More Than Just a Stolid Pump

by

  Ash Hibbert

Sitting at a table in the yard under the stars with a dozen dropped matches laying between his feet, my brother’s old friend finally makes fire. Brian has invited himself to my place on the pretense of collecting a lighter for his smokes, but the truth is that he is dealing with a fix and needs somewhere safe to mellow out.

I still call this my parents’ house, even though my father is dead and his widowed wife the sole inhabitant. I still rebel against him, but on such a subconscious level that it no longer registers. Now I am able to dedicate my conscious energies to rebelling against my mother. So, when Brian asked on his last visit whether he could inject himself in the kitchen, I instantly said yes. The bench became a shooting gallery, water from the kettle disinfected a purpose-made spoon, and a lighter from the local supermarket dissolved the goods.

Alone in the kitchen, I make a coffee for myself and white tea with two sugars for my visitor, who sings outside to the beat of the lounge room stereo and punches the air like Rocky Balboa. After joining him in the courtyard and placating him with the tea, Brian crushes the cigarette butt into the muddy ground. He stands.With pants rolled up and shirt hanging out, he scratches his heroine-induced itch. He will continue to irritate his skin long after his entire body is red, yet with the cold evening air biting, at least his top will not be coming off this time. The dog drops sticks at Brian’s feet; neither of them are impressed. Both start to shout at one another, but with the help of the coffee, my own heart is beginning to race and soon Brian and I are comparing martial art techniques and correcting each other's stance. I am hot beneath my coat as we feint and recall similar matches of skill and strength. Then he asks me where he can be sick. I point to the far back yard and he jogs eagerly up the steps.

Back at the table, he sculls down the last of his tea with a grin and sighs. He fingers the box of matches and makes another pile between his feet. I reach out and take his shoulder as he begins to lean forward. While I have never been up close and personal with someone coming down from heroin, I am well versed in the language of melancholia. I do not need a degree to tell me that it was the death of his two sisters in a car accident ten years ago--including Lindy, who I was friends with--that lead him to take up mainlining, and I do not need to be psychic to see that his habit is failing him. He tells me he is down. I tell him that it is time to start rethinking his choice of medication. He questions my choice of the term "medicine." I mention my mother’s Bach flower remedies in the cupboard above the fridge. He tells me about the fight that my brother started shortly after our father’s death, which left him with a purple face and a limp.

It seems that everyone has his or her own rescue remedy.

I think of asking him for a spare cigarette as a reward for not asking earlier for a taste of his other drug of choice. Even if what I am looking for in such substances is not relief from sorrow but relief from my bourgeois background, I remember that each rescue remedy itself becomes something from which we need rescuing.

I finish my coffee instead.

Brian collects his words like spilled matchsticks from the ground. He wants to talk about his sisters, yet when the dam of his thoughts busts, all he can produce is an indecipherable flow. His feelings, though, are obvious. His pain finds shape in a tongue that belongs to a time earlier than the tower of Babel. I lean back and let him slur. I hope that in the morning he will feel he has offloaded some of the burden weighing down his heavy heart.

After helping him light his second cigarette, I tell him about my friendship with Lindy. He asks me if I liked her. I reply that she was a beautiful girl and that everyone liked her.

We think about that for a while and laugh.

While eating toast in my grandfather’s kitchen, I realize that all of us are trained by our predecessors to depart into the night. For I now see in my widowed mother the same conversations, the same routines, the same obsessions, and even the same aroma as her father. In three years of living alone, my mother has begun to echo my grandfather’s amnesia, deafness, and fascination with the banal that took him decades as a widower to manage.

She is no longer growing old.

My grandfather and I have never had much to say to each other. I am here only on the urging of my auntie and because it is on my route to the city to return library books and make sure that no one has ransacked my apartment. However, today he is glad to see me and we talk of his son in law, of the confidences that they shared, such as my father’s dark foreboding in the month before his freak death. I try to think what it would be like to anticipate your own extinction. The only comparison that comes to mind is when I am standing near a tram driver’s compartment and the doors are closing. I try to anticipate the moment that the tram will surge forward and I sway towards the front of the tram to try to counteract the inertia. Inevitably, though, I misjudge by a second and end up faint.

