The Last Magician (10 page)

TRIAGE: a system of priorities designed to maximise the number of survivors in times of crisis and natural disaster.

Designed by whom? That is the interesting question, it seems to me. It seemed an interesting question to me very early. In high school, quite suddenly, on a railway platform in Brisbane one day, it seemed to me the only question worth asking.

Charlie made photographs of triage. For
triage
, he felt the fascination of a man for whom words are live and squirming. They were creatures that crawled into his brain, he could taste them, smell them. He wrote in light. Here's one of his words, black and white: the entire photograph swarms with ants. A magnified lens has been used, and the ants are a horrifying writhing warring mass. It is a dark photograph. There is an out-of-focus greyish blur from the top right-hand corner of the print, reaching diagonally toward the centre, and only at that still centre, within a small bubble of light, does the blur reveal itself as the fang of a snake. The elect, the handful of chosen ants, wait in the bubble of light.
Triage
, the photograph is called.)

Charlie photographs the swaying lanterns in the rift valley below a gutted building in Newtown:
The Descent into Sydney.

He descends. Down, down, down, past the honeycombed pitface, how many caves per circle, how many bodies per cave, how many new tunnels per body if each has a hammer and a trowel and one little, two little, three little, four, five little, six sticks of quarry-made dynamite, seven sniffs of glue, eight of smack, nine hypodermics, ten tokes of dynamite crack?

The flares and the transistors and the steady percussive hammering mesmerise him. This is how they cope, he thinks. With this and the dope.

They choose this, the government ministers and the businessmen and people from the university and the wise judges in their cascading wigs all say. They want it this way. Down there they are more like monkeys than like us. They are not at all like people who do not live in the quarry, they have chosen to be there, and for the good of those of us who do not so choose,
triage, triage, rhubarb rhubarb, triage.

It is not altogether unpleasant, Charlie thinks, the pattern of hammers and lights, the rhythms which can be felt through the rock face. There is something hypnotic … perhaps he will stay for the night, perhaps he will take photographs later, perhaps the work … it is difficult to remember what work exactly, it is difficult to remember why he is … A shape, as of a cat slinking along a wall, passes across the rungs of the ladder, climbing up. It is that woman again, he thinks for no logical reason, the one who taunted me, the one who perhaps knows Cat. A hot flash of erotic hunger shakes him. On all fours at the edge of his rock shelf, he cranes his neck up into the glow cast by a flare and he thinks he can see the length of her smooth brown legs and the shadow where they meet. Then dizziness. He has to crawl back, he has to lean against the cliff face, he has to stare at the opposite wall of the pit.

Across from him, ladders bow under the weight of his watching. The fluid bodies of men and women and children are climbing the ladders, the long swaying dangerous ladders, hand-made, knotted imperfectly with rope. Which is the woman who taunted him? And which one is Cat?

An image of Cat forms in his mind, as he had first seen her when they were nine years old in Brisbane. She has the body of a tomboy, she moves with feral grace, she is a witch. He imagines the way she might be now: still ugly, still small and wiry, cheekbones high and gaunt, eyes set in deep smudged sockets, a forty-seven-year-old witch. He wants to find her.

His eye settles on a body climbing through a haze of floodlight on the opposite face of the pit. How crowded those ladders are, how insanely long, how constant the jostling is. The woman who might be Cat enters an area of turbulence, there is a scuffle. Involuntarily, Charlie flings out a useless hand to save her. She falls as a cat falls, her body flaccid, and though the fall seems to take an inordinately long time, he watches with a lunatic hope that she will land as a cat lands, miraculously light on her feet, unharmed.

But this is no such catfall. This is a perfectly ordinary quarry fall, there are scores of them every day and more every night. Somewhere down there, a ledge or a ladder or the galvanised iron of a shanty roof or some dealer with a knife breaks the fall. There is a sick thud as of an overripe melon bursting, and the scream, which must have started when the fall began, doesn't reach Charlie till after he sees the blood splash into the lights.

He pushes his back against the rock, breathing raggedly. What if he should vomit? Head down between his knees, something watery and bitter in his mouth, he feels both feverish and clammy. The ladder fills him with dread.

