Defenestratos

We were walking through the humid night in Karlsruhe and there was a zoo nearby and you could hear the African night birds cooing away. I was visiting my old friend Roy and then it all screwed up and I missed my train because the one that I wanted only went on Saturdays and today was unfortunately a Tuesday. Bugger. I was supposed to catch the 2350 back to my house in Freiburg and the next one was at 0450. No problem. Just five hours to wait. Lucky Roy was here really because nothing sucks more than being stuck in an alien city waiting for a never coming train-in the night-with a steady drizzle-with a broken arm.
“Look man,” I had said, “We should go back to yours and get some shuteye because you have a rehearsal tomorrow. I’ll take the seven thirty or whatever and leave you to it.”
“Whatever, but I’m happy to wait around with you.”
“I don’t want to be an intrusion.”
“In any case we need to see my friend because he has the key to the place that I am staying anyway. He is actually at a party and so we should just see how it goes.
We arrived at a relatively nice suburb and pressed the buzzer on one of many doors. No answer. Roy rang the guy on his mobile and the door made a buzz. “He’s not at home but rather downstairs at his neighbours house with his girlfriend.” Roy explained as we reached a door. We pressed the button. The door creaked open and we saw a non descript looking guy standing. He was backlit, his hair a mess and instead of Instead of letting us in he moved in super close to Roy and muttered aggressively and importantly,
“You must stay!” His breath stank of wine and cigarettes. “There is single malt whiskey, Chech olive oil, French baguette, Spät Burgunder, and much much morree.” The way he said More betrayed his eastern European accent.
“Come in, come in,” He suddenly said in his usual voice for the as yet seen others to hear. He walked ahead with Roy, slapping him on the back and saying something I couldn’t quite make out over the music. Strange party, there is no one there, just this guy, and, as we made our way into the living room, two others.
The red designer sofa, the only piece of furniture in the room save book cases, a giant stereo system and TV, contained a man. He sat with his feet up, crossed to the side so one could see his dainty toes and his pink knees poking out from under his expensive designer shorts. A pink shirt covered his portly midriff and in one hand he supported a glass of wine and in the other perched a cigarette. A manicured tuft of chest hair erupted below his chin. He had expensive European type glasses and looked about forty. Continental and schick. Perhaps Schwul? In front of him lay a stylishly minimalistic puff in leather which matched the sofa and on which leant a young woman, long of leg and arm, blonde of hair and coquettish in nature. She bore a plaster on her right wrist and knelt on the thickly carpeted floor sort of slumped over the puff. Straight out of an Ikea magazine.
“Aah, I knew that I should be expecting one visitor, but two-this is indeed an unexpected plesure!” Our host annunciated in boozy, excellent english. “Please do take a seat. Sorry it’ll have to be near me or on the floor. Never did much care for furniture you see and it is just me in this whole bloody place Hahahaha!”
I sat on the floor and Roy sat next to our host. “Let me introduce Hugo Zanker from New Zealand,” Roy started, “Hugo Zanker, let me introduce Bernhard,” Our host bowed, “Robert,” the intense young man smiled at me, making eye contact for the first time, “and Karolina,” The young woman looked across at me and grinned on hearing her name.
“If you can’t understand her it’s not your fault. She’s Austrian, you see.” Karolina looked puzzled as if knowing we were talking about her and not understanding but hoping it was nice. “Aach so, young Karolina can only badly understand English. You must forgive her if we speak in German. I trust you can speak German,” Bernhard looked me in the eye.
I continue in German, “But only naturally!” I turn to watch the TV for a minute. “Amy Winehouse right?” “Jawohl!” What do you think of her, Roy?” “Well you know it’s not really my thing but her show seems diverting and I am enjoying it I have to say.”
Robert opines,“I just find it so produced. I mean what year is it, two thousand and bloody eight and they are all traipsing around the stage in sixties soul mufti. then there are these token blacks just sort of gyrating and singing occasionally with the soul purpose of showing the contrast between their teeth and their skin and they never alter their dance even in the slow numbers. Then there is Amy herself…” His diatribe was interrupted by the end of the song.
