Concerning Jokes

What makes a joke? The question is a tricky one, there is probably no single answer, but there is fun and profit in attempting to find some baseline characteristics. My own theory, the one I am believing at least contingently, at least during the instant I am writing this, is that a joke is a logical argument, an argument that seems plausible on the surface but is actually absurd. For a moment, when we hear the comedian's joke, we are persuaded by a line of faulty reasoning, but only for a moment; then, when we suddenly realize that the logic is specious, we laugh, and by doing so assert our membership of the comedian's community. We know he is saying something ridiculous; we are 'in' on the joke. We are together with the comedian on the other side of language. Humor is the nihilistic flip side of reason. If all rational argument is really just rhetoric, as I believe, jokes, which are logical arguments often of the reductio ad absurdum variety, are rhetoric no less and employ the same devices, devices such as irony, analogy, metaphor and simile. A good joke can puncture bombast, conceit and pretension and speak truth to power, but equally well can also often reinforce prejudice and intolerance. Like all rhetoric, a joke can go either way.

A couple of days ago I saw John Cleese and Eric Idle perform at the Civic in Auckland. Cleese told a number of jokes that made fun of non-english nationalities, among them the Swedes and the Greeks. His point was, perhaps, that we have become too politically correct. An example of one of his jokes? "Why do the French fight so many civil wars? So that they can win one."

Another joke he told satirizes the Jews:

"Two old Jews, Abraham and Solomon, are walking through Miami when they pass by a Catholic church. Outside the church is a sign saying, 'Convert today and we'll give you a thousand dollars!' Solomon ask his friend to excuse him and hastens inside. Half an hour later, he returns. Abraham asks him, 'Did they give you the thousand dollars?' Solomon replies, 'Is that all you people ever think about?'

This joke is patently absurd but the reason why it is absurd is not obvious. It is, after all, based on a logical argument, an argument consisting of three premises and a conclusion. The argument seems initially persuasive. We can set it out schematically as follows:

1. All Jews are avaricious.

2. Catholics are all non-avaricious.

3. A Jew can convert to Catholicism.

Therefore:

By converting to Catholicism, a Jew can become non-avaricious.

This argument is valid (in the technical meaning of the word, that the conclusion follows logically from the premises), so, if it is specious, as it seems to be, this must be because at least one of the premises is false. Either the stereotype that all Jews are obsessed by money must be false, or the idea that a Jew can turn into a Catholic must be false. The joke does not specify precisely which premise is incorrect but when we hear the joke we sense that there is something wrong with it somewhere, and this is why we laugh.

Another joke, this one not attributable to Cleese but to an aunt of mine, takes as its target the Catholics instead. It is, just to warn you, a little risqué but I think still quite funny.

"In a Catholic seminary, novice priests are told they are going to be given a final test before they can be admitted to the priesthood. It is required that the pupils will be capable of maintaining the Vow of Celibacy. The young novitiates are lined up, asked to take off their pants and to tie bells to their wieners, which being dutiful, the novitiates duly do. The seminary teacher brings in a beautiful young woman in a bikini. Rudolpho's bell jingles. The teacher takes Rudopho aside. "I'm sorry Rudolpho but you simply can't be admitted to the clergy. It's obvious that you can't resist the Temptations of the Flesh." Rudolph goes to collect his clothes. When he bends over to pick up his pants, all of the other bells in the room jingle."

Again, this joke plays with a logical argument. The form of the argument is as follows.

1. Catholic priests must take a Vow of Celibacy.

2. The only people willing to take a vow of celibacy must be gay.

Therefore:

The Catholic church must be full of homosexuals.

To the absurdity of this argument, the joke adds another absurdity, the idea that the only way to tell if a man is gay or not is by attaching a bell to his dick. The territory of the joke is the uncomfortable. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person believes two contradictory ideas at once and both of these jokes, the Jewish joke and the Catholic joke, inhabit spaces of general confusion. Is Jewish-ness a religion or an ethnicity? Is Gay-ness a lack of sexual desire or a desire for people of the same gender? Recent psychological research suggests that a sense of humor is related to the ability to think abstractly, a theory borne out by the fact that (I think) many of the Monty Python boys studied philosophy at Cambridge before embarking on careers in comedy. Good comedians are all too well aware that most of the things people believe are ridiculous. The is why comic talent is so often also associated with depression - as Robin Williams demonstrated. It's understandable. Thinking about these kinds of things too much is surely enough to make anyone depressed.

On Recruitment

Sometimes the world can be a fucked up thing. In the last several posts, I have set aside my normal concerns, which have tended to be with literary theory and analyses of films and literature, to talk a little about my own life and the more distasteful topics that have occupied me more in recent years than I would like. One post I wrote a couple of months ago, "An Unpalatable Suggestion", concerned sexuality. I am going to talk about this subject again. I am not going to entirely withdraw the hypothesis I proposed in that post but I would like to amend it somewhat.

People are interested in the causes of homosexuality and so I want to offer a theory about it. In coming up with a reasonable explanation of the etiology of this 'condition', one requires a good basis. We must reject two principles, one from the Right and one the Left, that dominate discussion, but which are both wrong. The first 'axiom' is this. People choose to be gay. Sometimes fundamentalist Christians and other extreme conservatives argue that homosexuality is something like a lifestyle preference - that homosexuals decide, for some obscure reason, to choose to want sexual relations with people of the same gender. The reason these right-wing groups believe that sexuality is a choice is partly a result of the unshakeable conviction that people have free-will, that everything that happens to a person springs from their own volition. It is an idea that goes hand in hand with a faith in capitalism. Second, the religious people who believe this credo, that sexuality is a choice, often tend to understand sexuality in terms of morality. Homosexuality is a sin and it is the duty of all good Christians (or Muslims or Jews etc) to always try to choose virtue over sin. Gay people are sinners and are destined for Hell. Because they have chosen to be gay. Everyone is personally responsible for what they do and who they are and so their sexuality has ethical implications. Naturally, I think this right-wing credo is ludicrous.

The second 'axiom' is this. Sexuality is the result of nature, not nurture. Oddly enough, the idea that people are born one way or the other despite being a left-wing tenet is also a fallacy. (it was a fallacy interestingly that Kurt Cobain, for instance, believed). But this idea is equally ludicrous. To anyone who knows anything about biology, genetics and naturally selection, the idea of a 'gay gene'  is patently specious, as is the old-wives tale that sexuality has something to do with mother's milk during infancy. The issue of sexuality actually exposes a contradiction in the left-wing liberal world-view: on almost all other issues left-leaners believe in nurture over nature – but this paradigm, this belief in the power of society and environment to mold people, a notion beloved of the social sciences and humanities, is for some reason set aside when matters of sexuality arise. Identity politics here trumps rationality. Yet about this it is the Left that is wrong. I'm sorry, Lady Gaga, but people are not "born this way".

Instead we need to say, first, that sexuality is not a choice, and second, that sexuality is the result of nurture not nature. Given these two premises, it follows logically that homosexuality must be engendered by environmental factors and it falls to people who want to understand this murky issue to determine what those environmental factors might be. If they are at all interested in these things. I do not believe that there is a single environmental cause, that there are many; furthermore I believe that homosexuality is often the result of a combination of environmental causes. The one I want to focus on though is 'recruitment', a term that is often misunderstood. The word makes people imagine that the Gay community is like the military, with army centers at which young men can queue up and sign a form saying that they are opting to choose a career of spandex, the Scissor Sisters, ballet, small dogs, interior decoration, the Wizard of Oz and sodomy. Or that the the Gay community is like the Jehova's witnesses, going door to door converting bored housewives. This is not what I mean by recruitment. What I mean by recruitment is a situation where a vulnerable young person finds him- or herself in a scene in which he or she is preyed upon by a predatory homosexual - a homosexual who may well been the young person's friend. A sexual event, which may not have been entirely consensual, upsets the victim's sense of personal identity and can result in him or her deciding later that he or she must be gay. This is my theory in nutshell.

