The Disestablishment of Paradise (53 page)

Hera
Hopeless. Getting Mack to talk about himself when he didn’t want to was like pulling teeth. He’d tell stories – and he had a lot of
them, funny and tragic – usually against himself, but something got in the way when I asked him even simple questions about himself, about his own feelings. He would deflect enquiries
with a joke. At the same time, when the pressure was on him – like when he was afraid of being captured by a Michelangelo – his feelings just poured from him, and I was glad.

I suppose I could have asked more, but I felt we were living on borrowed time – and we were. I made him promise once that when we escaped he would let me ‘debrief’ him
properly. And he agreed on condition that he could do the same with me. Do you see the problem in getting a straight answer?

Olivia
I’m interested in why Mack never learned to read. I would have thought that a woman like his granny, who seems to have enjoyed literature, would
have made certain that he did.

Hera
Yes, well. You don’t know Mack. My impression is – though I emphasize he never said this – that he deliberately decided not to learn to
read. I believe he also actively fostered the impression that he was a bit simple.

It was protection. He knew he was different from the other boys. He was experiencing horrific dreams of being possessed and of sometimes being outside his body, and so to protect himself he
played dumb. He was the one allowed to sit at the back of the class and doodle while the rest got on with their lessons. But he was quite good at maths. He must have been a difficult boy to
understand. On the one hand he was indolent and dreamy, but yet he had enthusiasms and gifts. Also, he had this habit of disappearing.

Olivia
Disappearing?

Hera
Yes. He’d go walkabout. Wouldn’t tell anyone and just go. He once let slip to his grandmother that he had gone off with a friend – and
she knew that wasn’t true – and that she was never to worry about him because his friend would take care of him. It was a spirit friend, you see.

There was his size too. He grew very quickly – he was already six feet tall when he was fourteen, and he had some kind of breakdown. He didn’t remember much about it, or at least
that was what he said. I think it was puberty more than anything else. I think he was going through a bigger change than most. Anyway, when he came out of hospital he became interested in
bodybuilding – a lot of boys do, and he just bulked up naturally.

As soon as he could, he dropped out of school. He told his grandmother one time he was going on a ‘long walkabout’. That was when she gave him the ring. It had been her
mother’s before her and her mother’s mother’s, and so on. She reckoned Jason would do all right, but Arnold was the one who needed protection. And off he went. Into the
desert.

I suppose it was a kind of pilgrimage or a retreat. He moved around, getting odd jobs, experimenting with his life. He lived with a woman in a caravan for a while and she gave him his first
sexual experiences. She was an alcoholic and used to steal from him to buy cheap sherry. He didn’t mind. He reckoned he was getting the best of the bargain. But the thing that struck him
was that when she was drunk she was a different person, in fact several different people, and she would move from being comic and fun, to being broody and resentful, to angry and sarcastic, to
crying, to comatose – all in the space of two hours. And he would put her to bed. The next morning she would wake up and not remember any of it.

One day when he was out doing a job, chopping wood or some such, he had one of his hunches. It was so sudden that he almost chopped his foot off. It was one of his rare visual premonitions,
and in it he saw himself lying dead outside the caravan with a wound in his throat. So when he finished work, instead of going straight back to the caravan like he usually did, he went to a
bar. Apparently the time after work was when they had sex. They’d got things worked out quite well. He’d leave in the morning before she had woken up. She’d wake up sometime,
slop about, do some shopping, get the place tidy, and start to feel randy about four o’clock. By the time he got back after five she was ready to tear the pants off him. Have you ever
behaved like that, Olivia?

Olivia
Get on with the story.

Hera
Well he stayed at the bar until it was late and then he walked to the caravan park. There were police all over and an ambulance, and he saw the woman
being carried from the caravan on a stretcher. There was a man dead.

The caravan was sealed but his possessions were in there, so he did his dumb act and spoke to one of the police officers and got the full story. The man was the woman’s husband and
he’d heard about Mack, so he’d come to the caravan park with a gun, intending to shoot him. When Mack didn’t come home, he broke into the caravan, found his wife half naked
and already into her first bottle. They had an argument. He shot her and then himself.

