Title: Quest Clinic

Author: Geoff Cochrane

In: Sport 9: Spring 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 9: Spring 1992

Eight

Eight

Michael Hart had left a note for Bede. It was written on a single sheet of paper torn from a sketch pad, folded once and left on Bede's bed.

Bede,
Stoned, faceless, tremulous with the prescience of mescaline or datura, you might see this place as a clutch of radio components, all of crystal. It's aglow, this translucent chassis, with little worms of fire, with vortices of light, tiny and sharp. Your bloodstream steaming with Methidrine, you might paint it, you might draw it with an air-brush, this little city of glass. And what is its function? What does this pigmy metropolis of transparency and venous filaments do? It absorbs neuroses, it imbues itself with delusions. Yours. Mine. Theirs.
I'm gone.
   Michael.

Several days passed. One afternoon under an ashy, quilted sky, in a place where the air was saturate and a permanent dew clung in pearls to the gorse, Bede was helping Greg mend a fence.

'I heard at lunch,' said Greg, 'that they're bringing Michael back this afternoon.'

Hart arrived as they were having tea in the lounge. Two policemen brought him. They were curious as to the function of this place, its extent. Powell met them.

A doffing of hats; 'best-place-for-him' smiles of abdication; they went page 62 with the careful nonchalance of the observed back to their aliens' car.

What did Bede see?

Hart had the tousled hair of a fugitive. Bede got an impression of captivity, of identity smeared, of the operation on Hart of an ethos which was its own compulsion, sans proddings or handcuffs. Bede saw a handsome, cowed head, a shadowed face of some beauty on which the smile seemed irrelevant, futile. He saw this in the bright, forceful concentration of an instant.

Bede carried the image of Hart's profile, its stamp, into his counselling session with Mr Snow.

'Why do they bring him back? What's the point?' asked Bede.

Mr Snow was very fair. His face had a raw, veiny appearance. Winter's astringent air threatened to make it bleed. His skin seemed lit by irritations, a litmus paper on which were registered the stains of the inhospitable, the air, the very hour.

'The point is, and I'm sure you've already thought this through, that he has asked to be brought back. He did that when he had himself committed. Have you any idea what a menace that guy had become? Anyway, this is typical of you, your concerns are always exterior, never in there with yourself where they should be, given your more recent history. You are the lame duck for the time being and it's you you should be worried about, not him.'

'A menace?'

'They had to take some guns off him. But you know all that.'

'No. I hadn't heard.'

'He had a modest arsenal. Seen with the things at four in the morning, that sort of thing. Very nervous neighbours.'

'I believe he's something of an artist, a painter.'

'Won an Australasian prize. Look, we're here to talk about you. Have you written to your boss yet?'

'No.'

'You decided you would.'

'I've changed my mind.'

'So we're back to the drawing-board on that one. Mind if I make a note?'

'A weirdo, then. Him. Assembling, disassembling the instruments of death.'

'His winning entry was called "Glass of Water and Maiden". I hear they arrested someone this morning for a shooting in Otaki.'

page 63

'They stormed the house. They don't, you know, "storm" anything, they're very quiet. Mute, up trees.'

After dinner Bede moved his few things to a room he had been allocated. It was his own and small. There was a desk at which he might write those letters he dreaded because to each he must add this strange, remote address, an admission of defeat. His window looked out into that square of lawn and shrubbery where the little totem brooded. Night would soon immerse it.

'Knock out that wall and window, you've got my cell in Japan.' It was Hart.

'Really? Come in. Your cell?'

'Absolutely. I was in a Buddhist monastery for a while.'

'On what basis?'

'No basis. I was just there. The sound of two hands clapping, I suppose. My father had said he would send an air-fare. Well, he took his time. So long, in fact, that I had time to get my head shaved.'

'The other monks did that?'

'No. A local barber. Outside our cells each mornings one of the monks would make a fresh pattern in the sand, a new and careful pattern every morning with a rake. You must have seen it, that sort of thing, in photographs.'

