The Last Magician (8 page)

Be patient, Lucy. Wait. I haven't told you anything yet.)

Alone in the dark, sheepish, I remind myself that I am, after all, not on a ladder but very comfortably settled in a chair. There are people around me. Charlie himself is in New York. I open my eyes.

How long has the screen been spinning like this, a giddy blur? Am I still on the ladder? I hold tightly to the arms of my chair, my ladder. When the image comes to rest, the whole scene has been turned on its side, and from this perspective, the ladder looks like a railway line with someone lying prostrate on the tracks, other figures bending over it, watching. No faces can be seen. The figures are cowled and stooped, the mood is stark but also mysterious: these hooded forms are keepers of a horrible secret.

(Oh Charlie, I don't think I want to know what you're planning to tell me about this.)

What is the queasy sensation of decomposition, of dissolve, which follows? The rails and the sleepers are growing green fur, growing moss, growing slack, sucking colour into their spongy limbs, turning organic. The figures, all except one, slump into soft rotted logs. We are back in the grotto of Cedar Creek Falls where a young woman, wearing jeans and T-shirt and a battered straw hat, sits on a boulder, knees hunched up, chin on her clasped hands. It is not possible to see her face, but her eyes are fixed on the dark hollow between the boulders. The shadow spreads.

(Foreboding drops, shadow out of shadow, a sense of dread. What explains this? What is it you're dabbling in, Charlie? When you made this, you had no inkling of where the bones would be found. When you made this, didn't you believe the body was warm and vibrant, its heart beating, its hopes high?

And when I saw the film I too still hoped that all was well, I didn't know death hid in that place, and yet I felt such dread, such dread, to watch that screen. Why? What explains this?)

It is not possible to see the young woman's face. The shadow spreads, the sequence ends, all returns to patterns of blackness, and begins again.

This time the order of events is speeded up and the effect is that of a time-lapse nature film, the kind where before your eyes the rosebud appears and swells and opens and loses its petals, all in a matter of seconds. Conscious not of movement nor of any actual detail of change, but only of mutation, I watch the rainforest deconstruct and remake itself, I slide down the declensions of Cedar Creek Falls into the vortex of water which is the funnel of Dante's hell which is the Serra Pelada mine which is the Newtown quarry which contracts to one of its ladders which is a railway line which is Cedar Creek Falls in the middle of a dark enveloping wood. This happens in the space of twenty seconds. And happens again, and then again: three time-lapse mutations which by now seem so natural that the audience could believe any plughole drops straight into hell, any railway line will grow moss and will harbour a fallen body.

(Okay, Charlie. Point taken.)

Begin again. The fifth cycle is in slow motion …

Yes, it was during this final sequence that, for myself, there set in those little burrs of visual disturbance that add up to panic. Small alarms went off in my mind. There was nothing I could put my finger on until the railway line scene, and then I felt a buzz of excitement and agitation because I recognised a particular house and overhead bridge. I stared. Yes, I knew that bit of railway line, I knew the bridge near the embankment cutting, and I began to think I knew the tiny figures on the overhead bridge. They were leaning over the parapet to observe the prostrate body on the rails and to monitor the hooded figures who were a dark Greek chorus. The mourners. Or vultures. They could have been anyone, those tiny figures. They could have been — I was almost sure they were — Catherine, and Charlie himself.

As grit bothers an oyster, something else kept scratching at my mind. I closed my eyes and mentally replayed the film until I found the eighth circle of hell within the slow fifth cycle of the film. I held the image steady in my mind, I didn't know what I was looking for until I saw it: the face of Charlie himself under Dante's hood.

So Charlie was Dante, speaking in code and turning history into allegory. I kept staring at the image in my mind, scanning every profile, every averted face. Ahh. The figure floundering in the bog of sewage just where it went under the bridge, was it not …? Yes. Yes it was. It was a young man in a school blazer with a prefect's crest on the pocket.

