ASIM issue 55 Read online

  All my life I’ve liked the wind-swept spaces of the world. I still don’t understand what’s so deadly or dangerous about being alone, about liking to listen to the absence of things, but I learnt young to keep such truths hidden behind a mask of others’ making. And slowly, so slowly I don’t know how or when, that mask sank into me, diffusing through my every pore and atom until even my thoughts were half someone else’s. But even infrequent and sparse and cut with self-doubt and guilt and fear, as it always is now, still I will take what silence and solitude I can scrape together. Affliction or addiction, it is part of me, and without its binding I will break apart and drift away and nothing will remain beyond my unthinking flesh.

  Tears sting my eyes, because they promised, Ike and Cecily and Vera, to cure me of myself. Soon their knock will open the door and call me back, and what then? They will find that stripping the silence from my mind is as ruinous as slicing the bones from my body, and they will make my family pay the price of their failure. Cecily will see to that.

  * * *

  “You’re not lost.”

  It’s a luxury I can’t really afford, with Vera’s stopwatch counting down the moments, but I’ve let despair fold my knees and sink me to the ground, which is asphalt now. I’m contemplating ignoring their knock and just living here, in the layers, but I don’t think I can stomach this freeze-frame, click-snap world, and I know I can’t forget my family. So I’m trying to think of what I can look for that Cecily and Vera and Ike might possibly value, when the voice startles me out of my fruitless reverie.

  There’s a young girl, perhaps eight years old, standing three feet away. She has untidy blonde hair cut in a crop, a bright red clip pinned to one temple for decoration, and she’s wearing a pinafore straight out of the 1950s.

  “I am, a little,” I say. After all, it’s true enough.

  She shakes her head, and says, “You’re not patched. That means you got someone you remember, who remembers you. You still belong.” She gives me a grave and melancholy look. “You can go back.”

  “Yes,” I agree. I don’t understand what she means by patched, but the rest is accurate.

  “I’m Pig,” she says. “I think I belonged, once, too. I don’t remember anymore.”

  Just for a second, she changes. It’s so fast the only detail I catch of her other form is that she’s taller, and then she’s back in the shape of a little girl. I can’t tell if she knows what just happened. But perhaps that’s what being patched means: all your forms stitched one atop the other.

  “Are there others like you here?” I ask.

  Pig shrugs. “Sometimes. It gets cold and dark and grey in some corners of this place,” she adds. “Happens to the people, too. The forgotten can’t hold together on their own.”

  So even memories get recycled, sooner or later, I think. It’s oddly comforting. I wonder why she holds together, but I don’t ask. Perhaps she has a relative still living who remembers her as this child; or perhaps her errands for Cecily’s ilk keep her whole.

  “How come they sent you in?” Pig asks, examining me with a critical eye. “Most times they knock, and I fetch them back what they want.”

  “It’s a sort of test,” I tell her. “What do you fetch for them?”

  “Lots of things,” Pig says. “And it’s always different. They’ll give me some scrap, a handkerchief or a necklace or a family photo, see, and I’ll find everything I can which belongs to the same person that scrap does. I keep finding things until that person is fixed.” She looks uncomfortable, shifting on her feet, then blurts, “Is that why they sent you through? Because of those pieces that won’t go back? I don’t know why they won’t, honest!”

  “There are pieces that won’t go back?”

  “I can hand them through the door as often as I like, but it doesn’t matter, sooner or later they’re back here.”

  “Pig, what are these pieces?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Walking isn’t easy, what with the landmarks and even the terrain shifting with no warning. Despite familiarities, this isn’t the Melbourne I know. Instead it’s a jumble of the city’s scraps and leavings, the GTV-9 studios in Richmond tucked hard against a long-lost Kensington livestock sale yard, the wetlands at the mouth of the Elster Creek swallowing up a Fitzroy mansion. That snarling panther lies across from East Richmond station in my world, but Pig won’t let us venture into the nearby underpass. It wasn’t built when she belonged, she tells me, and she doesn’t trust it to remain in place long enough for us to traverse the tracks, which themselves are fluctuating between two, three and four lines.

