17
Displacement. Wandering. Jason felt as though the world had somehow been tipped and not righted correctly so that he was walking on slanted tiles, trying to keep his balance between leaning walls. It wasn’t just the blow to the head. He couldn’t return to the apartment. It had been risky to even contemplate as the news reports kept increasing and his blurry, half-formed picture kept appearing on the screens around him. And the house at the foot of the mountains was a loss now. There was no center to his world, no axis on which to pivot. Where were the mice? What would happen to them? He imagined them, pawing the glass, padding at surfaces they could not see.
The light above him in the public toilet was flickering, coughing to life an electric purple that made his eyes in the mirror look black. Outside, a train rumbled into the station, didn’t stop, went squealing away again like an angry child. His hand trembled as it held the tweezers. Glass in the sink, spotted with his blood. He turned his head and felt the wound, winced as the instrument scraped against bone. He still felt pain. That was good. The naturalness of it made his limbs warm, made the crooked purple world seem a little righter. He washed his hands and raked his fingers over the hole, trying to feel any glass that might remain. He hadn’t even thought about the woman yet, the one who had escaped him. He was afraid of the fury, of what it would make him do.
Jason had pulled two stitches into the gash in his head when the man entered the bathroom. He was not in a position to look, holding one end of the thread through his skin between his teeth, the needle above him and to the left, almost out of sight. He heard shuffling footsteps and felt the air leak in from outside. A lanky, halting figure appeared in the mirror beside his own, long hair and a leather jacket, huge gaps between narrow nubs of grey teeth. Jason had seen him outside on the bench, waiting, making a young woman sitting there uncomfortable with his close, loud talking. Some mentally ill homeless nobody creeping around the earth being a problem to everyone he encountered. Shadow person. Man of smoke.
“What you doing?” the man asked. His voice was high-pitched, cronelike, the voice of an elderly woman. “You hurt yourself?”
Jason let the air escape his lungs slowly, gently, between his teeth. The wound was bleeding again. He had only just managed to stem it before the homeless man entered. The air smelled of urine, nearer and more immediate than it had been before. Jason slid the stitch from the wound and stood there half-sewn, his hands gripping the sink to stop the shake.
Before he could open his mouth, the man spoke again.
“Can’t get a bus. Nope. Not at all.” He shook his head. “Bus strikes all over. Reminds me of the Whitlam days. The bad old days. I’ve called my mum. Maybe she could get you to a doctor on the way home, if you want. I could ask her. She’s nice. She’ll probably do it.”
“You called your mum, did you?” Jason’s voice shuddered from between his lips. The rage was pressing at the back of his eyes like fingers trying to worm their way out of his tear ducts. He looked at the man. He had to be forty. “You live with your mum?”
“Off and on. Can’t stand her cooking. Can’t cook for shit, my mum. Heh. Heh. Can find better stuff on the streets, yes sir. Don’t have to clean my room up none neither. Don’t have a room, do I?”
The man’s head bobbed slightly, eyes hungry for approval. For friendship. Jason gripped the handle of his bag tightly, heard the leather groan, the buckle pop open.
“I know you,” he said.
“Really? We’ve met before?”
“Oh yes.” Jason licked his bottom lip, felt the stitches in his head pull tight. “You’ve been wandering around the edges of my life from the moment I was born. You, the un-right, the slightly off, the occasional rarity. Sick one. Damaged one. Runt who should have been pushed from the litter and starved but was not because of the stupid rules we make, because of the laws we write, because of the continuous unreasoning idiocy of it all piling one on top of the other until all we’re doing is walking around in one huge, disgusting hallucination. You, the over-hugged, over-soothed, over-supported. You’re a walking problem. You’re this.” He pointed to the hole in his head. “You’re a wound that no one’s got time to close.”
“Hey.” The man half-frowned, uncertain. “That’s a mean thing to say.”
“Parrot, that’s what you are.” Jason stepped towards the man, into the cloud of his urine smell. “Parroting the words you overhear. The Whitlam days. The bad old days. You got any fucking idea what you’re talking about? You can’t even manage to get from point A to point B. You can’t even manage to shake off your own dick.”
Jason was trembling from head to foot. His lips stopped moving but the words still came. Parasite. Leech. Burden. Sucker of teats. Bag of skin. Useless, useless creature. Just another example of the world’s lack of instinct, of the will to simply close his mouth and nose and remove him as methodically and as effectively as the amputation of a rotting limb. The world was so full of these unnatural creatures wandering, bumping into each other, fumbling in the dark. Inside them were organs, blood, bones, plasma to feed the strong, nutrients that should have been returned to the earth from whence they came to fuel trees, grass, plants. The circle interrupted, bent out of shape. User of good air.
The man was sucking it in now under Jason’s hands on the floor of the bathroom.
Drawing it into his mouth as he drew it into the wide, gaping slash in his throat.
Jason felt blood on his face as he worked. It was not all his own.
“You,” he grunted, slicing and slicing, hacking away wet flesh. “You. Are. Unworthy.”