Surrender

I am dying: it’s a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of a cello:
dying
. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

Several times a week I must be cleaned. Water comes to me on a sponge. I must lift my arms, shift my heels, lower my flaming eyes. I must smell pink, antiseptic. I’m removed from my place while the bed sheets are changed and set to sag in a wheelchair. I am proffered a pan, and the sight of it shames me; at other times I can’t call for it fast enough. My food comes mashed, raised on a spoon; spillage will dapple my lap. I am addressed as if an idiot, cooed over as though a child. I’m woken when I wish to sleep, told to sleep when I’d prefer to be awake. I am poked, prodded, pinched, and flensed; I’m needled and wheedled and cajoled. My existence is nothing but a series of humiliations; what little life is left to me can hardly be called my own. All of this, this horror, just to say, “He’s dying.”

I hear the words blow like dust through town. From where I lie, in this lean white room, I hear them spoken under awnings, murmured over counters, delivered as knowing statements across gates.
It won’t be long now. They say he’s dying
.

They say he’s fragile, his skin sugar-white; they say he must be handled like a delicate crown of thorns. They’re saying he’s as weightless as the skeleton of a crow.

Breathing is an undertaking: it takes minutes to sigh. My rib cage is the hull of a wrecked and submerged ship. My arms, thin as adders, are leaden as dropped boughs. The mattress, my closest friend, has been carved by the knots of my unfleshed bones into a landscape of dents. The soul might rise, but the body pulls down, accepting the inevitable, returning to where it began.

This is where I began: I am dying in my childhood home. Beyond the window straggles the only world I know and wish to know; I was born and grew up in this few-thousand town. There is nothing about its weft and fold that isn’t familiar to me. I know the cracks in the footpaths — I have stepped on them a thousand times. I know the product on the shelves and the reflection in the glass — I have seen myself there, left imprints of my hands. I’ve felt summer’s sahara heat and seen autumn’s bedraggled blooms; I’ve kicked black crickets from my toes and fed wood to a hissing fire. I know which gate tilts in the wind; I know what’s cropped in which field. I have known the exact moment when every calf and child was born. From here, on the bed, where I see only paneled walls and a haze of curtain that ushers in the breeze, I can distinguish and put a name to every rooster’s cry. The breeze brings to me the scent of sawdust, diesel, feathers, chicken soup. They say that smell is the last thing to fade, so I sniff about while I can.

It is as easy for me to die here, in the bedroom of my childhood home, as it would be to die anywhere. The procession of needlers and pinchers knows where to find me. The word on the street agrees, says, “It’s better he’s home — it’s comforting there.” My aunt takes care of me from day to day; she sleeps in the neighboring room. I’ll not pretend her task is enviable. The chronically ill make for difficult work; neither is it easy to be chronically ill. It is an effort for me to do anything — to think, talk, imagine, prepare — to do anything except concede to the demands of my squalling usurper. It rules me like a dictator; in turn I rule my aunt. When the end comes, Sarah will have earned her peace. In the meantime, she’s not the sort to put a pillow to one’s face: when the illness is looking elsewhere I apologize for the grief I cause and, “Gabriel,” she replies, “I’ll miss you.”

Inside me roils a thunderstorm. When I breathe, the breath is winter. Lightning jags through my chest, splashes shocks of blood down my chin. Rain falls inside my lungs, sloshes when I move. The thunder rolls like a great cat, settles with a feline weight. The marrow in my bones is ice. My eyes are hailstones.

And I feel old, as old as the mountains that the walls and window won’t allow me to see, as old as if every moment has somehow stretched into a year. And anyone who didn’t know me might mistake me for an ancient man — I have an old tranquility. But I am young — I’m the martyr’s age. At my age, hearts are pierced with arrows, and taped over with bombs. Mine is the saintly age, the sacrificial one: I am only twenty.

But there’s no one here who doesn’t know me.

In this small town, conversation is whispered. Treetops, when they buffet, do so mutedly. Cats don’t purr; goats don’t bleat; birds keep their tunes to themselves. The cow separated from her calf swallows back her moan. Children in their yards don’t play, trucks take the long road round. Anything daring to slam with the wind is forcibly nailed down. The wind itself does its best to skulk unheard. Everything here is silenced, for me. Everything keeps a respectful hush. I lie alone in this small room, my childhood’s unreliable sanctuary now my prison, soon my morgue, and silence, which is what awaits me, is what I’ve already received.

