I.
The terrorist boy turns out okay. Sock-puppet innocence. Not a bad kid besides his wild white eyes and the trail of plasma leak from the ears. We climbs and climbs, we do, up to the diving board – one mile high in the susurrating air and we talks. No speaks with the other boys, he says. They taunt and saw the news about his abnormal ways. So he says. It’s said a liar looks to worlds with lying eyes. How’m I sposed to know, with mirrors? Don’t look down is tattooed on the platform’s tiles. A long way to fall, I say sincerely. He nods and takes a bite of sandwich he’s pulled out a Reedbok backpack, still in cellophane. The wrapper blows the breeze when he gets to the crust,
dancing in their air like a cosmonaut sucked into the vacuity of space. The boy is trembling and weeping, he has made the fatal mistake of looking down. Honestly, you’d think a terrorist chile would know. As my father used to say, they don’t have them on building sites. The cellophane is still dancing in their air, like a slight glitch in the all spark.
II.
This concert arrives, this person that I do not know – he drives us through lysergic streets. Who are my people? They stand in barbarous queues buying snacks vendor machines as the sun goes down over the colossal white dome of ANZAC arena and a great crowd of ravers dressed in dayglo 80s steampunk gathers, winged. Concentric circles on a hissing conveyor delivers bags of chicken twisties and boxes of buttery corn cobs like the industrial revolution is back in town. One for the road, a cleft palate blonde announces and dribbles down her chin between a tattoo of Woody Allen’s eyes. You can hear the clinking clanking clattering collection of collagenous junk as it whirls surrealist and leaks into open air like an alien call to prayer. The lines under the dome’s prosceniums are long and nearly naked but for the half-machinery of cosplayer costumes. One large lady pushes in and gets pushed back by a dreadlocked rasta who oinks and shoves with exoskeletal appendage. This person I don’t know has fogged into the crowd and disappeared. Was I supposed to watch the Stranger? Bodies shuffle and press on like a motored meat-locker and a woman’s skin is moist to touch. How does she live like boiled fruit left in absentia? Pulsing music threatens thunder closer to the gates and archways shake and crack. A smell of rot as the dark descends and a girl with glowsticks snaked round her arms blows kisses over a laz-cannon perched on barest shoulder. Someone must have spiked the water – I’m lost in vertiginous glaze for hours, until I see the solid geometry of giant stairs. Big black blocks leading to immense curtains. The music thunders internal, gooning at my organs in a song the stranger taught me: Victoria Gargantua Take Me Home. Go up onto the stage, Matthew says – he teleported in and his eyes are grey and his hair’s white as albino down and my feet shiver to follow his bony finger aim. There is a secret just behind this final moment’s gesture. A Phil Spector phalanx of hieroglyphic ecstasies just beyond the motley curtain’s afterlife sigh. It wails, calling, like a devil choir made god-headed, shaking off an avalanche of sin.
III.
Mum puts the Camry in reverse and we crash into a Ford. I keep demanding answers: why did you reverse us like that? No reason, she says. The other driver is a dummy. Literally. Some poor assemblage of silicon and e-bay stiches. Is he radioactive? Mum asks. Yes, Pal. There’s a bumper sticker on the back of his head. It’s the sermon on the mount in itty bitty comic sans. You’d need a microscope to read it, Mum says. Are we on candid camera? A vague sense that someone far away is playing pranks on us. Not just my mother, not I. An old man seeing all our troubles and comes over to say: It’s against the law to leave the scene of crimes, but you can carry on committing till your heart’s contented. His beard is full of thistles and thorns. Like a trail of tears, he says, and bursts into a medley of toothless laughing. He shouldn’t have said that, Mum says. One long stretch of napalm jelly leaps out of my flammenwerfer and a bag of steaming bone’s all that’s left of him when violence is done. We hoist the dummy on my back like a bad habit. It will be ages and ages hence to walk a ways home, Mum says. And that will make all the difference, I say. There are sirens calling in the distance. The world flashes red and blue along constellations of grey concrete and night gums shake along another endless highway out of all towns.