He must have been a bad shot as he only wounded her, but he managed to blow his own head off. ‘So you were bloody lucky, mate; you stayed in the bar.’ That was the
policeman’s verdict.

Olivia
What happened to Mack?

Hera
Nothing. He was the intended victim, but otherwise he wasn’t really involved. The police kept his things and he was supposed to be able to pick them
up after the enquiries were over. But he didn’t bother. He went walkabout again.

Olivia
How old was Mack at this time?

Hera
Sixteen. We then lose three years of his life. I think he was in the desert. Just drifting. There was always work for a ‘big fella’ – as
he put it. And not too many questions asked, because anyone who went bush had their reasons. They were sorting themselves out and the desert was a wonderful place to be alone. Life on the
margin, Olivia, an interesting place.

Olivia
So when next do we catch up with him?

Hera
Nineteen, going on twenty, high summer, northern Queensland, into drugs. ‘A good time and a bad time’ was how he described it. He was picked
up for robbery, and the comic thing was that the drugs he and his partner had found had actually been stolen.

So he found himself in prison for seven years, and that saved him. That was when he got the name Mack, and it stuck. He went through a lot of hard times. He was very angry but he
wasn’t stuck in his anger – it was something that was passing through him.

You asked about him not reading. Well, in prison he had ample opportunity to learn to read, but he didn’t. By now he had the idea that if he learned to read it would stop his inner
life.

Olivia
His intuition?

Hera
Yes, something like that. What do you think of that? Has that idea got any merit?

Olivia
Well, I’ve always thought of reading as stimulating the imagination –

Hera
Perhaps Mack didn’t need stimulating.

Olivia
– and of helping you find the inner you, apart from the pleasure it brings. Access to ideas, new experiences, new thoughts. Look at young Sasha,
finding her way.

Hera
That’s writing. And that’s
if
you want to communicate. Mack didn’t want to communicate. He had nothing to say. He was living
too intensely. When I was a girl, I was a bit like Sasha – well, in some ways, in my interest and my curiosity. I sometimes think now that I would have been happier if someone had sat me
down and said, ‘You don’t have to do anything, Hera, you don’t have to explain or make judgements; just sit and look at this painting, and let the painting look at
you.’

Olivia
Inner knowledge, waiting to be born.

Hera
Higher knowledge, possibly. You see, what’s interesting about Mack is that he could do numbers, and I think that is a more important skill than
reading. It gave him access to the abstract, but in a purer form than words. Words are so loaded, Olivia, and most of all when written. It’s so hard to strip them to their essentials,
that’s what writers and poets—

Olivia
Let’s get back to Mack. He’s in prison and . . .? What did he find hardest?

Hera
The hardest was not having access to a woman – women. Hell, he was only twenty and he was fizzing. But being close to so much anger and hatred was
very hard too. He could feel it like a burn. And so he kept to himself, and if anyone caused him trouble, he did his dumb act. And if they persisted he waited for his moment and hit them hard.
Hit so he broke something. Hit so they had to be sent to hospital.

He had it all worked out. He trained in the gym – a lot. He kept himself very fit and he met men there who taught him about fighting. After a while he was respected, and they knew he
wasn’t so dumb.

Olivia
OK. So what turned him round?

Hera
Two things. The first was he learned a trade. Halfway through his time he was moved to a more open prison, an occupational prison. He became a mechanic.
He could scribble his name if he needed to. Most of the manuals in the workshop had little drawings and so he could follow them. And the teachers . . . well, some of them were former inmates,
and they said things like ‘If you’re a mechanic you get your hands dirty, and if you get your hands dirty you can’t turn pages in a manual because you get the book dirty, and
if you get the book dirty you can’t read it anyway – so learn it in your head, Mack.’

Suddenly the days started to whizz past. He learned how to maintain the big magnetic torque trucks. He worked on scaffolding, and that led to platform construction, and that led to
elementary space technology. He was a welder and a fitter. He took every diploma he could – and he could do the maths.

