Intimate Antipathies Read online

  To give you a sense of how uncertain and irrational I can be, after I wrote the paragraph before this one I went to sleep, and woke when it was the middle of the night and saw the shape of a man holding a child in his arms at the foot of the bed. A rush of terror ran through the axons of my nerves but the terror sat side by side with an immutable incredulity of reason which assured my semi-conscious mind that the figure was only an illusion in the dark. Neither the impression caused by tired senses nor the reassurances of the rational mind were totally persuasive. Both senses and reason argued against my reaching over and turning on the lamp, which would have put paid to all argument about the matter. When I woke late this morning, both senses and reason maintained that the other had been under the influence of irrationality, with the superstitious side suggesting that it was madness to refuse what was evidently apparent, and the logical domain rested its case on the misleading nature of appearances.

  But with the idea that the guy in the green Camry was going to kill me, I was for the first time in my life truly certain. I was more convinced of that idea than I am the order of the days of the week, the whereabouts of the sun when looking at a clear blue sky, or the surety that it is my own mind which controls the hands that are writing this sentence. In one long moment, the idea that the man in the green Camry intended to kill me became so insistent that my fingers began to tremble on the steering wheel and an odd moan broke out from my mouth.

  One of the things I was surprised to discover about myself from this affair is that I really don’t want to die. When I realised the man in the shades in the traffic behind was going to kill me, my foot came down hard on the accelerator and I saw myself as if in a film, flying and spinning around oncoming traffic at the intersection, dodging between the cars turning onto Elizabeth Drive and the startled faces of their drivers as they slammed on their brakes, too stunned even to consider pressing down on their horns or screaming out their windows.

  By the time they thought of doing something like that, I was halfway to Penrith, overtaking trucks and retirees and swerving in and out of the traffic lanes all the way to the turn-off onto Badgery’s Creek Road. Hanging a left there I almost lost control and came to a stop in a wide spot of asphalt near an old fence with a long stream of flapping yellow tape tangled in strands of black barbed wire that had rusted into the branches of a eucalypt.

  From there I sat and waited, scanning the roads in the distance behind me, watching the traffic passing the turn-off, waiting to see if the man in the shades would follow onto this quiet road, while I breathed in gasps and swallows.

  From there, a slight rise in the general slope of the land, it seemed the whole of pastoral suburbia was spread out in a great green plain, and over the long stretch of fields and the farms on the horizon the clouds were glowing gold and lit with fire, an immense stillness and a deep silence, and powerstation sentinels guarding the scattered sheep and dairy cows moving over the hills. In each of the three fenced-off yards by the main road the sky was mirrored by still silver ponds as deep and wide as pools. Maybe it was the adrenaline or the imbalance of chemicals racing through my brain, but looking upon those three bodies of water reminded me of a story I’d read many years ago of a scientist hiking through a hinterland wood and coming across a frozen waterfall with three columns of ice hanging from its cliff-edge. The scientist stood before the ice, dumbfounded, and as he fell to his knees his resistance left him, he had seen the face of God. I felt God’s presence hovering high above the still waters of the ponds, in the immensity of the red and gold clouds, and trembled at this terrible force.

  As a child I had dreamt one night of looking out the back windows of our house and seeing angels gathering in the night sky. They were hovering over the hills in great squadrons of cloud, and God, an enormous figure with a Zeus-like physique, rode at the centre of this winged caravan of clouds. He raised his arm, and sheaths of fire rained down from the angels’ fingertips, and the homes and streets and the land beneath them exploded into eruptions of smoke and ash and ruin. In the clouds above the paddocks and plains while I waited for the man in the shades to come, while the scattered sheep limped between old tractors and dissembled cars, I saw God’s presence, and there was nowhere to take cover from him, he was there watching how my small drama would unfold.