He has to picture himself as a figure on videotape to be able to move. He has to visualise the top of the ladder as a narrative ending he can reach and rewind and rereach at any time. The risk of falling into a black void is real, the long arduous climbing away from the pit has always been real, but he needs to invent the image of Virgil (with Gabriel's face) reaching back to take his hand, he needs to invent the woman at the top of the ladder, Beatrice with her gleaming Cat eyes, beckoning, waiting.

So he reaches across the screen of his imagination and climbs. Cat watches. Gabriel waits. Charlie reads the signs. In a pub on Main Street in Newtown, Gabriel waits.

“Thought I'd lost you, mate,” he says with relief, and they strike out on foot for King's Cross and Bayswater Road.

8

Set down this: a conversation had already lapped at Gabriel's edges years before. He had paddled in it inattentively, he was just a child, he certainly didn't remember that he'd heard it.

There are many things people don't know that they know.

Once, when I asked Charlie why he took photographs so constantly, so obsessively, why he collected
other
people's photographs, why he scavenged in second-hand shops and bought, by the shoebox full, old cracked brown-and-cream records of
other
people's pasts, he said: “So that I will see what I've seen.”

Of the
Ch'ien
hexagram, he said, his ancestor Fu Hsi had this to say:
Within the Earth there is a Mountain.
He smiled, apologetic. “I'm afraid Fu Hsi had a maddening and elliptical style.” Charlie frequently spoke in the maddening elliptical manner of Fu Hsi. He spoke on rice paper in brush strokes that had to be laid down in a ritually specified way. The mountain, as Charlie saw it, was that intractable tiling that was always blocking one's view. It was the thing that would not be dislodged. The mountain, according to Charlie, is an obstruction that we partly create, it is the thick solidified lava of the things we know but don't realise we know. Our task, if we want to clamber over or round the mountain, Charlie said, is to observe more sharply, to set everything down, to record the minutiae, to add to the documentation on premonition and coincidence and chance, to know what we know, so that we may inch ourselves toward that place from which everything will be seen and understood.

“That is why I take photographs,” Charlie said.

“At least to know what we know: that would be a start,” he said.

I think he was right.

Consider this recent item in the
Sydney Morning Herald
: a woman was assaulted and robbed late one afternoon on a side street in Darlinghurst. In these days when the quarry seems to dilate and distend itself like a jellyfish in the shallows, when it can pass as invisibly as a virus into the world of order, when the residents of Darlinghurst shelter themselves as from the plague behind high garden walls, no one saw the incident.

A black car pulls up (these things can only happen in the present tense, they go on and on happening, they never recede, they are always now), the rear door opens, a man leaps out, he holds a knife to the woman's throat. After that, confusion. Touching her bruises and cracked ribs, the woman conjectures: “I think I screamed, I think maybe I struggled, I think I wouldn't let go the strap of my purse, I seem to have been in the back seat of the car, but that can't be right.” Pain like a hot poker is all she remembers, and gutter dust in her mouth, and herself as a comma of shock against the kerb. As the car drives off, she stares after it dully. Why does no one come running?

“It happened so fast,” she tells the police from a hospital bed. “I never saw the driver at all.” She seems to have a sharp vision of the cracks on the leather of the back seat, though this can't be right. Of the back-seat assailant, however, she recalls with eerie clarity the colour of his eyes, the brown spiky hair sprouting above his forehead, the freckles, the blister on his lip, the dark hair on his arms, a scar on the third finger of his right hand, the mole at his wrist, and the fact that the knife was a large kitchen knife, the kind used for cubing steak or peeling and chopping pumpkin. Its blade was mottled and old. She remembers having a sharp memory of her grandmother making beef stew and of a long conversation in the kitchen about one of her uncles.

And what about the number plate of the car? the police ask.

The woman is embarrassed and furious with herself. “I must have stared at it as the car drove away,” she says, frustrated. She remembers what her grandmother was saying about her uncle, but not the number of the car.

