Dead Sun

He enters the house at night and is taken up to a bedroom that hasn’t been used since the death of a son. He expects to walk into a room of toys and picture books and bright clothes in small sizes and images of jungle animals tacked to the walls. Everything has been packed away in a garage or given to extended family or thrown away, leaving an empty chest of drawers and a bed covered over with a clear plastic sheet to stop dust. Impressions in the carpet show where other furniture stood and marks on the plaster where pictures once decorated the bare walls. Outside the dead room is the sound of a car’s engine turning over.

If it weren’t for the dust on the plastic sheet he might have thought the room had been cleared for his arrival. He waits in the doorway, struggling to stay on his feet. His knees buckle twice as he waits for the plastic to be removed. The bed is made with fresh linen and he is told to stay put. Don’t open the curtain. An open curtain would reveal that the dead boy’s room was being used again. He is not to risk revealing himself.

The overhead light is not turned on when he’s led into the room. A lamp is plugged into a socket and left on the floor with a globe offering minimal illumination. It won’t leak at the edges of the curtain. Sun-yellow clouds in the blue plastic surface of the lamp, the kind suitable as a night light for a child—not so bright that it would keep the child awake.

He wonders how the boy died. The man and woman who own this house are reluctant to talk to him. The woman said the child was ‘gone’. The man amended this a moment later and said he was dead and they did not look at each other and did not look at him.

As he was taken up the stairs to the attic room he thought he could see the difference between ‘gone’ and dead. His mind is so befuddled by lack of sleep, he told himself he was himself dead yet he wasn’t gone and soon he’d be gone but not dead. It’s also the morphine affecting his thinking. His vision blurs and he can’t keep his eyes open.

He walks into the room from the doorway. The mother closes the door a moment later. She has not slammed the door—not quite. It startles him like a gunshot would a dog. She walks down the short hallway, talking loudly enough for him to hear her voice, not her words, loud enough for the anger in her tone to be clear. He hears her thump-thump-thump down the wooden stairs and he hears the hiss of her husband for her silence. Both very quiet, perhaps whispering.

He sleeps through the night and the next day and wakes disorientated, wondering at the night now as before, as though he’s travelled to a place that doesn’t know the sun. No clock to gauge how long he’s slept. His facial hair tells him it’s been a good while since he’s shaved.

Food on the floor, within the circle of light from the lamp. A can of tuna on a plate with a fork. A bag of bread. A bottle of water and no glass. Next time it’s a tin of baked beans and a fork. No plate and no glass. He has the bread from the previous day. He need only pick off a few spots of mould. In the late evening she brings a glass of cold milk and a warm croissant.

He takes one of the morphine pills from his suitcase. He’s stretched the pills out—allowing the pain to grow— now he feels overcome even by the mild discomfort beginning to emerge. He needs the pain to be beaten back to a deep obliteration. He takes a second pill with the milk and lets the brittle crust of the croissant soften and dissolve in his mouth as he waits for the morphine. He eats every crumb from the plate. Leaves the plate and empty milk glass outside his door and when he walks back he stands in the middle of the room. The walls of the attic room slant to his left and right. This is the only place in the room he can stand upright.

He closes his eyes and feels an instant disintegration— dead and gone. Even with open eyes he finds it difficult to keep his balance.

A flash from outside and then the noise of thunder. Distant. It takes a few minutes for the rain to come. He had pushed aside the curtain upon waking in the middle of the night, spinning with vertigo simply lying in bed. He doesn’t see much outside the window, continues to stare at the ripple of black leaves on the dark limbs of a tree running with rainwater. There’s a cat’s-eye on the windowsill in the groove of the window track. He plucks out the marble and closes the curtain. The old couple would have been young when their child died.

Asleep, he becomes aware of a noise without waking. Shoosh, shoosh. A gentle sound that works its way into his dream about a woman removing clothes. She is dropping layers of fabric from her body—clothes as heavy as curtains. Feels his initial excitement turn to dread as he listens to the shoosh, shoosh of the woman in his dream letting fall her dresses and gowns to the dusty ground. A barefoot queen, not sure really what she is but that her feet are dancing over brocade and silk, heels beating the brilliant fabric down into a dirt floor, alluring and frightening at the same time.