Yeah so this next one’s a little tricky and you know how my voice has just been a bit shitty lately, and my manager says I gotta rest and…
“Damn right she needs a rest. She looks like a wrecked crackhore,” I interjected in English, …just take it easy for a while but you know it’s all just so downhill for me at the moment and I hope you can forgive me if I like, you know stuff it up…
“With acts like this, it’s all scripted probably,” said Robert, “I just find this genre so cynical,” The song started and her crocodile tears disappeared as her colossal jaw opened, revealing row upon row of perfect white teeth and with half the audience in her mouth she snapped her cruel jaw shut and started to sing a little pearl of a song. Perfectly executed. “Manipulative stinking bitch,” said our host. “He reached over for the remote and pressed eject. Winehouse disappeared mid-scream. From his position he could reach both his DVD collection and DVD player and so busied himself with cuing up the next DVD. “Help yourselves to wine or whisky. Everything you could want is in there on the table.” “Why did you buy the DVD if you did didn’t like the artist?” I asked. Bernhard just shrugged. Boy was Robert right! There was cabinet german wine, scotch whiskey and Czech olive oil. Baguette peeped out of the end of their long bags, golden brown and impossibly large olives sat in a wonderful looking juice of olive oil and herbs. “We’re staying here.” I said shortly to Roy as we both poured ourselves generous servings of Spät-Burgunder.
Made me think about Amy Winehouse however. Maybe her’s was a talent which really only stayed a talent while the doom lay thick over her head. She seemed truly to be marked by the evil eye and cursed to sing better and better, just as her life and health tumbled to rock bottom. This parasitic talent was going to destroy it’s host. No amount of shrinks or coaching could turn this around. If she ever chose happiness then she couldn’t be a starlet anymore because her talent feeds off her torment. We want her torture! Watching her come reluctantly onto the stage, I knew this. Cynical record executive devils were promising her a miserable demise along with fame.
“That was the new bestseller at Mediamarkt. Mediamarkt has an excellent selection of DVDs. You ever been?”
“No sorry.”
“Really try it! Check this out. Dadadadda, select whole concert. Aah. Here we are.” The screen lit up and the selection screen showed an old boomer in a two hundred euro shirt playing on a Ovation guitar. Bassy and earthy were the characteristics of this number and the proliferations of African women singing otherworldly melodies while being bathed in blue light with just the accoustic guitar, bongoes and didjereedoo made for a queer mixture. Everyone’s teeth glowed blue in the light. “Have you heard of Saccaro before?” Asked Bernhard. “Is he that Italian guy? Man he must be about sixty eight.” “Sixty nine I believe, sixty nine,” We watched some more. “This is his celebrety collaboration DVD-Oh would you like a cigarette?” He throws me a pack of Philip Morris. “Yes so he does collaborations with Eric Clapton, Pavarotti and others.” “Can we watch the Pavarotti?” Asks Karolina. It is the first thing she said and I didn’t know what Bernard was talking about. I perfectly understood her and even found her accent musical and beautiful. You hear the alps in some of those dialects.
“But of course.” At the press of a button the blue toothed African women disappeared and the screen was dark except for a few technicians lamps. Suddenly a synth hit a chord and a light came up on Saccaro. The shrunken boomer sat on a stool and played a piano. A wrinkeled old man, dwarfed by the setting. The crowd became silent. He sang a simple, heart felt ballad about some such italian stuff and then at the end of the first chorus whispere Bella Grande Amico or some other italian. This pissed me off because this concert was in the Royal Albert Hall in London and I believed these guys could both speak English. Like magic, these special italian words caused the lights to dramatically come up on Pavarotti and he belted forth in a way only he can the next verse of the song. the sound was immense and his voice totally drowned out the pop ensemble on the stage. Pavarotti was smiling but one could see confusion and fear in his old hollow eyes. “Man he is huge!” “Is it really professional to let your figure get away like that? I mean he is famously big but he is actually clinically obese now.” “He’s dead you know,” Said Robert. “This was his last season.”
And so on it went. I caught the train later.