I mean . . . Let me put it this way, Olivia: if he had needed to read and write, he could have, I suppose, but he got through without it, and I’m not sure what that says about the
system or our culture. There were always people on hand to help. Not being able to read became normal to him. Even with his demolition team Polka did the invoices and Dickinson handled any
paperwork – and Dickinson, make no mistake, was very sharp. It was not until Mack met me and wanted to share more in my world that he decided to make an effort, and wasn’t he
lucky?

Olivia
You mentioned two things that helped him.

Hera
Yes, the other is a bit strange. One day one of the warders came round looking for volunteers to attend an experimental counselling session. Now all of
them were used to this kind of thing, being guinea pigs for social experiments or prison reform studies or criminologists doing their PhDs and the like. And they used to sign up because
sometimes it meant you got to go out on a visit and see women. So they were taken into the lecture room and sat down in rows.

After about five minutes the door opens and in comes this Buddhist monk all in his robes and with his head shaved. In fact he looked like one of them. This little monk sat down on the floor
in front of them and just looked at them. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked.

Several of the prisoners just got up and walked out. They thought he was playing mind-fuck games and they knew all about that. Finally he said, ‘Well, now we know one another a bit. I
am here so we can help one another.’ And that was all. He went back to sitting and looking at them. At last one of the prisoners said, ‘Do we get to go on a trip?’ He was
being clever. And the monk says to him, ‘Where do you want to go?’ and he was being clever too, because the way he said it made it seem like a special question.

After half an hour the session ended. The monk got up, thanked them for their attention, said he would see them next week, bowed to them with his hands together in front, said a short prayer
and went out. They all looked at one another, shrugged and went back to playing ping-pong or whatever they did in their spare time.

The next week there were only four volunteers, and the same thing happened. And the week after that there were only two volunteers, Mack and another fellow who was also very much a
loner.

Finally Mack said, ‘Is this what we do? Just sit and look at one another?’ And the monk said, ‘That’s quite an achievement. But is there something else you’d
like to do?’ And Mack said. ‘Yes. I’d like you to talk to us. Like, tell me how you are able just to sit there and look at us and not do anything.’ And the little monk
looked away, thought for a moment as if he was weighing up the question, and then he looked back and said, ‘I think it is because I’m not worried about anything.’ The other
prisoner said, ‘Aren’t you worried about us? Most of the religious people who come here are worried about us.’ And the little monk said, ‘No, I’m not worried about
you. You’ll find your own way, now or later.’ ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Mack. ‘What do you want to do?’ said the little monk. And so it went on.

Mack was fascinated. He noticed that if they asked a question such as ‘How do you manage to sit like that? Don’t you get pins and needles in your bum?’ the little monk
would answer them. But if they asked him a question which wanted him to initiate something, he would always turn the question back on them. He would never take the lead. And these questions
went round and round and round. For Mack, it was the first time anyone had asked him what he wanted, and it was so difficult to come up with an answer – but that didn’t mean there
wasn’t an answer. But he started to ask himself the question and eventually, eventually, eventually he started to get some answers.

He said to himself,
What do I want to do when I get out of here?
and there were lots of answers – find a woman, have a beer, get a job. But the biggest answer of all was,
Be of some use
. When he found that answer it really surprised him. And that very day word arrived that the UN was looking for drivers to take food into Sichuan. It was dangerous work,
but there were people starving, and he signed up because he was a good driver and knew all about big trucks.

At the last session, before he left, he told the monk what he had decided and started to thank him. The monk stopped him and said, ‘You did all the work. Good luck.’

So, no conversion. No sudden light of understanding. But a calmer mind, and I think finally that was Mack’s greatest strength. He drove relief trucks for six years, wherever he was
needed. He was shot twice and came down with various fevers. But he survived.

He had lots of adventures. Lots of hunches. Lots of lovers. Lots of heartache. Lots of risks. After that he went into space. He helped build the Hercules space station in the shadow of
Mercury and the stories he can tell you about that would make your hair curl.