A Man Melting (10 page)

‘I’m not a child.’

She placed the platter on the counter, made to return to the party.

‘Babe —’

She turned.

‘Are you having a good time?’ I asked, and reached out for her hand.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s excellent.’ I kissed the top of her wrist.

‘I’m going back to the party. Are you all right?’

‘Dandy.’

I still had ginger beer left, and found a half-full bottle of vodka, so I made a garden-variety Moscow Mule to go with its Latino cousin and carried my two drinks back into the living room. There were no spare seats — it seemed as if more people had arrived, but I couldn’t be sure — so I walked to the bathroom for a final spruce before we headed to town. The door was locked so I went into the en suite in our bedroom.

I was roused by a knock on the door.

‘Open up. It’s me, Alice.’

My body seemed to respond quicker than my mind and I had popped the lock before I really knew what I was doing.

Alice stripped her face of all expression and blinked once.

‘What time is it?’ I asked.

She blinked again.

‘Have people started heading into town?’

‘The younger ones left an hour ago.’

‘An hour?’

‘You don’t eat anything, you drink a bottle of tequila and smoke a whole jay by yourself and you’re surprised you pass out?’

‘The younger ones,’ I repeated. ‘Did Mish — ?’

She nodded.

‘But you — ?’

‘I couldn’t very well leave you passed out, locked in the toilet. And don’t think I’m going to give you and your sore bear routine any pity in the morning. You’re — how old are you now? How old am
I
now?’

‘You can go now, if you still want. To town. I’m sure —’

‘It’s okay.’ She came right into the en suite for the first time and sat on the edge of the bath. I had slunk back down against the vanity. ‘I’m not a big town person anymore.’

‘But Mish —’

‘It’s different. She’s single still. She has younger friends. She never left that scene.’

‘Younger friends,’ I repeated.

A smile broke out on her face. ‘Did you talk to Eamon?’

‘The quiet one?’

‘Well, that’s what
we
all thought. Dark horse might be a better term. He left with Delancey. She was the one —’ She let the sentence hang, half finished.

‘Left with?’

‘First they’re looking a bit cosy on the couch, then she’s leading him out the door by the hand. She seemed like such a nice girl.’

‘Huh,’ I said, like I had just been told an interesting fact about Saturn.

She lifted herself from the edge of the bath. ‘Shall I get you a glass of water?’

‘Please.’

I got up and relocated to the foot of our bed. I slipped my phone from my pocket. No messages.

Alice returned, holding a glass of water in one hand, the other balled up in a fist. From experience I knew this hand would contain several ibuprofen.

I had questions, but didn’t quite know how to deliver them, so thought it better to stay quiet. In my head I counted,
One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus
…

‘What?’ she asked.

‘It’s just … I saw Eamon taking pictures of that girl, Delancey, earlier in the evening. I don’t understand why she —’

‘Pictures?’

‘With his cellphone. Like … like a pervert.’

‘And she caught him?’

‘In a way.’

Alice gave a tilt of her head, then handed me the glass of water.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘That head tilt.’

‘Well, it could be quite flattering.’

‘Flattering?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know.’

Flattering? I looked down at my feet. How could this have happened? Granted, I should not have passed out in the bathroom, but that did not explain Delancey leaving —
leaving
— with that meek, eye-contact-avoiding technophile. I’d kept it casual yet mysterious. I’d offered her weed and she accepted. I’d played the white knight, showing her Eamon’s cellphone. And she left with him? What happened to survival of the fittest?

I saw it then, as if the first swoosh of a windscreen wiper had revealed my wrong turn. I was not the only hunter that night. Eamon had set up his own ambush, playing that clueless con. The vulnerable idolater. But he too was on the prowl. That little cellphone trick, leaving it in the bathroom for someone to find. I’d played my part to perfection; his conquest made all the more simple with me zonked in the bathroom. But I had to hand it to him. He had fooled us all.

The shock of this was short lived. It had to be. What happens to the rabbit in the headlights? He gets run over, that’s what. So I was trumped on this occasion; what can you do except learn from such an experience?

A bag of tricks is never full. You can write that on my tombstone.

I looked up at Alice. Her face wore a faraway expression. I held out a cupped hand, coughed once and she rolled in two pills.

