Before Her

Like the reptilian eyes of a cat in sunshine a morning sky more white than blue finds itself divided by an enormous vertical slit of purple cloud, still as a stone but roaring. Yawning; the sky is old and tired. But when I first approached the airport it was the dilated pupil of a cat prowling for possums in the night. And my parents, though they had listened eagerly over breakfast as I answered their questions about money and insurance and severed heads in Acapulco, could not look me in the face, as if only it were leaving and my body remaining behind.

Oil spills on the tarmac, planes taxiing backwards, fingernail-deep foundation on the cheeks of flight attendants whose pants zipped up on the side instead of the front. Grudgingly I cried but felt my tears were an elegy to nothing. So removed was my mind from this Melbourne, the Melbourne of the airport with its barren paddocks and industrial estates, and industrial lakes of refuse, so typical of those skirting airports the world over – so much further removed from the city. Then in the air all the dams on the eastern plains were spangled silver and that great slit of cloud revealed itself to me, and inspirited by that strange contagion I yawned back at it and took out my notebook.

Perhaps out of frustration at my score of failed attempts, the big man sitting next to me fastens the pendant clasp around my neck. His hands are the biggest I’ve seen and worked coarse; I find a paternal strength in their touch and consequently feel smaller than I am, and my voice lighter, my independence more arguable. Now that we have ascended beyond the highest vapours the sky is young again: the sun monsters me at my window. Next to the emergence exit I am afforded more legroom but also a confining sense of vertigo – the ease with which I could grab and yank that handle! My first awarded story centred on a scenario like this. I shudder to think how it ended and why I chose to end it so.

Wednesday will be longer than Wednesday, for I am scheduled to cross time zones and lay over at three airports in the USA before arriving in Montreal. Disconcertingly, the girl who checked in backpack seemed somewhat vexed as to how it should reach Canada. She instructed me to ignore Sydney and Atlanta but to be sure to recheck the backpack in Los Angeles and with 5AM nonchalance I nodded but was more taken with the idea of holding her in my arms a while, like two disaffected loners trying intimacy out – like me and Audrey – Audrey the person she bore a slight resemblance to and who would probably be reading Stendahl when, at midnight, well into Thursday Melbourne time, I finally reached Pierre Trudeau.

In the back of my seat and everyone else’s there is a credit card slot and I don’t like that so much. It calls forth memories of coin-operated appliances in cheap motels. Bathrooms in pompous Europe. Rolling along a sequence of parallel thoughts, not pissing in Melbourne because the urinal was crowded strikes me now as a sad, quintessentially western state of being; even though I can argue to pencil shavings the ills of that condition or direct one to arguments made by men far superior to me, that condition is me and I it, inexorably. Usually I can exhort the piss out by thinking to myself, you are enviable, you are talented, you have been places many people haven’t, made money off your pen and your looks and there is no fucking reason why the company of other men – not even the company, just the presence – should make you nervous. But my giddy stomach, and my humiliation at having to engage in such conceited inner dialogues just to take a piss get the better of me.

Transferring from Sydney’s domestic to international terminals I sit on a bus beside twin girls more lovely than any others because they are here with me now. Barely ten years old, they repay my adoring smiles with blush and laughter. I stare straight ahead for propriety – their mother might (will) misinterpret my affection as lust – and consider them good luck omens. My heart flushes; I check myself before tears start falling – how tenuously these emotions, all of them, are perched! Later, while attempting to find departure gate 3 – the one I should have been looking for was 53 – the girls flash back into my mind. Only this time it is sadness they bring. How facile and shallow it was to feel uplifted about human beings in general because those two children were so physically beautiful; would I have reacted the same had they possessed faces less angelic? But wait: would the hairs on my arms stand more readily erect above gooseflesh if I were looking at Mount Hotham, or Everest? Absurd analogies poison my spirit.

And whatever it augurs, they also sit front of me on this shabby jumbo bound for Los Angeles.

Sydney airport was bitterly cold and its floor so crowded with duty free products that I could not take a step without grazing some designer handbag or comically oversized block of chocolate. Light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl, light and lovely like the movements of a beautiful girl. The solid mantle of white below us has given over to snowy spots in the sky and specks of foam scudding across the sea, down there on earth’s eternal blue. Fingerprints smudge my little portal window, which is directly aligned with the tip of the right wing. Not even the glassy lakes of Banff or Colorado can offer two skies like altitude can. Apparat is a tremendous artisan of electronic music but cannot write lyrics – why does a German try to write lyrics in English? Market appeal? Write fantastic lyrics in your own tongue and sing no more songs about sunlight washing things away. I’m disappointed by Apparat but consider that perhaps his lyrics have been translated from the German the way, for example because his book of essays happen to be on my lap, Hesse’s writings were. In that case, I’m even more disappointed by him. The flight attendant gives an inconsolable man watching Beauty and the Beast a tray with fruit salad – mostly cantaloupe – tasteless pasta, crackers, lettuce, tomato, horseradish. Water.

