They'd dumped the case on me. I was going to throw it right back in their faces when a name caught my attention. It took me back, and I didn't like it. The evening was still and cold. She'd called it crisp. I'd lit the fire and then those lines from Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation cracked out of the flames: "It is very often that they like to care/That they have it there that the window is open/If the fire which is lit and burning well/Is not open to the air." It's not true, she said and wandered over to check the window. She hesitated, the curtains draped around her, the half-light tugging at her. What's wrong? I asked, picking up on her discomfort. It's out there, on the hilltop, watching us. Again. It had been months. Seasons back since we'd last seen it. On an evening just like this when those lines of Stein's leapt out of the fire. I kept reading through the file. I couldn't turn it down, and they knew it.
The storm blowing all around me, the tempest of uncertainty. Nothing compares to you. In that cylinder of curtain, of drape; your body so expertly cloaked, you look out the window and notice how the main drama of the night is playing out in your body. That strength cannot be matched by anything else: not wind, not pounding rain. The word that looms, one you have not thought of for a lifetime, but still it seems to fit. Corpuscle.
A relation to a body, to a fire and a set of words about a fire; the moon is out, out there, and here you are, being loved. Internal combustion always sounds inadequate to that fire, that setting-on-fire of a couple of bodies matched with a purpose. It's a fire, a frisson, a dream of desire. And then it happens. Crisp and, finally, satisfying. So thanks for the memory. The sheer sweep of the words as they whip around me. "I am I and my name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and then oh then I could yes I could I could begin to cry but why why could I begin to cryÉ (In the distance there is daylight and near to there is none. They asked about clues and I said you're missing the point. This isn't a case about clues. But what about these lines: "Be made to ask my name. If I think well of him be made to ask my name."? It's stanza LXIX, I said. It's not a clue, I added for good measure. You seem drained of emotion, a mere shell. That's just my manner. I could sense they were trying to drag something out of me, to build a profile not of the victim but me. I guess I had it coming. Never turning up at office parties, refusing to join the circulating joke. That kind of thing. And yet, that fire and window and that point at the top of the hill, as the light was fading, comes back again and again. I see myself at that point. Distance clarifies. Duration is essentially memory, consciousness and freedom. The genetically modified crops move towards... ripeness? A bit of each of us in them. The chain, the cycle. I don't buy any of it. When I see, Give me a Martini! I mean give me a damned Martini. Nothing more, nothing less. Shaken not stirred shaken not stirred shaken not stirred comes the mantra. The steroids kick in and the hurdles seem less of a problem. Just lines in the barcode. It burns within us, she said. Within you, I said. I postured for the sake of memory, for the old ways. "I'll tell me ma when I go home/ the boys won't leave the girls alone/ they pulled my hair and they stole my comb/ well that's all right till I go home." That's the joke, and I don't get it.
I get it all. I insist on the getting. Is that duration or endurance. Pulling myself through clues, through fields filled with fluff. Some sticks, some winds up my nose. I am insistent and in the end I always get my way, find the path and avoid resistance. Stanzas are good for some purposes, and clues guide us well in our sleep, but I wont be a victim again. It's sad enough to watch the half-living; hell, we don't have time. We need this push and sometimes the push is entwined with the Campari, sometimes it is autonomous. Once upon a time I read an alarming tale of betrayal and after that time I memorised it, rehearsed it, and now I know it backwards. The denouement comes fast and is relatively painless at version # 376. Sometimes I wonder about repetition, about the madness of posting numbers on the board and then trying to remember necessary sequencing. As long as it doesn't keep you awake all day I'd say, my old boy, you should do it. To the maximum effect will do, and jolly good company.
But then doubt creeps in again. I return to Deleuze on Bergsonism. Not that it's a crutch, but an inevitability. I sense myself dividing into indefinable parts. I am bright in the loungeroom, dull in the bar. I read, or say, for example: "...at each instant pure duration divides in two directions, one of which is the past..." and I'm there, at the fireside, again. They came the next day and burnt the house to the ground. I said, this is an extension of our activities. Our flesh seared together. I carry her with me and now I'm supposed to be on her trail. Or on the retrail of a memory. I'm writing my own obituary, and there is some pleasure in this: "...the other the present; or else the _lan vital at every instant separates into two movements, one of relaxation (d_tente) that descends into matter, the other of tension that ascends into duration." And it was here that I reversed gender, upset the plot. They wanted to assign an extra. I told them. No, I'm telling them, the stage isn't big enough for both of us. Two seniors melding in and on the one case, persisting in their prejudices, hungry to feed their hunches. We are the both the same height, same weight. Sexual proclivity uncertain.
