The Truncated Blister

Lovelorn Wally Trebble tries to walk from Kuala Lumpur back to Brisbane.

In the early to mid sundown of his sorry years Wally Trebble met a lady named Splendid Maree and fell into loving emotions. As conditions prevail in the merely mortal realm, however, complexity intervened and he lost her again and walked away one lonely night of barely committed rain. Next thing he was a thousand miles away and watching yatching on a river in bright green Malaysia. There was a birthday party for a little boy. The outline of the mosque quivered on the water. Smiling Malays by the busload descended on the barbaques and sang happy birthday with balloons. Then he saw her face.  He was certain it was her. Splendid Maree disguised as a Malaysian woman in sky-blue hijab. She was talking to an older lady, both of them walking off into the humid Sunday afternoon. He dropped his travel brochures and gulped. His heart crowded into his throat. He jumped up. He took a few steps and corrected himself. The back-up voice in his cerebelum told him he was dreaming. Elsewhere, though, the moods of olfaction cycled back and he could smell her skin, smell her hair, smell her sweet breath when they kissed beside the phone box on Heatherton Road the day they decided to be together forever. Forgetting himself Wally raced to follow her but as she turned the corner he lost her again - again.

Shaken by this compelling nostalgia and the whole negligence of distance he returned to his hotel that afternoon and asked the desk-clerk to book him a taxi to the Chandrabanoo Airport the following day. "I am going home," he declared, "to claim the love of my life!" The upshot of his experience was that one thousand miles means nothing to a true connection. If anything, as the saying goes, it makes the heart grow fonder. Too late, and a journey into Asia, he realised what he'd thrown away. He determined then to  do whatever it takes and to persist however long, because destiny has plans for certain men and women. He fancied himself as a martyr to broken affections. He specialised in the unrequited kind. But this was different. This time he ached in places where his own self-regard should have been.

The desk clerk looked at him and shook his head.

"No sir," he said.

"No? No taxi?" asked Wally.

"No," said the clerk, "no airport."

"No airport?"

"No sir."

"What do you mean?"

"The airport. It is shut sir. It has been shut for six months."

Incredulity.

"What? The airport is shut?  Chandrabanoo Airport?"

"Yes sir. There is no such airport."

Wally looked at him and wondered if they were having a communications breakdown.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "Are you saying that the Chandrabanoo Airport is closed?"

"Yes sir. For the last six months."

"But I have tickets to fly out from that airport tomorrow."

"No sir."

"No?"

"No sir. It is shut."

Wally was going to raise objections but instead said "Hang on a minute" and raced up to his room to fetch his airline tickets. "You see here," he said, pointing to the print-out. "It says here, Chandrabanoo Airport. Leaving Chandrabanoo Airport, tomorrow's date."

The clerk was unimpressed.

"No sir," he said. "There is no such airport."

"Are you saying," asked Wally, still getting his mind around it, " that I've been sold airline tickets to an airport that no longer exists?"

"Yes sir," said the clerk, emotionless.

Three hours of awkward English on the Kuala Lumpar telephone system failed to correct this situation. A recorded message from Gold Dragon Airlines merely confirmed that the airport in question was no longer in service and wished him a pleasant stay.

 

He first decided to deal with this calmly but by the middle of the usual thunderstorms he had talked himself into a vicious urgency. He could see Splendid Maree sitting at her kitchen table maybe thinking wistfully about her Wally Trebble. But then another thought arrested him and he remembered the dark and handsome Gavin who had been lurking in the background and who now, of course, might be knocking on her door. Wally was suddenly hot and consternated. Standing on his balconey, overlooking palm trees and a shopping mall, he beset himself in aphroditic panic not unlike Dustin Hoffman in the final scenes of The Graduate. If your sports car runs out of gas and Simon is no longer talking to Garfunkel, the only thing to do is start running and hope to make it to the church before the fixed "I dos". He didn't even pack his bags. He set out, itinerate loner, step by step, penance for his lady's heart. By the morning he had traversed all the suburbs of the sprawling city and was on the roads towards the Penang land bridge. With every step he looked ahead and cried out lonesome "Hang on baby, I'm comin' home!"

Unfortunately, this really only works in the movies. By the time he reached Johar he was nearly crippled with an ill-fitting pair of sandals. He hobbled up to a roadside warung and sitting down for some satay ayam he couldn't get up again. The propriator, a kind and moon-faced man, decided to ring the district nurse. She was an ageing Chinese lady with limited English but who, when she heard that her patient was Australian, was pleased to be able to say the words "Licky Ponting" over and over along with a big grin. She stopped grinning, though, when she peeled away the cloth and had a look. Her face went pale. She immediately fetched Dr Ravishenda. He peeled away the cloth and made an alarming diagnosis. "Whoa!" he exclaimed. "A truncated blister! I haven't seen one of those since the Burmese Railway!"

Wally couldn't see it. It was on his blindside but the look on the faces of the medical attendants gave him grave concern. "Is it bad, is it Doc?" he asked.

All the same, his heart was ever yearning and a strange little voice told him that if he was lucky they might amputate and Splendid Maree will then come running, moved by love and pity to be by his tragic bedside. On any other occasion delusions like this might have suggested malaria but Dr Ravishenda pointed out that self-absorbed romantic fantasies almost always go with trunctated blisters. The only known cure for an attack of the Splendid Marees, he said, was rest and Buddhism.

