges open.
He wails. His wailing washes over everything, like a flood, like a sudden whoosh of wind. It’s a sireny song. It destroys like a bushfire. It scorches the walls. His wailing reverberates over everything, over forest, over fields, over time. He wails on his back veranda, by the side of the road, in the vestibule staring at an open doorway, at a barbecue over a plate of chicken wings. He wails, teetering on the rocks looking at the ocean, thinking of Phlebas the Phoenician. His wailing bellows through the bush, screaming its way around the thin rasping trees. Even the birds will hear it.
The wail will always be there, washing over his skin. He will never stop wailing. There is always more to come.
He wails in the stationery cupboard. He can’t stop. His colleague places an ivory hand over his.
He wails silently in the dusty space outside the lecture theatre. A young woman asks if he’s all right. He doesn’t remember what words he sobs out to her.
He wails in the hospital, this hospital, right now. The afternoon light is shafting through the open window, but he can’t hear any birds singing. The woman wants to hold his hand, he knows this. But the wailing is like a Perspex bubble around him. The girl is terrified, her face mirrors the face of the man in the bed opposite. She claws at the fairy tale book in her hands. He wants to stop wailing but it pours and pours out of him. It’s a scream that overrides all others.
Then, without warning, the girl’s body dashes towards the bed, like a sudden gust of wind. Her body crashes into his. Her body is like a barnacle on his skin; her head knuckles into the cavity between his collarbone and his chin.
He keeps wailing. She clings to him. He wails and wails. The rhythm changes. It undulates. The wails fluster and feather in the air. He feels his hand being taken. The woman’s hand is warm.
Then the room empties out. He can see it washing away, polishing the light.
After a long time (An aeon? A childhood?) the girl untangles herself. She goes back to her book. The covers span open on her lap.
Even though it’s just a fairy tale, he listens to his daughter’s voice as she begins to tell her story.