The Slip, page 5
shifted, apparently, although I don’t feel like I’m making any steps toward a cure. I’m just lying on the couch about to burst with talk I cannot bring myself to utter.
With the men my reticence is never a problem; if you let them, most prefer to speak about themselves. My mother keeps calling in the middle of the night, she’s worried about me, she can’t get the time difference right. I don’t want to talk about Anna and sex is a good distraction. I like the sweating writhing grinding. I like binding my body with others. Afterward, when my partner is sleeping and I am cool and quiet, my thoughts return to eels. My hatchlings are growing now, losing their translucence, becoming creatures of substance. In the early hours of the morning I leave whatever bed I’m in and head to the lab, where I stand before their tanks and watch the eels swim through my reflection, blurring my edges before
filling page after page with * insert picture here * our reproductive systems though he doesn’t know exactly how to draw it. If the boy-man knows already what he’ll know once he is older it’s that every patient yields to the compulsion to repeat and in such cases where the resistance is greater the repetition will be gonads
gonads
too. He breaks for a coffee – perhaps he takes two sugars, stirs thrice – before returning to his microscope to peer at slides which frame the slick remains of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother like stills from a slasher film I like to think it was my grandma anyway and not just an eelstress who happened to look exactly like her like to think of him in crisis: crisis of science, crisis of self, crisis of image blurred * he focuses the lens * still blurry, not like me, streaming toward the sea with this sudden clarity of vision.
I feel ethereal!
At first it really fucked with me, with my sense of having a soul or spirit or whatever; I guess it’s normal for earthbound creatures to cling to feelings of embodiment. It is the strangest thing to seek your own annihilation. A terrific pressure builds inside me. I think it means I need to hurry. Can’t get mired in any ocean gyres and find that I’ve arrived
late, being evasive. In secret, I find it intolerable. In session, I say LISTEN: either you want to be here doing the work, or you don’t. She surprises me by failing to appear for her last session before the Christmas break. So, she’s given me the slip. That week I dream that there’s a wave, a big wave coming to wipe everything and everybody out. In the dream a panel of advisors asks Why don’t you listen when your own life is at
stakes are high for me right now, alone in my apartment while the rest of the world’s on holiday. I refused to fly home and see my mother. I couldn’t bear the heat, the sun, the ham, the brandy without Anna. This foreign climate keeps the memory on ice and I keep lights off and the curtains closed. About a week ago I dreamed I was an eel again. As the migrating eel gets closer to the sea, its eyes widen and turn blue in order to absorb light underwater, but in the dream my eyes don’t clear and I can’t find my way. Since then I’ve been losing sight in my left eye, like there’s an ink blot over my iris. I haven’t seen any doctors but I’ve been Googling it and think it must be an ocular occlusion, probably due to psychic distress.
(I know what you’re thinking. My analyst is going to
have fun with this, bitch!! I’ve been feeling philosophically minded on this last leg of the journey, like that cunt Rousseau … or is it Cousteau? Which one’s the shark guy and which one’s the frog? It’s hard to tell with these Enlightenment types. For one thing they’re all named Jacques, a name I hate by the way. You didn’t ask but here’s a compendium of my friends’ monikers: Nikki, Brendan, Libramax, Dettol, Batshit, Common Dog Winkle, Sammy, Glasgow, Hans the Shoveller, Curly, Barry the Crab (he’s actually a limpet, don’t ask), Mernda, Bonbeach, Ativan, Lifestyles Extra Large, Constance, Cool Climate Chardonnay and Flux. Guess I’ll never be seeing that fine crew of urchins, con artists and guttersnipes again! Fuck me sideways, or should I say fuck me dead. Because it strikes me that it’s coming. I try to let these words sink in, but the closer I get to where I’m going the more my sense of fatalism warps and bends into an idea – and I’m wary of sounding overly redemptive here – of freedom.
But sea here see inside her I’m embarrassed to admit that for all my pompous airs I’m still like the sweating writhing grinding stranger than most almost old no hold on it’s hold, holdtight
want some seafood? Now is not the time for song and dance, dickhead! Now’s the moment for some eleventh-hour reflections on BEING and
time has a different texture when you can’t observe its passing. I wear an eyepatch – I know – and lose the ability to judge distance. Some eels take up to a year to migrate depending on currents, place of origin, vigour and inclination. They are blind for most of the way, getting by on feeling. Maybe this is a lesson. See feelingly, say the eels. I think about this for a few days, grappling with
so many sensations!!