It’s alright. Physically I overtop the world and metaphorically I look back at six months of indecision, anxiety, unsuitable affairs with girls I care nothing for, joy at sad times and sadness all besides, the rapid disintegration of my little brother, passing up university for the second year running, palming the trust of best friends into dirty gutters, mimetic shapes forming in my head as physical embodiments of the alphabet while on magic mushrooms in rooms where everybody else is sober, and Audrey – always, inescapably, Audrey est ici.

Forty minutes from the City of Angels, the sky still pitch black, cabin lights somnolently dimmed. Even the jet engines seem to have quieted. Since these sleeping tablets wore off I have begun to obsess over the whereabouts of my backpack – was it sent to Atlanta first, then LA, then Montreal? Because if it was I have a problem. I’m pretty fucking certain she did. Then breakfast rolls in – an upside to vegetarianism on a plane, the only upside, is that yours always comes first. But worries encroach again before I can fork the first mouthful of spinach; my times seem out, too miserly, wrong. It’ll be seven in the morning when I enter the terminal and according to my itinerary I arrive in Montreal at midnight tonight. There is either a monstrous unspecified layover or this itinerary is a bunch of shit. I feel a great deal more privy to small annoyances than I did on my way to Europe, almost twelve months ago to the day, and the fact that I condescend to thinking of such trifles when the only person I have every wanted to devote myself to will be awake soon and organising her bus to Pierre Trudeau serves only to annoy me further. White waterlily skin, hair like the dilated heavens closed off to me now by a plastic shutter. Nine months now I have imagined our re-acquaintance. Every possible scenario, every angle of the mind’s great camera I have countenanced and exhausted, never, for all my efforts, managing to get past the first hug. Good, good – she is inside me again.

No monstrous layover, no bullshit itinerary – just people altering the time in accordance with their share of our great star. In LA I sight my backpack with manifest relief. I pass through customs without shoes or a belt or a kind word from the huge officers.

“We do not discriminate against belts,” one of them, a young black man, bellows to the tired masses, “black belts white belts skinny belts chubby belts, get ‘em all off”. 

The backpack is rechecked without incident and I will not see it again until Montreal.

Many familiar faces surround me as, Atlanta-bound, we take off in a shroud of oppressive rain and un-Californian cold. Next to me is a heavy man of thirty who buys up large when the lunch trolley comes; peanuts are complimentary but everything else costs. I ask him, where are you going? Home? “Yeah,” he says, “where are you going?” So I tell him and he merely acknowledges my reply without harping on the romanticism of the situation, as people have been prone to. I love him. Since he will be the last to pass judgment it has left me on the ground, for if this fantastical holiday love is doomed to fail it will be brought down by that impossible idea of love conjured in the mind during its darling’s long absence, reinforced by the gushes of friends and family, the often wistful gushes of people who may once have found themselves in a similar predicament but erred, to their eternal regret, on the side of caution.

I buy an avocado sandwich in Atlanta and buy some Wi-fi too. And I eat the sandwich while writing Audrey an email. The sandwich came with potato chips and half a massive gherkin which I eat in little increments with mouthfuls of bread and avocado and rubbery cheese. Then I post some lyrics from Beauty and the Beast, about Gaston, on Facebook and Audrey is online so we speak for what is categorically the final time before me meet. I’m deliriously tired but quite excited, or the thought of excitement exists but has no able body through which to channel itself. I am not nervous. We chat for a few minutes. Her written persona, that irrepressible cascade of slightly Awry English written with the sagacity of a native poet, that voice of a thousand emails to whom I have confided the celebration and mourning of my life as I never could through speech – she leaves me. She is gone to me. And even though I exchange her for the reality beneath, there echoes in my heart another mourning that I can confide to no-one – words often fail me, but with much more aplomb when they come from my mouth and not directly from my mind. To whose silent sessions will my own be carried? That heavy man sang in a capella at the Brisbane convention centre three days ago.

I love the mango sky. I love the ridiculous pink ties worn by Delta pilots. Red exit signs and Georgian women wearing stilettos on long-haul flights. I love the blacks and hispanics who cook people’s fast food and clean their floors, ragged mops roiling the brown water in their rusty pails detergent. The Devil’s Walk is better than I gave it credit for. Ohio State, Arizone, UCLA Business – I love them. More than anything I love layovers because they represent the closest possible phenomenon to the suspension of time. What state was Walt Whitman from? Who knows but I think of him, his words like mental furniture for so many Americans. Audacity! Federation! Singing! Contradict! The leaves of grass I love but still can’t picture – are they leaves or is it grass?

Smelling almost offensively now, I watch a baseball game with great confusion and wonder if the rules are the same as rounders. Twenty minutes until Montreal. The girl whose nose is pressed into a book as she walks through a standoffish crowd of sleepwalkers is going to kiss me and take me to her apartment. For the first time since that sad Berlin morning I imagine I will sleep in peace.