  The whole thing is beginning to make me queasy.

  Pig doesn’t suffer from the same discomfiture. “The trick is to see past the shape of a thing, to the next one beneath,” she says, but I’m not up to it. If I squint, I can make out a vague hint of the form to come, but it gives me a headache and my brain can’t see two things on the same spot and still know where to put my foot.

  It’s not just the architecture and terrain that are shifting. There’s also a morass of debris underfoot that needs avoiding. Scissors seized at airports, pens and fishhooks and twine, and an inordinate scattering of wedding rings.

  After about five minutes’ walk that’s wended us through hundreds of years of Melbourne’s history, Pig stops.

  It’s barely changed from what I’m used to, but still it takes me a moment to recognise the field as Gosch’s Paddock. Here, it’s become an insect graveyard.

  I stand at its edge, my breath trapped in my throat as I stare at the thousands of insects, dead or dying, that obliterate equally the grass and the bitumen path winding through it. There are crickets and moths and bees, praying mantises and dragonflies and locusts: all still and silent, their wings glittering and carapaces shining only when the shifting light chances to fall the right way upon them.

  Pig says, “They’re voices.”

  The voices of those like me, cast here by the facilities trying to cure us of our innate selves. Deprived of the quiet we need to recharge and fathom, we can make no contribution; deprived of any agency to consider ourselves equal, instead of ill, we cannot speak in our own defence. The knowledge settles through me, cold and clear and pure as midnight dew: in ridding the world of silence, half the world has been silenced.

  Pig misunderstands the reason for my lack of immediate response, and proceeds to explain. “Look.”

  Opening her mouth, Pig reaches in, curls her fingers into a cage around her tongue, and pulls.

  There’s no resistance, no difficulty: in the loose confines of her fingers, her rootless tongue slips free of her mouth, and when she turns her wrist to offer me her upturned palm a butterfly hesitates there. A breath of wind and glitter fashioned into vulnerable flesh, its hair-fine legs rest on the tip of her middle finger and its broad wings stand upright over the sliver of its spine. The undersides of its wings are a warm otter-brown softening to cinnamon at the outer edges, with a march of orange and black eyes along its hemline.

  It’s a remarkable moment, but I’m not staring at the butterfly.

  I’m staring at Pig; or rather at the changed form that took hold immediately she removed her voice.

  Gone is the little girl with the unruly hair and pinafore; in her place stands a young woman unfairly aged by deprivation, clothed in overlapping layers of abuse. Bruises laid over bruises, broken teeth sprouting from a shattered jaw, a snapped neck that must have been her death-knell laid over a necklace of choking.

  Cecily’s instruction comes back to me, to find the little girl and what silence did to her.

  Looking at this broken wreck of a woman, it isn’t hard to guess what put her here, not with the years of hurt etched into her flesh, every mark a minute loss of hope and dignity. This was no quick death, no mugging gone wrong or innocent fall. A father or husband too free with his fists had pummelled the innocence out of her, casting the ghost of an eight-year-old girl into the layers and, sooner or later, the bod
y of a woman into the earth.

  For the first time, I understand something of Cecily’s anger towards silence, and by extension those who seek it out.

  Pig, I think, should scorn me as much as Cecily does. Because there is a sharp difference between the freedom to be silent, and the silence that condemns freedoms to perish.

  And I, with my small scrap of defiance, my refusal to make noise because I am clinging to the former, have done my part in contributing to the latter.

  * * *

  It’s all taken moments, no more.

  Then the young woman slips the butterfly back between her lips and Pig is back again. She’s smiling up at me, unaware of what’s just passed, and she says, “Your turn.”

  I look back at the paddock, now a hospice for banished voices. They’re such unassuming little things, taking up so little space. They need quiet in which to breed; they sing, if at all, only in the silent spans of night. Has anyone even noticed their loss yet? Can Cecily and Vera and Ike even recognise them for what they are, when Pig fetches one back?