In dreams the sadnesses arrive, multiple, weighty. None of them about specifics; they don't need to be. The storm reaches some point of utter madness outside my head and so I sleep poorly all this last night. I am sure the house will be blown away, that all my confidences in a secure future will be damaged. Miles upon miles of tarpaulins covering people's precious living spaces, their collections of comfort. The albums of photographs that will now and forever curl at the edges, look lesser because of the tint of dampness. I am being blown this way and that. Decide against an obituary, for anyone at all, but especially not for me. The smooth surfaces of a box seem appealing; I need rest, need to remake this trajectory of flesh, of complementarity, of equivalent measurement. Where to from here? The bush track seems an option at last, for the first time. Getting lost in deserts is no great drama, more a communicating impulse, a madness worth owning. This desert is big enough for the both of us, but let's walk in opposite directions. Should I begin to tell of my sexual proclivities, begin to reveal myself and my needs? That is a decision still to be made. I remake myself.
She's come in now, fully. Speaking with my voice, I with hers. They'll have me up in front of internal affairs over this. Complicit before I begin. It's the genre that has me say, I'm being consumed. I'm aware. The investigation spawns metatext. The Holocene. All of it leading to this. Year after year. The calendar kicks in and we watch the months flutter to the ground like dry leaves. It's a cheap picture. The nitrate film is decaying, sticking to itself. The rot of a Shepherds calendar. Let's just suppose the collusion of hill and domestic bliss was a dream. Let's suppose the intrusion was something hoped for, desired. The fire's warmth a pheromonal trigger. Mary Daly has been locked out of her room. A rightwing thinktank is backing the moves of her enemies. She takes a leave of absence. The Jesuits are keeping quiet and the Vatican is unmoving.
Unflinching. I know someone down in Files who can check on this. Not everything has found its way into computers yet. The city is short on cash and this is a job that'll take years. I'll have long gone by the time they get to D for Daly. They're still thinking about A. Built-up areas no more than rubble. The tarpaulins don't keep us out. The eye of the camera takes a sneak preview. I go through the photographic evidence. There, there's something we've missed. A slight blurring to the left of the body. This is the desert in the discourse. The blank. The shifting emptiness.
This is where we meet, despite walking in opposite directions. It is the point of rapture and of tragedy. Chandler writes, in this dusty place: "His cigarette was jiggling like a doll on a coiled spring. "The duration of the scene is measurable in terms of heat. Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, joule, calorie. Absolute zero. By degrees. That's just before dawn and the storylines freeze over and fuse. We become articulations of derivative tales. The subplots come into their own. I keep a straight face, though inside my nerves are getting the better of me. This isn't about the nature of a relationship with the case, with the crime. There's a bunch of us having tea in the office and we look out of the window onto a hill. A light glints in a window opposite. The hard-baked among us take two lumps of sugar. It provides energy. We move faster away from each other in this widening investigation. Tomorrow I'll take the case to the prosecutor. The air will be thick with smog and electricity. There's powder in the air. Late summer storms. The desert is turning to plaster, sticking hard to the skin. You can taste it. You can taste the oxidation of sulphur. Which takes me back even further, right back to the day before we met: the gardens were lush, but dust had found its way into the city.
I left the body out in the cold one more time. There is something to be said for practice, for staying in the world of sex and its concomitant pleasures, its way of teaching you how to be with people, with letting down barriers between talk and touch. Once, you know, she went out of her mind worrying about whether it would ever be possible to be like that again: malleable, open, casual about her body and about how pleasure might be activated and then lived with. The man in the brown suit sitting at that table on the edge of the room, a room of cooked food and beverages, of cordiality and sociable choice--he knows all about this. I knew him once and in a brief encounter I learnt a great deal about loss and how to live with it. A range of barriers were dissolved in a brief encounter; the calendar was made inexplicable and the shape of a life was given a new constitutive power. This was all liberating, no doubt about that. Leaving all of us frail but smarter by the end of it. The leave of absence lasts for about a year and contains many conditions. Don't forget any of them because if you do you forfeit all that came before. Once a word was uttered in the dining room of food and conviviality and that one word took her on a path that lasted for years, many years. The word? Holocene. She so far has not come out alive, but she will.
And when the push comes to shoving and all of the players are in the cold and none of them are what you'd call satisfied, even properly alive, it is then that it seems the time might have been reached when it has to be abandoned, all of it, and left for dead as a bad idea. Not sustainable. Once upon a time there was a figure in the street and that was a time of fear. It was unclear what the motives of this figure might be. It did not even matter, really; what was invoked was terror and a cowering away from life. I know this might sound like melodrama, but really it was a political matter of the most profound urgency and import. Unbelievable images came to her at night and the building was a concrete heap without windows. It looked like a torture centre and it was hard to dismiss. Why else would they build it with such strong messages, such totalitarianism? If I tell you this is Australia in the late 1990s, right at the end of all of this centurying, would you believe me? Could you? Well, it depends upon what you do with your paranoia. Hers was fully fledged; total.