He is able to turn from his left side onto his back and then onto his right side. Slowly. The bruises on his body have become less painful. The first day or two he’d only been able to sleep on his back and it was a question of tolerating the pain. When he urinates in the toilet downstairs the water in the bowl is tinged with blood, nowhere near as red as the first time he used the toilet. The pain in his kidneys and ribs can still be sharp so he is careful even when unconscious.

The sound outside continues, a shoosh, shoosh that might be the noise of cars passing on a nearby road. More asleep than awake, he imagines it’s the sound of a bird flying. The narrow child’s bed is near the window. The glass is loose in the rotting wooden frame. In the evenings he can feel the cool of the night waft past his ears. It is calm and quiet now and there’s nothing, only that distinct noise. Cars passing on a wet road perhaps but that shoosh, shoosh might be the sound of wings.

The large wings of an albatross that can fly across the ocean without needing to stop, for years gliding, diving and picking up fish from the waters below and sailing again high into the sky, flying on and on—the sound of those wings moving air past and below and rising. Shoosh, shoosh and then the silence of a long gliding progress up and down along tumbling currents of wind. His wife had told him that story, about years of flight over vast and hostile water. And he was told a while after she died that when the wind fell to nothing, the albatross, whose wings were too long to seagull-flap-and-flutter, would have to sit bobbing with every ripple of the ocean for hours and maybe days waiting for a gust of wind strong enough to lift it into the air again.

When he awakes more fully he realises it’s not the sound of cars on wet bitumen or a bird in flight and he’s already forgetting the falling fabric of the queen in his dream. He identifies the shoosh, shoosh easily enough as the sound of sweeping. He moves the curtain only enough to see outside. There’s a thin woman. Pretty. Nearing fifty. Clearing leaves from her back porch with a broom. Black hair past her shoulders. Small breasts, lovely. Long arms and legs. Strong-limbed, surefooted. Slow and rhythmic. She lifts her head and he is not sure whether she has caught a glimpse of him in the window watching her as she sweeps.

In the bottom of the chest of drawers, pushed to the back, he finds a snow globe from a fun park. Within the swirl of snowflakes is a roller-coaster with a carriage halfway down a descent. In the carriage are two people, arms raised and mouths open in happy screams.

He shakes the globe and watches the white flakes float around. One of those gifts that might have given the boy a moment of entertainment before getting shoved into the back of the bottom drawer. Prior to that it might have been kept on top of the chest of drawers for a year or two, to be given an occasional shake by a visitor. He turns it upside down above his face as he lies on the bed—lets the flakes collect in the bulb of the snow globe.

His wife had hung on to many such mementos. She didn’t get to travel as much as she wanted to but when young had spent time in Mesoamerica exploring pyramids and ruins. An obsidian knife from Belize had been a prized possession in their home. Not authentic to the Maya, yet it was well made and a tool capable of ritual heart extraction. His wife told him the reason for the human sacrifices was a way of feeding death, of satiating a great devouring maw that had to have its daily fill so it would not need to feed on the Mayan high priest and those he loved or wanted to protect. It was a way of offering a substitution, someone else for me, this heart for my heart.

His wife told visitors that the reason she kept the obsidian knife was to ward off death from her household. He knew she wasn’t superstitious in any real way so the obsidian knife had been more of a talking piece to set out on the bookshelf in the front hallway. Their guests were always surprised by how sharp it was and she told them that you could buy scalpels with obsidian blades much sharper than any made of surgical metal.

A snow globe would have been a better memento, at least more fitting for their home, since his wife had a series of miscarriages over the years of their marriage and was never able to bring a living child into the world. Another shake of the globe and he places it on the windowsill. He lies down on the bed and watches the last flake of snow settle.

Outside he hears the sound of a car engine turning over. The owner of the house believes in warming up the engine of his car for a few minutes before he drives. Early every morning. From the attic room he can hear him return from the garage to the kitchen, where his wife tells him to finish his cup of tea. Stone cold or piping hot, he says he likes it either way, not lukewarm. Then gets into his car, puts it into gear and drives away, leaving a silence deeper for the lack of an idling motor.

