I grope ahead towards no light,in blindness, feeling. Soon the world fades
back, shifting like a ghost, and Michael is there. He thinks, I can't
believe I am at this place. Everything is so connected to her I thought it
would all disappear when she died. The counsellor in front of us talks
voicelessly and makes soft gestures with her hands while we nod. Michael
stops listening, focusing instead on the rhythm of his heartbeat and
breathing, and the room shivers like disturbed water. The counsellor is
washed away by pulse over breath, submerged under body-sounds until
Michael's thoughts are clear again: I am never coming back.  He forces a
smile and shakes her hand. Perhaps this is a dream; the slow closings of
eyes, ranks of relatives, heavy doors, darkness. No - with the crash of
recollection that comes from having just woken, it is clear: not a dream,
it is me that is the ghost. I have been careless. Somehow I managed to
mislay my life.
	We leave the hospital as fast as colour draining from a face and
follow Crown then Burelli streets until the Art Gallery stops us. Across
the road is the Department of Social Security, and Michael thinks, I must
remember to put my form in this week, before pushing into the thick quiet
of the Gallery. Art and taxes. He finds a seat in the only empty room,
full of turn-of-the-century landscapes. Unlike the declarative
contemporary art that fills the rest of the building, these pictures are
too civilised to talk frankly of the heart, but they are highly trained
and speak eloquently of other things. Still, they find themselves alone.
	We are in front of a picture depicting Wollongong in 1887,
although it takes us a few minutes to notice. Even though photography was
invented forty years earlier, the scene has been carefully drawn, and
descends onto the harbour from the sea. It is an illustration of the
tangling of worlds. Both steamboats and broad sails nod in the Bay, and
roads and fences etch ribs into green bushland, where much older
communities still watch from the hills. The picture is more map than
artwork, a rediscovery of claimed landscape, and Crown and Burelli streets
are recognisable like a street directory. Beside the picture is text,
headed simply "Artist's impression of Wollongong", and it continues to say
that by 1887, this city had already learned its name, a Koori word that
refers to the sound of heavy waves stumbling onto an endless beach. This
beach was the only road north to Sydney until 1821, the text finishes.
Wollongong, like a deep bell struck hard and left to reverberate, now
belongs to verdant mountains that peeled back their skirts so cattle could
graze, and much later, let them down again over the university. 
	Michael's thoughts grow slower in the Gallery, and it is less
claustrophobic in his lucid, sensual meditations. Synapses. I fall into a
pothole of memory; evidence of my life like a signpost without a road. I
knew a little neurology. Thought cannot be located in any specific
physical place. It is what happens between cells, the interaction that
occurs when flesh reaches to touch other flesh. Neurons find each other
like two people in Splashes nightclub and exchange fluids before groping
away to another connection. Dreams are a long, elaborate kiss. Some
peopleUs brains are so orgiastic a medical photograph has trouble finding
flesh without thought. Spider-energy, the brain is a landscape of constant
change, like a camera with the shutter stuck open. 
	We wander home, along Corrimal street, up the hill, up to floor
seven. The apartment is small, just big enough for two people to cram
their lives under a double bed. The heavy machines that used to sit in the
corner are gone, but  Michael's mess has already begun to encroach onto
the bare, indented rectangle where they once weighed heavily on the
carpet. Next to where the mini-lab used to be, the CD player spins a song
I can't hear, the "repeat" button glowing red. Silence. Like a breeze
another memory approaches, but I do not recognise it as mine. Loud and
filmic, it rattles past like a cross-country train. 
	A musician once sealed himself in a soundproof box so he could
hear silence, clean and pure. Instead, he heard his heartbeat, breathing,
and the electric hum of his nervous system. From this he concluded that
there is no silence as long as there is life. 
	Michael's memory buzzes through me and is gone, shivering into the
distance. 
	Whatever the CD he has left on, it has been condemned to live its
stories over and over while he was away. Michael switches on the
television as well, then shifts the pillows to the foot of the bed, so
when he sits on the mattress Mount Keira and Wollongong City are visible
out the window. It is his drawing position. Hundreds of sketches of the
mountain surround the bed like a moat, those on top of the pile less
realistic than those near the floor. 
	He pulls off his shirt, takes a charcoal sketch from the top of
the pile, and uses a hard pencil to draw over its expressive imprecision
with photographically exact lines. The lead-edged mountain clenches like a
fist over the heavy, dark ghost behind it. Usually the press of pencil
against paper lets Michael get beyond himself, tune into the pressure and
rhythm, let go of any bite of stress. But tonight the repetition makes him
feel heavy and tired. Before finishing it, he tears away the picture and
rests charcoal-stained fingers on a fresh cut of blank paper. Night is
beginning to fall. He reaches under the notepad, into his tracksuit pants,
and begins to masturbate. 
	As the elastic scrunches down around his thighs, Michael streaks
charcoal over the sheets, his pants, his penis. He lets himself indulge
and remember me, feel the memory of our bodies pressing against each other
in the dark. It is painfully close. When he climaxes the pleasure seizes
like a gasp, before crumbling into a surrender of tears. The smell of
himself alone is unbearable and his knees curl in to contain the grief.
When he pulls the sheet over his shoulders, I am in his thoughts. He is
thinking that he feels most naked when there's no-one to see him.
Invisible, almost. As if nakedness was meant to be seen by somebody.   
	If I could touch you again I would believe in any God. Parts I had
taken for granted, like your elbows, or the skin in the middle of your
back, or the chicken pox scar near your eyebrow, have become sacred again.