"I've got to get home, doctor," said Wally, imperative.

"You're not going anywhere with a truncated blister I'm afraid," said the medical man. He was so intrigued he rang a cliche of his colleagues and four of them arrived on a small Honda motorcycle to have a closer look.

"O my God!" said one of them, an older Muslim chap, and he did a quick prayer to Allah. 

"Fascinating," said one of the others, poking it with a stick. 

"Does this hurt?" asked another one, giving it a squeeze, and sending Wally into paroxyms of agony. 

"How did it happen?" asked the fourth, scientifically curious.

Wally explained that he had started seeing Splendid Maree in every face in every bazaar and in every flower, in the face of the moon, the rays of the sun, the swans on the rice pond overflows, the first glow of orange dawn waving through the canefields, the peasants turning the manure of the water-buffalo into the grateful soil. Face of the Beloved! Omnipresent obsession! Much punishing mania!

"Sounds like a job for a dervish," said Dr Ravishenda, and he wrote out a referral. Being old-fashioned, he believed in getting to the cause of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms. The referral was quickly relayed to the nearby village and preparations were made.

Meantime, the other doctors packed the aforementioned abrasion in ice and decided to go in. "We're going to have to pop it!" said one grimly and the others took a step back. It was at this point that fever set in. With a semi-conscious malaise Wally was transported to a day the winter before when he knocked upon her splendid door and she gave him splendid loving. He could smell her skin. He could smell her hair. He could taste her lipstick on the bus-ride home. Splendid Maree, an appartition, did lay down beside him as the pethadine took hold and she explained in whispers that she'd said the things she said because she was fearful of her feelings and she never meant for it to end up like a huge mat of old spaghetti.

"I know," said Wally, "I didn't mean it either. I told you I wasn't any good at love." And he wept into her shoulder and said he didn't know what happened or where it all went wrong. With this torment he fell asleep in his dreams and it seemed as if he'd never wake up again, but then, in the middle of the night, the dervish came wearing goatskins and rattling a rattle and took out the patient's heart, beat it with a big bamboo stick and threw it in the river and left him to grow a new one.

***

 He didn't know at first but he was then tended by a small Malay woman named Fedula who sat through the hot days and mopped his brow and said sincere duas for him in Bahasa-laden Arabic. At length he woke up and when she smiled he remembered that he was an ocean away from the ones he loved. "You're very kind," he said, humbly, homesick. Respectfully, she disagreed. She brought him rice soto and sweet ginger tea. She was maybe twenty-five years old. Pretty. Intelligent eyes. A button nose. Her whole family had died in the tsunami some past Boxing Day. She had been due to marry but - as conditions prevail in the merely mortal realm - a thirty foot wall of water intervened and her betrothed - like her brothers and her sisters and her mother and her father and her grandparents - was never seen again. Wally frowned and shook his head. He wanted to ask her, 'How do you cope with that?' He watched her wrapping rice into banana leaves, her hands content in their smooth busy-ness.

He regained his perspective over the coming months sharing a hut with Fedula beside a ragged clutch of date trees. Then, finally, as his travel visa neared its expiry date, he determined to be going, but not by foot this time. The wound healed. The bouts of sepsis waned. But more essentially his heart had been refurbished and there was no mad clammer anymore.

"You know," he said as much to himself as to dark-haired Fedula, "Splendid Maree is probably warm and cuddly with her Gavin by now, while I'm happy sitting here with you watching the thick brown river of time." What a rush to the head! It took him two months to catch his breath. He felt like he'd walked three times the width of the planet. Only a truncated blister had prevented him from trudging all the way back to Brisbane.

At length he fixed a balsa raft that he bought off a boy named Mazanan and set it near the rope bridge at the far end of the village. There were clouds. He had to beat the monsoons. He stepped off the bank. "Fedula, are you coming?" he called. Secretly, she had been crying all night, but now she looked up and her eyes shot with rainbows rippling in the humid air. Wally smiled. It was different now. She climbed onto the raft and he held her hand and together they drifted off in search of the rumbling sea. She confessed that she was frightened. She would always be frightened of the sea.

The sea? In his plans to walk back into the arms of his one-time darling Wally hadn't even figured on the sea. What was he going to do when he got to Singapore? Why hadn't that problem even crossed his mind? Against all his scientific habits he wondered if the dervish wasn't right that Love is a wicked jinn that makes a mockery of lonely men, and lures them into phantasms, and must be exorcised with chanting babble to a rustic tambourine. In some serious infatuations nothing else will work.

"You've got to confront your demons," said Wally. He wasn't good at this himself but he had learnt that there is no other way. 

 

The Bilooga Himbo

The town of Bilooga is famous for its good-looking but brainless young men.