We New Zealanders believe that in comparison with our unruly landscape Europe is a flat table top. Not so; Europe is an unforgiving place but the Autobahn network has recently tamed the land. If Switzerland or the Black Forest was civilized, in spite of the monumetal landscape and freezing alpine climate, it could happen in New Zealand.

We were somewhere in the wilderness west of Mannheim, north of Karlsruhe, and south of Frankfurt. The weather was dull and overcast and as we drove into the Hinterweidenthal the rain laced through the limestone bluffs and the road wound through tunnel after tunnel, bored into giant mountains of soft rock.

During the atmospheric trip, I pondered on how tough and isolated life here must have been before the industrialists made these roads to get to the minerals. Coke, coal, lead silver and gold. You don’t think of Germany as wild but in corners of it like this where the forest is thick, the mountains high and the valleys deep it must have been basically impassable for six months of the year. Trapped travelers debasing themselves by eating one-and-other trapped in some alpine cave while the weather roared outside.

We were heading for Kurstadt Dahn: This was a place where retirees came to breath the fresh alpine air and indulge in Kaffee und Kuchen without having to find a car park first. Peter the driver turned back to me from the driver seat while we were driving along a perfectly straight causeway bored into the side of a valley:

“You know the Neanderthal Man? The guy they found petrified into the rock? Well the valley over from the Neanderthal is the Hinterweidenthal.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Neander-Thal. Thal equals Tal equals valley! They found the Neanderthal Man in the Neander Valley. We are going to a bordering valley.”
“You don’t say.” This impressed me. I was in an ancient place where people had existed ever since they came north from the mother continent and turned white. When I get to the Hinterweiderthal I will look at the inhabitants and imagine them as roaming tribes of stone age people.

On arriving we found Kurstadt Dahn battered by rain and sleet, a hellish sunset in the west illuminating the hotel. This was where we were playing. I didn’t really know what the deal was with this gig. All I knew was that it was 220 km away from Freiburg and that I was getting paid €200 for the afternoon. Peter had assured me that it would all be over by nine and we should be home by elevenish. There was a buffet dinner put on for us and the music was super easy. I heard something about choirs and thought that we were probably going to play another mass or something.

We walked inside through an elegant and functional restaurant where old people looked over their coffee and cake at us quizzically. We were ushered through a back door into a large lobby with red carpet and gold hand rails.
“A wonderful good evening to you all!” A man with an enormous stomach but erect and athletic had saluted us and was walking towards us grinning. This man’s face was the colour of a radish and I was afraid to be near him because I had the expectation that his head would explode with the unstoppable blood pressure within and soil my smoking jacket. “I am Dietrich and I am the harpsicordist and musical director of the evening. Be welcome! Please come into your dressing room. There is a buffet in there and I trust you will find everything you might want.”

The dressing room was a small room, just large enough for the quartet to unpack and warm up. There was a table with grapes, a coffee heater, Sprüdel, Butterbrezeln and a bowl of christmas treats. Typical Christmas affair, although it was still only middle November.

“Ah it is so sweet how our hosts are so thankful that we are here!” Katharina the 2^nd violinist glowed with satisfaction.

“It is so nice in the provincial valleys. Really nice people.”Opined Henrike the viola player.

“Yeah. I have been coming to this gig for years and the choir is kind of a family. You’ll see.” That was Peter the 1^st violinist.

The door banged open and Dietrich came in. “Where are you guys? You should be on stage now!” He walked off muttering. “What am I paying you guys for? Jesus!”

He went out into the hall and there was only the roar of the chattering choir left. Bemused, we walkedwith our instruments to the stage.

We were dressed in standard concert blacks, the two women with high heels and plain black skirts and we men with black trowsers and shirt. We started playing almost instantly. Henrike was nearest to me. She had a really quick head which could hear all of the bizarre demands for bar numbers. She would whisper while I was fumbling with the music, completely lost as to which piece we were playing.

Dietrich had a habit of screaming “RUUHE!!” at the top of his lungs to quieten the choir. It frightened me terribly but the choir hardly noticed him. It must have been a regular event that he would resort to screaming at the top of his lungs because the effect had declined.

In this business you have a lot of time to look around and take stock of your surroundings and colleagues. It is normal for musicians to zone out and stare into space, only to realize they are staring at someone at the other end of the ensemble who are staring straight back. These moments of eye contact in a crowded room are special. Because of where you are sitting and personal preference your eyes will always come to rest on the same person. Through a rehearsal week you build up a special rapport with that person and every time your eyes meet it is like you are sharing some inner joke. It is extremely instinctive who you choose to look at; It is usually a woman who is beautiful in an unorthadox way or someone who fascinates you visually in some way-someone non-threatening. The beauty is how it is reciprocal; You will never keep looking at person who scowls at you or ignores you. You always seek someone out who you have a dialog with. I believe it because the natural human instinct to be friendly and communal becomes independent of all of the normal pressures of socialization in a crowded space, five meters separated, and can function at an optimum level, no hurry, no consequences.

In this gig I didn’t have anybody in front of me save the volcano-man Dietrich so when I wasn’t playing I instinctively turned in my seat and scanned the choir. Staring at the choir is one of my hobbies. The men and women in this choir all had a strong similarity; The men were overwhelmingly a full head shorter than the women and had heavily built arms and shoulders. They were a bit stooped and looked as if they could drag a rock up a hill all day. They all had strong jaws and expressive, resolute features. The women were extremely tall and striking, unanimously blonde and blue eyed. They were a handsome people I thought.