A less misleading and ambiguous term than 'recruitment' would be homosexual rape.

Fear of unwanted homosexual advances is evident in many films. In the 1987 blackly comic film Withnail and I, the two young male protagonists, cohabiting actors with highly disheveled life-styles, find themselves staying in a house belonging to Withnail's homosexual uncle. The film contain this amusing yet ugly piece of dialogue. The uncle comes into the protagonist's bedroom. "Are you a sponge or a stone?" says uncle Monty. When the protagonist, Marwood, asks him what he means, Monty says, "Do you like to experience all facets of life or do you shut yourself off from new experiences?". Monty is obviously soliciting Marwood for sex and despite Marwood's protestation that he is not homosexual, the sequence comes close to depicting a molestation. It turns out that Monty's advances are the result of a misunderstanding (the whole sequence can be viewed on Youtube) but it still makes for very uncomfortable viewing. In the 1979 film Being There, the protagonist Chauncy Gardiner is approached at a party by a gay attendee who asks him if he has ever had sex with a man. Chauncy, who unknown to everyone around him is actually quite simple-minded, replies "Not that I can remember". In the 1922 poem The Waste Land, TS Eliot describes being propositioned by "Mr Eugenides, Smyrna merchant" - a episode, which whether or not autobiographical, distresses the narrator and is intended to shock the reader.

What I am getting at here is that being approached for sex by someone of the same gender can be very upsetting and the reason for this is because it poses a genuine existential threat. When I was younger I was very non-homophobic, in the abstract, and even a keen supporter of Gay rights (I still am) - but nevertheless I strongly felt that gay men and women should only go out hunting for sexual partners in Gay clubs and through sites like Grinder, that they should avoid hitting on people in heterosexual locales because they should only come on to people who they already knew to be gay. I thought that the two worlds should stay separate. I know this makes me seem somewhat bigoted or insecure perhaps, but I believe my instinctive avoidance of gay men and dislike of being the object of male attention was the result of an extremely strong self-defense mechanism. At some level I found being the object of male advances threatening.

If homosexuality is something like a social disease that can be communicated person to person, it makes sense to avoid gay men.  Of course, when I use 'rape' I am not thinking of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace gets buggered by a couple of hillbillies. The line between consensual and non-consensual sex is often  hard to draw - people do not draw up contracts before they engage in heavy petting and sometimes, in heterosexual sex (to draw an analogy), a man can misread a woman's signals. It is precisely the ambiguity surrounding a sexual encounter that can create the conditions for a destabilization of personal identity. A person who has had a homosexual experience may for whatever reason not be able to appreciate the fact that he or she has been raped. I understand that in recent years it has been found that women can experience orgasm during rape (a disagreeable finding, yes, but apparently true). Is it not then possible for a woman to rape a woman perhaps and cause her to climax? Or for the same thing to happen to a man? Such a situation if it can occur is surely enough to mess with a person's mind.

There is, of course, the question about how someone can end up in a situation where he or she has become the victim of homosexual date-rape and this is presumably where other environmental factors must come into play. Presumably there must be something like an underlying vulnerability. Nevertheless the idea of recruitment is worth considering. It may seem odd. Surely, you might say, homosexuality is a matter of personal identity? Surely a person can't change from straight to gay as the result of an experience? Isn't this why gay men are camp and lesbians butch? I am still thinking about this issue and may never have a complete answer. However, this idea of recruitment still seems to me plausible. I think of the line from "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" by Faith No More, a song which has had some special relevance to my life: "If you don't make a friend now, one might make you, so learn the gentle art of making enemies".

Me and Jon Stewart Part 2

In the previous post, I discussed a spooky moment in my life when Jon Stewart appeared to talk back to me out of the TV. I have reasons for talking about this so candidly. A number of years ago (in 2013 in fact) I was diagnosed schizophrenic. It is risky for me to talk about my diagnosis so honestly considering the stigma attached to this label but I do so not only from a compulsive need to be completely transparent but also for political reasons. The broader public has very little understanding of psychosis and false stereotypes tend to dominate discussion. People who have been diagnosed with this condition need to know they are not alone. 'Schizophrenics' are not necessarily incoherent;  some can be very articulate indeed. The vast majority of us are not violent nutters. Current forms of therapy leave much to be desired and this is partly because people diagnosed schizophrenic are so utterly misunderstood by those around us, even by the people tasked with treating us. 

One of the problems for people who have been diagnosed with this condition is that there are so few people who they can look up to as positive role models. A few can be found. Mark Vonnegut (Kurt's son) wrote a book in 1975, The Eden Express, describing his experience of psychosis in the late 'sixties. Mark was institutionalized at the time, pronounced incurable but after a period (according to his own account) fixed himself using multivitamins. Later in life he became a pediatrician, married and had a son. Also later in life, he revised his life-story, saying that really his condition was better described as bipolar disorder. I regard this revision as a cop-out. Couldn't he have described himself as a recovered schizophrenic?

Other famous schizophrenics include John Nash, the subject of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind (a film I have written somewhat scathingly about in the post Why I hate "A Beautiful Mind"), Virginia Woolf and French dramatist Artaud. Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys developed schizophrenia in early adulthood, as did Pink Floyd's first principal songwriter Syd Barrett. Both of these last two were heavy drug users and I would hesitate to ever describe Syd as a positive role model for schizophrenics, but it is still reassuring to know that they exist. I'm sure that there are many other successful people who have experienced psychosis at least once in their lives but, generally, people never seem willing to talk about it publicly. These few are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

When I read in the newspaper about someone having suffered from a depressive episode, my first thought is always "What precisely were they depressed about?" Mental states have intentionality. I am interested not only in the outward symptoms of mental illness but in its cognitive content. To say someone "hears voices" or has "paranoid delusions" is not particularly informative. When I get the chance to talk with someone who has experienced psychosis, I always want to probe them about what the experience was actually like for him or her (although usually, I admit, I hesitate because I fear invading his or her privacy.) But we cannot begin to understand a person unless we actually know what he or she believes. And psychosis differs from person to person. For example, most voice-hearers, I understand, hear abusive voices, but this was never my experience. Rather, I summoned up imaginary friends, Jon Stewart among them, to support me in my lonely and essentially invisible battle for my very soul. I felt, then and later, that I needed help not just to save myself but to save others.

I'll give a brief example of voice-hearing, one that is actually quite funny and that I like telling my friends. A number of years ago I was lying in bed when I heard a girl's voice in my head, one I spoke to often. I'll call her Jess. She said, "I have the perfect word to describe you - sesquipedalian." I thought to myself, "What the hell does 'sesquipedalian' mean?" I climbed out of bed, googled it, and found that it meant, "Lover of big words".

In the previous post, I promised that I would describe a psychotic episode I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010, an episode that constitutes the most intense and memorable period of my whole life. I'll undertake this description now. Over the previous year I had often spoken with Jon Stewart, even one day hallucinating that he was walking beside me when coming home from seeing a psychologist. During a Hearing Voices group at the end of 2009, I met and fell for a girl, the one I call Jess. Over the next couple of months, I found myself talking, in my head of course, to her and to Jon Stewart almost continuously. At the time, I believed whole-heartedly in telepathy. I believed people could communicate mind to mind. I thought they were talking to me in their heads as much as I was talking to them. This was of course (objectively) quite mad. During the initial period, Jon usually acted as a messenger between me and Jess, as a kind of go-between. He was something like my wing man.

I cannot talk about Jess at all in this post and even in talking about Jon I have to omit key details. But I can still say quite a lot. Up until that summer, Jon had been for me more like a guardian angel than anything else – but now I felt like I was talking to the real person. This Jon Stewart would tell me jokes all the time. In my delusions, he was suffering a mid-life crisis - he had left his wife for a half-African-American, half Native-American woman he had met at a buffet and was living with her in the penthouse suite of some New York city skyscraper. He would sleep all day and lie awake all night talking with me. As the episode continued, I began talking with or at least hearing others - friends, family and acquaintances from my own past, Jess's family, Jon's celebrity friends. John Oliver featured quite heavily in the dialogue as Jon's main emotional support. Steve Martin and Thom Yorke had brief cameos. It was as though I had become a psychic switchboard or human social networking site. At a particular point during the episode, when I was visiting Milford Sound in the real world, Barack Obama himself began talking with me. This was intimidating to the point of being harrowing.

