Chapter 33

THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY

The higher he gets, the lower his eyes train over the ground – first to the tiny green ants that race up the trunks of trees, as if the forest is made up of these tiny souls scurrying skyward. Then to the moss that seems to cover everything; he thinks, If I stop even a minute now to rest, it will cover me too like a blanket of snow.

The higher he gets, the louder the humming in his ear. It goes on for several turns of the mountain until, through a sudden break in the canopy, he catches a glimpse of its source. It’s a small propeller plane calmly ascending the eddies of mountain air. Turning slowly on its side, it glows in the sky as bright as a sunspot.

For a moment the sky opens up.

A year after the crash, while doing his HSC, Lewis had watched the home-movie footage of the last moments of Air New Zealand Flight 901. There was a giddiness to the scene as heads gathered around windows, hair backlit by the blinding light of the snowy scene outside, the camera gliding with a giddy bounce. He’d imagined heaven to look like this.

Somewhere unseen in the shadows were his mother, father and brother. In the days that followed he’d gone off to do his exams as planned, Aunt Agatha proffering a small white pill he later realised was Valium. All he remembers now is a summer of dreamless sleeps. He feels their loss like an absent limb.

He slows, stopping in his muddy tracks. Reaching up to mop his brow, he realises he’s been crying.

Was this what Wilhelmina was staring at so intently, looking to prise from his eyes?

‘Are you okay, Lewis?’ she had asked as they huddled together under the giant mango tree. ‘Are you comfortable with us?’

It was the simplest, most direct question, but impossible to answer.

‘Do I look strange?’ he found himself responding.

Her eyes took him in, in one long blink. ‘Let your mind relax,’ she said, ‘and let the stories in.’

It dawns on him now how nothing remains buried forever.

In his early twenties, with his hair and eyebrows dyed blue-black, he’d been discovered in the Dunedin Botanic Garden wearing one of Aunt Agatha’s thick woollen coats. It was a hot summer’s day and he was found hugging an old elm, the unnatural radiance of his face matching the electric blue of his aunt’s coat. To the cautiously approaching policeman he was heard to declare: ‘I want to kill my brother.’

Lewis was put on lithium at first, turning his lurching frame into a mental mouse – at once everything about him began to contract and shake, bringing his field of view down to the size of a postage stamp. It was as if an earthquake had passed beneath his trembling hands and knees while all his attentions were fixed on this tiny invisible thing. He walked as if slowly travelling this fault line in his mind.

After a year he was back in his university supervisor’s fluoro-lit office. He was now on a new medication which had the effect of plumping him up, greying his hair and manicuring his memories. His PhD supervisor – a pale, thin-lipped man who later died of a rare tropical disease in Mexico – suggested a change of tack. Nerli, it was decided. Yes, there was much work to be done on the painter Nerli.

He thinks how the portrait is the very opposite of this vinetangled forest through which he dives, mud splashing his calves like paint. All this the writer’s room cannot contain.

He thinks how, in this way, Nerli captured a perfect likeness: we are each defined by our opposite. It’s a strange relief knowing this as he continues his slow, imperceptible climb.