Logical Unsanity

There’s this thing about concrete footpaths in Brisbane. If you start perambulating about on them over an extended period of time, your feet become compasses, each singular heel reading the literature of the streets. You learn rather hastily to avoid trudging in the gutters, where accumulations of silt and stale garbage aggregate, bringing that beauteous perfume of metropolitan sweat right to your kisser. See, people don’t stop to think in this city, not often enough; it’s all feet, feet, feet, like they’re living in a fucking Kerouac novella, or a marathon, or their heads; the bustle of the city coming on in an overwhelming din. It’s getting so that other peoples’ shopping trips, business meetings, dates, drug drop-offs are the soundtrack to my soul.

I dig the music of Brisvegas. Seriously. Just that this one song gets old.

Still, this ain’t the romantic way to start, eh? All those years pouring diligently over Camus, when I could’ve been happy. Boy, was I smart. In all honesty, this place is paradise. I mean, call me a lackadaisical twat, but it’s not half-bad. Those days when the sun celebrates in the hair of the girl in front of me, when the dandelion clocks explode in joyful galaxies of flower and smell, when there’s nothing but the scent of wet grass like the bottom of an old footy boot rising up to meet you on a lonely morning, a white sky, a pair of fraternising butterflies – those days make me ache with love. It surges through me like the zenith of wonder, a train through a desolate station, rattling my insides and all that shit I hug tight within me, making me feel again. It’s not Brisvegas that gets me down, not at all; it’s me.

Wednesday. His gaze is beady and intelligent, but there’s something else there today, like his nightmares have started to take shape, pushing onto the backs of his eyeballs, forcing them out of their sockets. The squinty look’s being daggered at me, but I’m no expert on implied threats. From up here, it’s merely an expression indistinguishable from constipation. Granted, I want to laugh, but I’m also drinking coffee. I don’t want it coming outta my ears.

‘Look, you’ve got to scram!’ Cue the pin-wheeling arm movements, the symphony of spittle; he’s like a precious Ken Doll, stuck in an electric blender, arms akimbo, all noise. Zooming ’round. Great fun. ‘I don’t want to be derogatory, Maddox, but if you don’t fuckoff right now, I’m going to have to call the fuzz.’ I love how he articulates “fuzz”, how he’s suddenly LAPD Detective Goren or something, straight from the annals of Channel 10, packing heat here and now. ‘You hear me, Maddox?’
‘Leon,’ I murmur, chewing on my best response. He used to remind me of a parakeet. Now, I wouldn’t offer him a potato crisp if he was juggling rainbow balloons. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘I told you, Maddox. You’re fired.’ His voice seems small, like the city itself when you’re standing solitary on the Glasshouse Mountains, the distant world illuminated by lightning. Where I am, I can’t quite see the perspiration flooding the under-arms of his business shirt, but I know it’s there. He’s exuding the air of bravery, alright, but all he’s musing upon right now are his whites. Just plain ole’ how is he going get this one clean for tomorrow, when his washing machine’s broken at home?

‘I have a gun. Right here. See?’ I struggle to simplify. It’s getting heavy in my hand, but there’s no bullets. It has the same effect, though – or, at least, it did, but maybe employers forget the fundamentals after decades of passing up getting laid. Must mess with their mental maps. ‘You want to take a shit,’ I suggest, pursing my lips, attempting to show some etiquette.

‘No, no Maddox, I want you out. Gone. I gave you your pink slip last week.’ There are tears like sea-snails, encrusting his eyes, and his frown’s beginning to really get me down.

‘I know that, Leon. I don’t work here anymore. So don’t worry.’ I swallow some coffee. It’s gotten cold, philosophising with this bumpkin, but I don’t mind. I’ve rigged a pulley system to the office kitchen so that a new mug comes piping and wispy, tiered by a plume of caffeine smoke, every half-hour. I pull the rope, the fulcrum established below me shifts, and up comes the Havana Roast, straight to hand.

‘I don’t see why you have to live in the office, then,’ Leon pleads, gushing. It’s melodrama sundered straight from a Barbara Streisand song, all blubber and dead bunnies. I wave the gun vaguely at his head, cock the hammer, finish off my cuppa. ‘Don’t make me blow two windows through you, pops,’ I recite, wearied and bored. Sitting up here for so long has made my left foot itch. I can’t scratch now, not in front of my hostages.

Ugh. This is torture.

‘I won’t kill you,’ I reiterate. ‘Just let me take off my sock.’

