Of Ephemeral Dusk

The Isle of Husks and Music

There are no graves on the island cliffs. The bodies were cremated in the incendiary debris of ancient life and their ashes were scattered across the fields by sage winds. As headstones stand two iron husks fused together, all rust and charcoal, that would look years younger but for the island’s harsh winters. At night a young mourner sleeps inside them, although he does not know he mourns. He is a strange mourner, and in the sun and by the moon he plays a strange violin strangely.

One of the husks is big, with a roof like a house, but the mourner does not sleep under this one. The roof was buckled by the impact and burned by the fire, and now provides shelter from neither rain nor wind. He plays beneath it in the daytime, sometimes, but at night he must seek the solid roof of the second husk. The second had always been empty, unlike the roofed one. Things had spilled from the roofed one as it swerved, before it crashed, and so had been saved from combustion. These things had kept the mourner warm and alive. He knew where they all had fallen because he had fallen too.

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Of Empty Men

Under dark April skies I walk along this tumid river’s bank. The party is over. My love is gone; my sanity is dropping away like chunks of bread from a soggy loaf. The sun has almost completed its descent beyond the hills and I am left sightless in its wake. But my friend George walks beside me, on the near side of the riverbank so he may catch me if I fall.

“I wish you would talk to me,” he says, “instead of just trying to forget about it. That never helps. Not like talking. Talking always helps.”

He’s right, of course. I think he’s right. He seems right. Yet I cannot bring myself to share these feelings of mine with my oldest friend. George is an intransigent romantic. To the party he wore a black Edwardian suit with a jacket adorned by a perfect rose instead of a handkerchief – a symbol of his devotion to the force of love. Now that rose is all that’s visible in the deepening darkness. George’s sentimentality is unswayable. I could open my heart to him, as he asks, but I know he will not understand. George is of the type who can never understand.

“You were pretty rough on her,” says George. “Breaking it off with her in front of all those people. That was cold.”

“I had to do it sometime,” I say. And it’s true. I could not be with her any longer. It would be untruthful.

“She still loves you,” says George.

“I don’t think she knows what that means,” I say. “I’m starting to doubt that anybody does.”

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Deutschland, Deutschland…

In three days (and fucking counting), I’ll be arriving at Frankfurt Airport, having disembarked from my economy class Emirates seat alongside an unknown number of other Australian students whom I’ll only just have met. It will be six degrees Celsius with a mixture of rain and snow. I’ll have spent an hour and a half in Dubai, I’ll be tired, my body will be reeling from the time- and temperature-changes, and I’ll be in fucking Germany.

I’ve spent two years waiting for this. It’s the only thing that kept me fighting through a second year of senior German. And now I’m catatonic with fear.

Firstly, I’m not very good at German. I think that barely conversational, as long as you speak very slowly and clearly is the term for my grasp of the language. Think of the worst, most insufferable foreign tourist who has ever stood in front of you in a cafe queue. That’s me, counting out my euros by the cent and reverberating Entschuldigung! from every part of my body capable of carrying sound.

Secondly, I’m not great at conversation in my own tongue. That’s why I tend to avoid dialogue when I write. Conversation is hard. I freak out. I get stressed. Sometimes I rage-quit and storm out of the crowded building in search of quiet. The thought of this happening in a foreign country where nobody knows me nor is used to my idiosyncrasies terrifies me. Also, I lose things. I guarantee you all, a week into my stay I’ll have had the Frankfurt Fire Department digging snow around buildings in search of my lost passport.

But I’ve managed to keep that stuff wedged tightly into the back of my mind. It’s there, of course, keeping me shackled to reality, keeping me cautious. That must be a good thing. Despite the anxiety and the foreknowledge of disaster, the one thought that gets louder as the hours draw nearer is this:

I’M GOING TO FUCKING GERMANY WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 

An Epitaph for Humanity

Here lie the custodians of an Earth which some were allowed to enjoy; who were minds and masters and bodies and slaves; who realised eventually the reflex of action, but for whom, by then, the dice had long since fallen.

Minute in Retrospect

We were in the back row while his father gave that impersonal whitewashed fifteen-minute lie of a eulogy to great-uncles and third-cousins his son had never met. His mother sat in front, accepting empty non-verbal consolations with a delicate, almost practiced hand. Teardrop falsehoods fell from her cheeks and the tip of her nose. The insincere solemnity of the place kept me from scoffing. Ours were the only true tears in the room.

There was a berth around us, his friends. Rows of empty pews fanned in a neat pattern, like the radius of an explosion, like we were diseased. They kept us away from the wasted shell of the beautiful man who mattered more to us than anything had ever mattered to them. He was all that could ever matter, and now he was gone.

He never wanted this; the congregation of suits, the cross and the steeple, the priest sermonising over his coffin. It would have offended him. That kind of thing did. I thought back to when I proposed, that idyllic autumn before everything sank. He laughed at first, then told me why he couldn’t. It was an offense, he said, both to our world and to the extraneous fools who believed in marriage. It was a formality we didn’t need, and a jeer we didn’t need to make. He said no, but then he kissed me and I couldn’t have been happier.