To give a little taste of what it was like, I'll relate a moment I remember vividly – I have written about it before somewhere else. One night I was explaining to Jess that many African-Americans thought milk in schools was a honky conspiracy because so many African-Americans are lactose intolerant. Jon immediately chipped in, "Lots of us feel that way". To which John Oliver said, "Jon Stewart – are you black?" Jon was often unintentionally funny as natural comedians so often are. One one occasion, Jon told me about being the victim of anti-Semitic bullying as a school kid when waiting at a bus stop. One night, because Jon himself was in distress, I felt compelled to act as though I was his father, encouraging him to look up Physics entries on the internet to alleviate his unhappiness- Jon's father had been a Physics teacher who had divorced his mother when he was ten.

A lot of these particular details about Jon's life are verifiable. Jon Stewart genuinely is lactose intolerant, was subject to anti-Jewish bullying when he was young, and did indeed have a father who was a physics teacher, a father from which he was deeply estranged. You can check out all these facts on Wikipedia – although I had not done so then. If I'm rational, I have to suppose that I had, when creating a Jon Stewart character to talk to, based it on what I had gleaned from my deep engagement with his TV show. The Jon in my head also told me about his experience seeing a Portishead concert once – I would love to know if the real one did.

During this period, I didn't just hear the voices of 'real' people. On occasion, the often neurotic and agitated voices of celebrities and friends and presidents I usually heard would sometimes fade out to be replaced by a calmer voice with no precise identity. This voice would simply ask me questions, a kind of maieutics, and I would address it simply as "O disembodied voice". The topic of our conversations was hazing in the US military. It is difficult for me to say now what the purpose of this dialogue was although I can conjecture.

During the early part of 2010, my psychosis evaporated. The Daily Show, for some reason, stopped screening in New Zealand. (It was early in that year, by the way, that Jon carried out his famous "Rally to Restore Sanity"). I was almost entirely free from psychotic symptoms for the next three years and was in fact discharged from the Mental Health System for a year. I never quite managed to get myself entirely off the drugs. In 2013 I became 'unwell' again and voluntarily reentered the service. I felt at the time a need to try to get the record straight. I was, for the first time, later in the year, officially diagnosed schizophrenic. At the beginning of 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act because I refused medication. Once a month, as a consequence, I began receiving, and still receive, a dosage of Olanzapine administered via needle in the backside - awful to admit, I know. Despite four judicial hearings to try to change my legal status, I have been unsuccessful. At the time, being made the subject of a Compulsory Treatment Order was deeply traumatic because, by that stage in my life, and having had years to think about it, I had completely abandoned my faith in psychiatry and psychiatric medication. I had concluded by then that almost all psychiatrists are either sadists or idiots. It seemed likely to me that anti-psychotics might not only be useless but might well be deleterious. Being put under the Act was terrible and the next couple of years were no better. 

Also early in 2014, the Daily Show returned to New Zealand TV. This was important to me. I felt like my imaginary friend had come back to help me when I needed him. That year Jon helped me again, as he had in 2009, to get through a very difficult time.

I'll finish this piece by returning to what I said at the beginning - that schizophrenics require positive role models, people willing to admit that they have experienced psychosis. It seems to me quite likely that Jon is a possible candidate for such a role, that he is or was, if not quite a high-functioning schizophrenic, then at least a schizotypal personality. Stephen Fry has talked about hearing voices when he was younger, as has Lady Gaga when she was interviewed by Graham Norton. Is it so strange to think that Jon Stewart might also have heard voices?

Me and Jon Stewart

I feel fairly confident that Jon Stewart has many squillions of friends. A relatively recent clip of him gatecrashing a Stephen Colbert monologue has over 2,300,000 hits on Youtube - the reason for this being I think that people want to watch simply for a chance to see their pal again despite his retirement. For sixteen years, multitudes of people in the U.S. and around the world had welcomed him into their house most weekday evenings like a late arriving party guest - he was appreciated not only for his humor but for his humanity and for his extraordinary intellectual integrity and honesty, for his combination of compassion and indignation. This is the asymmetry of broadcasting. For the viewer, the celebrity on the TV seems to be speaking to him or her alone; for the celebrity though, the relationship is not one to one but one to a billion. He is speaking simultaneously to a vast and extraordinarily diverse community. Yet he must still try to create the impression of intimacy. This was a trick Jon could pull off like no one else. Sometimes it felt like he was baring himself naked - but his gift for self-deprecation not only made his comic confessions forgivable but made the viewer feel better about himself. 

And of course Jon must have squillions of real friends. Sometimes on the show he would intimate that his life off-camera was hermit-like and reclusive (I find in my thesaurus the quite lovely synonym 'eremitic') but he was obviously on good terms with all the comedians and show biz stars and politicos he interviewed and perhaps, at least occasionally, hung out with. And he was obviously mates with his colleagues at the Daily Show as well, some of whom, such as Steven Carell, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to name just a couple, have gone on to have stellar solo careers. John Oliver has gone on record at least once saying that he "owes Jon Stewart everything".

I have a reason for talking about Jon. In 2007, at the age of twenty-seven, I experienced an intense, terrible and almost apocalyptic spiritual crisis and began receiving treatment for psychosis. I have tried to talk a little about this in the post "A Messed Up Story" (the attempt wasn't successful). Over the summer of 2007 and 2008 I went into remission; during that year, while I was more or less well, I started watching the Daily Show which had just begun screening in New Zealand. Jon appealed to me because I liked his humor, his politics and his personality. Over the summer of 2008 and 2009 I became unwell again and for the first time started hearing voices. I believe this second long and terrible period of psychosis was a consequence of being trapped in a terrible situation that I couldn't escape, and of being compelled to take a medication that I found intellectually debilitating but which no one seemed to have any intention of allowing me to discontinue. (That's right. I believe the antipsychotics I was taking actually caused me to become psychotic.) 

For the first time in my life, over this summer, I began hearing voices - a year and half after I had first started taking antipsychotics.The first occasion that I heard a voice, I was in the bath. I was trying to derive the Theory of Relativity from first principals in my head, something I had managed recently on paper. I heard a voice with a distinctive Texan accent say, "Do you want George W. Bush to help you?" The outgoing president of the U.S. was talking directly with me. Judging George to be of little assistance, I changed the subject. I asked him if he was straight. He said, "I think so." I then asked him if he believed in God. He said no. I asked him how then we could be communicating. He replied, "Mitochlorians" (a Star Wars allusion, of course.) After I got out of the bath, I continued talking with him. I asked him for the real reason the US had invaded Iraq but he was typically unhelpful, brushing me off with some piffle related to the Clash of Civilizations, a obvious evasion. I sussed out that he hadn't been speaking the whole truth when he said that he didn't believe in God, told him so and he replied, "So you do know a joke when you hear one".

After speaking to George, I began hearing voices quite a lot, especially when I was in bed trying to go to sleep. Among many others, I heard Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton and Helen Clark. To be frank I don't remember this period very well but I know that this period of psychosis lasted, with a break of a month around September, over a year. I was in hell. Every night, though, I continued watching the Daily Show. It was my candle in the dark. One night I was in bed when I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" This was in itself unusual because typically the people I spoke to seemed to know already who I was. I replied, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand". He said, "Are you straight?" I replied that I was or at least thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours."  We talked for a bit, although I now can't remember what we talked about. I went to sleep. The next night I watched the Daily Show. During his bit to camera that he would perform at the beginning of the show, Jon would would often answer questions made by audience members. During his bit that night, he referred to the conversation I had had with him the previous night. It was uncanny. He then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America…" During my periods of 'illness', I have experienced quite a few bizarre and freakish moments but this was perhaps the most important. In the intervening years, I have tried to track down this Daily Show episode but, not knowing the date, have never found it.