The sheet music, I suspected, was arranged by either Dietrich or the choir conductor. No one would know though because on the top right of the page (Where you usually put Arranged by…) there was just the composer’s name. The pieces were crudely printed on one side of paper, either with pen or using Sibelius software. There were numerous notes from previous users, ranging from helpful explanations of a a Da capo to lurid poetry and expletives. Es ist schönwarm in diesem Saal…

We were playing and singing a piece called “Ubuntu” and it was a massed choir thing. There must have been about three hundred people on the stage. There was a percussion orchestra, made up from kids. They were playing bongos, marimbas and tambourines, then there was a jazz band with drum set, the harpsicordist and us.

Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu,

And we praise the lord to-ge-th-er!

People were mixed in how they sang. Most stood bolt upright, staring at the conductor or into their score determinately, the only movement their clenched jaws. These were people who often in my experience were the most extroverted off the stage but on the stage just couldn’t bring themselves to perform and let themselves “lose control”. This was contrasted by the people who were letting the music govern their bodies, and were swaying or clapping, eyes closed. These people were normally introverted and insecure young women. They were the people who were achieving carthasis through performance-being someone else during this mediocre number. It moved me.

The English parts were sung with a heavy German accent. Do they even know the mundane meaning of what they are singing? I have often wondered that. How much English does your average Hinterweidenthaler know? Don’t they have their own songs with so much more cultural value with this fashionable international pap? We might sing this stuff in New Zealand. It’s tragic that choir directors the world wide busy themselves pandering to some asshole music writer in America or Britain, brainwashed.

It certainly was a trip though, watching the three hundred Hinterweidenthalers sing international dross. What the hell is this outpost of ideal Germany doing, singing African songs in English? Is this modern German culture? The need to be diverse is everywhere here!

The violist looked unhappy. She was playing Hindemith’s Trauermusik with us but the conductor had no experience with instrumental soloists or with this kind of music. The orchestra was made up of good players but the group was running wild, compounded by the fact that they were all women who knew eachother-apart from me, the only man.

We were working in a large hall, which was connected to the Merzhausen Protestant Church. The denomination of the place and the people were to me, a hired contractor , of little concern. What worried me was producing a good concert at the lightest exertion and getting home on time. I want to make clear that I certainly wasn’t there on account of my faith or of my musical preferences. I, quite frankly, would much rather have been curled up in bed watching Star Ship Troopers and smoking a cigarette than in a drafty hall playing mass after mass until they all blend into one and other, so many requiems and Pie Jesus and Hosannahs. Interchangable. Masses from Zelinska, M. Haydn and Webber.

The hall was very large, with a capacity of about 450 people. I assumed that the hall would be about a quarter full during the concert. That’s how it usually went. The largeness of the marble hall presented certain accoustical issues.

I stuck my hand up.

“Can I just suggest something?”
“Sure.” Said the conductor.

“Just during the Hindemith, I believe that it needs to be really in the lower piano dynamic. It is sad music, woeful music. It sounds too healthy. Also in this hall we need to be super careful because we will all blend too much.”

The conductor, Reuben, smiled condescendingly.
“No no you’ve got it all wrong!” He interjected before I could continue. “I wouldn’t worry about the accoustic at all. During the concert when there are people in the house there will be no problem with reverberance. Some of the other players here, who have played in this hall before will remember how variable the accoustic here is.” He looked down on the concert master, Rach, and she smiled nervously back as if to say

Why are you singling me out? I’m not comfortable with your attention.

I battled on, aware of the daggers from the conductor “What I mean is we are playing really very loud and we are going to drown the viola player out if we play like that in her register-And that goes in any accoustic.”

“That’s true, Yeah. he’s right.” Said some of the other players.

The conductor looked away and without acknowledging my comment said “OK Guys, That was the rehearsal. Get back here in an hour to warm up.

I packed my instrument away slowly and leisurely. I unwound my bow to the perfect tension, I removed the pencil from my stand and arranged my music to the beginning pages and then slowly wandered off stage, cello on my back. As I walked past the conductor I saw he was listening to the trumpet player, a huge fat man with no manners. Typical brass player. “I didn’t have time to get any food anywhere. Is there any supply around here?”
“No we didn’t organize anything for today. There is a restaurant down the road where you might find something. Don’t know whether it is open though.”
The trumpet player looked frustrated and panicked at the prospect of no food for the two hour duration of the concert and shuffled off to the changing room. I wandered on toward the toilet out the back but was blocked by a ruinous wall of old people who were headed for the seats of the hall. I waited while they stumped past, jaws chewing absently and muttering to one and other or to themselves. I waited politely and watched on, smiling reassuringly to them as they passed. “No you take your time.” “Good evening. Here for the concert? I believe there are chairs near the heaters over to the left.” Such monologue needs to be mastered in my trade.
Eventually the throng revealed a gap and I fled to the toilets. Before I even arrived there I spotted a queue of the choir and orchestra. I stepped up to the concert master and her desk partner.

