I.
Mary Leunig has learned to levitate. Her plaid skirt sweeps the open air as she rises above the school yard skipping rope and off into eternity. Do you think I can float, too? I ask my cousin Sammy sitting by the hopscotch squares. She shakes her head but I call the Vice Chancellor and he assures that all I need is surgery to bring the essentials out. Sam seems cynical, and she asks how a schoolboy would have the number of such an important person. Who can say? Up into the clouds and far away goes Mary Leunig at our little lunch. A joke occurs to me: what’s blue and black and big all over? The sea, the sea, the sea.
II.
Sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. The cruise liner we’re aboard groans its golden towers sideways over the vast sea, pitching and rolling, and I am Donald Trump’s doppelganger. The cruise came with drink vouchers and by now I’m so sacked the room is spinning as it rises and falls o’er the waves. The councilmen of international affairs are picking at the sea turtle avocados and giant marzipan swans. A woman in gold Lycra sings Tina Turner classics to leftover applause. At the far table are the great writers of the post-anthropic scene: Richard Flanagan; Judith Bordertown; Long LeFosse. They are standing on their chairs with medallions advertising lost books noosed round their necks. A political pundit well known for sobriety is saying there’s a war for the end of the world raging in the middle east. He calls it the death of conscience and sips cab sav. His lips are pink. He is conversing with a cultural theorist named Bensen, who replies with spontaneous review of contemporary affairs: all it offers readers, he says, is alliteration and a-textural tectonics, like a swamp stiff wafting its scapula waters akin to ethnic cleansing propaganda. The captain attempts to talk through the sound system, while the waves beat white and black on tower windows. He is trying to remember what epoch ending errors have been inculcated in the navigational charts. Pounding waves are pompous. What a laugh, I say to a faceless bureaucrat, pointing at the watery windows. It’s sad, but I recall how tall I am: Trump-foot-six in my suit and lobstered salmon tie. The secret service grab the hilts of their heavy bolters and fasten bayonets to muzzles. Remember, I announce looking over the marvellous crowd of eminent law as they fall to silent attentions, there are three witches perched in a peaty inclination musing over what’s to be done with the Scot. And yet, there’s a hadron collision in all revelation, pounding psi beyond measure, like the waves that say I am I am I am in every last modality. The room pitches and rolls, but only water replies, fulminating ‘gainst wide glass with the astral impotence of mongrelled nature’s divine protest.
III.
Through the darkened streets the carnal headlights pave illusions of progress. Brad Pitt goes by on a Harley in full leathers and another biker with a chain round both shoulders is on our other side. They flash and thunder through the thin illumination. Must be a biker town, my mysterious passenger says. Who the hell are you? There’s a gun in the glovebox with my name on it. Take it out and tuck ‘er in my jeans. The passenger and I are both dressed like Jesus in denim. A sign on the road reads ‘Now Entering Islamic State’. That’s bad timing. There’s shotgun scatter punctuation on the road-signs and the brazier glow of great fires fume in the distance. This is my retirement job, I tell the other Jesus and we drive in silence for a while. An enormity of sudden shrapnel sounds pierce the air and shatter glass and craunch through the car. We’re under attack! Jesus wept. All explodes. Allahu Ackbar! Blood erupts from my buddy’s body. It’s just me now, and I fall from the wreckage into the long grass by the roadside when the firing’s finished. It’s cold and insect quiet and I crawl and crawl. The heap of smouldering violence steams behind me. My legs are broken. The unforgiving minute fills with nerve and sinewy. At last I come to a fireside where Brad and his biker friend are frying franks in a camp cook. ‘Glad you could join us!’ Pitt says. His famed features are shadowed and swept in the flame’s lusty oscillation. The biker is hunched in the dark. Fat from the franks hisses in the flickering fire. It takes every exertion available to pull the pistol out, aim up high, and blow both their spirits free. The dead choir of gloom swallows mistakes up like a snake with dislocated jaw, eating all creation until dawn dissolves to new positions and divisions.
Air. Water. Fire. An elemental triptych of Summertime dreams.