Of course, I could have been seeing what I was looking for. I could have been, as they say,
projecting
; but then all of us see what we expect — what we
want
— to see, don't we? Is seeing what the rest of the audience doesn't see, seeing against the grain, reading against the grain, therefore more intelligent? Is it more intellectually rigorous? Is it more moral? Or is it, in fact, less so: a murky private enterprise of the ego? Is all exegesis of necessity eisegesis in disguise?

At any rate, an answer came to me then, or
leapt
at me, it would be more accurate to say, an answer to Gabriel's riddle hit me between the eyes and I told myself I read that answer in Charlie's film. Perhaps this was true. Or perhaps, as Charlie would claim, I had known the answer all along. Perhaps I always had an explanation for the missing people and for Charlie's hasty departure for New York. Perhaps I even knew what happened before it happened.

Perhaps Charlie knew. Yes, very likely Charlie sensed what had happened and was bound to happen, and that is the explanation for the film.

Then I thought I was quite simply crazy. I rejected the answer out of hand. It was the wrong answer because it couldn't possibly be true. It was preposterous. And absolutely nothing was certain.

When I saw the film a second time, especially that slow final cycle, I stared at the image of the eighth circle of Botticelli's hell and was certain only of two things: that the faces of Dante and of the man doing shitstroke under the bridge were deliberate photographic impositions. In fact, the methods of film collage drew attention to this, for the face circled by sewage was torn from a group photograph in a newspaper, you could actually see the rough edges and a neighbouring arm and a few newsprint words. The face was peripheral, almost hidden under the bridge in the manner of carvings on the undersides of pews in Gothic cathedrals, gargoyle faces where no one can see them, subversive jokes, a mere trace of the countertruth.

But when I go to New York, when I next bump into him, I know what Charlie will say. Total strangers are forever insisting I've made raids on their lives, he'll say. It's the occupational hazard of the artist. Listen, he'll laugh. If it doesn't happen, it probably means you've failed.

But you've used actual photographs, I'll argue. You deliberately superimposed on Botticelli a picture torn from the
Sydney Morning Herald.

Did I? Pure accident, he'll say; or more likely, punning away as usual, pure graft. Or maybe: Must be the unkindest cut of all. That is the sort of joke he'll make. All art is accretion, he'll say. I use random found matter all the time. I can't be held responsible for what you make of it.

Besides, he'll say, the world is crammed with messages. We'll never have time to read them all.

Perhaps, perhaps. All art is reception, that is certainly true. But on the slow projection of my mind I found everyone. Yes, I knew I could be putting them there, the way the gullible do with Tarot cards, but I also knew, I
know
, the faces that haunted Charlie.

And what does it have to do with me? Nothing, really. Or so I used to believe, so I told myself, I am nobody. I'm a mere bystander who got sucked in, who got infected by Charlie's obsessions and Gabriel's riddles, who lost my footing and nearly drowned in their nightmares and bumped into all the floundering people in Charlie's dream: the latest dream I ever dreamed, or ever want to, on the cold quarry side.

Well, they are all gone into the world of archive now.

Into archive or underground.

And I am awake, and I find myself here alone, and no birds sing, and I stumble about in a dark and trackless wood.

So.

Once upon a time, having been so lost in thought and grief that I was oblivious to the ending of a film, I found myself sitting alone in an empty cinema, in London, in Sydney, wherever, waiting for the second showing. No. Wait. Before that I opened my eyes into someone else's film, not Charlie's I mean, one of the other postmodern offerings, a jazzbeat concoction of cartoon and real figures mixed. I watched it blankly. I can't remember a thing. I think I sat through three features, four. Then the theatre was empty. Then it was full again. This time I knew what I was waiting for.

It began again, it begins, it goes on beginning.

