bottles, the clink of bottles on the beach, and she wanders into the scene. Some of the boys are digging the swell, running up their boards laid out next to Thommo K. while the belly of Nicky the Greek is exposed and the bandage that The Dutch insists be kept on awhile is tossed on the sand and no one is quite sure what such a needle gore tattoo might be. “A wolf,” Nicky is insisting. “A werewolf!” No no! “A goat!” a voice cries out. Ho ho! “A hungy boar.” And the mound in the sand is pried open until the aroma of pork cooking begins to spill into the moment. . . . Tito Livio and Siemens Roszak are laughing and so is the song, a shindig, a clambake kind of wail, and mama steps up to the fire and says now, “Is this spot taken hey?” Something tiny and glowing and smoky is being passed along and it reaches her and maybe she partakes and maybe she doesn’t. Man! who can be sure, but the sun is completely gone from the scene now and if there is light she is making it herself . . . and mama says, “Some party!” Ummm! Hmmpf! “Maybe we should split.” So then she walks off along the shore and the tide is coming right up onto the dry sand and a thousand eyes are watching and she lets the sea drag at her feet . . . but now she is not alone. And when they have all passed beyond the twinkle of city light which might have identified one or the other . . . when they have passed beyond . . . she reaches down, or across, or around Who knows? . . . She keeps her eyes shut the whole time. . . . She reaches. She fugs. She plucks. She takes a pop there on the dying warmth of the Queenscliff stretch. She takes one against the sea wall where the rock makes a landscape of his behind. She leads one blindly to the grassy verge and covers him like the dew. She topples one into the whitewater and flips with him like a porpoise. She chases one to the sea caves and finds the entrance to her liking. (Yes, she is saying yes I will Yes) She turns him on his side and joins with him like his double. She holds his hands above his head and demands of him like his captor. She touches him at a distance and calls him: “Laddie, daddie che che choo.” And when the night is almost over and someone is waking and crying “O no, babe, not now, I . . .” she puts her fingers to his lips and shines down on him again in the red light of morning.
Sc.2
Mare Ingenii
The repeated cycle of the moon as it grew from a tiny
crescent to a full moon, shrank again to a tiny crescent,
vanished, and reappeared, was interpreted as the actions
of a deity who turned her face toward and away from the
earth, or who was born, died, and was born again.
—Dr. B. M. French, The Moon Book
3 Freeing the School
And now, with the wind gusting to thirty knots from the sou’east and the rain in whorls and twists about our parapets, a knock at Maxim’s door. Who could it be this late in the evening?
- - - - -
O sweet babaloos! What’s wrong? Wow! you shouldn’t be out with this storm going on! What? Bad dreams? Of Manticora, no doubt. Come in. Come in. Ummmm, dry yourselves. Sure thing, it does that to me too. Man, all those crazy sub-titles on True Crimes: MOTORPSYCHO NIGHTMARE, and CONTRACTS SIGN AWAY FROZEN EMBRYOS. Puts us in a mind here to do away with the spoken word completely. But how did you manage . . .
Ho! Ho! Don’t you realize: vigilance is your mamas’ strong point? Unless? Perhaps a little methaqualone dropped into their . . .
Well, sure, all drugs is dodgy, but some is more dodgy than others.
. . . Nevertheless, warm yourselves. Gather round. I’m nearly up to the part where I reveal who is your . . .
O, you know?
Then something tells me you weren’t afraid at all.
I thought not! So I suppose now you’d like to hear what happened after . . .
Arrrhh! so that’s what’s going on! Yes, it’s true: the kites were very popular. But before we fly kites . . . Well sure, kites were the beginning. Aren’t we all somehow related here to the famous engineer Kungshu Phan who mentioned them in 400 BCE? Yes read—it’s a start! (‘How long ago is that?’) Before you were born! Giambattista della Porta describes a flying sayle in his fairytale Magiae Naturalis but . . . Sure, sure Isaac Newton also. The very same. Discovered the law of gravity, created calculus, discovered white light is made up, as everyone knows, of infinite colors. All that—and kites also. Alexander Graham Bell who had Ho! Ho! wind bags of another sort in mind. (Babaloos long in the womb wondering: “Bags?” “Wind?”) And B. F. S. Baden-Powell whose brother, Lord, gave yours truly something to do on a Friday night dressed, as Sgt Atherton showed me, in woggle, lanyard and badges of proficiency and, of course, surely to tell you about Lawrence Hargrave. But let me just mention . . . because while we’ve been talking Daffodil Rosa has been hurrying home in the dark. She doesn’t realize five hundred million tiny tadpoles have been sent swimming. Fast swimmers and slow. Offering now, two degrees of magnification: one in which a labyrinthine interior of Daffodil herself leads to dead ends and dark uninhabitable recesses; another in which a luminous halo of nutrient floats in suspended inner space. Fatherly tail strokes propel, while Daffodil Rosa, propelled by imagined threats of her impresario mother, passes the harbor in which fishing boats carrying refugee doctors, lawyers and journalists are floating, passes under the branches of the corkwood tree from which hyoscine, the native drug for seasickness, is produced, passes the Victorian mansion of the never-smiling bushman Philosopher Smith, built on the discovery of a massive lode of tin at Mt Bischoff. Incipient forests of cilia. And now a mere pool full of swimmers are left—carrying twenty-three chromosomal formulations (mathematics casting another line into my life). Babaloos paternal genotype looking way ahead by being shaped not so much like kites but like the rocket train of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Admirable like the prototypes of Alamogordo physicists who came forward on V-E Day. Guided as if by gyroscopes and leveling pendulums. Like A-4s, V-2s whizzing out from Peenemönde in the direction of Piccadilly Cervix with the hopes of the Wehrmacht attached to them. They jostle and jive on the strength of mitochondria until finally they toss off their enzymic acrosomes, curl streamers of X or Y in celebration of the high times ahead, and so . . . Corona radiata. Two nuclei. Morula. Blastocyst. Zona pellucida. Endometrium. These things matter.
“Hee hee hee,” cries my eldest son from his wheelchair, “but is it true, pop—that for nearly twelve months no one noticed you at all?”
Well, sure . . . but let me tell you: right from the start I was as hopeful as Pandora and as jolly as a sandboy. The world at that time was no more and no less than the film 2001 by Kubrick. The lodgers moved in, making the place their own. My mother took me with her wherever she went, beaming up high. (No less, I repeat, than a secret flickering filmic Odyssey whose director liked to shout “Do Your Own Thing!” No less than the fields of Tyuratam where a boy from Klushino—Have you heard of Gagarin?—was about to be put into elliptical orbit)
My mother and I went swimming together below the cliffs of Columbia, riding the sea wash like a brown manta, shimmering and round and bathing to silence. During the long evenings of 1961 Maxim lay awake inside her while she streamed silver tulle along the corridors and a bay named after that least loquacious animals, the pig, became famous. At certain times of each month she deemed to set the tides of the South Steyne Oceanarium rising, swirling currents into still waters, and sand also, creating littoral drift and strong rips, tubular swells and tsunamis and, in doing so, unknowingly whipping up my briny amniotic sea too and . . . and I was secretly with her when she sprang up wild and impassioned into her dormer window.
Record this: I did not cry out! I (who had been instantaneously endowed with a seemingly unfathomable equation of algebraic