When the fortunes of the global economy turned into lumpy yoghurt in the twilight decades of the second millenium AD and a fifth wave of post-industrial innovation swept the land, manufacturing withered up and all the woolen mills, brace assembly plants and tractor blade accessory factories along the sturdy Nelson Ranges fell into rusty ruin. A think tank led by Professor Bright, who was, according to his webpage, Emeritus professor and Goulburn Chair in the History of Ruralness, first suggested the town invest in hi-tech robotics for the production of plastic modules necessary in the assembly of Teenage Ninja Turtle figurines for a Japanese cartel looking to move plant for the tax perks. When this fell through unemployment soared and the future of the town looked bleak. Then, in their second report, the think tankers hit upon a somewhat more robust idea when a consultant pointed out that - other than the mine disaster of 1931 - the only thing for which Bilooga was rightly famous was its good-looking but notoriously brainless young men.

For whatever reason - a quirk of Darwinian mutation or the massive arsenic content in the watertable - there were several key families of the district known for producing big, loping, handsome dolts. There was the Walters family, for example. There was Bruce Walters. Barry Walters. Reece Walters. Toby Walters. Mick Walters. Arnold Walters. All as handsome as Hollywood but as dumb as Detroit. Then there were the Hudsons and the Bishops and the Maslins and the Farrier's and the Turners and the McCourtneys. Not a daughter - or a brain-cell - among them. The Drapers had eight strapping sons with a collective IQ of 15 - they did have one daughter, Louise, but even she was six foot three, simple and looked like Errol Flynn. For whatever reason, a cluster of local bloodlines were prodiguous in this department and local lads towered over all-comers in both earthy goodlooks and sheer natural stupidity.

Regrettably, though, these gorgeous hunks of thickness showed no inclination for normal pursuits such as football, athletics or farm work and so had never excelled in the things that locals valued. Instead, after floundering around in numerous sales assistant positions, they all eventually found their way into the fashion industry, a fact about which no one liked to talk. Thus was Professor Bright's brainwave. "Let's break down the barriers!" he said and proposed a chic-led recovery. He wrote to Carvy Delure, the fashion talent agent, who jumped on a jet and decided to turn Bilooga into a stud from which to seed pretty boys onto the catwalks of Europe. Soon people began to talk about it as an "export industry" and the men's hairdressers of the town tried to tell the tax department they were "value adding".

For many years young lads of Bilooga had made their way in the magazine and advertising industries as nostril-flaring pieces of dense masculine meat. Roy Draper had modelled briefs in full colour at an international level. Neville Maslin was the eighteen year old blonde bombshell on the Kellogg's cornflakes ad. Young Jake Turner had left a good job in hardware sales to model ties in Sydney. Most famously, back in the seventies, the very hot Alec Hudson had gone to New York and been an extra in most of the Village People videos including YMCA where he can be seen making the letter C. The local beefsteak was a proven product. Carvey Delure opened an office and the talent flooded in.

It was at this stage that the Maslins hung a shingle on the roadside saying 'Maslin Stud Services' and people began to wonder. Was crusty old Bob Maslin, a potato farmer who had taken on the shape and demeanour of his produce, offering to service women for a fee? A rumour went around that he was leaving his wife Carmel for a nubile breeder from the United Arab Emirates. Another rumour said he'd tried to insure his DNA for a living fortune. Meanwhile the McCourtneys had hired a high profile agent for their son Carl who, even though he was only thirteen, already looked a bit like Brad Pitt. They were expecting big things and big money. The town prospered with an influx of lawyers, sub-agents, male beuticians, photography salons and plastic surgeons. Some said things had gone too far when the two eldest Walters boys signed a walloping contract to expose their backsides in a beer commercial aimed at the thirty-something set. Carvy Delure remarked on the fibre of the land. "Such boyz!" he exclaimed. In a career stretching across three decades he'd never seen such buttocks. The tough red earth. The relentless sky. The grit. The canola. The broad antipodian gait.

The most successful discovery of them all was the rugged but boyish Lance Bishop, with Sinatra blue eyes, a chiselled physique, glistening abs and a stoney, solid jaw that made him look like a famous aviator. He was the dream package. Everyone who met him told him he looked like a sober version of the guy out of Law & Order. Carvey signed him up and flew him to Milan where he wowed them wearing the new season's designs. One day he was drenching sheep and the next he was strutting his frame for the big names. The outrageous Bilal de' Molyneus said he was a natural. This is what Lance related to the press when he arrived for a shoot in Basel. He was in fine form. "Lance," he explained. "It means a pointy stick." When a member of the French press asked about his  contract, Lance said he would be reviewing it "anally".

"Anally?" asked the reporter, looking twice.

"Yeah. Every twelve months," said Lance, talking as if it was the reporter who was clueless.

As breeding stock the Bishops had known four or five generations of grinning ignoramuses. Lance was pure-bred (if indeed not in-bred.) He told the woman at the airport that he didn't want a window seat because he was afraid of mussing up his hair. All the same, he appeared in Cosmo, Blom, Alpha and Brut, among other lifestyle magazines. Then in June he was photographed pouting in his Y-fronts with a teddy bear by salon master Marlon Drochslesher. He had arrived.

It was after a show in the spring of that whirlwind year that he encountered ageing socialite Sonya Brickencraft who needed a toy-boy to appease her nagging melancholy. She found him slightly Kurt Russell.

"Do you find him slightly Kurt Russell?" she asked Alistair, her secretary.

"Slightly," he said.