Ken from Canberra was the unhappiest Associate Professor of Astronomy Stellenbosch University in South Africa had ever had. He felt justified in his unhappiness as, contrary to the information he was provided during the job application process, the Astronomy Department at Stellenbosch was not well regarded. It did not even have its own observatory.

And, as Ken from Canberra had learnt, justifiable unhappiness is the worst.

The best word he could think of to describe his unhappiness was
stolid
.

He regretted emigrating to South Africa to take up his post, but found himself paralysed. The one big change in his life to date had been an unmitigated disaster, his thinking
went, so what guarantee was there that making another big change would not be an even greater disaster?

So he stayed in Stellenbosch, writing papers on celestial mechanics which none of the good scientific journals would publish because they had never heard of Stellenbosch University.

The only place he had ‘published’ in the last three years was on Wikipedia, where he described ‘Orbital Resonance’ as:

At parties he used to talk about orbits. How they relate to more than just planets. He would ask his audience to imagine two people running around an athletics track: it didn’t matter what speed they ran, if they ran for long enough they would come level again. The runners behave differently, he would explain, just before they are level, while they are level and just after they are level. Drag coefficients are altered. Motivation increases or decreases.

‘The rules change when two people come together,’ he would say, and lean in to kiss whoever he was talking to.

It didn’t work often, and certainly not in South Africa, where people couldn’t understand his accent when alcohol was involved.

After a while he stopped going to parties. This coincided with no longer being invited to parties.

Some days he could not get out of bed.

On the days he could get out of bed he would stare at thorn trees for hours while drawing lines on the dusty pavement with the tip of his shoe.

Then one day his pillow, which had been just the right balance of softness and hardness, was suddenly too soft. He got up in the middle of the night and searched his house for something firmer.

He tried a sofa cushion. Too soft.

An old VCR. Too hard.

A stack of two phone books. Just right.

When he woke in the morning, Ken from Canberra was possessed by the sudden desire to list everyone he had ever met.

He called in sick and wrote the name of the colleague he spoke to in permanent marker on the wall above his telephone. He wrote the names of his immediate family in a line as he inched his way towards the bathroom. He wrote all of his cousins and second cousins and great-aunts and uncles on the way to the kitchen. While poaching two eggs, he wrote the names of all of his school teachers on his cupboards, the names of his sports coaches and piano teachers and university tutors on his fridge-freezer. When he made it to his bedroom, he wrote the names of all of his friends and their family members, then his school classmates who were not quite his friends but who he did not dislike, then, right down by the skirting board in tiny letters, those he did dislike.

By mid-afternoon, he had run out of names, but was surprised how much of his apartment was covered with permanent marker.

He returned to work the next day. The names of people he had left off his walls would pop into his head now and then. He wrote them down on Post-its and placed them in his pockets.

When he met someone new he also wrote their name on a Post-it and placed it in his pocket.

And so the week passed, Ken settling into the routine of adding the names from his pockets to his walls when he returned home each evening, before fixing dinner. Filling a blank piece of wall with another person he knew gave him a sense of enormous well-being. He wasn’t sure where he had heard this phrase before, but he didn’t want to Google it.

Until he Googled it, he could believe a sense of enormous well-being was his phrase.

Logan and WayCoolMic had never met in person (Logan didn’t even know WayCoolMic’s real name), but they were gmail chatting about how their fathers were failures and how it seemed inevitable they too would fail in almost identical fashions.

At the same time, Logan was looking up unconnected things on Wikipedia:

Cherry Coke

Orbital Resonance

Ziggy Marley

When he typed ‘Tug-of-War’ he was redirected to ‘Tug of War.’ He wondered why he’d even used hyphens in the first place.

Under ‘History’, Wikipedia said:

Logan cut-and-pasted this into his conversation with WayCoolMic and typed: 

Another person wanted to start a gmail conversation with Logan, someone he had met in person but not seen since middle school. This person was called Oliver Carol, but everyone called him Oh Carol, even though nobody their age had ever heard the Neil Sedaka song — it was just one of those things, Oh Carol had told Logan once in a gmail chat, that every person in the Western world absorbed through the placental wall.

A few years ago, Oh Carol had written a one-act play called
Cultural Osmosis
in which the main character lay in a foetal position in the middle of the stage for the whole play and the other cast members circled around him doing impersonations
of Buddy Holly, Henry Kissinger and Doris Day.