The entire thing (first cycle, three fast cycles, slow-motion fifth cycle) takes only ten minutes. At the last slow dissolve of the girl in the rainforest, a young woman sitting just where I myself had often sat, a young woman sitting on the very boulder below which the bones were found, at that last interminable slow-cycle image, the sense of foreboding began to suffocate me (although I cannot tell why). It was the old sense of entering a burgled house, the wariness, poised at the brink of something you do not want to know. I wanted to close my eyes, I wanted to leave. I had a sense of dread about it. The figure could have been any young woman, any woman at all, a university student on a field trip or a local slut or a young mother whose toddlers play behind the ferns. The face was hidden in shadow and it could have been any face. People were always seeing themselves in Charlie's work, it was ridiculous really. I don't know what I was nervous about.

Just before the smudges of blackness spread to touch one another, in the last gleam of that high bony line of light, the camera came close to the girl and she looked up at the photographer and the light fell on her face.

Lucy, meet Lucy.

I could feel myself falling, a cloudiness swimming across my eyes.

My right hand (the one on the screen) was extended, gesturing, and from the tip of the index finger dangled a thin gold chain. The final close-up was of the pendant at the tip of the chain, not a pendant in the ordinary sense, but two small gold rings, earrings, each threaded with a tiny glass bead.

A black dizziness, like a sack over my head, descended.

When I came to in the dark room, when I came back to myself in that dark wood, I thought first of this: that the last time I had been at Cedar Creek Falls was long before I met Charlie, and long before I ever saw that thin gold chain which I had never held in my hand and never touched.

Was it a memory I then dredged up, or an invention? that vision of a small hiking party, tourists evidently, smiling Japanese businessmen with cameras, or maybe Chinese, how does one tell? Or here's another memory, or invention: two solitary wanderers, strangers, bump into each other near some falls. “Beautiful, isn't it?” the girl says. And the man says, “Yes. I grew up near here.” And the girl says, “Really? So did I.” And the man explains that he's been away for years, been away in New York or China or somewhere, but the place still haunts him.

At any rate, someone with a camera asks politely, “Do you mind?”

And the girl shrugs, “Feel free,” not paying any particular attention.

And was that Charlie? Did we stare at each other idly, as polite strangers do, before we met? Or did Charlie simply clip the photograph from somewhere, a Qantas flight magazine, the
Geographic
? Did Gabriel give it to him? Did he pick it up in some second-hand shop full of other people's bric-a-brac? And which coincidence would be more strange?

Or is it just a piece of technical wizardry, a bit of cutting and splicing, the normal cinematic black magic? After all, Charlie had plenty of photographs of me, plenty of negative footage. I suppose, for someone like Charlie, inserting a moving figure into a different backdrop is nothing very remarkable.

Not that it matters. Because at the time he used it, when he made this particular collage, when it was first lying as a neatly labelled videotape in his workroom, we had still not yet met — though of course, of course, he could have added to it, changed it; I could have changed it: the observer brings images to the screen.

But I couldn't reassure myself, I felt afraid, I felt that all my bearings had gone haywire, I knew I was somewhere in the middle of a pitch-dark rainforest and all straight paths went in circles and ate their own tails and they all went down the plughole of the quarry or of Cedar Creek Falls.

I cannot start with that, I cannot start there.

I will start somewhere in the middle, in Sydney. I will start somewhere shortly after Charlie's return from New York, shortly after the first time I met him, and I will try, like any archivist or reader of entrails, to salvage the future and to predict the changeable past.

6

A name, I think, tugs its owner in its wake as a string tugs a kite. That is why, when we overhear the name of someone we have not yet met, we may feel a curious shiver of premonition. That is why we pause, the wine glass an inch from our lips. It happens that there are people we have not yet met who are on their way toward us bearing gifts: chaos, perhaps; or desire, or transformation. It happens, sometimes, that their names reach us in advance, telegraphing upheaval the way stillness in stringybark scrub foretells dust storms; the way milfoil stalks thrown properly, in accordance with ancient rules, will trace a map of the future in the dust of a Sydney pub.

