Quipu (20 page)

Mandy asks for a Harvey Wallbanger.

They stock up well enough on pepper steaks, brandy, creme de cacao. Appallingly expensive.

Peter O’Toole is screamingly funny.

As they go about finding her car Mandy makes several jokes that send Joseph to the pavement, cracking his knees.

Getting out of hand.

Brian is obliged by a previous engagement to leave them. Blur of careful driving.

You might as well stay the night, you’ll fall under a tram in that condition.

But she keeps her pants on under her shortie nightie. And the bed is only a single. They lie extended like nails. Joseph quivers.

It’s that time.

What?

Very bloody.

An old-fashioned and absurd objection, Mandy. Haven’t you read
The Female Eunuch
?

Of course she hasn’t, that was ten years ago at least.
Cosmopolitan
seems to have turned against menstrual sex. It must be the New Romanticism.

She shows him the trick she uses to build up her chest. You press your palms together, elbows out like a plucked chicken’s wings, and push like buggery for a count of ten. It doesn’t make your boobs bigger, but the underlying pectoral muscles increase in size and this plumps out the chestal area.

The
chestal
area?

Yes, haven’t you heard that hilarious Woody Allen record?

Joseph has missed out on many of the last decade’s more salient cultural events. Now he makes good his ignorance. Mandy pops the tape on. It is screamingly funny, but only while it lasts. Mandy turns her back and goes to sleep. Joseph lies beside her, his spine like a stake through a vampire’s heart, and waits for sunrise so he can skulk home.

Mandy’s apartment faces the Royal Park Golf Course, and beyond that the walls of the Zoological Gardens. As the early summer sun whips the lid off the sky, bleary Joseph hears the lions roar for their breakfast.

1970: eaten inside

University of New England,

Armidale.

June 10, 1970

dear grub

Without the decencies of modern mechanical transduction, in chilly Armidale, forced to take up the archaic pen (tried using Paul’s typewriter but it possessed so many astonishing faults that I gave it up), here, alive and well, or approximately, looking into the sky for the secrets of Time and Space. Maybe, one day, anyway.

I would have written earlier but so much sudden organizing has disrupted my habits. After you returned home to Sydney I dithered with my flu for a few days and decided at last that the only sensible thing to do was plunge in, put my bloody theory to the test, so I flew up to Armidale. If Paul and I do find any time-reversed tachyons in our mess of pottage I’ll use them to signal my former self and spare both of us all this hurry up & wait.

My body has been rebuking me. The day before I was due to catch my plane north, there came a crotchety gnawing at the entrails. As luck would have it, Martha had prepared one of her glorious carnivorous curries, a splendid trencher of lamb and beef and spiced vegetables and coconut snowed across the lot, and her famous yoghurt, and spliced bananas and diced apricots and small pieces of tomato and onion and cucumber, and chilly beer in each fist, and my metabolism rebelled, overloaded, croaked it.

In mid-munch I hied me to my bedroom, guts growling and snarling with unknown pains, where I capered in the semi-dark acrobatically seeking some posture that might supply relief. No way. All the shades of gray and blurting blurry trumpets. In and out of consciousness I went. I might have been having a miscarriage (yes, I thought of your pain), had the plumbing not been otherwise.

Reluctantly, fearful of paramedical scorn (amazing how these high-level social responses surmount our most bitter and unmediated pangs) I made the great trek back to the dining room where everyone ate happily of pudding, and consulted our resident nurse. Quaffing her prescription (copious milk and aspirin) I went back to die in my room.

Horrid, frightened night. Next morning to the local quack, a ponderous oily sweating man with a Hitler moustache who prodded and poked and ruminated and thank god saw no cause for a barium meal. I must abandon nicotine. I must exercise like a decent Christian. Above all, I must eat only of the fruit of the blandest tree in the garden. The list he provided is horrendous: custards & milk shakes & no booze & nothing of a fibrous or irritant nature.