Lying in this bare room might have been a difficult confinement. He hasn’t unpacked his suitcase. Leaves it sitting on top of the chest of drawers. He’d imagined that the week or two in this room would be impossible, yet the months have been so turbulent, the years overseas have been so hard, that everything shuts down in this room and he lies on the bed in an unusual torpor. Pins and needles break out over his whole body at times.

The next door neighbour’s boy plays tennis just beyond the attic room window. When he didn’t have a friend over yesterday, a machine fired tennis balls at him and he practised his shots, a grunt for every ball he hit. With his friend over today there’s the sound of laughter and boisterous boys in competition.

To the old couple who live in this house the sound of laughter, of boys at play, growing so slowly … how torturous a sound are those outstretched voices in racing excitement and free laughter. The old couple move about their house quietly, rarely talking. The woman downstairs coughs. She turns on the tap in the kitchen and the plumbing rattles through the walls of the house as water passes through.

The voice outside calls: love–fifteen, love–thirty, love– forty. The score is called out for each point the boy plays his friend and he is winning easily. The woman downstairs coughs again and flushes the toilet. The plumbing ceases its rattling in the walls and the game outside concludes when the black-haired woman next door calls her son in for dinner.

He lies in the bed knowing there’s only so much longer he can stay now that his body doesn’t limp down stairs or flare awake with agony because of a bad movement while sleeping. Only so much longer will he be able to sit in this dead room and listen to life outside the window or below the floorboards. It makes him think about his wife and how she had lain in a bed waiting for him to return from Caracas.

He’d tried to get home as soon as feasible, even so it was months longer than he’d intended. He arrived to find her in her hospital bed, unconscious much of the time; she’d gone from receiving treatment in recovery to being moved to palliative care. Not merely in pain—agonised without the liquid painkiller entering her bloodstream via a drip. Dreamy and soulless in her drug-drowned eyes. Catching a hold of her writhing hands and trying to calm her and wishing he could sink his teeth into her neck like a vampire and suck out the diseased blood that was destroying her body.

He didn’t leave the hospital for days, hoping to get one more lucid moment with his wife. Hour after hour passed and he began thinking it would never happen. He woke with his body half over the hospital bed, face down with her hand on the back of his head, her fingers across his ear. He didn’t move for a moment and let that caring hand lightly hold him down to the place in her body where she had tried to give him a child many times. Lifting his face to her, to tell her he was sorry, he loved her, something … saying nothing when he saw the pain that was rushing up to obliterate her. She didn’t speak softly and of love; pain had given her no patience for easy sentiments.

The anger was clearer. Fury that he had been absent when she needed him. Always overseas. Absent so often in their lives. Absent when she had been raped in their home. No point telling him when he came back from Kashmir a year later. But that had been the real reason she’d sold the house, their first home together. Afraid to tell him about the rape, of course—then again, so much of her heart had been eaten up by fear that there was nothing left of affection, only the boiled-down residue of black metal hate.

He did not believe her. It was the disease and it was the medication and she must have seen the doubt because she reached out a hand and didn’t offer him a caress that put a lie to this implacable anger. Her nails hadn’t been cut for weeks and she found a ruthless force within her spine that made her rigid and then snapped her forward so she could drag three deep lines through his face, from forehead across a closed eye and down to his chin. He left that room and walked out of the hospital bleeding. She died a week later, unconscious to her last moment.

Music outside his window. Murmuring and then the sound of dinner and drinking—voices, cutlery, crockery and glass. Conversation getting louder. He doesn’t look outside the window. He knows the black-haired woman next door is having a party. They begin an unsynchronised counting, “ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five,” a drunken chorus getting more ragged as they approach zero. Fireworks pop and ratatat in the distance. Cars honk their horns on nearby streets.