You might wonder why I am telling you this. I am unsure myself. What I believed at the time was that I had genuinely spoken with Jon, that Jon Stewart also heard voices and that he had heard mine. I have never since been quite able to quite shake this delusion, that I genuinely spoke with him then and later. Of course, it is understandable that I might want to have Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend but what I have never since understood is why he might want me as his imaginary friend.

In August of 2009, I finally convinced my psychiatrist to allow me to stop taking Respiridone, the drug I was taking, by threatening to kill myself. The shrink panicked and let me discontinue it gradually over a period of six weeks, the fastest reduction he thought safe. Being permitted to discontinue the Respiridone cured my psychosis – although I still had panic attacks every day at 2pm. For a number of months Jon had been like a guardian angel, helping me navigate through the particular misprision I was trapped in; I remember, during a panic attack at work, stepping into the cafeteria to find The Daily Show on TV and Lily Allen, my other guardian angel, on the radio. I felt people were watching over me.

For a month, after I had succeeded in getting off the Respiridone, I was symptom free. And then I got sick again - an episode triggered weirdly enough by seeing Iggy Pop in an advertisement on TV. Shortly after, I was put on a different antipsychotic Olanzapine. Over the summer of of 2009 and 2010 I had another episode in which Jon featured quite significantly. I am not going to talk about this episode in this post, except to say it was dense, profound and highly memorable. If anyone wants me to talk about it, he or she can drop a request in my comments box. It was actually quite interesting, if I say so myself, and I may talk about it sometime anyway.

I like to think that maybe I chose Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend because, in some strange way, we are a lot alike.

I will say one thing in conclusion. During the psychotic episode I experienced in the summer of 2009 and 2010, I often tried to convince Jon to mention New Zealand on his show. I would flippantly suggest he mock up a fake news story in which he pretended the US was going to launch a nuclear strike against Whanganui or Waiheke Island. In more recent years, when I pretended to talk with Jon in my head, I have been more serious, trying to convince him to do an item on the atrocious treatment of the mentally ill in the US and around the world. He never (of course) took me up on my suggestions. Recently, though, John Oliver did a long piece on Mental Health, criticizing the lack of a coherent federal policy with respect to the seriously mentally ill. The piece was good but incomplete. We need not only a change in governmental policies but a change in social attitudes to 'illnesses' like schizophrenia and a complete revolution in psychiatric discourse. People need a better understanding of what it is like. For another thing, we need to get the doctors to stop sharing the same bed as the pharmaceutical industry. I have a lot I could say about all this but I will rein myself in now. I can talk about it another time.

[Note: I referred to a previous post "A Messed Up Story" early in this essay. There are two versions of this piece. The first, better version I accidentally deleted, but I believe this original is still floating around the internet. It may be locatable somewhere, if you want to read it.]

Pastoral

Today another short story... This is one I wrote about a year and a half ago. I should say something about its politics – it is not a hundred per cent politically right on. This story may seem, at least on one reading, to be advancing a slippery slope argument, the kind of argument fundamentalist Christians and other Republicans use against gay marriage. I remember, a couple of weeks after I wrote this story, the Daily Show making fun of a young lawyer who had advanced a slippery slope argument when opposing marriage  equality in the Supreme Court; this young lawyer bore a slight resemblance to me and I felt (irrationally I admit) that Jon Stewart was actually speaking to me via proxy and effectively calling me a dumbass. Nevertheless, I publish this story because I think it is funny - it is the prerogative of fiction to raise uncomfortable ideas. I hope you enjoy it

***

                                                       Pastoral

            I’d wager my wooden leg that never, in the whole history of the Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association or our local parish church St Marks, never in the whole history of the township of Horowhenuapai and its outlying districts for that matter, has there ever been a bloke quite as eccentric as Barry Drysdale. Of course, we have our fair share of oddballs and crazies in Horowhenuapai – all small towns do.  And because everyone knows everyone else, gossip travels fairly quickly. There was Agatha Beumont, spinster and long since retired piano teacher, who collected cats and whose death as the result of some strange flu-like illness was made known to her neighbours by the cacophonous yowling of her dozen feline companions. There was George Jameson who brained Patrick O’Hara with a wrench because he thought O’Hara had tampered with his tractor. Stories like this got around. But for sheer theatricality and ridiculousness, for sheer dramatic punch, there was no beating Barry.

            The gent I’m yakking about ran a small sheep station up the valley. The land up there is pretty unforgiving but Barry handled it competently enough, enough to survive and probably put a little money aside into the bargain. Certainly, he was no spendthrift. We almost never saw him town. He never drank at any of the locals (such as the Queen Vic that I frequent), never had a flutter at the racetrack, never played bowls although he was a member of the club. The only time he came into town was when he needed to stock up on essentials like food and whiskey. During shearing season and lambing season, he would hire a couple of young lads as farm hands and put them up in the barn, but apart from Barry himself there wasn’t a soul who ever saw the inside of his house, a big old mansion he had inherited from his father. He rattled around it all on his lonesome and your guess is as good as mine as to how he filled in the time when he wasn’t looking after his sheep.

            You could probably describe Barry as a hermit and not be far wrong if it weren’t for one thing: he was very litigious. He would seek to take legal action over the most peculiar things. Now, the only solicitor in town is Geoffrey Dane, a chap who happens to be a mate of mine. We meet up fairly regularly for a pint and a natter at the Vic and, one time, he told me a tale about Barry. This story isn’t actually the primary story I want to tell but it serves as a good introduction to the man.

            Apparently Geoffrey was sitting at his desk invoicing a client when there was a knock at his office door. Geoffrey doesn’t have a receptionist and so he has no idea who the visitor is. He calls out “Come in!” In walks Barry, wearing a flannel shirt, black shorts and a pair of gumboots.

            “G’day, Geoffrey,” he says curtly, “I need some help. I’ve got an action I want to take.”

            “G’day, Barry. Sit down and tell me about it and I’ll see what I can do.”

            Barry sits on the other side of the desk across from Geoffrey and rests one gumboot on his knee.

            “I wanna sue my neighbour, the one to the East. Robertson.”

            “What’s he done?”

            “He been stealing from me.”

            “Stealing from you? It sounds outside of my speciality, Barry. Generally I only handle civil cases, not criminal ones. Why not go to the police?”

            “I’ve been talked to the police. They laughed me out of the room.” As he said this, Barry seemed to jut out his jaw defiantly – it was a solid jaw and an excellent foundation for his craggy face. It was as though he expected Geoffrey to laugh as well.

            “Did they? That’s unfortunate. What precisely has you neighbour been stealing?”

            “He’s been stealing my rain.”

            At this point in the narrative, Geoffrey paused to wet his whistle with a long gulp of beer. Then he went on.

            “Well, my first thought was that Robertson must have been stealing water from Barry’s water tank. Perhaps the neighbour had run a hose from the tank to a barrel on the back of a ute or something. Or maybe he’d diverted a stream that had run into Barry’s property so that it was running into his instead. Both ideas seem pretty far-fetched but I had no idea what else he might mean. I asked Barry if that’s what he was saying: that his neighbour was siphoning water out of Barry’s tank.

            “ ‘No,’ says Barry, ‘I mean, he be deliberately stealing my rain. The rain showers only come down on his property and stop at the fence line’.

            “This left me a little nonplussed. I asked Barry how Robertson could go about stealing his rain. Barry told me that he wasn’t sure but he had a couple of ideas. Maybe Robertson was firing silver iodide or dry ice into the clouds to seed them. Or perhaps he was covertly performing Native American rain dances in the secrecy of his shed. However he was doing it, Barry felt sure that Robertson was stealing his rain and wanted a court order issued to make him cease and desist.