“Hey Hugo.” They continued to chat to each other. Some other players came up and talk too. They fall back on those old staples of how cold it was and how the chairs weren’t very comfortable. I, quickly getting bored, fell into a private, anti-social reverie and stare out of the circle at a picture of Jesus or some other bearded guy. What is the point? What is the damn point? None of these girls are very religious. If they are they are all going to hell anyway. Why are delivering the message of the lord to the masses? The masses, many of whom are so decrepit and forlorn that they would be incapable of processing the true meaning anyway. We are like the spiritually blind leading the visually impaired! The sooner I get out of this sort of cheap dirty gigging the better.

Oh. Snapping back into the present I saw that the backs of my colleagues had formed a wall, excluding me from their discussion of who cares what. “Rach, do you know how much we are being paid for this gig?” I ask the concert master, who had wandered up.
“Somewhere around 220.”
“But everyone else is being paid that much. We are playing way more stuff. We have prepared a whole string quartet, a concert piece and the whole mass.”
“True.”
“I think it is pretty exploitative, don’t you?”
“But don’t you think it is fun to be exploited?”
“Yeah I guess but only because it is a perfect excuse to do it to our underlings later.”

Rach didn’t really get the joke and looked at me strangely. Her frozen smile echoed that of earlier when the conductor singled her out. She completely unconsciously wandered away, her back turned. I stood there, realizing that I had hit some kind of a barrier not worth trying to breach. I was confused how someone could so misunderstand me. Why did she feel so threatened as to wander off as if she had something better to do than to talk to me? There she stood now, flicking through a hymn book with the avid interest of someone avoiding eye contact with someone else.

I wandered outside to find a nice bush. Being the only man in the orchestra had it’s advantages.