A police hypnotist is engaged and his lullaby voice cradles her, seduces her, leads her back down the velvet shaft of time to where she lies huddled on the kerb. Can you see the number plate on the car? the hypnotist asks. Yes, she says in a sleeper's voice. Read the numbers, the hypnotist commands. And she does. Now you are struggling with your attacker again, the hypnotist says. The woman jackknifes into a self-protective curve, she throws her hands up in front of her face. The man with the knife cannot harm you, I will not let him harm you, the hypnotist says. Now tell me, can you see the driver of the car? I am watching the man with the knife, the woman says, but the driver is in the corner of my eye. Describe the driver, the hypnotist says. Uhh, the woman cries, doubling up again, her hands over her face. He is too close to see, she says. What is the driver doing? the hypnotist asks. He is hurting me, the woman sobs. We are in the back seat, he is hurting me. I do not permit him to hurt you, he cannot hurt you, the hypnotist says. Describe the driver, he insists. She describes the driver in detail.

Let us suppose, however, that there had been no hypnosis. Remember: the woman has told the police that she never saw the driver at all. She is quite certain of this. Let us suppose, however, that the driver of the car had entered her hospital room as a medical orderly. Would she not have recoiled? Would she not have felt a violent jolt, an apparently unaccountable and irrational spasm of panic? She might tell herself: I've never seen this man before in my life; but her body would retain the knowledge of harm.

Charlie, an intelligence gatherer himself, a kind of interrogator, a man who had been on both sides of harm, knew that this sort of thing could happen. He knew that it happened all the time. He knew that censors, both hapless and cunning, guard all the doorways of memory.

On a different night altogether from the night of the childhood conversation he didn't remember, on a night shortly after he began to work for Charlie, Gabriel was serving at the bar of Charlie's Inferno when the judge arrived.

I was working, so it must have been a Tuesday or a Wednesday or possibly a Thursday, those were the nights I worked downstairs. Weekends, well, that was upstairs, that was heavy traffic time.

It was a Wednesday, I think.

Gabriel was already in some distress, I remember that. There had been words between us, between Gabriel and me, all the more distressing for their quietness. Anyway, I was aloof and he was upset.

And then the judge arrived.

“My regular table, Charlie?” the judge asked, and I remember how Gabriel twisted round rather fast from a shelf of spirits at the sound of the voice. I remember that the judge glanced idly, as one does, in the direction of the movement and that the judge's hand, which lay lightly on the sleeve of the coat he was handing to Charlie, then registered something: the fingers clenched themselves into the palm, and four cords stood up like guy ropes across the back of the judge's hand. Then the fingers uncurled and splayed themselves, stretching, and then they relaxed.

“Gabriel.” The judge's tone, as always, was cordial and measured. There was a nod of polite but restrained acknowledgment in Gabriel's direction, the kind that people with power give to underlings. There was a smile. To me it seemed that the smile implied not only distance and the habit of easy courtesy, but also a warning. Or perhaps I thought so because of the tone of that “Gabriel”, the civil finality of it, the way it made clear that a passing comment on any matters of shared knowledge was not to be thought of.

Although we had met before, in quite other circumstances, the judge and I, he did not seem to be aware of me at all. He turned back to Charlie. “My wife's coming separately. And our other guests.”

“They're here already, Your Honour,” Charlie said, and the way he said it fascinated me, the way the voice seemed like a thing apart from Charlie, a synthetic voice, the voice of a robot, a voice acting the part of a voice.

And then the judge moved on quickly — unnecessarily quickly, I thought — through the small lush atrium corridor, to the restaurant.

Charlie was watching Gabriel.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Gabriel said.

Inscrutability is, in fact, a tactical skill, a habit of survival. Charlie had acquired it in childhood. I mastered it quickly, naturally, given the nature of my profession; I mean, once I had embarked on my calling. Gabriel, being someone who found truth puzzling, sometimes even painful, but not yet dangerous, was just a learner. Although he tried valiantly to hide it, you could tell he was rattled. Through practice, one can experience shock like a slow wave of sleeping medication; one can delay one's reaction for hours or days, even years. I went on making careful notations in the reservations ledger, watching Gabriel and Charlie. After what must have been at least a full minute, Charlie said casually: “You know the judge?”

“Mnh,” Gabriel grunted non-committally, moving glasses around.

Minutes passed. Charlie disappeared through the swing doors into the kitchen. Gabriel mixed two Bloody Marys, placed them on a tray, and took them to the two women at one end of the bar. Charlie came back from the kitchen.

“Do you?” Gabriel asked.