He lifts the curtain open a little and sees her on the back porch giving and getting kisses from her family and friends. A smile on her face sloppy with drink, pretty even when wasted. Abandoned to the hectic, clustering sense of time crashing in a waterfall and then flowing on again, all of us in a Niagara Falls barrel together or alone. Perhaps just the way he is thinking at the moment. This room—his barrel going over and over in a freefall before it crashes down into the watery turbulence of tonnes of falling time. Is it only what he sees or is the exuberant happiness in her face also an expression of a woman struggling for her next breath? He drops the curtain he’s been holding up with his forefinger.

A knock on his door. A quiet knock that will not be repeated. When he opens the door the old woman is quietly walking back down the hallway, her husband a few steps down on the stairs, standing there in the hope that his son’s bedroom door would not be opened tonight and he need not venture any further. Duty and propriety in his face, even if he blinks and everything in his mind rolls away down the stairs in fear. Both of them very quiet, holding plastic glasses with flat champagne.

“Happy New Year,” says the woman. Her husband raises his own glass a centimetre. She returns and offers him the champagne. A few bubbles jostle to the surface.

He holds up a palm to indicate he doesn’t want the champagne. “What day of the week is it?” he asks.

“Monday.”

When he wakes, a postcard is sitting on the floor beside a bowl with two hard-boiled eggs in it, shells already removed. No message on the back of the postcard and no postage stamp. There’s an image of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. He notices the snow globe has been taken away. He leaves the postcard where he found it. Stands in the middle of the attic room, takes two steps to the window and walks back to the door and stops again in the centre. He’s delighted by the postcard; even so he takes his morphine. He eats the two hard-boiled eggs in four bites and stares at the postcard. He’s seen the statue itself a number of times in Paris—goes on staring at the image of it on the card, a photo taken in 1970, then puts the postcard into his suitcase.

The ancient Greek sculpture gives him a sense of time, not of what it took to carve out each feather of Victory’s wings but the sense of an entire span of life as slow as his own, a person living under the same sun, so long ago the dust from his bones has been blown away until not a particle remains of the man on that Greek island who carved an image of a winged woman from stone. The small breasts, the belly with its navel, hips and thighs, pressed into the marble, the time of that love stretched long over that vanished lifetime, love for the art in the woman and the woman in the art, more than anything for a sense of love carved into his own soul, so astounding in its power after centuries it has not entirely crumbled away with the rest of his civilisation. She is all the more precious now for disfigurement. She is more sublime the closer she comes to demolishment.

He wakes after a few hours of sleep. Not sure what time it is—well before dawn. He climbs down the stairs and walks to the bathroom. The old couple are sleeping. He’s not worried about whether they’ll wake or not. Knows they’ll stay in their room and whisper across their pillows until he’s gone.

He uses scissors to cut his beard and the shaver behind the mirror to shave his face. He doesn’t see the three lines across his face, his wife didn’t scar him, yet if he looks at himself long enough he knows where her marks started and where they ended and the space between each sharp fingernail, her pinkie not reaching flesh as did her forefinger, her index finger and her ring finger.

He uses the newer of the two toothbrushes in the cup by the basin, brushing his teeth twice before he feels they’re clean again, then throws the toothbrush into a bin. His left canine has been wobbling since he arrived. It’s worse now—as is the pain in the left side of his face. He pulls the loose canine out easily and the pain diminishes as though he’s extracted a thorn rather than a tooth. He glances at the long, single-rooted tooth in his palm, white with little sign of decay, and throws it into the bin beside the basin as well.

He gets into the shower and washes his hair and then his limbs and torso. Some bruises are gone and others have almost faded away. He has brought fresh clothes from the suitcase in his attic room, dresses and looks at himself again. In the mirror he is fresh-faced with clean hair almost dry already, a well-dressed man. He is ready. A clock on the wall tells him it is 2:30 a.m. He turns off the overbright bathroom fluorescent. He stands there not moving, blinking uselessly, the contrast to the fierce light creating a new depth of darkness.

The light is on in the hallway. It’s left on every night, so he passes through the back garden, barely pausing, knowing it does not mean that either the black-haired woman or her son is awake. They feel safer with a light on. Sleeping in separate rooms, the light in their hallway is also a way to keep two bodies connected that are otherwise surrendered to the separation of night and unconsciousness. That might be why they keep the light on, he thinks, but the house is silent and it need not have much meaning, nothing more than a light left on in the hallway because it is easier leaving it than turning it off. He walks down the illuminated hallway and it’s not difficult to be quiet walking over the deep pile carpet.