Fortunately my ears are sharp.

I hear that they are whispering, “What was missing is found.”

The wind told me it’s found.

I jump from my tree (they are all my trees) and click for Surrender and breach the hill, him running in the lead. Surrender has heavy bones, heavy ears, a timber tail, a gatepost skull, but he’s light as butter on his feet: he runs back and forth, up and down, flushing birds that flew off yesterday, chasing rabbits that are stew. I don’t call him, he won’t come. I’m going to a place that’s hidden, and though if anyone saw the dog they’d know I was near, Surrender won’t be seen.

The fact that it’s found is at my shoulders like a swarm, pushing me through the slop and fug, up and up the mountain. The earth I touch with my hands is cold (the earth is mine, the dirt, the seeds, the grass, the worms, the cracks, the clods, all of it, all). The mud makes cakes on my knees. Up high the breeze is colder, and smells like a snake’s belly, and bites with a snake’s fangs. I clamber higher, to the top. I need the peak, the view. I need the world caught inside the black pit of my eyes.

I know where I’m going, the dip in the ground, the log and mucky gouge. Before me there’s been fox and wombat, and the earth tangs of them. I sit in the gouge with my arms round my knees and stare, a gargoyle on the mountain’s side. If I had wings they would be black: they would unfold with a creak like antique hide and, unfolded, drip oil.

From this towersome height this is what I see: miniature town, miniature trees, a world that’s a toy box upturned. A mansion for dollies, trucks driven by fleas. Then there’s bigger, other things, although farther away. Forests, fields, mountains, clouds. Mountains like shark teeth, ivory, serrated; forest dense as moss. All this in my eye. Beyond this, nothing. There is no place beyond this. From here I’ll see whatever comes, and I will see it before it sees I.

My hair blows in my eyes. I scrape it out with a nail.

Surrender returns, thinks, thinks about biting. His lip crooks like a wave. The one thing important to everything is this: my hound.

Another thing I see: the cemetery. Every town must have one: Mulyan has one too. No one lives forever (who’d let them?). In the cemetery everyone’s related, and not just because of the state they’re in. There’s daughters, uncles, grandparents, fathers, sons, cousins, mothers, brothers, the same names again again again. The clans gather together like it’s Christmas under there. Some had the town in themselves —
Sacred to the Memory of John Mulyan Devine
. Now it’s the town that has them; now they’re dust, dirt, loam. Rabbits have dug tunnels through John Devine, his rib cage a nursery for kits.

Another thing about Mulyan: nobody chooses to come here. In this little town ringed by shark-tooth mountains we are far, far away. We know only each other. And the names on the gravestones stay the same.

Mulyan hangs, upturned in my eye; a town of abominable secrets and myth. Its elders gather in the Chamber to vote against everything. They are frightened of change, and defiant. “We are happy as we are!” They are pigheaded to a person. “We’ll keep our own ways, thank you!”

I full-heartedly concur. Why wouldn’t I? I am the ruler of this island-town. I’m happy as things are.

The wind’s chilled me as blue as a corpse; my jaw is sore, my lips skinned. From my perch I oversee the yawning town, see it waking and greeting the dawn. I rub my hands; I breathe on them; I snuggle into the earth. I watch the tip-grubber’s truck grind its way to the dump. On the tray of the truck lurch twelve scrawny mutts, each salvaged from the rubble of the dump, each bearing an apostle’s name. I watch the tip-grubber to the end of the road, then jump back a mile to Mulyan. Surrender wanders near. He sniffs my face; his coat is chill. I settle like a hawk.

McIllwraith the local law steps from his matchbox house. I lean forward to follow. He climbs into his minuscule car and leaves the gutter for the street. The car bucks and snorts with the cold, fog bleeding from its rear. I imagine him in the driver’s seat, smiling smoothly to himself. The grave is found: it must mean good things for him. It might mean freedom, escape. He’s been caged in Mulyan for years. Now the grave is open; maybe so is a door. Maybe now, at long last, someone will recognize a job well done.

A job well done, like a kiss.