Chapter 18

PACIFIC TIME

It passes through the night, so low on the Richter scale that no one will remark on it the next day, but sending a deep tremor through his body, a silent shudder. It lasts just a few woozy moments.

In its aftermath Lewis wonders if he’s dreamt it, so surreal was the feeling of the hotel’s cement walls turned suddenly liquid, the room held inside a wave, suspended by it. The air was viscous, a bubble about to burst. Without his glasses, he saw the ceiling fan turn in the motion of a double helix, before resuming its slow-motion wobble, the keeper of Pacific time. His bedside lamp had remained on, a miraculous thought.

Two decades before, something like an earthquake had riven Lewis and his world in Dunedin. He had gripped the scaly trunk of an elm, the summer sky splintering into a million tiny leaves, but Lewis had felt frozen and murderous, his teeth chattering as if his mouth were full of snow.

‘It’s about regaining your balance,’ his doctor had told him in the devastating week that followed his psychotic episode. ‘Being bipolar is a terrible gift, the gift of shapeshifting. Living with it is also learning to mourn its loss.’

Sensing a musical nature in the young Lewis, with his wild blue-black hair, the doctor had added: ‘You’ll need to conduct your own requiem for all those surrendered souls.’

Of course it was much more than that, Lewis learnt, and ‘finding balance’ would take a small lifetime of tiny incremental adjustments, a marathon of patience. But every now and then his footing faltered, and he would find himself slipping willingly through the chasm – it was the sensation of slipping he couldn’t live without, even though he knew giving into it would be the end of his world.

As he puts on his glasses, the scene draws clear. Strewn like seaweed by his bed are the stems and petals from a flower arrangement; an orchid has imploded. Offered on his pillow are tiny smears, a seismographic smudging, and reaching for his nose he can feel a little blood, its metallic taste creeping up to the roof of his mouth. Spurts of adrenaline bring him bolt upright in his bed.

Now he remembers what occurred only moments before. Falling from his bed. Falling headfirst towards the sharp edge of the coffee table which sprang towards him, the pages of the book outstretched like arms with the portrait of Tusitala embracing him. It was welcoming, like finding land while bodysurfing. Then he was back in his bed, but this time the portrait was falling towards him, the book’s pages unfurled and flying through the air.

He remembers how the portrait was the only still thing in the room, around which everything moved and shifted. He thought that the room would never stop turning and dissolving, unanchored from the island, but still he was okay; swaddled somehow, straitjacketed by Tusitala’s smile that only he could see.

It’s still night-time outside and Lewis falls into a deep and wondrous sleep.