After partying to around twelve it was time to get down to the ferry terminal on the water front. Having indulged in nothing but beer and pies for the last week we scuttled down the roads. Lucky it was downhill because we were unfit. “We’re late.” “Yeah we’ll make it if we run.” We were running and just had time to hand our rucksacks in at the boarding gate and run up the gangway before the great ship, the Bluebridge, sprang from the warf. We wandered about for maybe half an hour and smoked cigarettes in the freezing night air on the Forcastle. The moon was out and the night air still, the water flat. Spectacularly beautiful. The cold air was giving me a headache along with the slow realization that in 48 hours I would need to be on top of my game and working on the film. A week of beer and no sleep was sitting at the back of my head like a rock. “I’m going to go and get some sleep.” I said. “I’ll come too. Got a headache.” Timmy shared a similar program for next week. We found some fold out seats built into the hull on the passenger deck and tried to get some sleep. The journey was four hours to Picton on this, the largest and slowest of the Inter Islander Ferries. We couldn’t sleep well though because there was a door a few meters away from us which opened every five minutes for drunks with bottles and beards, fathers and sons and pashing couples. The strains of conversation were unintelligible and mundane and the cold wind that came in from the Cooks Strait froze us. I ended completely huddled underneath my sheepskin leather jacket and must have looked very strange. Somehow I slept and the next thing I knew the sounds of the engines had changed pitch and there were people moving about like bombed wasps. Sluggish, drugged. Timmy was standing rolling a cigarette and looking haggard. “Now when we get off we scram and get in front of the boat and stick our thumbs out. Christchurch isn’t comin’ to us!” “Do you really think that we can get a ride?” I check the time, 3:55am. “It’s pretty early.” “Fuckin’ better.” THUMP! That was our ship landing. “Get ready.” We ran down to the entranceway and waited for our luggage. This was a flaw because our luggage was about the last stuff to get off the boat. “Hoof it!” I shouted, giggling with disbelief after we had recovered our gear. We grimly sprinted out the front of the terminal and stooped opposite the car exit. “Get your thumb out!” Timmy screamed as a car came up the ramp. It was one of the last. It drove past, an apologetic gesture visible through the driver window. Five more came, some gesturing and others not even caring. Soon it was very quiet. The Bluebridge had already headed out into the starry channel and looked like a great floating lantern getting smaller all the time. “Fuck.” Said Timmy. “Nobody is coming for ages.” “What are we going to do?” Timmy didn’t answer my question but rather hiked his pack on his scrawny shoulders and marched off, every movement one of rage. His expression was one of resigned grimness. I followed wordlessly. “Where are we going?” “Where do you think?” He asked sarcastically. “What might we conceivably do in this situation?” “We’re going to find somewhere to sleep.” “Bingo!” We walked maybe ten minutes until we found a children’s playground on the esplanade and we lay down on the frozen bark chip to take our evening’s rest. Timmy wrapped himself up in a thin woolen blanket he had brought with him from Christchurch and put my thermal leggings on and then my jeans and two pairs of socks and two jerseys and on top of that my giant sheepskin jacket. We froze our asses off for maybe three hours before we were awakened by the acute South Island sun. I woke first and looked out to sea. It was pretty beautiful looking out over the Strait. It was misty and the sun lit the whole sky up like fire. It was still and incredibly cold. You know how they say it gets colder just after dawn, well that is definitely true. “Way fuckin’ colder here than over the Strait.” I opined. “Got that right.” Timmy was lying on his back completely cucooned in his blanket, red beany covering his nose and eyes. “We have no money, and no car or anything. We just need to get picked up as soon as possible.” Timmy hitched himself onto a shoulder and surveyed me with doleful eyes. “The problem is, Hugo my friend, that you look like shit.” “So do you.” We looked each other over and were laughing pretty quick. Timmy was wearing a shaggy leather jacket with sparkling ice on his shoulders where he had been lying in the bark. His face was red and swollen, and his lips blue and cracked. His pupils were dilated like a mad man’s. I hate to think what I look like. “Shall we get to the highway?” “Yeah.” We staggered at first as we walked off our night’s restlessness and headed towards the highway. We talked as we walked. “It was getting pretty out of control last night. Glad we had to leave before it got worse.” I said. “Yeah well you were egging everybody on. You and your bloody dancing.” “Yeh. I just can’t control myself.” “I mean it was the sixth night. Had enough of that shit for a while.” “Me too. Jesus. Don’t want to know how much I drank during the week but I feel like shit.” We walked through deserted picton streets sparkling with ice. The weather was sunny but there was a cold wind and the horizon was full of nimbus. So we got to the outskirts and waited for traffic. Traffic was rare because it was still before 8 o’clock. When the occasional car came we stuck our thumbs out but the driver just roared past. They were just local folks anyway. No ferries until the 12 o’clock in four hours. A few more cars roared by and a gloom settled on us. “look perky!” I caught myself saying to Timmy, who had began to slouch and look grim again. He had a good line in grim, did Timmy. “What are you on about? You’re the one leaning against the traffic light.” “Whatever.” We must really have looked bad, being two scruffy young guys in leather jackets with beards standing on the side of the road and probably a bit intimidating as well. What drugs were we on? From what crime had we come? I can’t imagine your average housewife wanting to pick us up. You need a girl in your group to show that you are a sensitive new age guy to be able to hitch a ride successfully. “Fuck this!” Timmy said through shivering teeth. It really was cold. I had a horrible headache from the cold and I couldn’t breath deep for the shivering. “We’re kind of getting in a bad way.” “I know.” “Let’s get back into town. We aren’t catching shit looking so half dead.” “Yeah.” It was about ten now. We wandered back into town with not much to do. There was nothing to do because we didn’t have any money. “Well got any ideas?” Asked Timmy. “I know we could take the train. Why don’t we check the times.” “Yeh. Got no money though.” “Don’t you have a credit card or something?” “Get paid on Tuesday.” “But don’t you have a credit card? Thought I saw it in your wallet.” “That, is my dad’s and it is for business expenses. I would get a serious whalloping if we used that.” “Let’s just use it and get the fuck home.” “Yeah alright but you have to pay me back when we get home.” “No worries.”

In the middle of a wretched, ghoulish piece of land under a purple and angry sky there is nothing left. Just scrub bushes growing and reclaiming this forsaken and derilict place for their own. Beneath the scrub and creepers there are the remnants of power pylons, their thick wires buried in a thin layer of putrid soil, rubber jackets hardening and cracking and then decomposing, poisoning the soil. The jungle which the tangled wreck of surface infrastructure creates is now a hunting ground for rats and weirder creatures such as huge beetles and mutant frogs going plop into shallow pools of filth. When it rains water trickles down the pylons and fills the pools evermore so that a network of creeks and ponds fill the silence with the sound of running water. When the wind blows the air rushes through the cables and brambles and spider webs and makes the pylons creak like an old man’s rocking chair. The creaking, the trickling, the plopping and the smell of industrial rot makes for a thoroughly bleak and folorn atmosphere.