'One doesn't think about the pattern being varied.'

'The design mutates, even for the godless, and I was godless enough.'

He stepped into the room. Hart had a face of a type, a face in which the cheeks were dominant. The images of two opposing hatchets, long and thin, seemed stitched into the skin. But there was about the modesty of Hart's spare physique something Bede thought he would like to embrace, to test the substance of. Hart had glamour, was a thing of attractive parts. He settled on Bede's bed with an untroubled, welcome discourtesy.

'Were you though, are we?' asked Bede. 'I wonder. Oh, I know, we're supposed to find it here, this spiritual life to which they urge us. But have you ever prayed?'

'I'll tell you. Do you mind if I smoke?'

Bede accepted a Camel. With an ashtray positioned by his thighs Hart leaned back on the bed into his own tumbling smoke. He rested on his elbows, his chest concave and shallow, his cigarette white beneath the dark asymmetry of his hair. He exhaled productively.

'I was returning from a detox ward,' Hart continued. 'I was going back page 64 to a cottage I rented on the beach. I'd been doing a little hunting, a little painting, before things caught up with me. There were pigs in the bush, I was equipping a studio, I had a lot riding on staying straight. My lady would stay, blah blah, I'd been promised some design work. There was a difference this time, or seemed to be. I had really tasted these very bitter lees. And been frightened. Dig this; it was all still an effort? This isn't a simple story. Suffice it to say that I wanted to stay sober, I had seen right to the bottom and, surprise, there was no bottom. So here I am on a bus, returning, and I ask myself what could possibly weaken my resolve in this matter. Understand the question, Bede. What circumstance? Then I twigged. It came to me. There was this one guy. Between us, between the two of us, drinking had always amounted to a sort of sacrament. I hadn't seen him in years. Imagine his turning up. After so long, after so pregnant an absence. So I asked, I asked Him, I asked God, "Is this what You've got planned? Is it?"'

'And did you get an answer?'

'My friend was waiting to meet the bus. I could have hit him. We only sat up until midnight. He drank two bottles of beer and I, nothing, tea. But I don't think we ever got closer, were ever more clear-eyed and direct with one another than we were that night.'

Hart stood. Though, in a way, Hart's story was one of defeat, Bede felt for the moment a thrill of possibility, the intimation of what it might be to win, to flourish. For were they not young, was there not already something resembling friendship underway between them? Hart's shoulders radiated more than heat. The smile now making his cheeks two elongated dents of query revealed him to be a woodsman, a drinker at sobering springs. His teeth made that seem likely. Hart's smile had, too, the reassuring shape of scepticism. In this, Hart's caution struck Bede as being a function of his intelligence. For all their grace, Hart's shoulders were not broad. But he kept them present, spread. He made more room with them than the world had yet allowed them.

'So what frustrates us?' Bede asked. 'It seems to me that we have a fairly profound interest in states of mind, even in spiritual states. Where's the serenity?'

'I think of it as being a box, the box of entrapment in sequence, time's box. This frustrates us. Personally. But further to this, making really sure we don't get a good night's sleep, is our fear of nuclear winter, our memory of the death camps. For the time being, our collective nerve has been shaken.'

page 65

When Hart had gone Bede drew his curtains. Perhaps we love our own darkness. Reflecting on Hart's last remarks, Bede saw him as an artist whose interest in life was alchemical. There was no other word for it. Hart cast long shadowsat night. He brought his own mystery to the lesser mysteries of ammunition and firing-pin. And perhaps, like Kandinsky, he was the smocked manufacturer of his own pigments, a white-gowned chemist from whose deliquescent powders bloomed bloods, azure inks. He was certainly complex, had left something of his egregious congruence of mind and person behind him. But the forms of his cigarettes' blue and motile smoke, a series of steps or steppes erected in the air of Bede's still room, were already collapsing, were already becoming diffuse.