No ulcer, at least. Stomach cramps due to tension and lack of god-fearing sport. So for a week now I’ve been dining breakfasting and lunching on gloop. There is no end in sight. It does help a bit, true. He suggested three months. I shall certainly go mad. I know you will not credit this, but I have cut down to four or five ciggies a day though it’s creeping up again. I spend most of my conscious hours sneaking up on the clock, watching the hands creep: my rule is one smoke every three hours. Dementia. And the man speaks of tension as a cause.

I got to Armidale just under a week ago. As I think I told you on the phone, I’d arranged with Paul Ramsden to have the tachyon detector wired into the SQUID by his lab tech buddy in the physics department. My precipitate arrival was greeted with less than the total enthusiasm due a man who was going to share the next Nobel Prize; in fact, Paul berated me for a reckless spendthrift, but took me in and gave me the spare bed in his study. Cats lie on my face at night. (Martha is looking after mine, never fear.) There are no suspicious squeaks from the, ahem, master bedroom. Either Paul and Tom have got past that sort of thing, like my parents (and, to be honest, as you and I did for fair stretches) or they go about it with great delicacy.

Without the detector and its computing interface, I disport myself about the house in rather the way I’ve become accustomed to at home: dipping into physics journals, making endless inconclusive calculations concerning the boundary conditions we can expect to obtain in a universe closed at both ends by a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, both connected by swarms of shuttling tachyons, reading novels, wondering how I can turn all this into usable quipu form. And eating bland (yuk) meals.

Tom Truczinski, Paul’s friend, is very good about this. He won’t have either Paul nor me in the kitchen, except to wash up, and he insists on giving me what the doctor ordered. A few years ago he had a genuine ulcer, none of your crypto-bellycramp bullshit, and takes it all fairly seriously—knows what to warn me off.

Other than that continual kindness, we have a highly ambivalent relationship. He’s quite aware that I’m not queer, that on that level I’m no threat to his er “marriage” with Paul. He strikes me as absurdly insecure, given his proven accomplishments in particle theory; I take it that he’ll be the youngest person to have a high-energy physics Ph.D. in the history of the State. Still, he resents my presence ferociously because I distract Paul from total preoccupation with him.

I’m taking all this subliminal flak with as much cool (but warmish cool, if you see what I mean) as I can sustain. Since this sort of confused subfusc meta-communication unnerves me and makes me hostile by turns, I can only hope the damned detection apparatus is up and on-line soon.

It looks as if I’ll be stuck here a couple of weeks at least. Don’t know what darling Tom will think of that…(Yes I do.) So meanwhile write to me here.

lots of tachy love

Joseph

A DOG’S WIFE

…three

For some days we hid out in a Lina Wertmuller festival. Without disrespect I must reveal that she is not my ideal
auteur,
but Spot always makes taking in a movie such fun, and I was terrifically excited when he told me how much I had always put him in mind of Mariangela Melato, whom Lina employed with some wit.

“Hang in there, baby,” Randy told me from the West coast, his voice oddly interspersed by bleats of telemetry from the space shuttle preparations. “We’ll have the kid back on the bomb bay floor by New Year’s.” For a fleeting moment I wondered if Father’s lawyers had misunderstood the quandary facing my husband, and were in fact directing the enormous resources of the studio to the task of getting Spot into rather than out of the weapons research program. Such things had been known to happen.

1970: following orders

Caroline loiters on the stairs outside the English Department, hoping to worm some clues from her tutor for the forthcoming exams. Woe & gloom, her mood. Rising tension, her bodily state. Crabby, her demeanor. He rounds the corner, a man in his mid-twenties with the face of a handsome stoat.

Oh. Come in.

The bastard doesn’t know zilch.

Actually, Miss Muir, I haven’t even seen the exam paper.

I thought you all had to—

If you must know, they rejected my suggested questions.

She does not speak.

What topic were you worried about? I have a busy schedule today.

Drama. The course you teach us.

Actually, I have to confess that drama isn’t really my “thing.”

Caroline is flabbergasted.

Why are you
tutoring
in it, for God’s sake?

Well, you have to do as you’re told. He smiles enchantingly and pushes back a lock of hair. You know, tote your barge.