That was what Gabriel, overhearing stray words, had sensed. And before that, something had caused Charlie to stand stock still when he first heard Gabriel's name. It must be that random sounds move through the air by instinct, that they unerringly lodge in the niches where meaning will find them. Is that the explanation? I direct these questions at one of Charlie's grainy photographs of Cat, who continues to be her deeply silent enigmatic self.

It might be possible to adduce theories thrown up by the new mathematics. If turbulence, freeway collisions, and downswings in the market can all be shown to obey strange cluster compulsions, how can I discount an abstruse mathematical curve which might pluck four people out of Brisbane, scatter them, and pull them together again years later in Sydney? Attraction-repulsion-attraction, that would be the rule. They might be some sort of quadratic equation: Charlie and Cat and Catherine and Robinson Gray, Australia's golden boy, the Grammar School prefect, the man who became a judge and ascended into the Order of Australia.

What would that make Gabriel and me? Where would we fit in that theory? Scrap that. In any case, none of it really concerns
me
. It's not my story, though it's odd, is it not, and interesting, and revealing, the way the teller inserts herself into the tale, even when she's trying to avoid it. A funny thing happened on the way to the telling, but in truth I'm scarcely in the script at all. Marginal notation is my style. Notes from underground. (I imagine Charlie raising an eyebrow
Art thou there again, old mole?
I imagine him saying.) So. Scrap mathematics. I lean toward the instinct to invest sound with meaning, because it wasn't enough that the four of them surfaced again in Sydney. It took Gabriel too. He was the catalyst, everyone came to believe that, and it even seems possible that I, quite inadvertently, had something to do with the way in which Gabriel became the ignition switch. The whole course of events, it seems to me, was nudged into motion the day Gabriel walked into Charlie's pub and ordered his beer and sat staring down the slope of Bayswater Road, where King's Cross begins to slide into Rushcutters Bay; though I suppose you could say it began before that. I suppose you could say it began with an erotic encounter at Cedar Creek Falls, or with a different sort of encounter at Brisbane's Shamrock Hotel and with a girl who ran away partly because of pain and partly because of the pull of that underground jazz which sounded like freedom to her, or perhaps she ran because of certain obscure fears she couldn't quite put her finger on, and you could say, I suppose, that it began with Gabriel looking for her and following her to Sydney. Or it might have begun with Charlie luring Gabriel to his pub. Or with Gabriel seeking out Charlie.

Where do interlocking circles begin?

Answer: at arbitrary points.

It all began, then, a day or so before Gabriel arrived in Charlie's pub, with two nameless students sitting at the bar.

“Gabriel's back,” one said.

“Yeah? Couldn't hack Queensland, eh?”

“A few years planting pineapples, enough to drive anyone to drink.”

“Pineapples? Heard it was sheep at Cunnamulla.”

“Nah. Brisbane. Market gardening round Samford. Supposed to be doing law at Queensland Uni, but you know Gabriel, can't get him to lectures when there's action on the side. Took on the Queensland police is what I heard.”

“So'd he hafta clear out of Brisbane, or what?”

“Dunno. Wouldn't surprise me. He's on the lookout for a job, so give us a shout if you hear about anything, okay?”

What was Charlie thinking as he stacked beer glasses in the dishwasher? He was surely exploring the concept of Gabriel. The name would have come to him as visual image, a man in white samite herding sheep at Cunnamulla, or great swooping moonshine wings folded over pineapple plants. Gabriel. What kind of a name was Gabriel for an Aussie kid? Charlie Fu Hsi Chang had a particular interest in names, and he was well aware that a name like Gabriel would be an affliction. A photograph composed itself in the lens of Charlie's mind: a young man is tapping draft beer from a keg in a pub. The young man has blond hair and long lashes and that kind of disturbing beauty which calls masculinity into question. Two great shafts of sunlight bounce off the mirror above the bar and rise from his shoulders like wings. The photograph is called
Gabriel.