“Do I what?” Possible elided verbs slid through Charlie's mind like stops on a lottery wheel.

“Know him.”

Of all the possible moments, the one that came back to Charlie with a sick thump (so I choose to think now, from this distance, from my vantage point) was the two of them in school uniforms (himself and the judge) going into Chang's Grocers & Greengrocers on Newmarket Road in Brisbane, and there was Cat, as well as Charlie's own parents, behind the counter. But it could as easily have been a picnic at Cedar Creek Falls that he saw, or the railway cutting, how would I know? Any splinter had a dangerous edge.

Charlie pulled down a shutter. “The judge eats here often,” he shrugged.

Gabriel tapped off two beers for the restaurant and held them out toward Charlie. He smiled. “Why don't you read the judge's tea leaves, Charlie?”

Charlie said nothing. He was watching Gabriel's fingers against the beer glasses, and I was watching Charlie watching Gabriel.

His table for eight was the table Judge Robinson Gray always reserved. No doubt his preference stemmed from the habits of a legal mind, from that scrupulous attention to fine points which a judge must cultivate, for he had given standing instructions about many aesthetic details and about placement of the table at the centre of the glass-canopied courtyard. At first this surprised us. Most diners want privacy, intimacy, the romantic, all of which were available off the courtyard, in the ferned enclaves with their glimpses of Rushcutters Bay. Some patrons, however, do not mind being observed.

At times His Honour had requested, in his charming way, that an earthenware pot be shifted a little. Its waxy trail of orchids, perhaps, was obscuring another diner's view; or possibly the showy clusters of bougainvillea were a bother. His Honour would lightly touch the arm of a young waitress who was passing, he would put his hand on her wrist, she would feel constrained to bend close and listen to his whispered request, so that, with their foreheads almost touching, for a moment the two would seem to be lovers. He might even lift the fall of her hair from her cheek and hold it gently aside in a manner both suggestive and … well, judicious, quaintly formal, certainly irreproachable, in order to murmur his order privately. Singled out in this way, drawn into the aura of his conferring of special notice, the waitress would glow a little and blush. Watching, you had the sudden certainty that it had never crossed the mind of Judge Robinson Gray, not even fleetingly, not even once in his life, that a request of his would not be instantly carried out. You had the certainty, in fact, that being chosen to cater to the judge's whim was — in the judge's own mind — a distinction of the highest order.

“Of course, Your Honour,” the waitress would say. “It's no trouble at all.” And the orchids would be moved.

There would always, then, be someone across the courtyard, some woman whose view was now unobstructed by translucent commotions of mauve and pink, who might glance at the judge and away. By chance, by sheer coincidence, the judge would become aware of her at the very moment she glanced back again, that moment when she half turned to look vaguely across the room at something on the opposite wall. Ah, the soft accidental collision of their meeting eyes. I used to think of light hitting pillows of dark water. With such surprise, such pleasure, the judge would raise his glass. The woman would smile, flattered and a little embarrassed, and lower her gaze, though the judge knew she would steal glances all evening. He knew too that the little waitress who moved the orchids would be solicitous to gratifying extremes. Every time she reappeared, he bestowed on her the warmth of his artless and boyish smile. It reminded me of the smile of an adored child who knows a fond circle of grown-ups is always watching. It was the smile of a tribute collector. Render unto Caesar, it said silkily, the things that are Caesar's. It was the smile of someone you expected to see pausing in a game of football somewhere, brushing away sweat with the sleeve of his guernsey and saying to the camera: “In these times of
triage
, our response to the quarry is both a sad necessity and a moral imperative.”

People like myself could write lengthy commentaries on smiles like the judge's smile, but then people like myself can't be bothered. What would be the point? People like Charlie, however, will save photographs of a man with just such a smile, a man pausing in a game of football somewhere, winningly, to murmur
triage, triage
to the eye of TV. People like Charlie can show you a black-and-white photograph of a smile like the judge's smile and make you shiver.

The knowledge that comes from meticulous and ceaseless observation is a kind of power, is it not? Shadow power. And yet it was not power that interested Charlie, The thing that would not be dislodged was like a riddle without a solution that held a knife to his throat; your answer or your life, it demanded. It gave no quarter; the fact that there
was
no answer meant nothing to it.