This was good enough for her. She decided to marry him because, if nothing else, the reception would be a hoot and she could at last fulfil her long time ambition of parading around with an Australian bushman on her arm in front of Penelope Greystone and her crowd of ugly bitches.

"Ooo," she said, feeling his biceps at the wedding, "I like the way they breed 'em back in Bilooga."

"My grandma used to put sheep poo in my boots," said Lance, apparently misunderstanding.

Everyone looked at each other sideways.

"Quite," said Sonya, patting him on the head.  "Quite."

Unfortunately, the biceps from Bilooga only managed to amuse her for a further fortnight and after that he became the butt of her endless jokes. She nicknamed him "Einstein" and treated him with a calibre of contempt that outstreched the capacity of his rustic wit by several thousand miles. At length, she grew bitter.

When the women among a group of guests made intimations of her splendid fortune, she had to tell them the truth.

"Do you know Lance's idea of long and hard?" she asked. "Grade Four! Although, God knows, Grade Three was the worst six years of his life."

At this point Lance walked in with a leather jacket and his hair slicked back.

"Rebel without a clue," observed Sonya. Then, "You'll have to excuse Lance," she said, as he sat down with them, "He has a brain the size of a pea in the mornings."

"In the mornings?" asked someone.

"Sure," she said. "It swells up overnight. You know why God created Lance?" she continued rhetorically. "Because sheep can't bring icecubes from the fridge, that's why. Fetch me some icecubes will you Lance?"

Smiling, Lance slapped his knee, stood up again and said "Sure darl" in his usual goofy way and sauntered off to the kitchen wiggling his backside as he went.

"The thing I like about driving with Lance in the passenger's seat is that I don't feel guilty about parking in the handicap zone," concluded Sonya. "I knew there would be compensations."

Six months later, however, she swapped him for a doberman. The occasion was Lance swallowing a vitamin tablet at breakfast. "A tab-let," he ventured, obviously musing, "is a small tablet. Just like a starlet is a small star!" He announced it like a great discovery. He had just noticed the diminutive suffix -let on the end of tablet.

"But a tablet can't be a small tablet, because a full-sized one is also called a tablet," Sonya pointed out.

Lance didn't get it. "What do you mean?" he said.

Sonya looked at him, thought, then stood up. "That does it!" she said. "I'm getting me a doberman."

The exchange was made that afternoon. Lance returned home. He felt spat out, but Carvey Delure said that with a new hair-do and a miracle in elocution he might get a minor spot on the Bold and the Beautiful. This put him between lives. He went for walks in the forest. He explored the old mine sites and purple hills of toxic castings picturesque against the spare blue sky. Hot clean air. He caught up with his old flame, Linda Frimpsky from Elegant Ridge.

"So what's Paris like?" she asked, dreaming.

"Its good," said Lance thinking back. "Yeah good."

"That's good," said Linda. "Good."

"Yeah good," Lance agreed.

There are advantages to being cosmopolitan and scintillating repartee is one of them. He still thought a seizure was a Roman emperor but he was a man of the world and had seen the beautiful people and Linda Frimpsky was impressed. So too were several of the Walterses and other young men who all aspired to walk the walk and talk the talk and be snaffled up by ageing socialites in need of toy-boys and who held up Lance as their hero. He should have told them not to worry. They were handsome enough and dumb enough to go all the way. They had that famous Bilooga breeding. That very moment new talent scouts from the fashion halls of Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur were heading to the district to mine it for models. Americans were booking into motels in search of stars for Porky sequels. Bilooga rode the bump. There was a future for her sons after all.

By rights, it should have been the consultant to the second Bright report who took the credit, but Lance became the emblem of the newfound sense of achievement. He began to appear at fundraisers with his teddy bear and Y-fronts to relive the famous moment, and the crowds came along. The Chamber of Commerce funded the Lance Bishop Road to Milan Scholarship for many up and comings. He gave talks. He related anecdotes. He was guest of honour at the Lion's Club. He spoke to the Young Jewish Mans Association about the pitfalls of being a good looking Genital.

Then came the blue dildo controversy. It ruined his career. There is no need, dear reader, to relate the details of the whole affair, but it involved a female customs official, a Samoan tourist, a group of Catholic school girls and a very small and determined dog. It happened as he was leaving for a tour of Bali. It ruined his chances with Linda Frimpsky too. From there he went into a downwards spiral until at last he succumbed to his single greatest feat of stupidity when, at a low point in his days, he was talked into Pentecostalism and volunteered to preach the gospel to Muslims in wartorn Iraq. He renounced his former vanities and was suckered into saving souls.

Some were surprised at this apparent display of spiritual depth but, as his father observed, he might as well have gassed himself in the tractor shed. Sure enough, within three weeks he was captured by bearded mujahadeen who put out a video with their new camera. There was Lance, his hair immaculate, bound to a chair in an empty room.

"They're making bombs," he managed to whisper. "And they keep saying they've got nitrates. I don't know if they're cheaper than their day rates. It seems like a funny thing to tell me. As far as I'm concerned I'm staying here free. I'm not paying any rate!"

Not surprisingly, they chopped off his head. His body was never recovered but his head was mailed to his family in a gruesome delivery, who then preserved it for the Bilooga public library.