It comes off after something of a misanthropic protest, having to pull bemused, frayed threads from the end of my splayed foot one at a time, as though singular notes streaming from the headphones of the bus passenger in front of you, each minuscule example accruing to make one big fucking annoyance. So finally the sock comes off, and my soul ejects through the ball of my foot with it, releasing electric tension that I wasn’t even acutely aware I had, sending orgasms to the back of my retinas, fractured phantasms dancing before me. This is what comes of wearing socks when you’ve imperilled yourself by balancing somewhat precipitously in a tree, clenching a, granted, menacing pistol at your mewling co-workers. Uhuh. This city just brings on passive anxiety akin to any new Diane Keaton film. Still, it’s essence-sundering to view the lights of Brisbane from up here, though, even so; the spires of buildings becoming millions of glorious, individual fireworks, elevated slightly above the ground, blossoming forth like a continent of luminescent tropical flowers; like mosquitoes of pristine light encased in the embryo of the Brisvegas skyline; like a fallen constellation, where everyone’s existence is signposted by a goddamn star.

Yeah. Nights in this town make me choke up with nostalgia, and it’s always thick like treacle.

‘Don’t you think about moving, Anna,’ I command, rather ambivalently, waving the piece about whilst shifting tenuously on my haunches. These branches are beginning to doubt me, I think. ‘You attempt anything funny, y’see, an’ I’ll shoot Leon in the head.’ I improvise. ‘Twice.’
Leo, the ole’ soul, he begins to wail. I dunno. Should I be finding this so irredeemably funny?

But. Look. She’s.

Anna. Concededly, now, I don’t want this sounding reminiscent of one of those self-referential, post-modernist explorations into the virtues of narcissistic wallowing, but I can’t prevent myself from going all minimalist here, parroting people I don’t even particularly dig, Easton Ellis and the like. I mean, Anna. Maybe – maybe it was her eyes the colour and warmth of phosphorescent green Slurpies, penetrating my soft parts and infusing me with all the right tingles, but I wanted her. I wanted that smile, the one that gave off resonances of starry Christmas evenings outside, stark breath inscribing the night, lips like thin cordoned lines of blue infinity, all that shit that keeps me up past 2 am pointlessly swearing “fuck you” at the ceiling, in substitution for a notable god – I wanted it all. I wanted those tits, the way they made me depthlessly sad, thinking of the woman that birthed me, the woman that divorced me, the woman who fucked me limply for the notion that was in it. Yeah, right. I know how to write: “don’t tell – show”; but I’ve lost the focus to do so, and maybe that’s what’s provoked me to pull out the ole’ pistol. Wave it ’round. Affect the pretence that I have concrete in my veins, that Maddox Bitty is someone enduringly cool, like Toshiro Mifune, or that one dude who chewed off his arm in Alaska, you know him.

I’m not though, not nearly as suave. (Or as hungry). I mean: THE FIRST THING I’ve ever articulated to the girl I design to have twelve babies with, and it’s a threat that I’ll kneecap my boss because of her. There’s something in me, right now, that tells me it wasn’t timeless romanticism, certainly not a patch on just bringing the girl some choccies.

Gughh.

Christ. Did I just spend all that time whining? Rightio, Maddox; and you don’t want to be a self-masturbatory weiner, now do you?…

Here, nesting within these spindly branches, I’ve gotten paper-fine scars all up my arms. This tree smells distinctively of hospitals, y’know, the aroma that suggests there’s never been any blood spilled within a continent of the place. That always gave me the involuntary shivers, an odour so clinical that if it had body, it’d do tax audits. It’s the kind of stink you get from a coffin-maker’s calculator.

Being in this tree makes me bite down on my own tongue.
I opt, instead, for some high silliness.

‘This is a hostage situation,’ I announce. There are sighs about me, like a choir of conch shells, but they’re not examples of grief: they’re the candles of relief. These people are happy that I’ve finally told them where they stand. Or kneel with heads bowed, as the case may be. I swear on Daffy Duck, one insurmountably cheerful grunt has muttered, “Thank you, Lord and Saviour.”

No other seventeen people have ever been so grateful that they’re in a hostage situation.

‘Now, I know we’ve all been here, incapable of going home, for nine days. And I thank you all for your mighty co-operation, calling home to your beloved, telling ‘em you had to slog out some critical all-nighters because of the forthcoming catalogue, the TV commercials, an’ shit. I think we all deserve a round of applause. Real businesslike attitudes, people, true teamwork.’

I clap, legs hooked in behind me, ensuring that I don’t fall. Those co-workers of mine without flesh-biting rope securing their wrists behind their backs, they look hopeful. Even Judy from Accounting, two levels down – those plum lips hidden behind all that silver duct tape. These guys. Shit. I’m choking back tears, here. Man, they can make me feel wanted, sometimes.