  Echoing Pig’s gesture, I open my mouth, and reach inside. My tongue shivers in the circle of my fingers, but it doesn’t struggle. There’s no pain.

  I open my hand to find a dragonfly nestling there. Its splayed wings are limp, and the red of its body is dull and faded. It stirs in my palm, its tail curling, one wing moving out of sequence, like a clockwork creature winding down.

  “Oh,” Pig says. “Yours is sick.”

  It is, in fact, all but lost. It’s not strong enough to save me.

  But neither is it alone.

  Gently, I cup my free hand over the dragonfly, enclosing it in the warm cocoon of my hands. I want to save it for last. Then I step into the field.

  Whether it’s my resolve or their unanswered need that summons it, a wind starts up. The first slight curl of breeze lifts stunned and torpid insects out of the way of my foot. A few wings beat feebly; a cicada struggles to stand. Another gust, stronger this time, clears more path and I wade farther in. Their faint, stuttering attempts at renewed life throw shifting glints of red and black and gold through the ocean of green and brown bodies.

  The gale rises around me, buffeting the rousing insects and plucking at my hair, and one by one they take wing, struggling in the rushing currents that buoy them up as far as my knees, my waist, my shoulders. I cannot tell where their efforts end and the wind’s begins, but it doesn’t matter because, wind or insect or me, the purpose is the same.

  I close my eyes, and open my mouth, and the burdened maelstrom claws its way into my depths, a cavalcade of tiny barbed feet and fevered wing beats scritching and scratching as I swallow down a legion of shocked and hurting voices.

  * * *

  When the knock sounds, Pig slides the sliver of bright metal into my fingers and I pocket it, and I’m ready.

  The layers are nothing if not accommodating, and there’s a door in the middle of the now-empty Gosch’s Paddock. It’s a metal affair from this side, but I know that it will open on Cecily and Ike and Vera, so I’m not surprised when I step through and find myself back in the circular room.

  Ike and Vera are anxious, and even Cecily has some measure of uncertainty spoiling her hauteur.

  It’s ridiculously easy to walk into the nexus of their gazes and say nothing, because I know how to do that, say nothing, and they don’t. The next part will not be so straightforward, but I’m trying not to think of that.

  “Well?” Vera breaks first. “Did you find what you’d lost?”

  “That, and more,” I say.

  My voice sounds odd, but they don’t notice. Why should they, when they never paid any real attention to it before? Just as they never heard any of those unobtrusive little voices their treatments cast out of this world. There’s no reason why they should recognise any of them now, all twined together into a racket in my throat. All they can hear is the new volume, and it thrills them.

  “Your voice!” Ike cries, and he’s already flushing with the excitement of the success story he can feed to the media.

  I don’t correct him, because it doesn’t matter what he thinks, just so long as he can’t resist what I’m about to offer: a complete cure, the first patient to come out the other side of their diagnosis asking for attention.

  “I’m not used to it yet, not used to using it,” I tell him, because that’s true. My borrowed voice thrums and hums in me, the vibrations exhausting me. “My throat is already starting to ache. I was thinking, to save me from going through it all twice, we could discuss everything at a press conference.”

  Ike’s eyes shine, as if the lights and the cameras are already present, as if the publication credits are already rolling in.

  “What a wonderful idea,” Vera enthuses. She has all of Ike’s willingness to believe, and none of Cecily’s suspicion.

  “It’s a terrible idea,” Cecily cuts her off. “An unrehearsed release to the press? From an uncured patient?”

  “Uncured? Why, just listen to her!” Ike cries.

  “She’s found her voice,” Vera adds. “She’s requesting a public appearance!”

  Outnumbered, Cecily turns on me. “A press conference won’t save you any talking, Ms Micah,” she says. “We’ll have to go through what you plan to say beforehand.”