There had been a time when he would return late in the evening and enter his own family home and he’d enjoy the thought of his wife safely asleep behind the locked gates and closed doors of their house and bedroom. Late at night, the air inside would have a weight, every room’s captured air from the day just passed, and there was a welcome in the aroma of home, the way a house contained in curtains and carpets the lingering smells of many shared meals and caught their exhaled breaths. Different in this house, yet within minutes he feels himself slowing down, breathing through his nose until he sighs. A place to burrow down and curl up or roll over and stretch every last joint in feet and knuckles, where open-mouthed with a trickle of drool a person would still know themselves even while lost in the deepest abyss of sleep.

He opens a door and there’s the boy sleeping face down at the other end of his bed, one foot on his pillow and the other foot hanging over the edge. As old as twelve and outgrowing his first bed. Tennis racquet and guitar on the floor amid magazines and books, sneakers, socks and a half-light fish tank glowing emerald with water weed and silver-orange-and-blue fish. He stands in the doorway and sees his own reflection in a wrought-iron mirror affixed to the opposite wall—a father looking in on his sleeping son.

In the kitchen there are dirty pans on the stove and the benchtops are a chaos of dinner preparation. Plates have been left on the dining room table as if the diners simply stood up when finished, no-one cleaning up the slightest thing. Guests over tonight, five places set around the table with meals not fully finished, leftovers of pasta and salad and garlic bread and sticky toffee pudding with vanilla custard in bowls and on plates. He sits down and doesn’t need a clean plate or cutlery. He’s eaten in far worse conditions and in far less pleasant places. Food doesn’t become rubbish to him simply because it was near another person’s mouth or has gone cold. He eats everything that is left from dinner and he can make two glasses of good red wine from what’s at the bottom of the glasses and bottles. It’s the first time his stomach has been full in weeks and for a moment he feels overcome with sleep. He closes his eyes and sways in his seat at the head of the dining room table.

When he opens his eyes he notices a picture of the black-haired woman on the wall with her son when he was an infant. He’d thought she was pretty but didn’t know she’d been a beauty. Her son was about six months old in the picture, of an age at least where he was yet unable to sit unassisted. His face did not much resemble the lad hitting tennis balls on the court. Faces changed; never stopped changing from day one. He can see his own face reflected in the sliding doors that open onto the back patio and he doesn’t recognise the thin man in the black glass, sitting alone at a large mahogany table. He puts down the knife and fork onto his plate quietly. He gazes at the silver-framed picture of mother and child on the wall again—a lovely woman who had done everything she could to hang on to her figure and her looks and the baby had grown and grown, and was still growing.

In the lounge a clock on the wall tells him it’s ten past four in the morning. A neat, tidy room. There’s a terrarium on a low table by the large picture window—a very large jar with orchids growing from the miniature fern and moss landscape as though they were trees. A small temple almost overgrown with vines, off to the side, gives the miniature panorama a sense of living scale.

On the windowsill overlooking the garden is a metal statuette of Shiva Nataraja. A meaningless memento in this household, a frivolous spiritual nod to all things Eastern, about as significant as the yoga mat rolled up and tucked away between the sofa and the lounge room wall. An accessory to her exercise and yet the statuette isn’t a cheap trinket—it is a well-made, hand-crafted example of the Nataraja. It reminds him of sculptures he’s seen of the Trimurti, the three-headed god: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. While Vishnu is life and sustenance, the ongoing world, there are sects devoted to Brahma the creator and innovator, the birthing principle. And there is Shiva the destroyer. A devil in most other cultures, here he is in the middle of the night, stomping within a circle of flame on a windowsill, glorious in his destruction of everything that is tired and complacent, inert and weak, clearing and renewing the world in a blazing dance.