And that, dear reader, is where the present writer stands, not far from the DVD selection and the historical novels, trying to make sense of Lance Bishop, the Bilooga Himbo, on display. It has a glass case and a fluorescent mount. You can see where the curious poke the glass.

What moral might we draw? Perhaps a pun about getting ahead might be in order? Or perhaps this grisly memorial says more about free market economics? Perhaps it is a testament to how the fifth wave of post-industrial innovation swept the land? As a symbol there is an intriguing ambivalence. Is he a martyr to the War on Terror or to the War on Wrinkles? There's no hurry to find an answer. This emblematic handsomeness, somehow indigenous in this region, is frozen in formaldehyde and will remain as a stillpoint forever as the town's fortunes rise and fall with the on-going coagulations of the global curds and whey and their abstracted impact upon the rusted out communities right along the sturdy Nelson Ranges. 

The Drive-Thru Monstrosity

A fast food restaurant sends a small town into paroxysms of cultural outrage when it sponsors a surrealist sculptural installation near its drive thru.

Insurance salesman and authority on neo-surrealist performance art Clarke Marsby was among the first to see it. It was only eight oclock in the morning but, feeling peckish, he swung by the drive-thru in his tan coloured Toyota Festiva and leaned out at the pole to order a McBurger burger and Chunky Shake as usual. It was just as his eyes came back to the road that he noticed the new installation,  copper and aluminium glistening at strange angles in the morning sun, propped conspicuously in the vacant bit between the illuminated menu board and the sign pointing to the toilets. He shook his head and did a double take, just like in the movies. No mistaking it. French. Contemporary neo. The influence of Louis Dirshan perhaps.

He drove up to the window - where stood Fastidious Maureen - to collect his meal.

"What's with the monstrosity?" Clarke asked. "It's a bit early surrealist, isn't it? I mean, you can see the allusions to Andre Breton's early theories there, the juxtapositions, the debt to Freud, don't you think?"

"Yeah, that's what everyone's saying," said Maureen, handing over the burger. "Although I can see more of the Brussell's school than anything myself."

Clarke considered this as an interesting possiblity - and one he hadn't entertained - but was more inclined to his own reading, just on the evidence of the pointy bits sticking out the left side. In any case, he, Maureen and most everyone agreed that anything prior to Duchamp's first Paris phase was gauche, and this piece was clearly in the wrong camp.

"Unbelievable," said Clarke, shaking his head. He was truly taken aback.

He paid for the food and drove off at high speed, rushing to catch his friend Blicker before Blicker went to work teaching Art History at the local polytechnic. He caught him just as he was backing down the driveway.

"You should see it Blicker! Ghastly. A poor imitation of Jean Pierre Auvantaleiu's disasterous 2006 catalogue. Nothing more."

Blicker drove down to see for himself.

By this time a small crowd of townspeople had gathered around, most of them aghast. Some were comparing it to the failed poetry of Pierre Reverdy! Blicker had a look and was outraged. He stormed inside and demanded to see the manager. The manager was a nineteen year old named Darren of the Pimples who had started as a bacon tosser when he was sixteen and worked his way to the top. At first he thought Blicker was another customer disgruntled about the soft pastry on the apple fritters, but he soon understood otherwise.

"You can see the influence of Apollonaire there, can't you!?" Blicker demanded to know, making Darren look at the monstrosity out the drive-thru window.

"Well, spacially," Darren retorted, "I think its more early Dali than anything else. Dali-let-loose-at-a-metal-recyclers is what some people are saying."

Blicker was dumbfounded.

"What?  You're kidding me! This is way before Dali!"

In response Darren drew attention to certain themes in the early folios of Dali's pen and ink work. The same zeitgeist, he said.

In league with Clarke and now with a few others, Blicker stormed out vowing to go to local government to have the offending eye-sore removed. It was, as Clarke observed, a traffic hazard, if nothing else. He'd almost crashed his Festiva into the railing when he saw it. More patriotically, Blicker wanted to know what people were going to think? "They'll think," he said, "that this town is still stuck in the period of the Manifestos, as if the Dada Revolution never happened!"

Once word got around others shared the same concern. "It makes us look like bogans," complained Les Harrier from the Post Office. "Just looking at it, you'd say to yourself, 'Now there's a town where people don't know a rip-off of Yves Tanguy's 1942 masterpiece Indefinite Divisibility when they see one."

The local celebrity and retired lawn bowl's champion Grisly Miller - usually cautious on controversies pertaining to surrealist art - agreed that it did lend the unfortunate impression that the people of the town didn't know Arshile Gorky from Conroy Maddox and the British revisionists.

Ben from Nelson Irrigation Supplies across the highway, who wandered over during morning tea, was of the opinion that the surrealist preoccupation with the irrational had been at the expense of the more positive outlook of the constructivists - just the sort of thing a hardware man might say - but he did agree that the monstrosity looked like a cheap parody with 3D pretensions to Ernst Fuchs. What a mess! The artist had ventured bravely into the collective unconcious of post-industrial man and recovered nothing more convincing than the innards of a washing machine doing a vacuum cleaner doggy-style. It was anachronistic. It was cliched. It was not what people wanted to see as they salivated over burgers and fries.