salty warm
blue delirious yellowbrown
seaweed everywhere like a beautiful golden fuck-palace. Eels everywhere, fucking. Well not fucking, spawning, but that’s how I have to put it so I’m speaking a language we all understand. So, we’re all here spawning/fucking every which way. Upside down around sideways lots of hand in holes tell me the hole truth and nothing but the truth so help you Cod oh baby baby lots of places to enter lots of places to return Either you want to be here doing the work or fuck yeah I fucking want to be here sure as waves caress the sea and gods fuck mortal sluts and wicked mermaids tell sweet fibs and currents have no motive and the temperatures are rising and the rubbish is collecting and the crabs have no compunction and the kelp is all aflutter and the images are burning and the scriptures do not alter and the story is irrelevant and the truth is worse than it appeared at first and science is a fiction and conspiracies are coded and my organs disappeared to let the gonad sing a round and even if you don’t believe it every starfish is a swine (this is something you would know if you had seen one send its stomach on reconnaissance, blindly tonguing the sea floor like a free range fucking colostomy bag). What in ocean am I saying I am feeling kinda high and terrified and totally amazing: fuck poetry, fuck philosophy, fuck biology, fuck persiflage, no gentle banter this is rock n fucking roll you see aha I sea inside her I am here, at one with the lifeforce. All feelings of ethereality are suddenly nullified! I’m a body in time. I have all these eggs! There were so many it was a shock when I first released them – like, millions! Who needs cocaine when you’re high off your own fucking potency! I feel like I was born to be here. I fucking was! What a sublime joke it all is. I came here to find lose myself. Lose haha loose lost
last haha spawn til I die oh my
this place is fucking paradise.
I guess that’s it for me, folks. If you were hoping to read a story in which life triumphs over death, the creature doesn’t die, illumination is forthcoming or extinction is averted by an act of sensitivity or virtue then I must inform
the woman that while I can’t predict when her vision will return, it seems that her unconscious is telling her it’s time to
look at how the light makes gold the edges of things. Grief, when I allow myself to feel it, makes everything seem unreal or hyperreal; how painful, how beautiful this can be. The sight in my left eye is returning. I’ve held the box containing my sister’s ashes. They call them cremains. They call them larval, glass, silver, juvenile, mature, semelparous, extinct. My colleagues have been sending pictures; my eels are all grown up, no longer transparent but a dark, secret brown. Soon they’ll be ready for the river and then one day the sea. Anything could happen on their journey. Eels spawn once and then they die. When you think about it, it’s kind of funny. I could get upset but I have realised that I want to see the humour in
the best laid plans of eels and men or is it mice that go awry it rhymes with bye and best intentions curse your questions don’t ask me how it eventuated
I’m not a fucking sage I’m just a slick sick fish with a muscular torso gonads and an anal fin I’m full of BIG SENSATIONS shooting spawn in
new directions
I’ll be slipping off but maybe some of my fucking progeny might surface in a river, pond or water feature in a neighbourhood near you. The lucky bitches! May they writhe and
glimmer and
speed through the
Whatever, you know how it goes.
THE END
* * *
EAST: miriamwebster_92@gmail.com
From: submissions@theeasternreview.com.au
Thank you for your story – we think it’s intriguing. Edits to come. In response to your question, if you’re worried about writing from the perspective of
SOUTH: An eel?! texts my writer friend, crying emoji. Didn’t we agree that ventriloquising another species seemed
WEST: ridiculous? I know, I say, the next time we have coffee. But don’t you reckon
NORTH: it’s a big relief from the terror of loss to admit that it is always, at the same time,
absurd?
A Woman, a Man and Another
Adam has sensitive skin. Louise cannot abide it. She thinks Adam is selective about what does and doesn’t irritate him. Sometimes it’s washing powder, sometimes animals, sometimes gluten. Occasionally, when they are having sex, Adam bails just when things are heating up because the friction, he says, is hurting him. ‘Time out,’ he says, ‘pause. Your skin is touching me too much.’ Lately it’s the sun. Yes – actual sunshine. She tolerates it, just. She loves him. What else?
For three weeks during the summer break they rent a house in Shoreham. It is a big house belonging to Adam’s wealthy second cousin, an environmental consultant who’s agreed to rent it to them on the cheap. Before they leave, Adam buys one of those bulk containers of SPF50+ from the discount chemist near their house. It is fluorescent orange and reminds Louise of school and swim club; there is a middle-class pedantry about it that she finds dispiriting.
‘Are you actually going to use all that?’ she asks him.
‘It’s good to be prepared,’ he retorts.
Adam drives, because Adam is good at driving, which puts Louise in charge of navigation, even though she gets stressed out. They play Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers and Dire Straits – their boomer tunes. She rolls her window down and lets the wind whip hair around her face, resting her hand on Adam’s thigh. His skin is greasy from the sunscreen. It is peak season for beachgoers and all along the Mornington Peninsula hordes of tourists glut the shore: the old money set in Portsea, the Greeks with their jacked-up jet skis in Dromana, the big Pacific Islander families round the barbeques at Frankston Beach, the screaming children on the rides at Rye’s amusement park. The energy is festive, bordering on deranged, and as they drive Louise feels hopeful, like something is about to shift.
She and Adam have been together since before they were twenty. People say the person you’re with in your twenties is not the one you’ll be with in your thirties, but Adam thinks that’s bullshit. ‘They’re just jealous,’ he says. ‘They have no idea.’ There was a period where they tried being open and it didn’t work, so they went back to being monogamous, acknowledging that the model’s flawed. Louise accepts that they have traded the unknown for the familiar and that this involves a little boredom. They share a hypo-allergenic dog named Flossy, an apartment in Thornbury, debt and credit, friends, preferences and ideals. They have two heads for the one electric toothbrush and they know which attributes and flaws they each inherited from their mothers. Louise no longer thinks about other people.