Caroline presses her teeth together. Her belly knots. Fool, turd. She says nothing. She picks up her big bulging bag and turns away to the open door.

Oh, while you’re here.

Yes?

He’s glancing at a sheaf of paper from the department secretarial office.

I see you have two extra essays to hand in before the exam.

What?
What?

“Death of a Salesman” and “Mother Courage.”

But you didn’t—In panic she delves into her bag, spills paperbacks, brush, an orange. A sheet of paper flutters. She snatches at it. Look, here, there’s no mention of—

Really? No, sorry, I haven’t had a chance to tell your group before this, I’ve been terribly rushed.

But how can I possibly—I’ll need an extension.

No, I’m going to have to be firm about that, Miss Muir. It’s a departmental decision. We can’t accept them after that date. Sorry, sorry, just passing down the orders.

Caroline sits in the union. She sips a stewy cup of tea. Infinitely slowly she takes out a fresh sheet of paper, finds a pen, and starts a letter to Joseph.

1970: view from a distance

Twitchy Cloisters

Rozelle

12 June

My dear Joseph

Kiddo, you gotta watch yourself. An ulcer can’t be wished away. Do what the man said—go to a gym, put up with the effort and the embarrassment. But let’s face it, when have you ever listened to me about anything?

Had a rotten time with my tutor today. Wish you were here to give me a cuddle. The house is full on and off with dreary, dreary people.

Here’s my big exciting news: I have bought an electric blanket. One depends on these trivialities.

Downstairs the other happy members of our ménage delight in Scrabble, while I stare from the window of my little room. It might be winter but the view is very pretty. Everything is pretty from a distance. You even find
me
pretty from a distance.

love Caro

1975: the end of the universe

Joseph looks from his podium at the several hundred hikes and hopefuls gathered here, in the Reading Room of the Humanities Research Center on the top floor of the A. D. Hope building in the Australian National University in Canberra, waiting to hear him speak. Mastering the tremor in his arm he takes water, rattles the glass back to the table. They stares at him benignly. He recalls the
Bhagavad-Gita:

On all sides That has hands and feet;

On all sides eyes, heads and faces;

On all sides in the world it hears;

All things it embraces.

They are waiting for him to begin. He begins.

“Fellow Australians, international guests, it broadens my bosom, as they say in
The Thousand Nights and One Night,
to join you at this wonderful convocation. 1975 is a year I shall surely remember all my life. Since I don’t have a terrifically good memory for faces, I’d like you all to hold still for a moment, smile, and say ‘Cheese’.”

He cannot focus his gaze on any one of them. Are they gaping in confusion, smirking at the tremolo in his amplified voice, or perhaps smiling in complicit anticipation as he takes from his soft leather shoulder bag, hung on the back of his chair, a Canon complete with theatrically protuberant fisheye lens attachment. He raises it to his eye, pans across the room, sets the
f
stop, and hits the shutter button. Light blazes from his flash, rips the color out of their cheeks in that instant.

“I’ve always been interested in capturing important moments on film, on tape, on paper,” Joseph tells them, losing the mike for a moment as he turns to slip the camera carefully back into his bag. “That’s why I am a quipu hike, I suppose. Still, this must seem remote from my announced topic, which is a brief account of my experiments over the past few years. Those experiments, as some of you will know, concerned the possible existence of a class of elementary nuclear particles dubbed ‘tachyons.’ Sadly, the experiments failed. I think you might find some intellectual pleasure in hearing about the train of thought that led me to invest so much of my time and effort in such a strange quest.”

He sips again at water, feeling a little more assured, a touch more fluent. Despite the presence in the audience of several accomplished physicists who will find his simplified presentation puerile, unrigorous and absurdly rudimentary, he keeps his inner focus set on the rather larger number of brights who, for all their deftness with numerical puzzles, possess no special mathematical or physical training: the taxation clerks, housewives, historians, bus drivers, hedonistic layabouts like Wagner who certainly sits smirking down there in the front row.

“Why the camera? Because it symbolizes my goal. In a way, it became my ambition to take a photograph of the End of the Universe.” They look up at him. Moist stones.