  She’s thinking I’ll back down, proving her right or at least saving her some lost ground. But the advantage to years of passing is years of observation. Even if parading it before strangers doesn’t come naturally, I know I’m aiming for a mix of confidence and carelessness. I just have to convince or corner them, and their disunited approach has already given me the ammunition I need to divide and conquer. After that it’s one speech. One little speech, and it will all be over.

  So I shrug. “I’d rather the interview now,” I counter. “I can go through everything with just you three, but then you’ll have to wait, probably at least a week, until my voice stops hurting, before I can talk to the media. They’re already running my story, aren’t they?”

  A cure in a day is more sensational than one in a week. And after this morning’s protest, with dozens taken into custody and the press coverage sure to raise doubts about the centres’ successes, Ike wants this. They need it, and the lure of it is too much. He and Vera vanish to organise the press.

  Leaving me alone with Cecily, who is not pleased to have her opinions so summarily ignored.

  She stares at me, maybe to see whether I break under it.

  “Do you know how many people we’ve treated since the inception of this program, Ms Micah?” she asks. “How many I’ve personally overseen?”

  I have an idea, I think of answering. All the swallowed voices shift inside me, wanting acknowledgement.

  “But here’s what’s interesting,” she says. “In all that time, among all those people, there has never been a single person diagnosed as yearning towards quiet. Before you, it was thought to be a purely theoretical result.”

  She pauses. All I can think of is the media, who must have spent the day in something of a speculation frenzy if what Cecily says is true. Even the borrowed voices have nothing to say to that.

  Pursing her lips, Cecily says, “I still think it so. Ike may feel you represent a triumph because we’re catching the mild ones, but I know better. That result level was factored in to catch the chameleons. The sickest, the most extreme cases, those who are so good at hiding they register as only a formality. Because there’s more to a person than the data they throw up in a survey. Isn’t there? The look in your eye, for example. How many years you’ve had to practise at hiding. Or the way,” she finishes with a penetrating look, “you manage to say one thing and have people hear another.”

  Apprehension makes my every muscle want to squirm, but I’m not about to let her goad me now. While I have Ike and Vera believing me, I don’t need the same from Cecily. I simply need her silence, and I think I know the best way to secure it.

  “I found Pig,” I tell her.

 
Cecily’s visibly taken aback, surprised by the frank admission and uncertain where I might take this subject. “And?”

  There’s no give in her voice, but there is a kernel of doubt. It’s exactly what I need.

  “It makes me angry,” I say. “To think that if only one person dared to count her worthwhile and so lift their voice in her defence, it could have saved her life.”

  Cecily narrows her eyes, unable to fault my words and yet still mistrustful of the presence of hidden meanings.

  “Ms Micah,” she says. “I happen to know that the most deeply blighted have a certain spirit to them, a kind of defiance and resolve that can easily be mistaken for a healthy reaction. Not one of my colleagues will deny I’ve developed an eye for that sort of subtlety.”

  The threat is obvious, but I smile, because so is her uncertainty.

  “Your prejudices are showing,” I say. “Just because there’s been no one like me before doesn’t mean I don’t exist now.”

  * * *

  They’ve set up a trestle table, hurriedly swathed in white linen, at one end of the tennis courts. The reporters and camera crews are clogging both courts when I’m walked out to take my seat. It’s summer, so even though it’s nearly six p.m. the daylight is still strong, and the day’s heat is finally starting to peak.

  Stepping out of the air conditioning, the heat is especially searing, and I’m immediately parched. I swallow reflexively. My tongue feels thick and clumsy.

  Beyond the tennis courts, Balmain Street is thronged with onlookers, all of them shuffling and shifting and straining on tiptoe for a glimpse. Half the crowd has a camera of one sort or another held up, obscuring their face in the interests of documenting mine.

  My knees are shaking and my blood is buzzing. My mouth is dry, and tastes of bad breath and fear. All those swallowed voices are churning in me, scraping at the insides of my skin and prickling at my lungs. Sometimes the only way to succeed is to fail, I tell myself. It doesn’t help much.