  The light grew darker while I waited, trembling and sweating with my hands on the wheel, and soon enough I realised that the man in the shades was not coming. At first it seemed impossible to reconcile why he had given up his pursuit. I was certain that he wanted to kill me, it was not possible to be wrong about it. Like the movement of clouds, or the opening of a flower, my idea about the man in the shades began to change its dimensions into some new configuration. It was true – the man in the shades wanted to kill me, but he didn’t necessarily want to kill me this afternoon, he would bide his time, torment my mornings, evenings, afternoons with a timing known only to himself.

  Worse, he intended to torment me like God testing Job, he would take all there was of my life, piece by piece, until I’d paid in total for my sins. The terror this idea summoned in me was absolute. I called my ex-wife. ‘Listen to me,’ I said, ‘someone is going to kill me, he’s going to kill all of us!’ I told her about the man in the shades, how I’d seen his intentions from the glimpse in my rear-view mirror. She listened, left a long silence after I’d spoken, and when she responded there was an odd calm in her voice. ‘I think you need to call your doctor,’ she said. ‘Can you please, please promise me you’ll call him?’

  For a moment I pictured my doctor’s office on the street in St Leonards, the leafy garden and the stone steps between the bushes leading into his practice, the settling sound of his voice as he opens the door and invites his patients in, the honest blue of his wide eyes. Then another thought overran this image of my doctor. It was the night my son was born. My wife was asleep in the double bed of our birth suite, the lights were out, and I was standing over the cot, watching the little baby breathe, his slight movements in the dark, and the smell of him in the room like sweet fresh dough. Earlier in the night, we’d heard screams and an alarm had sounded, bringing rushes of midwives and nurses, their raised voices and commands coming through the door. A child, only just born, had stopped breathing in a room up the hall, and the mother was wailing. They took both of them away, but I stayed awake, above the tiny bundle, watching the small movements beneath the swaddle we’d tried to make around him, putting my face close to the nub of his nose to be sure it was doing its job and bringing air into his little lungs.

  ‘It’s too late,’ I decided to say to my ex-wife, ‘too late for the doctor.’ The idea that had coursed its way across my mind and announced that the man in the shades was going to kill me evolved its revelation one further time. With the same all-consuming certainty that had possessed me at the intersection, I realised that the only way to save my family was to kill myself. Whatever evil spirit animated the man in the shades made it inevitable he’d take everything from me, I knew it, but ending my life would just as surely put a stop to his devious intentions, and I’d save the lives of my loved ones in the process. ‘Please,’ my ex-wife repeated into my ear, but I said goodbye and resumed driving west. There was no need to hurry, my plan to kill myself was unimpeachable, and a great calm seemed to settle over the world. God, who was watching, would understand my actions, would forgive me for throwing my life away, he would see that it was out of love that I’d surrendered his gift of existence and he’d spare me from his wrath.

  In Glenbrook I pulled into a parking space out front of the local hardware store, thinking that a Stanley knife would be an efficient tool for wrist-slitting. To make sure, I googled ‘how to successfully slit your wrists’. A few websites in, I came across a statistic – only one in three hundred attempts to commit suicide by the slitting of wrists are successful. ‘One in three hundred!’ I said aloud at this discovery. ‘But those are preposterous odds!’ The thought of trying to cut myself to death and failing wa
s intolerable – absolutely unacceptable and exactly what the man in the shades would want. An entirely different means of self-destruction was required, but I couldn’t think straight in the car park of the hardware store, as two men in shorts and boots were leaning over a red wheelbarrow stacked with small tomato plants and their loud laughter was ringing in my head. So I gave up and went to my friends’ place in Glenbrook, thinking I’d have a cup of tea and come up with a means of killing myself that had better odds at home.

