Absolute Zero Cool (10 page)

•

Sermo Vulgus
: A Novel (Excerpt)

Cassie, you said diamonds were stone bewildered, confused and frightened by the glow in their soul. We are machines, you said, churning out rusted flakes of misunderstanding, but diamonds are doubts radiating hope.

Cassie, you said you would never wear diamonds. Diamonds, you said, are smug egos. They are too hard, you said, hard as the bones our yesterdays gnaw. You said only braided lightning would grace your finger; only a garland woven from a re-leafed oak would adorn your head. Can’t we at least try, you said, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun?

Cassie, you quoted Schoendoerffer on grey eyes: ‘Grey eyes are peculiar in that they betray no emotion, and in its absence one cannot help imagining a world of violence and passion behind their gaze.’ I think you wished your eyes were Schoendoerffer grey, but they were wide and candid and the colour of indecision.

Cassie, you were no reader of French. Thus I challenge the legitimacy of your perceptions. Now, when it is already too late, I dare you to consider that Xan Fielding’s translation of Farewell to the King improved Schoendoerffer’s original text.

Cassie, I beg you to admit possibility. For your approval I posit the hypothesis that nothing is impossible so long as we are prepared to consider its possibility. Only in an infinite universe can hope spring eternal.

Cassie, it is possible to try to braid lightning, to re-leaf your oak, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun. Cassie, it is possible to try at least. It is still legitimate to hope, even now, when the ash of the Six Million falls with the acid rain.

Cassie, are we really so far gone?

•

‘You’ve read
Farewell to the King
?’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I liked the cover.’

‘Why, what’s it look like?’

‘Your cover, I mean.’

‘Oh.’ My copy of Farewell to the King I found in a second-hand bookshop, crudely covered with a blank sheet of cheap leather binding. A blind orphan, swaddled. A good novel, I think, but my favourite book. A precious artefact excavated from the dross. The idea that someone would go to all that trouble to rebind an old paperback had me blinking back tears, so that the assistant asked me was I okay as I handed over the euro coin it cost to give it a good home.

Billy reaches into his satchel, takes out the book. ‘I borrowed it last week,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I meant to ask, but then Rosie wound up in the shed and, y’know.’

‘No worries.’

It takes everything I have not to punch my pencil into his Newman-blue eye. Because that book isn’t just a book, it’s a touchstone for how much some people love books; and not just books, but the weakest, the most disposable. Whoever bound that book could just as easily have tossed a coverless paperback in the trash, an object that was worthless by any practical assessment. And yet they covered it, crudely it has to be said, but that’s not the point, they took the time and invested the craft to ensure that the words would be protected, the delicacy of it preserved. I can only presume that whoever covered that book had died, and their collection of books sold as a job lot, for why would they go to all that effort just to sell it second-hand, especially as no bookseller in his right mind would pay good money for a ragged paperback bound in cheap blank leather?

I cried that day in the bookshop for the poignancy of it, certainly, out of a lachrymose sentimentality for the blind orphan who found safe haven, but also because I knew I had finally discovered the person I wanted to write for, the one mythical listener every writer needs, my ghost audience and reader eternal.

‘Have you anything else like that?’ he says. ‘That was pretty good.’

‘No, I’ve nothing else like that.’

He nods towards the chalet. ‘What about those Russians you have on the shelf?’

‘It’s a different kind of thing.’

‘Just as well,’ he says. ‘I mean, who can read those Russians? The characters’ names are nearly short stories in themselves.’

‘Being honest, they’re only there for show. Them and Kafka. And Beckett.’

‘Thank Christ for that,’ he says. ‘I was worried I might be the only moron around here.’

•

Today is a Red Letter day. Today was worth the wanton massacre of oxygen molecules required to keep me alive.

Early this morning a nurse discovered an old woman dead in her bed. There are suggestions that the death was premature. There are hints that the old woman’s miserable existence, eked out between bouts of excruciating bowel pain, was abruptly terminated.

Mrs McCaffrey’s was the third unusual death in nineteen months. All three suffered from chronic agonies with no hope of reprieve. All three had private rooms. Mrs McCaffrey appears to have been smothered with her own pillow, an embroidered affair she’d brought from her home when she realised she was in for the long haul.

Rumours surge along the corridors. Scandal plummets down elevator shafts. The speed of light is left standing in the traps. There are uninspired whispers about an Angel of Death. The word ‘euthanasia’ enjoys a hushed renaissance.

Despite the best efforts of the hospital’s board of directors, the cops are called in. They are, however, discreet. They are aware of the delicate nature of the situation. People cannot afford to believe that a hospital could be a place where people can die willy-nilly. There are research grants at stake here.

I am called for an interview, held in the office of the director of public relations on the sixth floor. It is a big, airy office. Potted plants feature. I sit in the leather chair and immediately feel my posture improve.

The cops ask if I was working last night. I tell them I was. They already know this.

They ask if I knew Mrs McCaffrey. Yes, I say. They already know this too.

They ask if I visited her last night with my concession cart.

‘Not last night, no.’

‘How come?’ says the cop with the salt-and-pepper hair.

‘She doesn’t like anything on the cart,’ I say. ‘I’ve offered to bring her anything she wants, but she can’t eat normal stuff. I think she has bowel cancer. Or had, rather.’

‘See anything unusual on your rounds last night?’

‘It’s a hospital. Pretty much everything that goes on around here is unusual.’

‘Okay. But was there anyone around who shouldn’t have been? Anything out of the ordinary?’