Anticipation does not always help.

I wash up in the bathroom before leaving. Looking in the mirror, I realize that in the three years since my father died, my head has shed its roundness and my hair, its blondness. I am the so-called "baby" of the family, and once upon a time, I revelled in the adolescence expected of me.

My reflection tells me that aging is no longer a ride I am yet to take.

That evening I drink my red wine in a lounge overlooking the corner of Brunswick and Johnson, remembering one of the last times my father and I had a night out together. I met him at his hotel in the city and we headed out for dinner on Brunswick Street.

I buy him his tram ticket, as he has never caught the city’s public transport. Later, he pays for dinner, as I have never held a job before. We eat Thai and drink whiskey distilled in the waters of the Mekong. As he is a connoisseur of spirits, I ask him what he thinks of it. He tells me it tastes like whiskey.

Afterward, staring out of his hotel room at nocturnal Melbourne, he updates me on his plan to maximize his retirement package. When he is due to retire in ten years, he will do so in name only. I drift into recollections of gazing across a similar height after accompanying my family through a canyon in the Grampians National Park.

Upon reaching the opening to the plateau, I looked out that little entrance like an ant staring out of a nest opening. I watched and waited while my father and brother walked the last hundred meters to the edge of the plateau overlooking the valley below. It was the roof of the world and my father had traveled to the perimeter, leaving me at the portal. One day he would not return and would leave me instead to shine a torch into the darkness of his skull, to ask myself whether that dinner on Brunswick Street was my father’s attempt to get to know me on my own turf. In the end, though, all I have is my speculations, and my own terminal ignorance.

I want to know what went through my father’s head in the last moments of his life. Perhaps I should find satisfaction in the funeral, where we talked about his life and demonstrated our belief in an afterlife--yet what about the unspoken: that bridge from air to dirt, sky to earth: death?

Lying on the grass at a friend’s Brunswick West backyard picnic one Sunday, conversation turns to athletes who suddenly die. Steve himself moves with the grace of one practicing Tai Chi his entire waking life, and speaks with a quiet wisdom of a young Yoda. From the glimmer in his eyes, however, I can tell this epitome of human excellence dropping dead has held a long fascination for him.

I too have often felt exercise to be bad for one’s health. Throughout primary school, I saw the fittest and most active of my peers relegated to crutches or plaster from bike or skateboard accidents. Acquaintances return from overseas skiing trips having torn every ligament from their knees, while a high school teacher meets an abrupt end in a solo skydive when his chute fails to open.

Steve holds a smoke in one hand and a bottle of Champagne rests against his chair. Sian, his partner, is in her late twenties, yet he is in his late thirties. Steve has an ambiguous relationship with vitality. While on the one hand he laments his declining empathy with young people, on the other he gains a perverse pleasure from the phenomenon of healthy people dying for no apparent reason.

Doctors call this phenomenon "sudden death."

What caused my father’s sudden death? What caused his heart and mind to forget its vital foxtrot? There had been no warning signs. Was it a slow kind of suicide? Had he worked himself too hard? Maybe it was because of coronary artery disease--the buildup of cholesterol in the blood routes--yet people have much higher rates without problems. Maybe it was lack of fitness, but then, cardiac arrest can happen to triathlon winners.

On the other hand, maybe it was something as incidental as touching water. The immersion of his limbs in the ocean off Eden for a routine scuba-diving session could have caused a coronary arterial spasm, triggering an arrhythmia. Coronary thrombosis--the blocking of an artery--may have exacerbated this, which is caused by a build up of plaque formed by cholesterol lining arterial walls that eventually rips off and causes clotting that, within minutes, prevents the flow of blood. This fatty gruel would have been collecting since his birth, yet only upon giving up regular exercise would it have begun to harden to a consistency strong enough to notch a surgical knife. Absorbing passing calcium and coalescing with nearby growths, the plaque would resemble stalactites and stalagmites filling an underwater cavern.