A different photograph composed itself. A young man in black jeans and sleeveless black muscle-shirt sweeps up slops and broken glass from the floor of a pub. The young man has an incongruously angelic face, but he wears a bike chain around his waist. On his upper right arm there is a tattoo of a foot crushing a serpent, and below it, the words Hell's Angel. Behind the young man, sitting high on a bar stool, an old drunk reading the
Sun-Herald
has managed to set the paper alight with his cigarette. Flames swoop up and the angle of vision is such that burning newsprint wings spring from the shoulders of the young tattooed sweeper. The photograph is called
Hot News of Gabriel.

Of course, I am interpreting backwards, from artefact to conception. Both of these photographs exist.

It came to Charlie, holding a beer glass up to the light to check for smears, that he needed an extra bartender. The awareness was brand new, blinding, but seemed to him urgent.

“This Gabriel,” he said casually to the students. “If he's looking for a job send him here. I've got an opening.”

And so Gabriel came, walking into a shaft of light, preoccupied. He accepted a beer and a bar stool from dumbstruck Charlie. “But what's really strange, Mr Chang,” he said, from the middle of some discussion inside his head, “the really strange thing is the way a name like that gets its hooks in. The way it sets up shop in your mind, bloody well takes over.” He laughed, and shivered a little, and shook himself in a curious way; like a terrier. Charlie thought to himself that people who emerged from Queensland were forever embroiled in debates inside their own heads; it was the only safe place to argue in Brisbane. Charlie thought that a young man who looked like Gabriel might talk to himself all he wished, and perfect strangers would sit at his feet and listen. “Next thing, you find yourself certain that you know what she looks like,” Gabriel said. “Next thing you're
watching
for her.” He gulped down half his glass at one go. “It's got bloody claws, a name like that.”

“A name like what?” Charlie was registering the way Gabriel's fingers drummed against the thick lens at the bottom of his glass. Something more than a name has got its claws in, he thought; something the name is pulling behind it, something Gabriel can feel along the tips of his nerves. There was sexual arousal, but also nervous excitement, maybe fear, maybe even dread, in the sweat on his palms. Yes, I believe Charlie detected all that. It was astonishing — to Charlie, at any rate, even after all those years, even after half of his lifetime spent on the kindergarten side of world history — it was astonishing what Australians would broadcast through the large-print magnifications of the bottoms of beer glasses.

Charlie said little, he saw everything, it was a lifelong habit.

Charlie read small print and invisible signs.

“Jesus, mate!” customers used to say, unnerved, after he'd translated their throw of the milfoil stalks, or the yarrow sticks, or three Australian coins thrown six times. “How'd you
know
that?”

If he'd said that their secrets were written all over them, that he read pages and pages of their past and inner lives before they even took the coins in hand, if he said that his knowledge was only startling because Australians are illiterate when it comes to a text that is not written down (the text of a life, for example; or the text of a disarming lie), if he said any of that, they'd get resentful. They'd turn nasty in that quick belligerent way Australians have.
Got tickets on yourself, haven't you, mate?
they'd challenge, and he'd see their knuckles turn white.

So he used to shrug and smile enigmatically. “Ancient Chinese secret,” he'd say, which was what they wanted to hear. Which allowed them to laugh it off, to demystify, to make crude jokes. “Bloody Chink mumbo-jumbo,” they'd grumble affectionately. “Ought to ship the whole bloody lot of you back. Where you from anyway, Charlie?”

“Brisbane,” he'd say.

That was a good one, they loved that, they killed themselves laughing over that one. You even
sound
Australian, you bloody two-bob magician. You don't even have an accent, you little Chink cheat.

This is the measure of love in Australia, Charlie used to say. The blunt edge of insult. The blunter the blow, the greater the level of acceptance.

“No, but before that,” they'd persist. “Before Brisbane.”

“Hong Kong,” he'd say. “Family of merchant princes. They sent me out to God's own country to go to school.”

