About to leave his house
for two or three days – to meet me as it happens – Lucien suddenly froze at the
sight of the ring on his middle finger, which had been forced halfway up by the
strange, almost painfully contorted hold he’d put on the doorknob, as if to
give it a secret handshake. The ring struck him in that moment as being insincere,
pathetic, and intolerable.
A harsh conclusion, of
course, to arrive at from nowhere. The ring was nothing but a piece of sterling
silver; unremarkable except for the way it had come to be on Lucien’s finger in
the first place. I’d been with him when he found it in the middle of a chaotic
road in Bangkok a few years earlier. He’d nearly killed himself darting in and
out of traffic just to pick it up and had until now thought of it as a kind of
good luck charm by consequence. He’d even – this must’ve completely slipped his
mind – received compliments about it, albeit mostly from women who wanted to
sleep with him.
What the fuck am I doing
wearing this, he said aloud, it’s a nut off a fucking Thai screw. He pulled his
hand away from the doorknob and held it close to his face, then shut one eye
and used a thumbnail to jimmy the ring up just far enough to examine its
underside. He seemed to be looking for a thread that wasn’t there. A feeling of
worthlessness rose up in his stomach. He lowered his hand and slid the ring
back to its usual spot, a double image of sunless and slightly cracked skin.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
Lucien, I need hardly
mention, was given to fixations of this sort and knew that leaving them to
fester untended was like putting out a casting call for more severe problems.
Once or twice I’d caught him walking down Smith Street with his face locked in
a grimace that made no sense from the outside, from outside of him that is,
with strange emissions of effort coming from his mouth the way they might have
a Karamazov’s, his hands wilted together by his solar plexus as if nursing
fresh a gunshot wound. And then he’d seen me and gotten all embarrassed,
checked himself, smiled and straightened up and shook my hand and become what
ostensibly he was – a tall, athletic, intelligent, handsome, exotic-looking
dude – a maddeningly superior dude. He was the only person I’d ever known on
whom dreadlocks looked tasteful. There were other occasions, too, on which I’d been
careful to stay out of sight, so as to watch him in that crucible of his for
longer.
He tried to take the ring
off. On this cold July morning, however, it proved impossible. Even with hot
water – Amy had taken all the soaps and other toiletries, which he was yet to
replace – there seemed to be no way of getting it over the first knuckle. Had
it always fit so perfectly into the contours of the knuckles beside it? He
thought of plants grown so closely together that they’d been forced into
concessional shapes, forced into harmony. After a while, all but resigned to it
staying on, Lucien was lowering himself onto the old mustardy three-seater in
his lounge room when he stiffened, took hold of the ring with the thumb and
index finger of his other hand – as if it needed to be carried – and rushed to
his bedroom.
The bottle he found in the
draw of his bedside table was nearly empty and smelt of strawberry liquorice.
As the last vestiges blew into his hands, Lucien felt a chemical cold break out,
a sensation similar to but milder than that caused by the shit used to burn off
warts. Was it liquid nitrogen, the wart-burner? The artificiality of that smell
dominated all his other senses in an unnerving way, as if they were being stunk
into permanent submission. He ran his teeth along his tongue from back to front
and shrugged his shoulders a couple of times.
While pulling at the ring,
now lubricated and giving a little more than before, he wondered how Amy could
have not only found pleasure in such a weird sensation but actually sought it
out as a means of improving their sex life, or hers at least. It was just
another nuance of her personality, my friend would later tell me, which could
be added to the findings of the previous week’s postmortem – namely that so
much had been hidden, or partially hidden, from those faculties of judgment
that should have followed his awareness of who Amy actually was and who that
person was to him, for so long and intimate
a period of time. It was more than rose-coloured glasses, man, rose-coloured
glasses don’t stay on for four and a half years. What was it then? I don’t
know. A weakness, a complex, a longing, wanting her to be perfect, wanting her.
None of these answers satisfied him.