Soon the townspeople as one were referring to the sculpture - officially titled Analytics/Distrust:Homage to a Lemon - as the "Drive-Thru Monstrosity." It transpired that the McBurger management had bought the piece for $45,000 at an auction in Sydney, funded dollar for dollar by the National Modern Towns Civic Enhancement Program. There were no tenders. The Council was in on it and there were rumours of kick-backs. The artist, a Master's graduate from the University of New South Wales who claimed to be related (conjugally at least) to Brett Whitely, had composed his thesis on the turtle motif in Man Ray and was now enjoying a plush residency in southern Spain. In his absence he was berated in the local press as a frenzy of writers appealed to Letters to the Editor. Bill Thompson from Golden Square wrote pointing out that the term 'Drive-thru Monstrosity' seemed to imply that the monostrosity could be driven through. Someone replied the next day, "For Godssakes Bill, don't give 'em ideas!" while another wit wrote and said he'd like to drive thru it indeed - right through it! The media joined the chorus. The headline ran, 'WHAT NEXT? CUBISM?' The Mayor's Office intervened and offered the limpidistic assurance that the installation would grow on people. (After all, the botched refurbishment of the pedestrian mall did.) Another wit said that the term "monstrosity" was, in any case, unnecessary, since this "Homeage to a Lemon" was a lemon sure enough, and he sensed post-modern self-referencing smart-arsery. He complained that these days you can't trust even bad art not to be a stunt sending up bad art.

Things started to get nasty when, one morning, the risen sun revealed the sculpture adorned with fish and cigars, a gesture poking fun at its provenance. Then, another morning, it was emblazened with a cross-section of the most tiresome of surrealist slogans, all of them implying - somewhat in a pop art style - that "this flavor's lost its taste." Every Saturday night the town's teenage revellers used the piece as a bottle opener and then, later the same night, as a venue for clumsy copulations. The real mystery was when someone threw a few tins of old paint at it more or less in the style of Jackson Pollock. A crack-down on welfare fraud a few years earlier had inadvertantly purged the town of abstract expressionists, but now it seemed at least one was still hiding somewhere in the suburbs and this controversy drew him from his lair.

In all of this Blicker was the most passionate objector. He had devoted 25 years of his life as an educator and class-room innovator to ensuring that the people of the region had a good overview of surrealist movements up to and including the contemporary revivals in New York and Madrid. He wasn't going to sit idly by and watch some monstrosity in a drive-thru make a mockery of his life's work. He gathered petitions and wrote to polititians. He organised a rally but called it off because of rain. He and Clarke and local art activist Brian Lannigan were nevertheless photographed giving V for Victory signs with soggy banners reading 'Surrealism Deserves Better' in the shelter of what would have been a cake stand and fundraiser had the day been clear.

Finally, though, it was the brute reality of economics that triumphed. The price of copper went up and a ute load of youths from a car yard in Bixley Downs drove over in the middle of the night, lifted the monstrosity with a winch, took it away, melted it down and sold it for $241.50 US an ounce as a means of funding their amazing cannabis addiction. In the ensuing investigation, the Closed Circuit TV evidence was inconclusive and charges were never laid.

That morning Clarke Marsby swung his Festiva in off the main street and started down the drive-thru in his usual way, but this morning no eye-sore to put him off his food.

He mentioned it to Fastidious Maureen.

"I see the monstrosity's gone," he said.

"Yeah," she said, "Someone took it in the middle of the night." She paused as she fitted the milkshake into the cardboard holder. "Not surprised, given the price of copper," she added. Then she opined, "I'd like to see something from the later Berlin School, or even the Vienna circle, in that spot. Wouldn't you?"

"Yes," Clarke said. "Something appropriate."

Personally, he felt the town needed a healthy dose of late Magritte. Something to teach the Lacanian realists a lesson.

He took his McBurger burger and Chunky Shake and drove away and headed to Blicker's house hoping to catch him before class with the reassuring news. 

Mikhail of the Lindemanns

Mikhail, a physics genius 50 years ahead of his time, has his scientific spirit crushed because he parts his hair the wrong way.

One might have thought he could adjust, but genius wields a stubborn whip and, speaking metaphorically, wears knee-high leather boots such that nimble gestures never quicken in their step. Marconi wouldn't shine his shoes. Tesla wouldn't change his underwear.

Thus was Mikhail of the Lindemanns a victim of obsession and the ill-fortunes of his time. It was only 1866. Fifty years before the Copenhagen hypothesis and sixty before the geometric ruins of Von Neuberg's catastrophe. Yet, in this misty dawn of the modern world, Mikhail had hit upon the hidden variable. "There is a sub-atomic system," he said, "Really, really little. It moves but tiny fractions in long, dry nanoseconds even as the universe that is known to us seems to inch along unnoticed." He formulated this mathematically. Through his own musings and delicate calculations on a chalk-board he had chanced upon non-locality, struck by the meaninglessness of both time and space, and he had furthermore cracked the code of quanta even before the experts posed the problem. These were items all unknown in the circles of the day. Newton prevailed. Einstein was still in diapers.

