The Catastrophic Brain Function

i.

WAKE ME UP IN SOMEPLACE NEW. Those were the words of my only living relative my grandpa now deceased. He fell asleep in the backseat of a car we used to have, which I have left behind, its spare tyre having burst a flat not far from the fallen town of Yuddaburra, in the outback of Australia.

I wanted to dig him a grave or give some final rites but I didn’t have the strength for it. Water is the only food I know; I’m yet to find a grub. Plus besides his body colder than ice utterly defeated me. Everytime I tried to touch him it ended with a cry.

So as sad as it might seem I left papa in the backseat of the car under the blanket he had died beneath, and it’s there that he remains. Of his possessions I took a single object: a silver locket, shaped like a heart. Symbol of a bygone era – it’s not one I’ve ever understood.

Most hearts are asymmetrical.

ii.

I haven’t seen another human soul in several years I think, and this makes me melancholic, tired, ready for the end of things – but I must persevere. Life begets life that is what he’d say to me and I take the instructions of my ancestors with the highest of respect.

So although I do not expect to see another soul again I’ll seek it nonetheless, and where else but here the heartlands of the bush would speaking breathing fighting beings seek to re-converge?

iii.

I do not have much ink, and I must use my paper sparingly. Beneath the stars out here my dreams are coming back. As Adelaide had flooded from those typhoon waves something must have changed in me, since I’d stopped seeing things at night at all, all those years ago.

Not even nightmares came to me for many years: sleep was but a blankness, a forgetting, not a think. Perhaps this speaks more to the quality of my sleep than anything. I was, after all, aware of the dangers that could ambush in the night, the men, bandits, the killers and the like. Hunger makes monsters; so I would sleep with one eye open. (As people used to say, back when people did exist.)

Anyway, and this is of utmost importance, with dreams returned, faces visit in the night. All but one are reassuring, and with all but one I’m falling deeply into love. She is a woman—a girl—younger than myself. The outline of her profile has the uncanny shape of the coast of South Australia. I’m not sure what to make of it.

iv.

I found a water spring today and everything has changed. I could not confess to myself how low my provisions had become. The thought of dehydration more than anything encumbers me.

It was strange, however, this water spring, for it was rather like a river but was dried at either end, and fish are swimming in it.

“How’d you get here, fish?”

But the fish did not reply.

v.

I realised today that rocks have eyes and ears. At first I was embarrassed at all the sights they’d seen of me, my vulnerable squats, my unproductive screams, my whinings of defeat.

But beyond this initial wholly human intuition, I see them something new. How venerable to be the target of these gods’ perceptions, the boulders and the dust. I’d always known the birds were looking (their looks are why I cannot catch them, after all) – but this is not like that.

These unblinking, travelling, smiling solids can never be alone. In billion years of disarray, they know just what to do. They do not rush, they do not race. It is for this reason I am sure that they do not judge the human’s life, just as the shell of the tortoise-king comments not on the fleetingness of the lifespan of a fly. What would be the reason?

To measure anything is the greatest human folly.

To measure measurements worser even still.

vi.

I’m writinj this at dusk. Without fjre, it’s harb to see the page. I am so, so cold. I amn so, so tired. Now, more than anythjng, I need my papa’s hamd. I will make jt through the njjht.

vii.

Magpies make delightful company. I used to be afraid of swooping, but now I know they like to dance. The way they speak to me they’re almost people, the charm, character, charisma of their hops and flaps, it’s a language I shall learn to speak.

They come close enough for me to try to grab and eat them. I do not try. It’s a test, I’m sure—their eyes are faster than my hands—and, besides, I do not want to betray the trust they’ve placed in me.

They are interested in me. That right there is golden. Something to protect.

viii.

The magpies have betrayed me. They stole my grandpa’s locket.

I had been using it for a game at first, then as a means of sourcing snacks. I would place it on the dusty earth to interrupt the path of ants, and I found that they would never touch it, for some forgotten reason, never climbing overtop. Their hands I guessed were petrified of silver.

With this knowledge I trailed a trail of ants to the pinhole-door of their great colony. I made the chain a little circle on the ground. In their nature they would exit, follow a friend in one direction, and then begin to spin. In a vague tangential resemblance it dawned on me that their spinning was something like a washing machine, then it dawned on me that those exist. I cannot guess what else my brain has lost.

So I had a perpetual plate of insects; if I ate them all, more came spewing out.

Eventually, one of the magpies, possibly a stranger, approached me at my dining table. At first I thought that they were hungry, happy and ecstatic to join me in my feast. But this was wrong, and it snatched the locket in its mouth, and flew away.

I chased it, yelling out profanities, to no success. For days I searched, though I knew that it was futile, since, if anywhere, the silver would be sitting in a tree, in a nest. To rumble through the nests—especially those of those I love—could only bring me deeper pain. Swoops would be the end of things.

Only now, without it, can I note I never opened it.

Had I been afraid?

ix.

My spirits oscillate like the light of the sun, I am—depending on the hour and the contours of my stomach, the temperature of skin—an optimist or pessimist, and never in-between.

All my life I have been waiting, even well before the ending of the world. But what now is it that I am waiting for? I really do not know. To see a human being? A community? A god? Love? Rest? Reconciliation? I wait for all these things, yet have forgotten what they mean. Perhaps his locket is the answer. (Also, you who read this, if its light is ever seen, I must confess, and yu must know: I could not bring myslf to et a fish. Their faces ask me not to.)

x.

Nt mch ink lft. Tired seekng stil aliv. Silver chain – hope rmains. Tmr is anthr day. Life begets

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with love

- T VV