*
Sitting on the edge of the
bathtub, Lucien let out a chuckle. He’d stained his good jeans, which would
usually have rattled him – the way he looked, as you might have guessed, was a
source of inexplicably deep anxiety – but this time everything began and ended
with the ring. At least until evening, it wasn’t going anywhere. Then he washed
his hands, but, owing to the lack of soap, that chemical cold persisted right
up to when he was seated at her piano and his fingers were caressing the keys
like the small of a beautiful woman’s back, or, if he’d had a daughter, her
hair.
Willis of Montreal,
Vertical Grand. Three more days and it would be gone too. Amy was having it
‘professionally moved’, whatever that meant. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t
have to put his back out, as he’d done upon moving it in. Have a look at this thing,
will you?
Cheap in its time, plain worthless
now in all but the most sentimental currency. Dusty, out of tune,
mahogany-coloured stain faded so badly in places that it looked intentionally
spotted. The lathwork on the legs and on the two supporting columns for the
oversized box above the keyboard were, however, still more or less immaculate.
Amy’s grandfather, a French Canadian whose lineage could be traced to one of
the earliest settlements in Québec, had brought it with him when he emigrated
in order to live happily ever after with his new Australian bride.
It came as a surprise to
Lucien that he not only remembered a scattering of tunes from his childhood
lessons, but could play them almost perfectly. I’d play like shit tomorrow, he
said to himself. He was thinking of the way a golfer or tennis player might
come out after a long layoff and swing thoughtlessly, freely, impressively,
only to find that the real rust caught up with them on the second or third time
round. Because this, in fact, was the first time he’d ever played the Willis. Amy
had never played it much either.
He tried to think of the
most difficult song he’d learned before giving up and figured that it must’ve
been Satie’s Gnossienne 1. Collecting his thoughts for a moment, he started to
play. But midway through the raspy, not altogether bad rendition, Lucien became
so lost that he felt a genuine panic set in, a feeling of being alone in a dangerous
wilderness of some kind, a hunger, a disorientation, an awesome helplessness.
For a long time – I’m talking hours – Lucien settled on the last note he could
recall correctly, with his fingers and, in an effacing way, his mind. He wasn’t
looking at the keys at that point but at the ring. When at last I got the phone
call explaining that our camping trip had to be delayed, Lucien told me
gnomically that he was halfway up a mountain and halfway to the bottom of the
sea. A mountain I could somewhat understand, since we were about to climb one,
and so I tried to limit my understanding of the phrase to its first half.
Tomorrow morning, then? Seven o’clock I’ll be at your place, with coffees.
*
We took another narrow
switchback in single file. A skink darted across the trail. The gradient was
increasing and there were no more birdcalls, or virtually none. Nor were there
any other hikers; it was a Tuesday morning in July. I could hear Lucien’s
breaths, Lucien’s footsteps, the shifting contents of Lucien’s overloaded pack.
Depending on our position – it felt like the trail had been etched into a
landmass that changed shape, so frequent were the twists and turns – I could
also hear the Taglia River. But I couldn’t see it and, amazingly, had yet to
see it at all. This wasn’t so much the fault of the trees, which were
arrow-straight and spaced out almost geometrically, but of the massive granite
boulders strewn everywhere. We’d been hiking for four hours and, Lucien
approximated after checking the map, had four more to go before reaching camp.
Then, moments later, a sign appeared; from the distance, the actual time to
camp was closer to five hours.
Lunch? I suggested. The
trail had flattened out and a big grey log on the shoulder of the hill seemed
as good a place as any to sit. Before Lucien had answered I walked over,
dropped my pack, felt that the log was dry, or dry enough, and sat down. I
picked a branch off a little fern that overhung the right side of the log and
ground it down to a paste in my fingers. The smell of ground-up ferns or
tussocks was like a double shot of adrenaline and ecstasy for me. Then I wiped
my hands on the log and took another long, indulgent breath and stretched out
my legs. Blisters had started forming on the balls of my feet. Come on, man, I
said to him, fifteen minutes. Come on. Alright, he finally replied, but I’m not
all that hungry yet.