The tragedy of it, though, was that Mikhail's parents, Sergio and Natasha, didn't rate his theories very highly. They were more concentrated on the fact that he wore his hair parted in a somewhat outlandish manner. Various neighbours had remarked upon it and several people stared. "For God's sake son," said his father. "Take a blasted comb to your head and do not shame us!"

Mikhail saw nothing wrong. "But I like it the way it is," he would say.

His mother pleaded.

"Son, son," she sobbed, "do what your father says!"

Mikhail tried parting to the left but felt that it made him look a dill. The fashion, in any case, was for a loose, angular arrangement, carefully held in place by a greasy application. Need he be so old fashioned?

His father explained, at this point, that his father and his father's father always parted their follicles in the said way, and it had saved them from the poor house and made their name a thing of wide respect. His grandfather, after whom Mikhail he always said took his bearing, was even rumoured to be handsome precisely because of the careful way he parted in a straight and tidy line and combed his cow's lick sideways at a meticulous angle. 

"I'd like to study among the brainy Hapsburgs," said Mikhail.

 His father grew cross.

"You're not studying anything looking like that!" he cried.

"There must be some reason," Mikhail went on, "why the non-local particles can bump into each other even though they're distant and remote. It violates all known thermodynamics. If we could unscramble the nucleoids and liberate the energy proportionate to the mass times the energy squared we could quickly build a massive bomb, I'm certain!"

 "Are your socks clean?" asked his father.

 "We could split the unsplittable," affirmed Mikhail. "We could harness the blinding breath of galaxies and sunbursts!"

 "Why won't you wear the shirt your mother bought you?" asked his father persisting.

Mikhail shrugged his shoulder with a wince.

One might have thought, as said before, he could adjust, compromise, do what it takes, meet them half way, accommodate, take the middle course, but once more genius is unyielding. It is, in any case, a random affair. It is a mutation of the nexus. It comes accompanied by minute inflexibilities and obdurate will. Fibonacci picked his nose in public. Blase Pascal refused to clean his teeth. Worse than that, in this instance, great streams of calculus poured through Mikhail's mind and he simply didn't care what his father's simple fears might be. Mighty rivers of algebra cascaded over all his thoughts such that might be misunderstood as headstrong. One day he decided he should tell somebody. But no sooner had he turned the door handle to creep out into the evening when his father called, "Mikhail is that you?" He came rushing in from the chilly parlor. "Just as I thought!" he said, pointing. "Wretched, miserable, child! You're not going anywhere parting your hair to the right!"

Mikhail tried to be indignant.

"Left or right! Is it a matter of vital concern?" he trembled.

"We'll tell that to Bismark!" said the father. "Where would Europe be if he thought left and right were not of vital concern?"

Defeated, Mikhail trudged back upstairs.

That night he anticipated the Rosen-Podolosky Effect and devised new models of the state vector. In particular, he proposed that any statements about what might have been are useless since any state vector can be regarded as the superposition of other state vectors. Energy, he decided, has strange relations with mass.

Late, his mother came with the voice of reason.

"Just try it," she urged. "Part it to the left and see what a difference it makes."

"I've tried it," said Mikhail. "It made me look like a wanted poster!"

"Nonsense," said his mother. "It could only enhance your cheeks, your brow, your manly profiles. Try it for me. Try it for your father. They say you're like your grandfather, you know."

For Mikhail it was a matter of principle. "I'm only interested in hydrogen molecules," he said.

"Must you torment your father like this?" his mother asked.

"It would only take a small quantity of atoms to provoke a mess of fission," Mikhail surmised.

His father, it should be noted, was a reasonable soul. He believed in national fiscal policy and the sway of influential relatives. His tastes, nevertheless, were formed in the relative vacuum of the Thirties in that grim hiatus between the bloomers and the serrated ruff. He had blithely ignored a whole sequence of innovations regarding the neck-tie that even less well-to-do men had acquired, and he earnestly regretted what others labeled items of health and progress. His gravest fear in life was that the Von Crustworts further up the road might one day discover the sum of his weekly wage. He held financial confidentiality - especially from one's fellow workers and from the Von Crustworts - to be sacrosanct beyond all measure.

"You're not wearing that old jacket out, are you?" he'd say.

Mikhail would explain that, if sub-quanta can be both waves and particles simultaneously, it hardly matters what jacket one wears out, does it?

His father would misinterpret this as a challenge to a fight with bar-stools and fire pokers. "You're just not taking life seriously, son," he'd say.

Mikhail's mother would then point out the various streaks of grey in her husband's hair, nominating causality. Large patches of grey were caused, she said, by the time Mikhail wore a scruffy undershirt and parted in a somewhat peculiar fashion at a dinner party attended by the regional manager. Similarly, the grey tips, especially on the temples, were caused by the time Mikhail forgot to get his neck trimmed and turned up undergroomed when Herr Bronswicksterken from the bank arrived for supper unexpected. To make matters worse, Mikhail had shocked him with talk of the Uncertainty Principle, decades ahead of its time. He was firing on all guns. He stared the guest down. "Esse est percepi!" he urged, again and again, as his parents clammered around holding his coat-tails and pleading with him to desist. Such episodes had left their mark upon his father, so his mother said.

"Here, look in the mirror," she said, sticking a mirror inches from his nose.

"Mother!" he said.