‘Not that I can think of, no.’

The other cop has florid jowls and porcine eyes. He taps a folder on the desk in front of him. ‘It says here you’ve been the subject of a number of disciplinary procedures.’

‘That’s not exactly a crime.’

He bristles. ‘We’ll decide what is and what’s not a crime.’

‘No, you don’t. If you want to criminalise attitude, call a referendum. Then we’ll decide what’s a crime and what isn’t, and you’ll enforce the laws we vote in. That’s the peachy thing about democracy.’

‘How come you’re trying to be difficult?’

The way he says it, I am now officially Public Enemy Number 1. This is a man who needs enemies. This is a man who needs justification for the chip on his shoulder and has found his vocation as a vampire feeding off crime.

‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ I say. ‘I’m co-operating. Anyway, how would mentioning my rights be making things difficult?’

Salty Pepper says, ‘How long have you worked here?’

‘That’s in the file, along with the disciplinary stuff.’

‘Do you like your job?’

‘It’s a job. And I like meeting new people.’

‘You get to see many people die during the course of your duties?’

‘Some. You?’

He sucks on a discoloured front tooth. ‘How does that make you feel, watching people die? I mean, are you comfortable with seeing people in pain?’

‘Not especially. But you get used to anything if you stick at it long enough.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

Florid Jowls cuts in. ‘Say someone begs you to end their life, to do them a favour and put them out of their misery – what do you do?’

‘I call a nurse. They’re obviously in need of a shot of morphine, something along those lines.’

‘Did Mrs McCaffrey ever talk about wanting to die?’

‘Not that I remember. But I don’t think she had a lot to live for.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She talked about how no one ever came to visit her. She said her husband died four years ago.’ They already know this. ‘People can die of a broken heart,’ I say. ‘That’s a medical fact. Hearts can actually break.’

‘So you did talk to her.’

‘She talked to me. I listened. Old people who are dying only want one thing, the chance to tell their story. To pass their lives on. All they want to believe is that life hasn’t been a stupid waste of time.’

Florid Jowls says, ‘And you told her that?’

‘Sure. What’s it cost to tell a dying person a lie?’

‘When’s the last time you saw Mrs McCaffrey?’ Salty Pepper says.

‘About three nights ago.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Certain, yeah.’

‘Okay,’ Florid Jowls says, ‘you can go. But we might want to talk to you again.’

I head for the door. ‘A word to the wise,’ Salty Pepper says. ‘No one likes a smart-arse.’

‘Not everyone needs to be liked,’ I say.

I can tell, by the way his eyes narrow, that he is not unaccustomed to considering this concept. I close the door behind me and breathe quick, shallow breaths. Blood roars in my ears. Tomorrow I bomb Nagasaki, etc.

My supervisor takes the cigarette butt hint and finds a new parking space. This time it takes me a whole hour to find his Opel Corsa, out back of the ambulance station to the rear of the hospital.

Strictly speaking, this is illegal. No non-essential vehicles of any description are allowed in this area. A kid propping his bike against the wall is looking at a hefty fine for interfering with an emergency service. A badly parked car could obstruct an ambulance on its way to resuscitate a coronary victim. Each minute that elapses before an ambulance reaches a coronary victim reduces his chances of survival by 10 percent, give or take.

There was a time when Sirens lured and seduced; today they alert and alarm. Ambulances are the all-wailing, all-blaring placebos of our generation. A flashing blue siren has replaced the Sacred Heart flame. The stench of burning rubber has become our incense. In CPR we trust.

My supervisor has violated this covenant. He has parked his non-essential Opel Corsa in a restricted zone. It is my duty to reprimand him.

I wear a ring fashioned into an Ouroborous, an ancient symbol of intertwined snakes, one depicting imminent annihilation, the other rising hope. In Asian cultures, the snakes become dragons. I have sawn through this ring so that one jagged edge overlaps the other. I dig this jagged edge into the paintwork of my supervisor’s Opel Corsa and gouge a line the length of the passenger side. In theory, this means he will not discover the gouging until long after he has left the hospital grounds.

My line for today is, Why stop now, just when I’m hating it? (Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

Cassie is a beautiful woman. This makes her difficult to live with.

Sex stunts the imagination, narrows focus, and diminishes the contemplation of perspective, scale or the possibility of diversions. Sex is an Opel Corsa careering downhill on a steep one-way street. Sex is half-chewed fuel-lines. Sex is dying before your time. Sex is defying destiny. Sex is waving two fingers in the face of infinity, and then slipping said fingers into infinity’s lubricated vagina. Sex is hoping infinity gets off first.

Cass is a finicky eater, an amateur photographer and a book club enthusiast. She admires minimalist two-tone interior design. When she was a child she wanted to be a blacksmith. Today she works as a physiotherapist. When we first met I thought ‘physiotherapy’ was massage parlour code. I was to be disappointed, but by then I didn’t care.

Today is my day off. We meet for lunch in town. It is a mild, bright day, the first real swallow of summer, the sun a bowl of peach punch drained. We skip the food and grab some take-out coffee, find a bench down along the river. We talk and watch the river flow by.

This is always an enjoyable experience. Cass is generous with her time and spirit. She possesses the rare talent of making everyone feel at ease in her company, a skill and gift essential in her professional life. She listens when other people speak. This attentiveness is flattering, even after you realise Cassie listens no matter who is speaking and regardless of the topic being discussed. Conversing with Cassie is like whistling into a soaked sponge. She hears everything but absorbs nothing. This is one reason I like Cassie.