            “Well, I thought about it for a moment and then told Barry that the problem, from a legal perspective, was that Robertson couldn’t literally be ‘stealing’ his rain because the water didn’t belong to Barry until it had arrived in his property and made contact with the ground. In fact, I’m not sure if it even belonged to him then. In the U.S, apparently, local governments own the rainwater and there are laws against homeowners ‘diverting’ it for personal use. I wasn’t sure about here in New Zealand and I’m still not. At any rate, I told Barry, even if there were legal grounds upon which Barry could argue that Robertson was illegally diverting water meant for him, it would be a challenge to convince a judge that Robertson was carrying out the diversion by means of Native American rain dances.”

            “So what the heck ‘m I sposed to do?”

            “I don’t know, Barry. Perhaps you could speak to Robertson and ask him to stop. Or, if you still want to take legal action, you could see Fred Baggage in Maungakerikeri.”

            At this point, Barry springs to his feet and, jutting out his chin again, says, “Maybe I’ll do just that,” leaving the room without a backward glance and with the air of someone who felt that his dignity had been affronted.

When Geoffey had finished telling me this story (it was about three months afterwards that he got around to it), I asked him if he’d ever heard any more about Barry, Robertson and the purloined rain since.

            “No,” said Geoffrey. “I asked Fred about it once, and he said he’d never heard from Barry. I guess Barry just decided it wasn’t worth the bother pursuing.”

            Now, like I say, this isn’t the primary story I wanted to tell about Barry but, before I get on to this main story, I should mention that the tale of the diverted rain has an interesting postscript. I’m also mates with a bloke called Simon Bragg, chap who ran for town council a little while ago, and he told me a tale about one time he was doorknocking for the election and had driven out to Barry’s place in his rusty Corolla. As he was driving up the road that lead to Barry’s house, he had found himself in the middle of a sudden vicious rainstorm. The rain was, in his words, “veritably pissing down” but, when he turned up Barry’s drive, it suddenly stopped. He pulled over to walk the last hundred yards to Barry’s house and, looking about him, noticed something odd. The Robertson property lies pretty close to the Drysdale property about this point and what Simon noticed was that it was raining in the Robertson property but not in the Drysdale property. In fact, the rain stopped completely and precisely at the fence-line of No.9 wire that divided the two homesteads. It was dry as a drought on this side and bucketing down on the other. “Damndest thing I ever saw,” Simon told me later.

            Anyway, I’ll carry on with the principal story I want to tell now.

            Although Horowhenuapai can nowise be described as a thriving metropolis, we are lucky enough to have a registry office, on the second floor above the courthouse. My nephew’s wife works there behind the counter. One day, she’s behind the glass screen that separates the employees from the punters when she sees Barry stride in through the doorway. He’s wearing his flannel shirt, shorts and gumboots and has a sheep with him, on a leash, as though it’s a dog. My niece calls out:

            “Excuse me, sir, you can’t bring animals into the courthouse!”

            “I’ll do whatever the bloody hell I want,” replies Barry.

            The niece hesitates, considers forcing the issue and then decides it’s not worth kicking up a fuss. Barry walks over to the counter, leans over it and says:

            “I want to get a marriage license.”

            “Certainly, sir,” says the niece. “You’ll need to fill in this form, a Notice of Intended Marriage.”

            The sheep drops a few pellets on the linoleum. My niece takes the appropriate

form from its tray and passes it to Barry, who starts filling it in at the counter.

            “You’ll need to arrange for a marriage celebrant to officiate at the ceremony,” says the niece, trying to be helpful and ignoring the bleating of the sheep. “And you’ll need two witnesses as well.”

            Barry is struggling to fill in the form, holding the pen in his thick fingers clumsily as though it’s a screwdriver. After a couple of minutes, he pauses.

            “What if I don’t know the bride’s surname?”

            “You don’t know her surname?” asks the niece uncertainly. “Have you asked her?”

            “Even if I asked her, she wouldn’t be able to tell me.”

            “Could she write it down..? I’m sorry, sir, but how can you not know the surname of the woman you want to marry?”

            “I don’t think she has a surname.” Barry waves his hand at the sheep. “This is her here. This is my fiance.”

            The niece, as you might have guessed, is fairly genial and easy going, perhaps even a little conflict-averse to tell the truth, but, nevertheless, this takes her by surprise. For a moment she thinks he must be joking; then, in a flash of horrible insight, realized that he’s not.

            “You want ­– to marry – that sheep.”

            “That’s right. Her name’s Polly.”

             The niece makes a sudden decision. She isn’t going to tolerate this type of carry-on happening during her shift. She grabs the near end of the form and tries to pull it out of Barry’s hands. Barry reacts by gripping the other edge more tightly.

            “Sir,” says the niece, “I can’t allow this. It’s not moral. And it’s certainly not legal. You can’t want to marry a sheep!”

            “I’ll do whatever the bloody hell I like!” cries Barry again. The notice tears in half and Barry falls backwards a step. The security guard, who had been dozing by the door, now well and truly woken up by the commotion takes a few steps towards them.

            “Sir,” says the niece, “I’m going to have to ask you and your – your animal to leave the building.” She gestures towards the exit. Opting to leave quietly rather deal with security, Barry marches towards the door, dragging Polly with him. The niece calls out after him.

            “It’s not natural!”

            At the door, Barry wheels around.

            “I’ll be seeing my lawyer about this!” he says.

            Now, like I say, gossip gets around and it doesn’t take very long for people to work out that the deviant in the registry office must be one and the same man as the farmer Barry Drysdale, confirmed recluse from up the valley. Word even reached Geoffrey and so, when there was a knock at his office door and Barry stomped in, Geoffrey had a fair idea what Barry was coming to see him about. Still he feigned ignorance, asking, “What can I help you with today?”

            Barry tells him about his intention to marry Polly the sheep, the ruckus at the registry office and how he has spent the last week enquiring after marriage celebrants by phoning up all the local Justices of the Peace that he can find in the phone book, without success. “They either think that I’m a hoax caller or they just hang up on me. I feel like I’m being discriminated against!”

            Geoffrey is familiar with Barry’s brand of paranoia and chooses his words carefully.

            “I’ve been thinking about your situation,” he admits. “According to the Marriage Amendment Act of last year, marriage is defined as the union of two people, regardless of their sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. So anyone can marry anyone. So long as the parties are over the age of consent and the relationship is not incestuous. And so long as both parties are people. And that’s your problem you see Barry. Legally, Polly isn’t a person.”

            “To me, Polly’s a person,” says Barry truculently.

            “Well, yes, to you she might be a person but, from a legal perspective, only human being beings are people. In fact,” Geoffrey paused to ruminate to himself, “that’s not completely true. From a legal perspective, a corporation can be considered a person. I guess that means a man can be legally married to his work. But that’s by the by. What’s for sure is that sheep aren’t people.”

            “Why not? Why shouldn’t Polly be considered a person?”

            “I bet a lot of tree huggers would agree with you. I guess it’s just the result of an entrenched history of anthropocentrism and xenophobia.”

            The meeting ended inconclusively shortly afterwards with Barry saying that he needed to get back to the farm but intimating that he hadn’t given up and intended to return.

            A couple of days after Barry’s first meeting with Geoffrey, an incident occurred at the Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association that involved Barry, caused quite a stir and is worth mentioning. The wife of a mate of mine works behind the bar there and she described what occurred in detail to me. It was a Sunday. The retired landed gentry of Horowhenuapai were out on the green in their whites enjoying a spot of physical exercise in the sun. In the tenebrous gloom of the saloon, off-duty players were cooling their palates with pints of frosty cold lager. Suddenly, Barry appears at the entrance in his flannel shirt and gumboots and with Polly the sheep with him, again on a leash. Although Barry was a member, it was the first time in living memory anyone in the club had ever observed his shadow darken the door. Nervously, one of the bar staff approaches him.

             “Barry Drysdale?” she says. “I’m sorry. It’s against club rules to bring livestock into the clubrooms.”
            “Polly ain’t livestock,” he replies. “She’s my fiancé!”

            Feeling increasingly anxious but still sticking to her guns, the barmaid speaks quietly, hoping not enflame the situation.