Beneath this, in the silent earth is a giant installation. It’s purpose has been forgotten and all that is remembered is it’s name: “The Crusher”. The Crusher extends some fifteen stories below the ground level and is three kilometres long and a kilometre wide. It is almost completely sealed except for occasional ventilation shafts, some of which have somehow remained unclogged from decomposing vegetable matter and have not collapsed as the concrete walls became sodden. Some of these shafts let water seep into the complex. The builders of The Crusher ensured that invasive water seepage was routinely pumped back out to avoid the flooding of the complex, using giant and regularly placed devices which kept the basement water to an acceptable level. These pumps are wrecked, like so much other old junk here, and therefore The Crusher is slowly but surely flooding.

The atmosphere in here is also becoming increasingly toxic as the rotting leaves and other organics rot and release carbon dioxide which makes the air unbreathable. Being heavier than normal air, this gas lingers around at the bottom of the lift shafts and the perished and dried out corpses of suffocated animals accumulate in these low, dry places. The Low Dry Places are becoming more and more rare as the water level consistently rises. There are three or four stories of submerged rooms full of heavy steel and iron machinery. There is iron shelving here holding dry fuel mix, and other barrels whose contents are perhaps best not identified. Now sodden and swollen, these barrels and packages crash and bang intermittently as struts collapse, sending their contents falling to the concrete floors. It sounds like there is a monster down there and he is turning in an uneasy slumber, tearing the dead bowels of The Crusher apart.

On the lowest floors are dozens of human skeletons, first killed by the carbon dioxide and then submerged in water, and eaten by micro-organisms. The gas creates a white mist on the lapping surface of the flooding which is forever rising, creating a ghostly feeling, like in an old horror movie in a graveyard.

A man lives down here. He survives by eating the bugs and spiders which fall down. When he is lucky he gets a big frog to eat. His world is one of darkness and the weak light cutting down through the dusty air from the shafts illuminates his surrounds only marginally. It is enough to see that the top floor is at least fifteen meters high, concrete of floor and roof, with brown and rusted iron pillars jutting up through the floor with bolts as big as fifty cent coins.

The man hunts for bugs on the dusty floor and drinks from the tricklings from the pillars and drips from the vents. All things considered, he is well nourished in fact and looks healthy, trapped as he is underground. He has adapted marvellously. He knows that he needs to escape but inertia and the insanity brought on by solitude has slowly dulled this urge. He knows about the creeping gas and water level. He knows that his time is running out to find a way out.

He had begun living in this place near the bottom floor, using bags of cement as a bed and hiding from whatever he was afraid of up top. He didn’t do much with his days and his source of artificial light, a headlamp with batteries salvaged from the abundance of material stores in The Crusher, assured that he had the use of his eyes to scout the far reaches of the installation.

When the water came he went up a story but he soon instinctively went several floors higher because he started having nightmares that the complex was haunted and generally he was angry and weak. That was the creeping heavy gas. He realized what was happening in hindsight and tried constantly to distance himself from the water which was pushing the unbreathable atmosphere higher and higher just as the layer was growing thicker and thicker. He felt immediately better after he had shifted, but sometimes he shines his head torch down an empty elevator shaft and is appalled to see that the layer of mist on the surface of the still, black water appears thicker and more substantial than it had the last time. He sometimes becomes lost in a trance and dwells on the thought of throwing himself into the wispy death. His paranoia of what he might find on the Earth’s surface has driven him down to the deepest man made bowels on the planet and now the natural world is driving him back towards light and human habitats.

Elevator shafts are the only way to navigate between levels of the installation and in each one there is a lift somewhere, the dead bulk of which blocks the access to higher levels up through the shaft, so he has to use another. It is however possible to get to the top using a combination of shafts by climbing the cabling and up to the next level. It is laborious and if he fell he might fall five to ten floors to his death into the water and gas at the bottom of the shaft. The shafts mean nonetheless that he can cautiously go hunting on the top floor and squint and cower fearfully below the bright white holes in the roof. It was here a little while ago that he heard what could only be human voices. The light changed more as well that day. Looking up he beheld fearfully a face looking back down at him, blocking some of the light and causing the disturbances. The face was bare and clean shaven and the silouette was very frightening for the man, accustomed as he was to solitude. It would have been impossible for the man looking down to have seen much except for blackness and the circles of daylight from the holes on the dusty top floor of The Crusher, some fifteen meters below. The face soon disappeared and the voices faded and the man cautiously began to hunt again.

A month after smashing his elbow in a motorbike crash in the central city, Brenden had noticed a change over his perceptions of the world, a change whose consequences followed him around wherever he went.