  Nobody was at my friends’ place. Once inside, I locked all the doors and stood by the front window with the blinds pulled down, looking through the cracks at the empty street as the sun set and the jacaranda tree’s long bare branches scraped the wall outside in the evening wind, sipping my tea and waiting for the man in the shades to come. For hours I stood by the window, sweating at the sight of every car going by. The house was so dark and quiet, I had no idea where my friends were, but I was glad they weren’t around – it was not safe to be close to me. At some late hour I decided he wasn’t coming that night, and crept quietly through the empty house and sank into my bed. It didn’t take long to fall asleep, but when I woke it was still dark, and at the foot of my bed were three leathery demons, silently watching as I came to. I screamed and ran out into the lounge room, hitting the lights and shaking in the silent house. I’d no doubt at all that I’d seen them standing there, black figures with skin like the wings of bats, their tall bodies covered in monks’ hoods adorned with bent crowns. I couldn’t go back to my room and face them again, so I sat in a chair, with the lights on, and waited for the dawn, or the demons, or the man in shades to come.

  When the dawn came I fell asleep, and stayed dozing in the chair until the front door opened and my friends came home. ‘Hello!’ Cate said as she stepped inside, her smile enormous, her arms held out wide in astonishment at discovering their housemate asleep in a chair by the front window. Tommy, her husband, lugged a bag into the house and smiled, angling his eyes to show them to me from behind his dark glasses. It is not my custom to assail people with bad news the moment they walk into a room, but I could not keep from speaking about my fate before they had even set down their bags. ‘I have to tell you something,’ I said, ‘there is a man who is going to kill me, and my family, and it is possible he will come here and kill both of you too, if I stay, so to protect you all I am planning to kill myself, today.’ They looked at one another. Tommy dropped his bags and Cate sat slowly into the couch. ‘Who is trying to kill you?’ they asked me in unison, and so I explained about the man in the shades in the green Camry, whose intentions were made clear to me at the intersection when I’d glimpsed him in the rear-view mirror. At first, they did not seem to understand the irresistible nature of this assertion, asking questions as if what they were hearing was unconvincing, but I expressed to them the depths of my certainty, and eventually they came to see how unshakably and immutably this circumstance stood.

  Lunatics, I have found, especially when they are fresh, are often persuasive about the contents of their misconceptions. Thinking back on the discussion I had with my friends in their lounge room, I really cannot say what portions of the madness they believed – but I remember that when we had finished talking Tommy had covered his chin with both hands, and Cate’s eyes were red and wet. Like a man sentenced to death, I said goodbye to them both and got in my car. Then I realised I’d forgotten to come up with a plan. ‘Ah hell,’ I figured. ‘I’ll just jump off a cliff.’

  A long way from the highway, at a turn-off just before Leura, there is a lookout a friend once took me to. He was a climber, and knew the secrets of the mountains and its trails well. There are many places with strange names in that part of the world, The Blue Labyrinth, Paradise Pool, and Silver Cascades being some of my favourites. I don’t know where in the mountains these places are, or what was the name of the lookout my friend took me to see, or why I thought of it as the place to go and jump off. On the way I called my mother and explained the situation to her, which seemed the right thing to do. She didn’t think jumping off the cliff was a good idea, and instead she begged me to come and stay with her. ‘I’ll take care of you!’ She insisted. I tried to explain that this would put her in mortal danger. She said, ‘I’ve been divorced three times, you really think I’m afraid to die?’ It seemed she would not be reasonable, so I had to say goodbye to her and hang up, and keep my mind on the mission at hand.

  At the lookout things moved very slowly. There was no one around, thank goodness. I figured if I did this cliff jump correctly, people might imagine that my final moments were bold and dignified, going into the undiscovered country like a stone tossed into still water, rather than what it started to become, which was a cowardly kind of hesitation, a sobbing and blubbering affair, where I stood beyond the fence over the deep blue-misted chasm of the valley with its immense green forests and whimpered and cried with shaking limbs. The idea, with all its perfect certainty, commanded me to jump, reminding me that this was the only way to save my family. For a long time I stood partially suspended over the empty air, the clear sky over the deep gulf between the lookout and the endless woods in the distance, urging myself to take the leap and get it over and done with. It is likely I was stalling for something like the following scenario to take place: my phone rings, and I discover my ex-wife’s voice on the other end, and somehow, she talks me out of jumping because even though I know it is the only thing to do, there really is some part of me that does not want to die. Fortunately, that is what happened. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Can you just please ask your doctor’s opinion on these plans of yours? If he agrees with you about this stuff then you can carry it all out.’ ‘That is a good idea,’ I replied, stepped away from the edge of the cliff, and climbed back over the fence in a hurry as I thought again of his office in St Leonards, with its fern fronds and rose bushes out front, and the sight of his big, blue, all-seeing eyes and his waving hand beckoning me into his office.