Except—
Except in certain moments, when she sees them riding bikes or eating lunch or drinking out the front of pubs or walking dogs or putting up scaffolding or coming back from the pool or dandling babies and wonders what it would be like if this person were her person, if this baby were her baby, if she had a different life. It’s not exactly what she longs for, but still a sense of satisfaction flickers just outside her reach.
When she tries to think about what she wants, everything takes on a horrible significance. She has made a life with Adam, but how much do they really know about each other? What is possible to share and to desire? She thinks about it constantly, desire: how to live with it and how to live it out.
Finally they round a corner and the house emerges from the bush, a large but graceful structure made entirely of steel and glass. The exterior is beautiful, reflecting greenery and clouds as on the surface of a rippling pool. But once inside, Louise begins to feel uneasy. Everything here is clean and soft and neutral, the kind of luxury that has no personality. There are no edges anywhere, no hard lines to mark the border between inside and out. Safer, she thinks, to stand in the middle of the room.
‘What’s wrong?’ Adam asks.
‘What?’
‘You have a weird look.’
‘I do not.’
‘You do. Like you hate it.’
‘I don’t hate it. It’s really tasteful.’ She walks around a little. ‘How rich is your cousin?’
Adam snorts. ‘A lot richer than us.’
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Not since he did the renovations. Look at this,’ he says, sliding the door across and standing on the deck. ‘It’s pretty fucking nice.’
‘Yeah, it’s nice.’
‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’
She crosses her arms. ‘Don’t make out like I’m being shitty.’
‘You’re the one going around criticising everything!’ Adam turns his palms upward, like he’s appealing to a jury.
‘You’re making me sound crazy.’
He runs his hands through his hair. ‘This is dumb. We’ve been working really hard to get here. We’re on holiday. Why are we arguing?’
He comes and hugs her but she pushes him away.
‘What’s your problem? As soon as we arrived you started freaking out.’
‘I did not freak out,’ she says. ‘It’s because you yelled at me about the navigation. You know I’m shit at Maps.’
‘I didn’t— I mean, I’m sorry for yelling, alright? I was under pressure, traffic was bad. You were supposed to tell me—’
‘To go and get fucked. That’s what I should have said.’
‘Louise!’ he says, holding her shoulders and laughing.
‘Stop it. Stop fucking laughing.’
Then before they know it, they are kissing.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, breaking the kiss. ‘I love you.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this.’
‘I like how you are. Now,’ says Adam. ‘Wine?’
They open a bottle of pinot grigio to drink outside. The deck is surrounded by a stylish native garden which is meant to look organic, as though it has spontaneously grown. Whip birds, little wrens and willie wagtails flit amongst the foliage calling pleasantly and past the deck the yard slopes down to meet some paddocks grazed by smooth brown cows, large and placid with their shadows falling on the grass. Further afield, some rows of grapes are growing lush and woody on the hills. Beyond that is the sea.
‘You’re right,’ she says to Adam. ‘It’s pretty fucking nice.’
They drink and watch the sun go down over the ocean. After a bit of desultory conversation about the weather and the view, their plans for tomorrow and some people that they know, their attention drifts to their phones. Louise can tell from the way Adam’s squinting that he is checking the security cameras at work to see if he can catch any of his employees snacking. They’re open late during summer, and he has put one of the junior staff in charge.
‘Oh my god,’ he says suddenly. ‘The fucking little—’
‘I thought you said you were going to switch off while we’re here.’
Adam looks at her like, don’t. She raises her eyebrows righteously and says, ‘Well?’
‘Siena’s eating the prosciutto.’
She pictures Adam’s staff, zombie-like, tearing into joints of meat. It is absurd, but somehow makes her shiver. ‘Which one,’ she asks, ‘the Riserva or the Campanini?’
He zooms in rapidly. ‘I can’t tell. Fuck. I’m going to have to call them. Can’t even leave for one fucking night, Louise,’ he says, disappearing inside.
Louise leans back against her chair, battling a sinking feeling. Since he and his brother inherited the provedore, Adam has been difficult to reach. It is a business with a long, binding history; his nonno opened the first shop in the sixties after doing time in a labour camp and then on the Snowy Hydro, and the family is focused around it – they celebrate their birthdays there, it’s where they do Christmas, it’s what they talk about together, it’s where they get their food. It seems to cater to the family more than it does customers, and by the time Adam inherited it, the provedore was running at a loss. A butcher by trade, more interested in flesh than figures, he has had to learn quickly and work hard to get it into profit. Louise is happy to be part of it, but there are moments when it feels as though they are oppressed by an entanglement neither of them chose.
‘I didn’t ask for this,’ Adam says.
‘So sell it,’ says Louise.
‘Oh yeah, as if my family would let me.’