Here’s how it happened: Coming round a T corner at a fair clip. He was in vertical part of the T turning left. He came round this corner every day and knew the turf. But the difference about today was his front tire was juuust about ready to rupture through a slight and as yet unnoticed manufacturing blemish. So round the corner he busted on his Honda 675 and bang went the front wheel. The centrifugal force fired him headlong into the side of a cement mixing truck which was cruising straight through right to left (Visualize the “T”). The helmet smashed into a hundred pieces, the visor cracked but his head was only slightly cut up. His right arm, which he had thrown up to protect his head went thwack on the side of the mixing barrel and just before he lost conciousness he could see through the blood coming out of his ripped scalp that his hand was facing the wrong way. Like it’s trying to hitch a ride from the cement mixer he had giggled before blacking out.

The cast itched not at all. This had surprised him initially because all of his friends and family who had had a cast said it itched like hell. And there is nothing worse than having an itch you can’t scratch. Like the whole photography thing. Brenden had been a professional photographer with an international glossy magazine but had lost his job to another candidate because he was never really on a salary from the rag. They hired him as a contracter and could take him or leave him if he did or did not perform. By breaking his arm he really had not performed .Even attempting to lift the camera to his eyes with his new metal elbow was impossible, let alone the quickfire but gentle and accurate contraction required to make a picture at the perfect minute. Pursuing his career was out of the question while he was recovering and he was quietly pleased about it. He would have had to have gone to central Australia this month to photograph aeroplanes taking off and that didn’t really appeal to him. That made him angry and worried though because when he thought about it nothing really did appeal to him.

So he sat around. He looked at porn on the computer and read. It didn’t matter if the porn was crap or the books boring, he persisted with them anyway.

Just after the injury he tried to take the advice of collegues and just think of it as just a holiday. The two months will just shoot by they had said. This is a rare opportunity to explore your own head. They were right but Brenden didn’t feel like he was savouring his injury time very well. Shouldn’t we savour every moment we have on God’s Earth and be thankful for what we’ve got? Shouldn’t Brenden be thankful for this rare respite from his usually frenetic and busy life? Brenden wasn’t. He wasn’t happy when he was busy and he wasn’t happy now. It was more painful now though because he had more time to think about it. To become introverted. More time to just spiral down into the darkness, through the black clouds and glimpse at rock bottom; A thick, dense jungle where poisonous lizards sat on rocks and flicked their tounges in the rain, only seen by the wierd light of the lightning. You could never survive there.

It was harder to do that when there was adrenalin in the mix. Harder when friends were close at hand and doing the same stuff he was. He never let it get too far but most mornings he woke up with a slight hangover and sighed. Another day. That hadn’t changed. He didn’t look forward to getting better because he knew that this malaise would follow him there and now that he had well identified it, it would haunt him in his normal routine as much as in his convalescence. Like in sci-fi stories where it was enough to know something existed for it to know all about you and for it to seek you out. It had already been pretty bad sometimes and he feared for his precious future.

How could he best use the time allotted to him? Associates and friends had rightly suggested doing some courses at the university in something that interested him. Or travel a bit or go on one of those health camps. Problem was, as Brenden saw it, he couldn’t just click his fingers and go down to the university and enrol in a few papers. The accident was a shock and it had taken time to come to grips with what had happened and he didn’t really think that university was the place to do that. Wasn’t really the place for him at all actually. Brenden didn’t have energy for developing skills before the accident, or after. He was the same guy now as he was before the accident but the reason he was here in the USA had been denied him. All of that other stuff was just peripheral stuff and if the people who suggested it became unable to do do their jobs, they would just nip back to their hometown and bathe in the warmth of lost childhood and learn to knit or read Harry Potter books or something. Brenden wouldn’t do that. He cringed at the thought of people pretending to be children in their twenties. Maybe he shouldn’t and just join in because there was escapism there and he wanted to escape his life temporarily until he could return to his life’s work and stop pondering topics that disturbed him and made him with each passing day more aware of how unhappy he was and how it seemed to be getting worse and more ingrained.

Everything was always the same now. It didn’t matter whether a person were wealthy, poor, able bodied or impaired, his or her central feelings followed them throughout their life for better or worse. Some people were blissfully unaware of it and they were the happiest. Brenden wondered whether there were people in the world who lived in a state of pure joy like an endorphen gland had burst and was in constant production so the person walked about in a constant state of orgasm. Brenden would like to know. Brenden had a strong belief that his moods could be consciously controlled and manipulated and made better if only he knew how. But Brenden certainly didn’t know how.