He really was like an
ascetic or something on camping trips, Lucien – it seemed as if he only spoke
because I spoke to him and only ate because I ate and made sure he did the
same. His dreadlocks were tied up high on his head, covered with a plain black
bandana. The long, wispy hair on his neck blew in the breeze. About to sit
down, he noticed that there were some fairly large and sharp nodes, maybe where
branches had once been, on that section of the log, and so I moved right to the
other edge, the little fern all but in my lap, to make room. We were sitting
shoulder to shoulder. Maybe because of that closeness, or because it was the
first time we’d been still all day, I thought it was a good time to ask him
about the previous morning. As I handed him a sandwich in a snap-lock bag, and
an apple, both of which he placed beside him disinterestedly, I said, so what
exactly happened yesterday to put you up that mountain?
To tell you the truth, I
wasn’t expecting much of a response. Only a handful of times in our friendship
had Lucien opened up to me, and even
then in such a way as to leave me perplexed as to who it was I’d really been
speaking to, if that makes any sense, with an invulnerability that seemed at
odds with what we was telling me, as if he had a persona reserved especially
for the purpose of relating the innermost parts of himself from an
informational standpoint, but which was completely detached from those parts
emotionally. It had made me wonder, before scolding myself at the thought,
whether Lucien might’ve been abused as a kid, or witnessed something truly
horrible, or even been some kind of sociopath.
Sitting shoulder to
shoulder, however, I felt that the strange events he recounted were coming directly
from him and I knew Amy’s decision to end things must’ve had a hand in that. Of
course, we’d spoken about her since the breakup, but only briefly. Given how it
had all gone down, how fresh it was, and the nature of the man, I’d treaded
carefully, affirming my love for him and restating that I was there
unconditionally for support if he needed it, rather than asking too many
questions. He hadn’t reached out at all except for raw companionship – a couple
of quiet coffees and an even quieter dinner at the pub.
But now and with dramatic
flourish he narrated the whole fiasco with the ring, which he’d managed to wrench
off in the evening. Clenching and unclenching his fist, he described how it had
made him feel to see the ring on his finger, how it had immobilised him and how
farcical and desperate his attempts to remove it must’ve looked. Then he did
the same with the piano. A little rain fell; it rattled through the near-unbroken
canopy above with the noise of a torrential downpour. Mosquitoes would be a
problem that night. And, so close to meekly asking why, why had Lucien suddenly
turned on the ring and why had he gotten lost at the piano, and was he feeling
better without it on his finger and without his fingers on those keys, in the
end I managed to ask him the real question – how are you doing without Amy? He
threw the last crust of his sandwich into the bush behind us and it disappeared
without a sound. I’d been listening to him so intently I’d forgotten to eat
mine.
*
Just below the footbridge
I counted eight rainbow trout suspended against the current, running out of the
lake they were trying to enter and up the crystalline river from which they’d
come. Lucien took out his phone and tried to take a photo. Can you see them?
Nah, it’s all a blur, the water’s moving too fast. It must be the Taglia, I
recognise its voice, I joked. She’s singing. She was serenading us from afar
that whole time. I loved her before I saw her face. Maybe let’s cook a fish
tonight.
We crossed the bridge,
both pretty weary by that stage – I also needed to shit a lot worse than I let
on – and headed towards the campgrounds. To our slight disappointment, there
were more tents already set up than we’d anticipated. Nonetheless, we swapped
cheerful hellos with a few people, all of them men around our age, and found an
unoccupied space right by the lakeshore. It was a raised timber platform with
six posts nailed to it for attaching guy ropes. I threw down my pack on the
slats and ran to the nearest toilet, only to find it out of toilet paper, ran
back and took some from the front of Lucien’s daypack, returned to the toilet,
lurching in desperation this time, went, washed my hands in the lake, which was
colder than I’d expected, and found our tent fully erect and our gear stowed
away in the vestibule by the time I got back. Lucien was sitting on the edge of
the platform, looking at the water, or more precisely the wall of mountains
beyond it.