  For the next few days I slept fitfully, or not at all, and cowered under the covers in the spare room at my mum’s place, thinking snipers were shooting at me from the street, and always seeing green cars, Camrys, Commodores, hatchbacks and station wagons circling the house as I watched from the windows, talking to myself about demons and the ghost in the shadows until my appointment with the doctor came. I touched the ferns and the rose bushes in his little garden, walked the stone steps between them and swung open the door into the dimly-lit comfort of his practice. I sat and waited by his door, and soon enough it opened, and he was standing there, waving me into his office, smiling and mouthing my name. In the calm quiet of his room he asked me how I was going. I told him about the man in the shades, about the demons and the snipers, about how the cars had been circling and the plans that were being made to torture me and test me like Job, and how God had appeared over the ponds at Badgery’s Creek. I was explaining all this to Doctor Young, when something occurred to me about the whole situation, something I’d not even remotely considered up until that very moment. I stopped and said, ‘Can I ask you something, Doctor? Does any of this sound, well, crazy to you?’ He looked at me, adjusted his glasses and said, ‘Yes, it does.’ I sank back into the softness of the chair and felt as though I’d broken from a trance, as though I’d been an actor playing a scene for days and the director had finally called cut. ‘Oh, thank God!’ I said to him, almost laughing, ‘I’m just crazy!’

  To encounter madness is as ordinary and natural an event in modern life as it is to discover dew on the morning grass. Manic tempers, obsessive vexation, insomnia, psychomotor retardations and bouts of bed-ridden anhedonia are everyday maledictions. It is easy enough to get used to these interruptions in other people, and, if you’re lucky, you can get used to them in yourself. I’m writing this odd account on the night of a blue winter moon. My neighbour is playing ‘Three Bags Full’ on his pipe, and late-night semis are grinding their compression brakes between the many speed humps in the street, while my brother,
invisible despite the orange light of the city to the east, assembles his telescope out on the grass. I had tried to warn him while he was sliding the lenses out of the Styrofoam slots, ‘You will wait a long, long time for anything much to happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud and the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.’ But he told me blankly that the heavens were teeming with happenings that poets don’t have the patience to comprehend. It’s rare to have clarity out here in the suburban winter, so close to the city, and he’s struggling to see the fat Jupiter moons suspended in their rows between the stars. He has to catch them now, they are already drifting outside the scope of his enormous contraption – and his eyes are going, and the surgery to save them is more than anyone I know can afford. Besides, there’s a resignation in his heart that permanence is not part of God’s plan and decay ought to be respected. Upstairs my mother is trying to sleep, but the new medication keeps her awake, the flow of blood in her arteries rings in her ears. I’ve started smoking again, which gives me something to do on the stairs outside at night in the cold. There was an ad when I was a young man where the surgeon general would splice open a smoker’s brain and aim a dribbling clot at the camera. It makes my head-spins seem ominous when I think of this. Upstairs the History Channel is blaring, an Englishman is talking about Freud and the interpretation of dreams to a woman who isn’t in the frame. They are in the doctor’s death house, where my ex-wife once took me. The death house is full of totems and ornaments. There’s a prosthetic jaw in a cabinet by the door. The tour guide stopped by this antique device and told us that the cancers which grew in the doctor’s mouth were sent by the unconscious to keep itself from being discussed abroad.