“Yeah? And you could never bear to leave again? Good on yer, Charlie.”

“So yer people got rich from tin watches and plastic junk? Half their bloody luck.”

“You blokes and the Japs are gonna have us all in your pockets if we don't look sharp, we got our eye on you, Charlie.”

“Heard the one about Dad and Dave and the Chinaman, Charlie? See, the three of them kicked up their heels in Kings Cross with three very well-stacked sheilas, and afterwards Dad says: ‘Well, Dave, I may be getting on, but I'm not over the hill yet. Lulu and me, we did it three times last night. What about you?'

“An' Dave says: ‘Well, Dad, I can't tell a lie. I reckon I was feelin' me oats last night, I reckon we managed six times.'

“ ‘An' how'd the little Chinaman do?' says Dad. ‘He's looking mighty pleased with himself. How'd you do, mate?'

“An' the little Chinaman smiles from ear to ear. ‘Velly velly nice,' he says. ‘One hundred and twenty-six times.'

“ ‘What???'
says Dad. ‘Now, hold your horses a minute. You count the same way we do?'

“ ‘Velly careful count,' says the Chinaman, smiling. And he makes his fist go up and down, up and down, like a piston, see? 'One-two, three-four, in-out, in-out, five-six, seven-eight, in-out …'

“You get it, Charlie?” they'd ask, falling over the bar in raucous laughter. “You get it, Charlie? You count the same way as us?”

Charlie couldn't keep count of the number of times he'd been told that joke, but he used to smile and say nothing and serve another round of drinks.

“So what do you think, Mr Chang?” asked Gabriel, on that day when the chickens began to fly home to roost. He was restive. He slopped his Tooheys on the bar and puddled in the spill with an index finger. “I hear you have a bit of a gift. What do you read in my beer?”

“You're just back from Queensland,” Charlie said.

Gabriel laughed. “No prizes for that one, Mr Chang.”

“Charlie.”

“Pardon? Oh. Thanks. Tell me something half the world doesn't know.”

“This name you bumped into is going to lead you a merry dance. You are looking for someone. She is going to bewitch you and lure you and lead you into the pit.”

“Hell,” Gabriel said, alarmed, and knocked over his glass, precisely because Charlie had told him something he already and instinctively knew. “Hell, Charlie, what kind of rubbish is that?” He brushed his soaked shirtfront with agitation. “I admit I'm looking for someone. Well, in a sense I'm looking for two people, and one reminds me of the other in some way I was hoping it was her, of course. It's just the kind of name she'd choose.”

“A whore's name?”

Gabriel frowned. About some things, he was quaintly old-fashioned in a way that bemused his peers. He could be positively perverse in his refusal to face certain facts. “She tries to be, but she's not. She plays at it. She plays with names. She hides behind them. I heard this one last night in the quarry That's where she'd go.”

Ah, the quarry.

“You saw something horrible last night.” Charlie mopped up the spill and refilled Gabriel's glass. “You'd like to forget it, but you can't.”

“Come off it, Charlie. People see bloody horrible things all the time in the quarry, don't they? Doesn't seem to disturb anyone's sleep. It was just a striking name, that's all. And for some mad reason I got excited and I thought, It's
her
again.”

Names have potency, this is ancient and unassailable knowledge. Charlie's name, for instance, his real name, was Fu Hsi, though no one had ever used it. Can you imagine how Fu Hsi would go down in Brisbane? You're Charlie Chink, the kids said, because they do that in Australian schools, bash the difference out. Deviation from the ordinary is not permitted here except as a source of amusement (
What'smatter, can't you take a bloody joke, mate?
), bewilderment is no excuse, certainly not in frightened little boys encumbered with arcane social rituals and bafflements and bed-wettings and sheer
foreignness
, which is a terrible liability in Australia. So Fu Hsi began to become someone else, he began to become Charlie Chink who could always be a good sport and take a joke.

A name that goes underground, however, continues to have a life of its own.