Leon wears this expression of guilt on his face, like a heat-warped Plaster-of-Paris mask. It’s an expression with its own jury. Though I’m squinting, I can see he’s trembling inordinately, like a Beatrix Potter-inspired rabbit cornered in a potting shed by the archetypal, axe-toting, goofed-up farmer. I don’t like seeing people when they’re scared; it renders their fortitude and machismo, their integrity and self-efficacy, their self-assurance and all the yoga pilates they do to nil. Here he is, my ole’ Leon, attempting to go to his Happy Place. Paint the landscape of positive affirmation behind those retinas, friend: you’re on a French steamboat, paddling incisively down the wending Somme, and the water plays sun with the sky, so that you’re bobbing peaceably along a streamer of glistening gold, as though the meniscus of the river is pyrites; you’re hearing jazz music sweeping languorously, notes like lone fruit-bats, overhead, and you’re tasting each individual breath of oxygen as though they’re freshly-baked muffins, the airy dough rising inextricably within your lungs. Yeah, Leo, this is your happy place.

Cut back: none of this is real. You’re still at work, about to be shot by a madman brandishing a pistol, ensconced in the vibrating folds of the unsightly, over-grown office plant.

Pan forward for an extreme close-up: Look at the psycho.
He’s grinning.

‘Leo, are you alright?’ I probe, leaning reflectively back into the hard tactile foliage. ‘You look as though you’re goin’ to faint. Don’t do that, now, on me.’ I gesticulate wildly about me, expansive arm with clenched gun creating the universe. ‘Look, I ain’t goin’ to shoot anyone unless you proverbially dig me in the ribs, and gimme a hassle. I’m doing this in conveyance of a principle.’ I stop.

Hold on now, pardner, says the Duke within me, tipping his metaphysical Stetson. Why the goddamn’ are you doin’ this, my lonesome friend? …That’s when the party halts. The gun in my papery fist feels like a star, and not in the fairytale, nursery rhyme sense; this weird, obsidian fish I’m waving about before me is as heavy as the world. It’s black and cold, blisteringly cold, like a dead star. And it’s breaking my arm. I’m disorientating myself now, I know it; but that voice within my psyche, asking me what the fuck I’m doing, I can’t answer it. I had it all figured out. Of course I did; I’m doing a criminal act, and all you truly need is to view any animated cartoon to realise the overwhelmingly trenchant fact that the criminal always has it “all figured out”. And, y’know, then it fails: “If it wasn’t for you meddling kids…” [insert shaken fist].

But I had had it all figured out. Leon fired me. Said I was a slacker. He didn’t romanticise the term, didn’t praise me for being a near-Generation X-er down-on-my-luck, for paving the pathway lain by Linklater; he said it with the implication that I excreted an air of stale piss and vinegar, that I was a hero now detested, that he was going to put me down. ‘You’re slacking off, you’re getting old, Maddox.’

Jesus Christ: I became Phar Lap.

‘You were brilliant, Maddox,’ he’d serenaded me. ‘But – now, I know losing your mother couldn’t have been easy – but ever since last year, you’ve stagnated, you’ve stopped runnin’ and started walking, you’ve taken a Smoko every hour you can get it, you’ve worn us down.’ And the words had come at me like vipers disguised as music, nesting in my ear canals with venom and rage. ‘Maddox, friend, mate, we have to let you go. The company has to let you go. Untucked shirts with iron marks, sleeping around the office, half-completed document reports, continually watering that fucking office plant, look, you might be nearing a break-down… So we’re giving you a break. Down.’

Here they were. Those biblical words.

‘Maddox, you’re fired.’

Now. I’d scurried to the toilets, dowsed my face in the glacial water, grasped the ceramic sink bowl with red-rimmed knuckles, like I was falling majestically off a cliff-face. The reflection of myself had worried me; it wasn’t me, it was just some guy. Some guy. Some guy with razor cuts on his face from artless shaving, with luggage beneath his eyes as though his face was taking a trip to Acapulco, some guy with a receding hairline, some dispirited fuck with acne infestations akin to warring tribes. A face like the fleshy pulp you skim off your mug of Milo if you microwave it for too long. I had a face reminiscent of the skin floating on hot milk.

I couldn’t recall the last time I’d looked at myself. I couldn’t recall ever caring.

Cue the technicolour yawn, hunched over the basin, throwing up my soul.