He pushes open another door, ajar to the illuminated hallway, her bedroom. The black-haired woman is asleep, covered to her shoulders with a white sheet and an orange mohair blanket. He stands in the doorway very briefly and moves to the bed. He moves closer. He wants to smell her hair. Closer and he can feel her breathing on his face. Closer, until their noses almost touch, he closes his eyes and sways. I could love you. His lips move but he’s not giving the words any air. Would either of us want that now? No, of course not. I know. You already are beautiful without me. Not quite as young, it’s all the deeper in you, that loveliness showing up bruised wherever it was touched. I feel you. And I have heard you sweeping away the leaves, sweeping away dead time. A sweet sound— the sound of that sweeping, the careless rhythm of each stroke across the wood. The calm movement, an empty dance to the quietest music in the world. I have heard you singing under your breath. He sways, his head spinning with thoughts, and almost falls forward onto the sleeping woman. Open eyes, standing and catching a hold of her bedhead to stop himself from tumbling forward. They touch. She turns over. He waits for her breathing to return to its deeper rhythm before moving again.

Her sleeping pills are on the nightstand beside a glass of water. Clear and reflective and very still. He taps the glass twice to see the water ripple. Watches it settle back to a motionless skin, thick enough to be a membrane. The tink, tink of his nail against the glass doesn’t wake her. The sleeping pills have a date printed on the side of the bottle. The same date that he arrived next door. The bottle is almost empty already. The prescription label on the bottle also has her name: Inez Beecher. Inez Beecher is still wearing her wedding ring and she’s beginning to snore in her new position on her back, mouth slightly open.

He lies down beside her on the bed. Doesn’t close his eyes. It’s a small room but three times the size of the attic room. He sees himself reflected in a freestanding wrought-iron mirror near the wall. At night he and his wife would talk before sleep took them away. He allows his lips to move noiselessly as he speaks. In Kashmir I heard a story about a sleeping god and how the world is his dream. You and me, your Shiva dancing or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, all the gods and all the animals, everything living, every bit of life on this planet, images flitting through God’s dreaming mind. I had this thought that, were we able to observe Him sleeping, we would worry at every twitch and night movement—that our tired God might wake and dispel existence from His dreaming mind. I’ve found myself thinking the world must become a nightmare, that we should welcome the horror so our dreaming God startles and is roused awake. Then He, and everything within His mind, can be set free.

He stands and takes from his pocket the last of his morphine with a drink of water from the glass by the bed. He closes the door when he leaves the room and walks down the illuminated hallway. The son’s door is wide open. The toilet flushes and the son emerges into the hallway. With half-closed eyes, mostly asleep, he knows there’s a stranger in the corridor. Fear stuns him. A sharp intake of breath—no noise otherwise. All he can do is blink his eyes before he has the man’s hands around his throat, has the legs kicked out from under him and is lowered down quietly to the thick carpet, is pushed down, down another millimetre, and another, his windpipe squeezed shut and crushed. They wait for the last air in his lungs to grow old.

He carries the body of the boy in his arms out of the house and up the wooden stairs and to the empty attic room. Lays the boy down on the bed. He’s not warm, he’s still not cold as he will be. He has paled yet the flesh of his face hasn’t fallen. Plump. It springs back after being touched. His eyes are closed and he appears unconscious. Children go to death easier. An older man will cling more desperately and the strain of that clinging is wrought in his every expression, even in the corners of a smile. It strikes him as pathetic, that obstinance, as though any one life should be the sole exception to the rule of the cosmos. Never as peaceful as this boy to whom harm never came close before his last moment, going into it as if waking for a moment and then falling back into another dream.

He takes his suitcase and makes sure it is locked and ready to travel. The suitcase had been so difficult and heavy he had dragged it up the stairs when he first arrived—that’s how enfeebled and battered he’d been. The suitcase is light and feels empty, as full of air as a ball. It is the contrast with carrying the boy’s weight out of the black-haired woman’s house and up the stairs. And it’s the morphine beginning to work in his blood.

He stands in the middle of the room and waits for the old man downstairs to turn his car on, to warm the engine. It’s not a long wait. He picks up his suitcase and leaves the attic room. Before going he remembers the plastic sheet the old couple use to stop dust and throws it over the boy on the bed.