How his heart failed is a reflection of how he failed. Once a strong organ capable of pumping more than the contents of an Olympic pool, likewise, my father had run marathons, constructed houses, and cycled to work. Yet, like the arteries clogging with plaque around his heart, he had filled his days with obligations until he no longer had time for himself. He had thrown himself thoughtlessly into work and tried completing his goals with brute force.

Blood supply to either his heart muscles or its chambers would have slowed. Tight, squeezing, gripping, hard and heavy pain would have spread from his upper chest behind his breast bone, upward into his neck and jaw and possibly into the inside of one or both of his upper arms and down as far as his belly and fingers. While, like very bad heartburn, he would have known something was wrong. He would have begun to perspire heavily under the wet suit. Blood vessels along his skin would begin constricting.

His face appears deathly white, and his hands and feet begin tingling. He reaches out to his diving partner still on dry land. His expression is one of fear, panic, perhaps resignation.

Days later, sitting at the dining table at my parents’ place, it is the image of our father or husband sensing in fear that something dark within him is ready to burst that causes my brothers and mother--having arrived from abroad and interstate--to disintegrate.

My own heart remains stoical, and my cheeks dry.

With his heart failing to pump out all the blood that it took in, it would have began to swell and accelerate. In doing so, however, it would have merely quickened its own demise like a driver turning the ignition of a car until the engine is flooded. Without the brain dictating the metronome-like beat, his heart, like a gyro, begins to spin further out of control, to fibrillate. If someone were to dip their hands into his chest and clasp his heart, it would feel like holding a bagful of agitated worms. His lips and tongue may have turned blue, his breath shortened. His lungs may have filled with fluids. He might have felt as if he were drowning, even though his head was above the surface of the water. Blood accumulating in his feet and ankles would have caused them to begin swelling.

His heart stops and the supply of oxygenated blood to the nervous system and the vital organs quickly begins to fail. Pulled onto dry land, his diving partner begins cardiopulmonary resuscitation--filling his lungs every four seconds with second-hand air to supply his brain, and pushing his chest sixty times a minute to deliver it. Those trying to save him, though, are like puppeteers pulling the strings of inanimate flesh.

Four minutes after CPR stops, his oxygen-starved brain ceases to function.

I look for the "me" in the man staring back from the mirror, who offers only what I give him. I try to guess the trend of the protrusions of jaw, shoulder and ankle. I see my brothers in that trend. But only after seeing my father, it becomes clear that our mother’s apparent femininity is all that tempers his spirit in them. The wary certainty that one day I will find the image of a dead man staring back at me beyond a few anomalous features through that looking glass drives my desire to solidify my self-image.

One of my brothers suggested that I refused to go back to our childhood home because I was afraid of finding our father. Really, though, I was afraid that I would not find him. As long, perhaps, as I did not open that front door, he would continue to reside there, both alive and dead for eternity.

When I finally return, like a pilgrim entering a temple, I turn the handle to the front door and find the tabernacle empty. My deity is absent, and the offerings within his shrine remain untouched. My father must indeed be in heaven, for these four walls have failed to contain either him or his memory. I walk down the side of the house and find Dad’s fernery guttered. I ask the spirit of the place if this what he would have wanted, but it is silent, for its loyalty is to its new owner and renovator.

While I am but a passing pilgrim, too weak even to plant incense in the sand.

I know now where I will meet my maker. He will not come to me like a thief in the night, but as a sleeper, an assassin or saboteur, slumbering in my cells. He will be a genetic time bomb waiting for my thirty-eighth birthday--the age of my father when I can first recall him. The sleeper will awake and I will stare in the mirror and find my father’s eyes looking back, questioning me, offering me hope, admonishing and absolving me.

[8/08]

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Ash Hibbert is something of a creative writing degree junkie. He has recently finished a novella for a Master of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia; he has completed a Postgraduate Diploma of Creative Writing, and an undergraduate degree in Professional Writing with honours. The English-Arabic journal Kalimat and the University of Melbourne journal Strange2Shapes have published his work. He also co-edited the Deakin University literary journal, Verandah 15. Hibbert is the resident writer of his own web-log, acoldandlonelystreet.blogspot.com.

WINNER! Best of the Web 2009

Pushcart Prize Nomination, 2008