To have contact with the smallest patch of skin would be sexual. I canUt
remember why I didn't kiss you fifty times a day. What was so interesting
about shoes, dirty plates, my wallet and keys, or computer keyboards that
I held them so often in my hands instead of you? Or myself? Why didn't I
ever let my fingers find each other, listening to my own body the way I
would if I could hold you now?
	Michael falls asleep as another memory opens across me, and I feel
it is my own: I took photographs. My camera was broken and the film only
scrolled every third picture, layering image after image on a single shot.
An overlapping murmur of events. It sits on our desk now, buried under a
blanket of medical textbooks and journals. If I could, I'd capture
Michael's dreaming motion on a single shot of movement, breathing deep
like the tide. Throughout the night he will shift with animal rhythm,
suspended in a strange code of re-energisation. Another flash of biology:
the body replaces itself entirely every seven years. I cannot see it but
Michael is right now passing himself from cell to cell, faithful Chinese
whispers before the whisperer is dissolved. After a few years, he will
start to be different, and in ten he will be new, body-snatched by
himself. Perhaps my faulty camera is the only thing capable of capturing
him faithfully. I love you through your intransience. Curious, that scars
like the one on his brow are reproduced in their exact imperfection, not
replaced by blemishless skin. His life has changed the blueprint of his
body. 
	I miss orgasm in only the sparest of ways. The sensations I long
for are much more ordinary. The way my feet were most sensitive when I
first got out of bed, so a sudden dash on a concrete path would cause
fresh awareness of them. The unobtrusive sting of a toenail that has
ripped off too low, the pain humming like a friend walking into the
distance until it thins to nothing. The smell of sweat just before it
becomes pungent. I am a traveller abroad, too long away from home, who
misses the university bus-stop, central station late at night, the style
of familiar road signs. I long for dull transit, the sensations that were
proof of routine, moments when life held no novelty. I want to take it for
granted. 
	When he wakes, I follow him down to the beach, where he removes
his shoes and strides north along the sand. He follows the edge of the
damp stain where the moon has pulled the water from the shore like a
naughty child. When we reach Fairy Meadow, muffled dance music lures him
back onto concrete. Waves nightclub is pounding a local band's tunes. 
	I haven't been here in years, he thinks as he pays the cover. Once
inside, the music swallows him and he abandons himself to it, falling
against the rhythm like one hand resting in another. Young people pack
close, their constellation shifting with each song. He pays new attention
to the cliched lyrics, dancing fiercely, pushing against his panting
breath. When his legs grow shaky they are ignored, and obediently continue
to pound out the beat. Michael can transcend the loneliness he sees
everywhere, like a stain on his eyes. It is pushed down into his body,
which becomes more transparent the longer he denies it water or rest.
Right now it cannot itch with longing where I had once pressed against it
in sleep, and he lets it gasp for air, his vision becoming speckled with
exhaustion. 
	He doesn't have breathing difficulties often, but as Michael's
lungs fail to keep up with his will, he knows subconsciously he hoped for a
penance of asthma. I am afraid to die, he realises. When a nearby woman asks
if he is okay, he doesn't have enough breath to answer. He begins to think a
prayer, but halfway through resorts to the emergency medical procedure for
asthma instead, compressing his rib-cage to force stale air out and draw
new air in with the body's natural reflexes. By the time he staggers
outside, he has begun to think he doesn't need air any more. Look ma, no
breathing and I'm still alive. As the woman rushes to find her ventolin,
Michael has the wonderful realisation that he is immortal. He never needed
air, maybe he didn't need sleep or water either. Before he collapses onto
the pavement he wishes that he'd known this all these years. 
	The loud music inside reverberates, discording from echo laid over
echo. As Michael sucks on an inhaler, he is finally too tired to grieve.
He is alive. He proves it to the pavement, his body embracing the weight
of gravity, his heart knocking hysterically in his throat. 
	Eventually the woman takes back her ventolin, and nurses him with
complaints about her dickhead boyfriend. She smells of beer, but her red
smile is clear and lovely. Michael listens, withholding his story. When he
can breathe again, he and this girl take their loneliness down to the
beach, eventually pressing it into the sand. I feel him thinking that it
is so nice not to care about something for a change. He is re-energised by
the existence of this woman, and the joy that she is heavier than memory.
He remembers to fish a condom from his wallet before anything happens, an
old habit developed with me. AIDS. She is thinking that the unknown
landscape of his body gives her freedom. 
	I love you, I would tell him. Maybe tonight we might've sat on the
sand, talking cynically about the tankers out to sea and the red haze
drifting from Port Kembla, while underneath our words the waves were
breathing. The sound is so constant we wouldn't even notice it, but it
would keep us from silence in the nicest of ways. The mountain is a dark
shadow of its daytime self, at points bleeding into the sky. It descends
through time to the present, as the mountaintop makes its way from
pre-settlement bushland down to concrete-rimmed ocean. But tonight we
would not see this landscape as all the things that have happened and will
happen to it, but just the lights of the city in this moment, urgent and
sharp. Clean, like the calender photos of Wollongong when it tries to be
the Gold Coast for the tourists. Where we live, a glossy Kodak moment.
Like a polaroid, like pressing a conch shell against my ear, I would kiss
you goodbye.
	I follow the shadows on the sand to the place where I will thin to
nothing. If my camera could see me now, I would be the mist returning to
the ocean, or the strange bruise where corrugations of sand dissolve in
dark water. Like so many other things I will teeter on the edge a moment
too long. Like the stranded tide I will dream myself into the sand.



Beth Cardier, 1996 copyright.