Next day, I brought in the gun, an archaic replica, but not half-bad when you deceive your own heart into fundamentally believing that you can pull THIS off; that you can swagger nonchalantly, with Tarantino-esque coolth, legs Ferris-wheeling your way into the office, with a revolver. And play God, because you feel yourself disappearing in vapours of cowardice and lamentation, and you desperately need some recognition. Fact is, I got lucky; if you’re in a militant city crowd, and you start yelling to be heard over the pervasive Brisbane din, rarely will anyone stop to pay you heed. You’re just some impromptu street theatre act, or some wailing crazy, or a Maddox Bitty. Holding my co-workers hostage gave me an objective, I guess.

No family. No job. Nothing to lose, essentially.

I’ve never been one for planning ahead. When I was married the first time, Veronica had asked me how I’d like to arrange our finances – should we get a joint bank account, par example? I can’t recall my response, but I know I hadn’t looked up from the wall of fiery television, her eight-metre large Plasma screen. I’m not one for planning, I just don’t live in that world. But when you’re threatening to murder people by inserting high-density lead into their stringy, workers’ bodies, it’s a requirement that you know what you’re doing.

This is all distilled wisdom in retrospect, of course. I had no fucking clue, then. So I made myself comfortable in the spidery branches of the plastic rhododendron, and took my time working it out. Leo, presumably, thought I’d be letting him go soon. Clever boy; I mean, shit, I’d taken a week to impart my first prerogative.
Time travel forward, then, to now: to the present; to my sweating, sticky form, inhaling laboriously, muttering to myself. I was feeling dizzy, like when I was a teenager attempting to dictate my artistic manifesto on the side of a building by spray-painting upside down. All the dangle, none of the eloquence. Because whenever I did that, I’d find, I just didn’t know what to write.

No literary perfection was coming now, either. Always remind yourself, taking hostages is hard work.

‘You slacker,’ Leon yawped, ‘are you going to shoot someone, or not?’

I sat, toady and stolid, eyes swelling. The words fell like old fridge magnets, sliding pathetically down my chin. ‘I don’t have any bullets.’

The world got all swimmy, then. I can see the dragonfly, right now, erupting through the half-open window shutter, iridescent green like the headlights of a freight train. Resting with satanic beauty straight in the middle of my crumpled, exhausted forehead.

It stung. My hands let go.

Maddox Bitty came tumbling down.

*

Hitting the ground. Ah. A blue fiery orgasm straight to the head, that’s what hitting that office room floor had brought with it, had evinced. Winded me with some sense. Things coalesced and began to crystallise once more. I’d fallen off the rails, I’d admit. If only an itty bit.

It had been all for something, I was reassured of that. With the carapace of my skull befriending the floor, the epiphany locomotive had pulled up with bells tinkling.

Y’see, it wasn’t my intention to shoot anyone, unless it was myself; I just wanted a proper ceremony. A big one. A celebratory goodbye, with all the people crowded round, with mournful eyes and reverential silences, telling me I had meant something to the company.

So, yeah, I’d gone insane, maybe. As pertains to one’s relativistic definition.

Fallen outta my tree, anyway.

But the police weren’t fast enough. See, when you’ve occupied the entire undulating length of your childhood sprinting away from the cops, tossing your spray cans, ducking under a neighbour’s fence or amphibiously scaling an old wall, you pick up speed. You blow forth like a terrific, horrific wind, with a chorus of chattering teeth and creaking bones. You know there’s an army of skeletons behind you, a garishly flaring light of red and blue, a beacon that will taint your soul for years to come if you slow down. So you keep going, you push harder, the bile reflex starts fluming up your throat, and the adrenaline supernovas inside your brain like a sky rocket. Now you’re a gazelle. You’re a cheetah.

You’re a bullet.

You have to be fast to be a slacker all the time. Real fast. Everything needs to get done first, before anyone else can possibly do it. Then you can afford to just let go, go to seed. That’s how I’ve always lived.

I s’pose that’s what I mean when I say there’s this thing about concrete footpaths in Brisbane. They guide you home, like devoted friends. Because it’s all feet, feet, feet here, in this fucking lovely town, and the soundtrack to my escape is the laughter of passers-by.
Crane overhead: Here’s a sixteen year-old boy, or it could be a monstrous thirty-year old man, and he’s hitting the beat like his feet are on rollerblades. He looks ghastly, that’s for sure, with sweat flowering off his face, and he can’t have slept for days. There’s even a bit of tree vegetation protruding hilariously from his shock of matted hair. The sirens of a cop car are half a block away. But no-one’s stopping this man. He’s a juggernaut. The heels of his feet are tattooing the cement. And everyone around him are showing this guy distinct recognition, now. They’re parting, stepping back, watching this runner balloon past.

Long shot: Now they’re clapping.

Good job, Maddox, sings their applause. It’ll be sad to see you go.

Close-Up: And the wild man isn’t slackening his pace.

He’s making his way home.

*