            “Well, whatever else she is, she’s still a sheep. And the club has clear rules about animals on the premises.”

            “I know my rights,” says Barry. “According to the rules, membership of the Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association extends to spouses. And Polly is my spouse!”

            Still trying her best to conceal her agitation, the barmaid says, “That may be so, sir, but even if she is your spouse, club regulations state that no one can bring animals onto the grounds without formal permission, and I believe that rule takes priority over the extension of membership to spouses.”

            Barry juts out his chin, plainly intending to argue the point, but, after a moment of silent struggle, decides against it. Dragging Polly with him, he stomps out the door, although not without the parting shot:
            “I know my rights!”

            In this way, Barry Drysdale continued his single-minded campaign to bring sexual equality to the backblocks of rural Taranaki.

            As previously signalled, a couple of days later Barry returned to Geoffrey’s office. He was still stubbornly determined that his romantic relationship with Polly be officially recognized and felt convinced that he could force the issue successfully through the courts. He told Geoffrey about the fracas at the Rutherford Lawn Bowls Association and repeated his request for legal representation.

            “To be frank,” says Geoffrey, “I simply don’t think I can help you. There isn’t a judge in the county who would ever seriously countenance a case like this being brought before him. The law is quite clear about it. Humans can’t marry animals. If you want to marry Polly, you’ll need to petition parliament and ask them to change the Marriage Act, again. And persuading them to do that seems quite unlikely.”

            “What about natural justice?” cries Barry. ”This whole situation is a violation of my basic human rights. I’m sticking up for a persecuted minority, fighting against oppression for the freedoms of the little guy. I’m just like Nelson Mandala or Martin Luther King!”

            This comparison makes even my mate Geoffrey wince.

            “Listen Barry, you need to face facts. You don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the state to permit you to marry a sheep. But, more than that Barry, I feel I must warn you. You’re running the serious risk of being arrested for criminal indecency. Bestiality is still a crime in this country. Listen Barry – I know it gets cold at night up there in the valley but is a moment of fleecy delight worth seven years in the clink?”

            This remark appears to strike home. Barry leans back with a frown and then leans forward again.

            “I don’t know anything about that,” he says. “All I know is that I’m being the victim of prejudice. I’m being unfairly discriminated against as a consequence of my sexual orientation.”

            This second meeting between Barry and Geoffrey on this matter proved to be the last but the story of Barry and his forbidden passion for Polly the sheep doesn’t quite end there. Even Barry, obstinate as he was, could recognize when he was fighting for a losing cause and he stopped bringing Polly into town, becoming, if anything, even more reclusive than before. Presumably his relationship with Polly still continued at his farm up the valley but he had stopped offending the townsfolk by shoving it down their throats and the rumour of it persisted among the townsfolk only in the form of gossip and off-colour jokes. Yet, in a way, the damage had already been done. His meetings with Barry had wormed their way into Geoffey’s subconscious mind where, like a festering infection, they resulted in broken sleep and bad dreams. One day, at the Vic over a pint, Geoffrey told me about one of them.

            “I dreamt that I had decided to take on Barry’s case. We were in the Horowhenuapai District Court and I was delivering an address on the rights of anyone to marry anything.”

            In the dream, the courthouse was full. The jury consisted of Berkshire pigs, the judge was a horse and the bailiff was a bullmasiff. The opposing counsel was a rooster. In the dream, Geoffrey stepped forward into the well to deliver his speech.

            “What is the most important thing in the world?” began Geoffrey. “Love. Love is what animates all the greatest works of literature, of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante, the Song of Solomon, all serious literary endeavours. Love is the goal towards which all people strive, the home they make if they lucky enough to find it.  Love is the lighthouse glimpsed during a storm at sea. Love lifts us, ennobles us, elevates us. Love is a transcendence of the petty self, a turning towards the other. Love is the apogee of all that is good; love cannot ever go wrong. And the truest expression of love is marriage. Who are we to say whom a person can love or can marry? Who are we to say that some kinds of love are wrong? To deny that a person loves is to deny who they are. I have a fountain pen with a titanium nib and diamond studs. It was given to me by my sister. I love that pen very much and, I think, that if I want to marry it, I should be permitted to.”

            The judge peered gravely down his equine nose at Geoffrey.

              “Neigh,” he said. “What about natural justice? And by that I mean the lawful order of the natural world?”

            “Love trumps nature,” replied Geoffrey wearily, sensing defeat. “Love is higher than truth. Nature is all ugliness and brutality.”

            It was, you have to concede, a pretty bloody odd dream and I told Geoffrey that. He conceded its bloody oddness himself. But that’s Horowhenuapai for you. Crackpots everywhere. I asked Geoffrey if he had seen Barry recently and Geoffrey said no.

            Sometimes I imagine Barry in the living room of his mansion up the valley. He’s sitting by the fire on a worn sofa. Polly is standing opposite him on a rug. Geoffrey is drinking whiskey from a tumbler and, after a moment, he raises it towards her in a toast.

            “I love ewe, Polly,” I imagine him saying.

             

A Refusal to Mourn

Today's post features my last short story, one written around the beginning of 2015 during a period when I was feeling a bit down. I think it's one of my better short stories and, by publishing it here, I can enjoy the buzz of reaching an audience instantly. If (dear reader) you are interested in any other short stories I have written, several can be found on this blog - specifically, "69", "Starlight" and "Beside the Lake". As I said about these other stories, you are most welcome to apply my literary theory to this one if you want.
***

                                           A Refusal to Mourn

In later phases of her life, after her marriage and the births of her two children, after the procurement of a second mortgage and the death of her parents, Xanthe would look back on that summer as the summer that she put her childhood definitively behind her. For a summer, she disengaged herself from ordinary reality and hung suspended between two worlds; for a summer the wheel of time stopped turning. The spring before had been the catalyst. Her parents had been fighting again, an interval of backbiting and bitching that would end conclusively in divorce at last; she had become disillusioned with the art school in Auckland where she was majoring in printmaking; all of her close friends had moved out of the city. Xanthe decided that she needed a break from her usual routines and made up her mind that she would go to Raglan for some indefinite duration. There she could live out of her van in the car park, sit every night on the beach with her guitar and permit her blonde dreadlocks to grow out. It had seemed like a vision of paradise. Xanthe was just a little more than nineteen years old.

The first day she arrived late, around eight. When she was settled, she cooked a dinner of baked beans and bread fried in canola oil on her primus stove and ate it on the beach sitting on her sleeping bag and watching the scarlet drain out of the Western sky above the crashing swells. The next day she went into the town to make arrangements for her stay. She approached the local backpackers and asked if she could use their laundry every week or so to wash her clothes. She went to the petrol station and found out the cost of a bag of ice – her plan was to keep her food in a chilly bin and replenish the ice every couple of days. She familiarized herself with the location of the supermarket. She visited the library and borrowed Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. That evening she sat on the beach and played Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

Sometimes it seemed to Xanthe that she all she had ever done her whole life was listen to other people talk – her parents endlessly exchanging barbed and sarcastic comments, her teachers droning on monotonously about history and biology and math, her friends with their chatter about parties and drugs and relationships and boys. For the first time in her life, Xanthe found herself surrounded, not quite by silence, but by an ambience that bordered on silence - the continuous wash of breakers falling, the unintelligible din of distant conversations, the occasional plangent cry of a gull. Sitting in the evening on her sleeping bag with her book and her thoughts, she wondered if Buddhist monks felt this way in their monasteries when they sat cross-legged and meditated on samsara and karma and suffering. That night, when she crawled into her sleeping bag in her van to sleep, she found that she had not shaken out all the grains of sand that had crept into it but, although she expected the itch to bother her and keep her awake, an unconsciousness nearly as complete as annihilation overtook her almost instantly.

