A Death on Dry Land

62 the minnesota review Lorna Tracy A Death on Dry Land "You should be more careful. You might stumble into the Abyss." Dennis Silk Death is the curtailment of Time. To acquire Time, avoid Death. * * * * Like most mischief it was the work of an instant. They had been absentminded and had put themselves into the hands of a fool and now their lives were in danger. From habit they had gone on feeling no responsibility for themselves, as if they were still on the airplane that a few days before had carried them here from the opposite side of the world. Air travellers so easily acquire the habit of reflex obedience. Their whole function is to sit still, eating and drinking what is brought to them, obeying the Captain's voice, the crew's instructions and the sign that lights up to tell them when they can smoke. They had stopped considering consequences. Forty thousand feet in the air what could they do about anything anyway? And now for carelessness here they stood in the sea on no footing, upright as pokers, two hundred yards off the coast of New South Wales, dressed as if for a winter's stroll over the downs, with only their heads still above sea level and the Pacific incuriously fingering their parted lips. Helpless and vertical in the water they looked up at the land they had only left two or three minutes before. What had ever possessed them to step so docilely— James after Phyllis— into that biscuit-tin of a dinghy and to sit down trustingly where the voice of authority told them to. The voice of authority: an idiot conceptual artist. Death is the ultimate source of human anxiety and the classic response to death is flight. Why hadn't James registered anything when he'd gripped the gunwhale to centre himself and his knuckles had touched water? He hadn't 63 tracy registered anything because his mind, off its tether, had wandered childlike away. He was absorbed in seeing the Antipodes. And for that innocent thing he was already seeing his last of them, and his last of anything, anywhere in this life's bright atmosphere. The last of the little she-oak growing up there next to the wharf where a moment ago he too had been, the delicate tree whose parts are dispersed like vapour, whose needles are so fine they hang like mist. Even when he was standing beside it the tree wouldn't quite come into focus but remained somewhat blurred, evading definition. An evergreen ghost. An embodied spirit, of no ghostly colour. What he'd come here for. Today you saw someone drown. Today, while you watched, someone drowned. It had been dark when James and Phyllis Scavenger had landed at Sydney. They had endured disinfection by aerosol before being allowed off the plane (if you can sit for twenty-four hours you can sit for ten minutes more) and they had passed through customs behind an American chap wearing four orchid corsages across his shirt-front, gifts of an airline — one for every stop-over — the crews passed them out like chewing gum. "Have you any seeds, fruits, plants?" "Just these," said the American, indicating his breastplate of orchids. Tom Stumbler, a Sydney art dealer and the Scavengers' host, had been waiting for them beyond the barrier with his girl friend, Chinchilla Burnoose . The evening air was still warm. At Tom's house James thought it would be a good idea to go straight to bed for awhile and resume marital relations. He'd had to go without for almost two days and nights. But the only thing Phyllis wanted was a bath. After ten thousand miles her cunt smelled like a dead bird. A tree just outside the wide-open bathroom window spilled in flares of red flowers. Or were they leaves? Growing straight from the bark, from the smooth grey horn-like bark, wide flowers with pointed petals as long as the fingernails of an Oriental despot. Phyllis patted moisturizer onto her face from a milk-blue bottle chinchilla had given her. PROTECTS AGAINST THE PASSING OF TIME announced the label. The...