I.
The lunch bell tolls, and Drew continues monologuing about his Babylonian girlfriend’s Only Fans account. There’s no one else enrolled at this school, not since the woodchipper prank went sideways. No teachers neither, just Drew and me. At the end of the hall are two simulated double doors and a digital banner advertising a ‘Film Festival for the All Times.’ There’s no law that says we have to go in, but we both know it’s happening. ‘You think there’s any medication to prevent our participation?’ I ask Drew, but he’s too uptight to speculate. There’s no one at the festival, of course, just an old projector clicking over for a bunch of empty chairs spilt out in the gym and a lot of spent confetti on the floor. Two silhouettes are fighting like Kabuki snakes on the screen. It’s Wes and Arnold, you can just tell by the shape of their shades. The rumour was that they’d been turned into figments of some Hollywood producer’s perverse imagination. Drew tells me to wander into the frame and free them, somehow. Getting my body into the beams of light is like trying to enter a needle’s eye, but I manage it by degrees, then climb up into the film itself to separate Wes and Arnold with a few transcendental manoeuvres the Laotian priests taught me during my staycation in Coober Pedy. It’s raining heavy in the world of film. No wonder people don’t go to the cinema anymore. ‘It’s a Western,’ Arnold explains once we go through the swinging doors of an old saloon and settle down. He’s wearing a black hat and has a six shooter on his hip. ‘There any indoor plumbing in these parts?’ I ask Wes. He smiles and reveals a row of golden teeth shining sparkly for the audience at home. ‘It’s worse than that,’ Wes says, and then tosses me a newspaper print. My face is on the front page, in black and white, Wanted Dead or Alive. The article’s small print alleges I’m trying to produce a reality television program demonstrating that the AIDS epidemic never happened. ‘In this dimension, you’re worse than J.K. Rowling,’ Arnold says, affixing a sheriff’s badge to his poncho. ‘Pure hogwash,’ I tell him. ‘You know how the mainstream media mucks these rumours out like cholera,’ He spins the barrel of his big iron, and a snatch of tumble weed rolls off set, out into the black void of the stormy desert wastes like some stray symbolic unit of a phlegmatic universal.
II.
Old Gord has his new lady with him at the school dance. They go round and round, while the wallflowers watch like panoptic monads for any sign of contradiction. ‘It’s a different kinda Christmas,’ Katherine says. She’s hanging something red on the top of a dead willow tree. Looks like an organ that can speak, but I don’t know what it’s saying. The little red mouth moves up and down and some small bones in my spine reverberate in mute response. Two Indo-European kids are playing with a clutch of pearls, and there are cats coming in and out of a revolving door by the plastic treehouse. A pallbearer arrives, towing an inground pool like Lucky from Godot, and the water within is so warm your skin swells up the moment you break the rolling surface. ‘We’re like lobsters,’ Katherine says. She kicks naked out into the deep and the hall lights flicker so that I see everyone’s skeletons in the flashing dark. In the distant corner of the room, near the esky hills, are a couple of Old Boys in overalls. One of them holds up a vinyl record when I get too close. He squints at me and says, ‘You wanna guess how much oil it takes to make one of them bad boys?’ Chewing tobacco is running down his cheek like a broken septic tank. I’m soaking wet and our mutual moisture makes me nervous. ‘You a truckie?’ the other one asks, and I just nod, real slow. ‘You ever seen a dead man drive?’ he asks. I keep nodding, water dripping from the tip of my nose. ‘There’s a body coming for us,’ he says. ‘Coming to this room, tonight.’ He grins, and I can hear it, like a long form curse. The sound of his teeth and the muscles in his jaw are making music. It’s like a steam-engine made of meat. ‘Not a damn thing anyone can do about it,’ he says, and starts-up an electric laugh track from his mouthy motor. His laugh is like a bat squealing in a cathedral organ. I excuse myself and peek outside at the streets. There is nothing but churches in the Surry Hills twilight, and an endless parade of mourners in black hoods heading for some distant blue aurora settling over the city like an archon’s malevolent effulgence.
III.
The court condemns the danger I keep posing to civil society. The judge calls me ‘a shoddy nobody who never did nothing right,’ and the court artist keeps scrunching my portrait up and starting again. ‘The defendant keeps moving, your honour!’ he curses me in the name of the demiurge, and the judge tells him to shut his blasphemous mouth. My defence attorney died a few weeks into the trial, but they just left his corpse in the bar chair next to mine. Every now and then he seems to scream ‘Objection!’ but they reckon it’s just gas leaving the body. I asked the judge if I’m still expected to pay for this sort of deceased representation, but he wasn’t interested in entertaining that line of questioning. The victim’s family keeps texting me all these fanciful obscenities. You can almost feel them, the way they breathe is so damp and loud. At least there are windows, and I can watch the soldiers marching up and down the main street with their bayonets flashing in the firelight. All week the protestors have been burning and pillaging. Baying for blood on the evening news. The prosecution puts on a pair of black gloves, attaches a sabre to his hilt, and challenges the entire jury to trial by ordeal. ‘Your honour?’ The jury foreman wants to know if this sort of treatment is strictly legal, but no sooner the question leaves his lips he gets a sabre slash – a sottano cut it’s called – to the throat, and his arterial blood sprays out across the room like a human hydrant. If ever there was a good time to do the old ‘turn into a serpent and slither an escape’ routine, this must be it. I shed my sacks of skin, and crawl bellied for the courthouse doors, eating the dust of all my days along the winding way.