"What do you see Mikhail? Hydrogen? Nitrogen? Protons?"

"No mother."

"No? My god, son! Look at your part! It's most irregular! Look!"

"You can't see protons, mother," he then went on. "They're very tiny. You'll never see them in a mirror. Actually, I suspect that when we fully understand the mechanics of the sub-molecular realm we will discover that the vital principle of such mechanics is that nothing in the state vector finally has the slightest reality beyond the perception of the observer, so that in that sense protons are so tiny they don't even exist outside of the conceptual frameworks necessary to discuss them at all."

His mother looked at him, her eyes searching over his face for some clue, anything.

"If you dare talk to me like that again," she said, "I'II tell your father! He can deal with you!"

In his private time Mikhail devised the neutron particle accelerator and the cathode ray tube no less than ninety-three years before the invention of television. He sketched plans for a high-end selenium amplifier to test his theory that the momentum of photons has a discrete numerical value the same as b where b is the frequency of spectrum radiation measured against the earth's unified energy mode or b + hT/c = E where c is never greater than 1. His father wasn't amused.

"You know what the men at the mill were saying this afternoon, don't you?" he asked, rhetorical. "They were saying that a man who has a solid hairstyle has a decent grip on life. That's what they were saying! These are practical men, Mikhail. Men with mortgages. Men with zinc ore and open pit commodities in their blood. Men with wives and drooling grand children. Men with cabbages in their gardens!"

Mikhail daydreamed about electromagnetic spool differentials and the number of real molecules in a mixed state probability distribution.

Exasperated, his father put his face in his hands. He looked up and once more saw his son's wayward part crossing his head rightwards against all the family norms. Again his face fell into his hands and he started sobbing. Where, O where, had he gone wrong?

***

Mikhail attended high school with only moderate success and when he turned eighteen - his parents deciding to put a stop to all the rot - he was apprenticed to a butcher. Like all trainees he began with washing sheep kidneys and mincing up the sausage.

 "Ordinarily," he bemused, hacking at a bone, "information is transmitted as an ordering of energy (or energies), or as a signal, as we say..." Customers waited for salami. "But suppose there is an instantaneous transfer of order from one place to another, remote in time and space, without any transfer of energy?" A nobbly white joint, almost hard plastic, stood in his way. "You can't transfer energy," he reasoned, "but no one said anything about information..."

He soon concluded that, deep within the meltdown at the very crack of time, is a spark of information, a truth too intense for the world. He ventured the theory that where (P)t/a then (Q)y on the assumption that particles travel at a constant velocity and that Q has an expectation value equal to any given wave function.

Many of his customers remarked upon his odd method of hair style but none with open disapproval. Besides, as the years went by, and the price of beef went down, new trends struggled up the Danube and a fresh breeze crept into public life. The parting of his ways hardly seemed as unrelenting as it had. Some people seemed to think it just "endearing". Most were more concerned about rumours of his suspect smallgoods and liver.

And indeed, for all his stiff stylistics and those knee-high leather boots that kept him so unbending, Mikhail learnt the chop and grind of his trade and grew to be accustomed with it all. Slowly, his thoughts turned to how to make a steel blade that would never let the blood stains mix, a single innovation, he decided, could save a butcher nearly twenty hours a week on his hands and knees scrubbing at the knives and toothy hackaways. He kissed physics goodbye and started to dream of black puddings, honeyed hams, pork hocks, chuck ribs, blade roast, top shanks, lean brisket, veal shoulder, cutlets, braising chine, cured bratwurst, rookwurst, mettwurst, knackwurst, kaserkrainer, kransky, haggis, salamis, pepperonis, oso bucco, rack of lamb and smoked tasso kishka.

In due course there came a point where he decided that perhaps he should get married.

Nothing had changed.

"You'll need a suit," said his father. "You can't get married in the one you've got. Where are you going to get a new suit?"

"And you'll need a wife," said his mother. "Where are you going to get a wife? Look at your moustache. Couldn't you have it trimmed? You're driving your father grey, you are, you're driving your father grey!"

Mikhail's theorems are recorded for the sake of history only by accident. A Professor of Mathematics, Herr Schoekelgruber-Nashings made remarks upon them in his notebooks after marking term papers on a contract in the ninth grade. His notes say words to the effect that he, the Professor, hopes to one day test the "alarming hypotheses" of this "intense fellow with the scraggy part" whom he also notes, without comment, was soon leaving for a career in the sausage industry. His parents had once come up to seek the Professor's support.

"If it came from you," said his mother, "he might take notice. He respects you."

"Just tell him to part it to the left, for goodness sake!" said his father. "A three-month trial period! Please!"

On this occasion his father spoke as one man to another.

The professor agreed, but never fulfilled his promise. The term ended. The students drifted off to salt baths, health resorts, beer festivals or medieval occupations, and Mikhail of the Lindemanns took up the axe and the chopping block and learnt to smoke his bacon.

Only now and then, when the universe posed a puzzle as it sometimes will, did he stop to contemplate the strange projections of the atom or the vast potential in a mere drop of solid matter, or the bizarre meanderings of the electron in a blind fit of quantum decoherence, a prodigy, a trailblazer, a pioneer that few recall and the history books might only mention in a footnote.