That was before the drugs and the debt, the vice and cliché that function to ruin men in their primes. It happens to the rich, of course, not to us; it happens in good books, not in our own tiny lengths of human experience from which we read them to escape. Maybe that’s why he did it. Maybe while he destroyed the friends who loved him, he was living the Byronic fantasy he had always quietly resented the world for not being able to provide him with. He was trying to build refined extravagance in a time that didn’t suit it.

I looked back at his parents. The proceedings were finishing, and they were on their feet returning consolatory embraces and shaking with jejune, obligatory grief. Neither was among the pallbearers, and neither followed their son to his grave. When they left the church they ignored us fully, trying with the breadth of their passive might to harm us, to land a vengeful strike on the ones who had somehow killed their son. It was then that my eyes stung the most; not because their efforts had hurt me, but because I lamented the injustice. It was all so very wrong.

It was us who stood by the headstone, long after they had vanished with their friends to some faceless country pub to forget they’d ever had a son. The stone was solid grey and unassuming, engraved with plain words in a plain font. There he lay, destined to be forgotten by the annals of history, forever lifeless in the cold sentry of hindsight. My eyes caught those of an old liver-spotted groundkeeper in the distance. He bowed his head and dipped his hat below his eyes. I felt understood for the first time in weeks.

We’re the ones who’ll remember him. We’re the ones who’ll grieve for him. For them, this funeral was only the final nervous spasm of a death that had occurred long before.

On Love

To say “I love you” is to be singularly unbound by the trappings of falsifiability: for a lover, the only real criterion for truth is the ability to say it aloud and be certain beyond the faintest trifling doubt that what you have said is right.

Linear Perspective

When I was studying for my journalism BA, I worked part-time at a café that ran at a loss because the managers were too hip for profit. One opens and closes every year in every city: the produce was exquisite, the coffee fresh and smuggled from deep in the Colombian underground, but the prices were insane and suited only to a clientele of five or six regulars who ate and drank themselves broke out of consumerist loyalty. Anyway, I applied for the job because it was a ten-minute walk from the flat I was sharing with four of my friends from my high-school.

They turned me down at first. I wasn’t really expecting much; my CV was practically blank, and I didn’t have good grades or references to lean on. But mostly, I think they couldn’t afford staff. They were polite and apologetic and offered me change for a taxi home.

No, I replied, I only lived around the corner.

It was getting dark, they said, Arty could walk with me; he was going that way anyway.

Arty, it transpired, was their sole employee: kitchen, coffee and front-of-house. Of course I declined the offer, but ten minutes later Arty and I were walking down the cobbled roadway swathed in idyllic pink sunset, moving slowly and making small-talk like new lovers too sober to hold hands.

Well, that’s how I saw us. The thought never occurred to Arty. I found him intense at first, but he was so confident in himself that the ice couldn’t help but melt. He was about my age, and full of words and concepts. He talked about the waves of ailing sunlight diffused by atmospheric moisture and turned pink; he talked about linear perspective and why the sides of the pathway seemed to converge on the horizon. I knew that if we’d met in high-school, my friends and I’d have hated him on principle. But when we arrived at my front door after a handful of minutes, I found myself regretting the parting wave I’d had to give this good-natured philosopher.

Arty ran into me the next evening as I was walking home from uni. We didn’t talk for long; he just smiled sweetly and told me to come to the café whenever I was free, so we could negotiate my timetable.

I’ve never been certain how Arty got me the job, or why. I guess he liked me. And, hell, it must’ve been lonely on his own in that desolate shop. I worked weekdays from three til close, all day during summer, and I looked forward to it. That’s what I miss the most, I realise now, about that naïve prelude to the real world: the ability to earn money and enjoy it. I thrived on our conversation; I would complain about life and boys and college, and he’d listen and guide me through these travesties with wisdom from Nietzsche or Bentham or Freud. I asked him a few times which uni he studied at; he always found a way to avoid that line of conversation.

We had a busy day one hot summer at the end of my first year. It hit us like debris from the sky, and was just as unexpected. Tensions were high for both of us; we weren’t used to the heat or the work. I took orders and he prepared food, that was the system, but it got muddled in the stupidity of the situation. I found myself in the kitchen, throwing wraps and sandwiches together and spilling jars of olives along the ground. Arty was memorising the orders and dictating them to me. I told him to write them down; I think I screamed it at him a few times. He refused to touch the pen or the order pad. Mistakes were made, customers were neglected, meals were returned. By lunchtime, we had to tell everyone to leave.

I haven’t seen Arty for years, but I think of him whenever I see a bright-eyed kid in dirty clothes collecting welfare money, or working some senseless job for less than the minimum wage. I think of that boy with all those brains in his head who should have gone to university but spent his best years working behind the counter of a failing café, sacrificing his own wage so that his managers could afford to employ for him a friend, all because through some quirk of neurology he was unable to write. He had brilliance behind his eyes, but he couldn’t put it on paper. And, after years of being known by his peers as illiterate and stupid, neither did he want to. My life and career have been founded on the staggering power of the written word, but when it comes making or breaking humans, its light is pale and weak beside the destructive supernova of the spoken one.

And as I watch those poor kids in the street through my thousand-dollar lenses and think of Arty, I feel so damn guilty.