A couple of days after she first arrived, Xanthe, while drifting purposelessly along the main street of the town, saw a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window of a local café. She opened the door, crossed over to the counter of the café and enquired of the manager serving about the job. The manager, harried by the mid-morning rush, briskly told Xanthe to come back at five thirty, closing time. Xanthe crossed over to the library and filled in the afternoon waiting for the interview by skimming through New Scientist magazines and googling music blogs on the Internet. When she returned to the café the manager, who was also the owner, flipped the sign hanging on the door to ‘closed’ and they sat down opposite each other at one of the tables in the quiet of the now empty dining room to discuss the job. The last kitchen hand had abruptly resigned to resume his travels hitchhiking around the country and Felicity needed someone to clean the dishes and generally help out out back. Felicity wore a long turquoise dress and dangling bone earrings; she reminded Xanthe of her godmother Gloria, a woman with gypsy tendencies who supplemented her regular income by telling fortunes with tarot cards and selling gemstones at local fairs, and consequently Xanthe liked Felicity immediately.

“I can’t afford to pay you much,” said Felicity. “And, if it’s not an problem for you, I’d prefer to pay you under the table.”

“That’s alright,” said Xanthe laughing. “If  you pay me under the table, then it won’t interfere with my benefit.”

Xanthe started work at the cafe the next morning. Felicity employed her six days a week. Xanthe began at seven and stayed until two, washing dishes and occasionally assisting in the cooking duties of the chef, an Australian Aboriginal with a wry, deadpan sense of humour who had come to New Zealand to escape the endemic racism of his home country. In quieter moments, he would entertain her by telling her stories about the Rainbow Serpent and the Dreamtime and by performing pitch-perfect whistling impersonations of Australian birdlife. Not only did Xanthe like the chef, she found that her first impressions had been correct and that she got on with Felicity like a house on fire. When Felicity found out about Xanthe’s living arrangements she offered to put Xanthe up at her house and, when Xanthe turned down this offer, Felicity compromised by inviting Xanthe around for dinner a couple of times a week. There Xanthe met Felicity’s husband Russel, who was absent-minded and bandy legged and who worked for the post office and as a part-time volunteer for the local Fire Brigade. After dinner, Felicity and Xanthe would retire to the gazebo where Felicity would sit smoking menthol cigarettes, drinking brandy-and-cokes and telling Xanthe, to Xanthe’s embarrassed amusement, long stories about the string of unsuccessful boyfriends she’d dated prior to meeting Russel.

“Make the most of your youth,” Felicity would tell Xanthe after she had put away a few drinks. “It’s the best time of your life. You never know what’s going to happen to you as you get older.”

Ten years later, Felicity would suffer a major embolism while driving to Hamilton and die on the side of the road.

Every afternoon, Xanthe would sit on her sleeping bag on a dune, reading or watching the other beachgoers. Because it was summer, and because the weather was fine, the beach was often crowded with people – backpackers from Europe, families on their summer holidays, locals wandering along with their dogs on leashes, and, of course, surfers. It was the summer of 2012 and 2013 and the sea was generous that year. The surfers fought for territory among the waves. When one caught a good swell, he would leap to his feet and hold a graceful, balanced posture, arms outstretched, for at the most thirty seconds before being caught and dumped by the breaking of the wave. A little down from and to the right of Xanthe, a group of young surfers had claimed a piece of the beach as their own, and, when they weren’t in the water chasing the best breakers, they sprawled together in a circle drinking, smoking, casually hassling each other and presumably chatting about sport and music or whatever boys talked about when they were together. Occasionally one would dart an inquisitive glance at the girl who sat every afternoon and evening by herself on a sleeping bag on a dune reading. After a couple of days, one of them decided to assuage his curiosity by approaching her and, having apprised his mates of his intention, wandered up the beach towards her.

            “Why are you here by yourself?” he asked. “Don’t you have any mates?”

            “I didn’t bring any with me,” said Xanthe. “I didn’t want them to spoil my vacation.”

            “So is anti-sociability a cast-iron policy of yours? Or do you want to come down and have a beer with us? What do you think?”

            “I suppose I could break my sobriety for a bit,” laughed Xanthe.

            “Cool,” said the boy. “I’m Mark, so you know.”

            Xanthe followed Mark down the beach and the boys made room for her. Mark yanked a bottle of brown ale from the chilly bin, opened it with his lighter and handed it to her. The three boys, all about twenty, were wearing loose board shorts and were possessed of the tanned, athletic bodies of young men who spent a lot of time in the sun and at the gym. Mark, in particular, had a form that tapered from wide muscular shoulders down to narrow sexy hips ­– Xanthe wondered to herself if he had some Maori blood in him. He was swarthier than other two. Sitting cross-legged next to him, Xanthe felt both self-conscious and preternaturally aware of his physical presence beside her. When he lifted his beer to take a swallow, he revealed that, on his arm, he had, not a Maori design as she might have guessed, but a tattoo of a snake that coiled around his bicep and bit its own tail – it made Xanthe think of the Rainbow Serpent and then the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology. She asked him if the tattoo had any significance for him.

            “Not particularly,” said Mark. “I just got it because I thought it looked cool. I only got it a couple of months ago.”

            “Did it hurt?”

            “Shit yeah. But I’ve wanted one like it for ages.”

            The other two boys were called Alex and Michael. All three had attended school together in Hamilton but Michael had abandoned Hamilton for Dunedin to study geography. The summer was the only time during the year when they could all get together. The three of them, together with Alex’s girlfriend Michelle who had chosen not to come to the beach that day, were staying in a holiday home that belonged to Alex’s parents, surfing while the sun shone and partying at night. In recompense, Xanthe told them a little about her own situation, explaining to them that she was working as a kitchen hand in the township, living out of her van for the foreseeable future, and had no idea what she was going to do with herself the next year. Mark was very attentive, leaning close with questions and showing genuine interest in her answers. It turned out that Mark himself was studying Media Studies but that his real passion was the electric guitar. He had just recently started a garage band with a couple of mates; they hadn’t done a gig yet but they were working on it; they were still developing a repertoire.  While he was speaking, Xanthe lifted her knee to her chin and clasped her ankle, displaying her leg in an unconscious gesture of flirtation, realized that she was doing it and immediately tucked in her leg again. The gesture must not have gone entirely unnoticed by the others though and provoked an odd reaction. An electric current passed between the Alex and Michael. They leapt to their feet and stood facing each other.

            “Why don’t you tell the chick how much you can bench-press, bro?” asked

Alex.

            “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, bro?” replied Michael. Xanthe burst into laughter.

            “Fuck this shit. I’m going for a swim,” exclaimed Michael, sprinting off towards the water.

            “Do you want to have a swim?” Mark asked Xanthe, leaning towards her – not lightly, but with the same earnest, confidential tone he had adopted earlier. It was as though they were the only two on the beach.

            “Sure,” said Xanthe. “Just let me go get changed.”

            Xanthe set off up the beach toward the car park across the blazingly hot sand. As she walked, occasionally she giggled to herself – boys of a certain age were all such retards. It must be something to do with hormones. Back at the van, she climbed in through the rear door, drew shut the mesh curtains that hung over the windows and quickly stripped off her denim shorts and yellow blouse. Her red bikini top was hanging over the steering wheel and the bikini bottoms were under the mattress for some reason. As she put on the top, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror she kept in the van. Bodies, she thought to herself with amused self-disgust, who needs them?

            Alex had brought a rugby ball with him and when Xanthe arrived back at the sea’s edge she found the three boys up to their waists in the water lobbing the ball between them. “Here I am!” Xanthe called out to them and plunged into the ocean. The water, as it always does on first contact, felt bracingly cold, especially, as she got deeper in and it reached first the level of her cunt and then her belly button, but Xanthe knew that once she got over the first shock she would soon become accustomed to the chill. Mark threw her the ball and she caught it in both hands.

            “We’re playing a kind of game,” he told her. “Do you want to be involved?”

