Tactics - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Karen Hitchcock
DANIEL CAME BACK AT THE END OF AUTUMN. Brown, crisp, beautiful. Towing a degree in Cultural Studies and a marijuana habit bigger than Texas. At the time, these attributes were both considered valuable. His eyes went wet when he saw me, and he said he wanted us to share a house. I played it cool, weighed, then promoted, my options. I knew where I'd come from. Jane called me a fool. The Hungarian man who owned the cafe downstairs scratched his stubble, mopped his brow and asked me what a twenty-three-year-old was doing with a boyfriend anyways.
I packed my records into crates and my clothes into garbage bags. A vegan named Rosie moved in with Jane, and they both set about dreading their hair. Daniel and I moved near to the beach. We both kept separate bedroom-cumstudies and chose where we'd sleep each night. That way Daniel got to order things in his particular way, and I could leave my frocks in bags. I was down to one subject a semester and losing momentum fast. Daniel was planning a thesis on Deleuze. He planned all day, sitting on a Deco couch donated by my Nan, rolling paper and herb between his fingers, between splayed knees. He'd inhale hard, then stare at his thesis on the wall. I was right there with him. We were a duo of vague, ambitious staring, listening to Trance-diluted classics. It was the era of nostalgia.
Jane and Rosie invited us to dinner to announce the inevitable. Jane looked a bit thin, but they seemed happy, domestic. After a few mugs of wine, Rosie admitted she liked the French Feminists. Daniel said they were philosophically sound. They discussed the dissolution of binary opposition.
Words like Kristeva and Helene Cixous floated around us like Methode Champenoise. Daniel's finger curled around his chin like a question mark. Rosie gently licked a drop of wine from her wrist. I complimented Jane on the lentils. She sat there looking binary.
Rosie moved out within the month. Almost as if the announcement were the whole thing. Jane started a celery juice diet. She said it was for cleansing her liver. I told her she was the cleanest liver I knew, but her shoulders stayed slumped. We spent our afternoons walking the shore.
"So," I said to her on one of those afternoons, "forgetting sexual politics for a moment ..."
She snorted.
"Now that you've been to the other side ..."
We kicked through dirty sand, our hands in our pockets. She said: "There's nothing else there."
DANIEL'S THESIS SUPERVISOR SUGGESTED HE COMMIT a few thoughts to paper. Daniel came home and slumped on the Deco. He got up to make a bong out of an apple juice bottle and a length of plastic tubing. Smoke roared from his open lips. There was no music. Nights were days were nights. For two weeks, his focus stopped before it reached the wall. Then it sharpened. He looked at me sideways. When the phone rang, he would bolt to his feet, point between my eyes, tell me not to pick it up. Then he started talking about the unification of fire and water, about rhizomic thought capable of reinstigating the word, of parabolas reversing to make pathways for death. He didn't recognise me. I waved my fingers in front of his face and asked him if he could see. He said: "I don't need to see to see." When his eyes became pinwheels, I called Jane, who called the community mental health team.
A psychiatrist put Daniel in the locked ward of a state psychiatric institution. He said that in his opinion the problem was drug related and most likely temporary. Daniel slurred and dozed, slurred and dozed.
Our flat made me think of reversals carving pathways for death, so I stayed at Nan's house for a month, sleeping in the single bed of my childhood weekends, reading the magic realists, watching dinnertime TV on her new velour armchairs. She made us breakfast and lunch and dinner. She urged me to study more and to wear a bit of lippy.
Daniel made no progress. His eyelids were mauve winter quilts. His parents discussed taking him back to their house.
I went to see Jane. What was left of her smiled at me from the open doorway. Her lips pulled her face behind her ears. She said: "I'll just go for a run before dinner."
Forty-five minutes later she came back and served herself a level cup of baked beans. "They're the perfect food," she said. "Protein and carbohydrate and vegetable, all in one." She shovelled fried rice and Peking duck from plastic containers on to my plate.
"Aren't you vegetarian?" I asked.
"Yes," she said and smiled, "but you're not." I put food in my mouth. Teeth worked, throat refused. I forced the issue, tried not to cough.
"So," she said, eating a neatly quartered bean and making the ghoulish grin again, "How's things?"
I READ THE ALEPH JUST LATELY and I thought of Borges recruiting young people to read to him. I thought of the blind, and the golden Labradors that lead them. Jane once told me those dogs weren't allowed to bark. She told me they beat the dogs bloody to teach them their silence. She thought the whole thing was wrong. I closed Borges and went online. I looked up the Guide Dogs Association and signed up as a volunteer. ♦