See there, above that escarpment,
where that plateau’s so high and empty and big? Yeah. If Australian winters
were about twenty degrees colder, that’d be the most spectacular glacier you’ve
ever seen. It’s still beautiful though. Of course it is, I didn’t say it
wasn’t. I know. You can say something could be more beautiful, or beautiful in
a different way, without affecting your appreciation of how beautiful it
already is, can’t you? Or is it neurotic and reductive and all that shit to
even think about those other states while you’re supposed to be in the present one? I told him it was a
question I’d given some thought to myself, but mainly with regard to food. No
matter what I’m eating I’ll always think about how it could’ve been improved,
or what I’m going to eat for dessert. That’s interesting. I guess. Do you still
enjoy food? Absolutely. Do you want to catch a fish?
Sunset had come and gone
by then, but we didn’t need much light. I brought a small head torch back to
the footbridge while Lucien carried the fishing net, a long stick he’d found at
our campsite, and a roll of duct tape. Locating the trout in the glare of the
torch wasn’t easy, but I managed to get a good visual on two adults swimming
side by side, all but paralysed by the ceaseless current. Meanwhile, he’d taped
the net, which was far too short to reach the water on its own, to the stick by
its handle. It reminded me of a splint and a broken, swollen limb. Will that
hold? It’s almost rapids down there. We should be all right.
He lay down prone on his
belly and dangled his contraption over the side of the bridge. We both fell
into complete silence like predators about to pounce. I felt my heart pounding
in my chest. I felt that Lucien and I had never been closer but that I had to
seize the opportunity, while his guard was down, to go even deeper, to accompany
him to the places where those judgments
he’d spoken of were stored, and to find out what else was in there. On the
second leg of the hike I’d realised, inarticulately of course, that I wanted
this because I was convinced and had always been convinced that by revealing
himself my friend could somehow reveal me as well. When the net hit first hit
the water I could see the flimsy plastic flex with the force, but its
connection to the stick seemed tight enough. And it was; under my torchlight,
barely ten minutes had passed before Lucien eased our thrashing dinner onto
land.
Opposite our tent, by the
water, I killed, gutted, roughly scaled, and filleted both fish with the
Leatherman my brother had given me one Christmas. Lucien was beside me and also
had his head torch on. After assembling the camping stove and checking that the
fuel bottle worked, he rifled through a plastic bag and took out the olive oil
and a few jars of seasoning. Then he chopped an onion. The sound of laughter
rang out from the nearby picnic tables. It was probably drunken laughter. There
must’ve been a fire, too; I couldn’t see it on account of the bend, and the
density of the trees between us, but smelt it. Fires aren’t allowed in this
reserve. Should we tell the ranger tomorrow, if he’s around? Let’s wait and see
if we need anything off them first. Seems to be keeping the mossies away, too.
Have you been bitten yet? No.
I left one fish floating
in a shallow pool, separated from the rest of the lake by rocks, and made small
incisions at either side of the other fish’s tail. Then I dabbed my fingers in
a bowl I’d filled with some rock salt, and used my fingertips to tease away the
skin. Strands of different thicknesses and lengths broke away, silvery in the
moonlight reflecting off the water. Some of those strands refused to be shaken
off, as if they were charged with static, and when one wrapped around my middle
finger like a ring I winced and said to Lucien, what did you mean earlier when
you said that none of those answers satisfied you? If it wasn’t a weakness or
wanting her or wanting to be perfect for you and so on, what was it that
clouded your judgment so badly? With dangerous speed I cut off both fillets and
put the carcass in a rubbish bag in a flick that struck me as heartless, and
did the same thing with the other fish, the one that’d been floating.
Impossible as it is to explain, it somehow felt as if our places had suddenly
switched, that I was the one who’d acted irrationally and who was now trying to
come down from the mountain, or come up to the surface, or maybe it was both
after all.
*
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