            The game was a version of Piggy-in-the-Middle. They four of them divided into two teams: team-mates would throw the ball between them and the opposing two would attempt to intercept it. Mark and Xanthe were on one team and Alex and Michael were on the other. Xanthe wasn’t very good at this game but she enjoyed watching the boys throwing themselves around, stretching supplely when they chucked the ball or diving dramatically to catch it before it hit the water. They seemed supremely unaware of their physical fitness and grace. Occasionally, a swell would roll in from the side, lifting Xanthe off her feet and then, when it passed, allowing her to settle again on the sea-floor. The time by then was a little past six and the afternoon was swiftly dwindling. After about half an hour, the four of them regathered on the beach and the boys pulled on cotton t-shirts.

            “You know what we should do?” said Michael suddenly. “We should come back here tonight after dark and build a bonfire.”

            “How can we do that?” asked Alex. “Where would we get the wood?”

            “We can buy a sack of firewood from the service station,” pronounced Mark with an air of decision. ”And a bottle of lighter fluid. I built a bonfire with my folks that way in the Coromandel one year.”

            Michael and Alex immediately and enthusiastically endorsed the plan and it was swiftly decided that they should head off into town to stock up on necessary supplies right away, although Alex inserted a diffident request that they travel via home-base in order for him to collect Michelle. Mark turned to Xanthe.

            “So what do you think? Do you want to party on the beach with us tonight?”

            “Sure,” laughed Xanthe. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else.”

            After Xanthe had picked up her woollen jersey from the van, the four of them piled into Michael’s car and they set off towards the bach where the boys were staying. They drove with the windows down so that the boys could smoke. On the way, Michael regaled them with stories about surfing in the icy-cold waters around Dunedin and the weird wetsuited dudes with grey pony tails he had met down there. The stories he told were often very funny and Xanthe laughed a lot, although her laughter was more the result of the edginess a person can feel when finding herself suddenly in a car with three strange surfer dudes from Hamilton than a reaction to the stories she was hearing. It was a situation she simply couldn’t have predicted.

The bach, when they arrived at it, turned out to be less a bach than a stucco cube. Alex went in the front door and emerged, a couple of minutes later, with Michelle, a petite zaftig strawberry-blonde wearing red jeans and white singlet and knuckling her eyes.

            “I was asleep,” Michelle said plaintively as they walked back down the path towards the car. “Why’d you have to wake me up?”

            “I told you – we’re going to get drunk on the beach tonight.”

            “But I was asleep.” Michelle stopped abruptly, looking towards the car. “Who’s the hot chick in the back seat?”

            “Just some random girl we picked up on the beach. She’s called Xanthe, I think. Mark’s got a major hard-on for her.”

            “Just so long as she doesn’t oust me from my position of sexiest bitch in Raglan,” Michelle declared.

             Michelle and Alex climbed in the car and the five of them set off towards town, Alex and Michael sitting in the front seats and Xanthe and Mark sitting in the back with Michelle in between them. Mark continued plying Xanthe with questions about her life and interests, speaking past Michelle as though Michelle wasn’t there. Xanthe could tell that he was hitting on her, that he was into her, and it gave her a feeling of keen delight to parry his enquiries and to play with him.

            “What do your parents do?” he asked.

            “My dad lectures in Economics at the university but he reads a lot of poetry in his free time. His favourite poet is Dylan Thomas.”

            Mark had no idea how to reply to this.

            “I like your hair. Is it natural?”

            “I’m actually a brunette. I’m planning to let the dreads grow out over the summer.”

            “Does anyone else smell burning?” Michelle piped up. “I smell burning.”

            Alex, who was sitting shotgun, swivelled around to look at her.

            “Michelle – your hair is on fire.”

            Michelle squealed. They pulled over to the side of the road while Michelle anxiously patted out the small smouldering in her locks. An ember must have blown back from one the boys’ cigarettes and lodged there. After everyone was reassured that no real damage had been done, Michelle burst into a gale of relieved giggles.

            “It’s because I’m so hot,” she said. “I’m so hot that sometimes I just spontaneously combust!”

            “It’s like an auto-da-fe,” said Xanthe smiling wryly.

            In twenty years time, Michelle would have put on thirty kilograms, be unhappily married to the assistant manager of an office supplies shop in Huntly and be childless as a consequence of endometriosis.

            After they had purchased wood, lighter fluid and a box of beer, the group decided to kill some time by going to a local pub for dinner. They ate their meals in the beer garden and then hung out for a while, drinking, smoking and talking shit. For the first time since Xanthe had met him, Mark opened up a little about his own life. He did, in fact, have some Maori blood in him. His tribe was Ngati Maniatpoto and he’d spent time on the Marae when he was young, although he hadn’t been back in a long time. Looking around, Xanthe noticed, with a little misgiving, that everyone was drinking, including Michael the driver, but felt, uncharacteristically for her, too shy to say anything about it. It had also occurred to her that there might be some local bylaw prohibiting fires on the beach but, when she decided to mention this, the others reacted indifferently.

            “Time to go,” Mark announced suddenly. “We need to get this party properly started.”

            They drove back to beach. By this hour, the sun had almost completely set: the sky was painted deep red and the undersides of the scattered cumulus clouds were burnished gold. Once they had found a suitable spot, they built a ziggurat of wood, doused it in lighter fluid and set it alight. It had become dark by now. Flames were soon stretching into the air, feet planted in the wood and hands waving and petitioning the empty heavens. Michael hooked up his iPod to a set of speakers and put on a play-list by the Beatles. Beers were handed round and drunk. Marshmallows, that they had had the foresight to buy when they were in town, were skewered on sticks and roasted. After a little while Xanthe was enjoined to go get her guitar from her van and lend it to Mark. Michael turned off the iPod and Mark played Bob Marley and Pearl Jam to the group, taking evident pleasure in being the centre of attention. Watching him, Xanthe privately concluded that she was probably the better guitar player but judged this an observation best keep to herself.

            At one point, when the conversation lagged, Xanthe found her eyes drawn to the fire and to the clouds of sparks that rose from it. In the old days, back when she was a Christian, Xanthe had believed that a spark rising from a bonfire was a perfect symbol for the human soul – a point of light borne up out of a conflagration, twisting and turning, alone and yet in company, until it winked out of existence… but she guessed that now that she was a Buddhist, she would have to abandon her belief in souls. Buddhist didn’t believe that people had souls.

            “Have any of you guys heard of the Fire Sermon?” she asked without thinking.

            “Nope,” said Alex. “What’s that?”

            “It’s one of the central texts in Buddhism. It’s a speech that the Buddha delivered to a bunch of fire-worshipers about pain and desire and ignorance. Zorastrians, I think.”

            “Buddhism?” said Michael. He was sitting on the other side of the fire. “Those guys believe in reincarnation, right? What do you think Alex? Do you believe in reincarnation?”

            “No way, bro. That stuff’s bullshit. I think that when you die, that’s it, the end, finito. You only get to live once.”

            “What about Heaven? You don’t believe in Heaven?”

            “I think Heaven is something invented purely to reassure religious wackos.”

            In twenty years time, Alex would have a crippling stroke while cleaning the guttering of his house and, despite serious incapacities with respect to language and motor skills, would still manage to cling on to life for another thirty.

            After a little while, Mark came and sat next to Xanthe. She was a little drunk by this time. The salt from the afternoon’s swim had congealed on her skin and had started itching. They chatted intimately, Mark complimenting her on the beauty of her mouth and the blueness of her eyes. They kissed. Mark put his hand up Xanthe’s jersey and felt her breast. They kissed again. After a moment, Mark drew back, grinning broadly, and said, “I’m just going to go talk to the boys for a bit. I’ll be back.”

            Mark crossed to the other side of the fire and stood talking volubly to Michael and Alex. Xanthe gazed blankly across the fire at him. It was a problem. He was good-looking - there was no denying that - but there was something wrong about him. For one thing, he wasn’t as smart as she had hoped when she first met him. And his strategy of endlessly asking questions and never talking about himself had grown tired after a while. Unbidden, the memory of her favourite cousin Andy rose to the surface of her mind. It happened this way sometimes. She and Andy had been the same age. They had played together, gone roller skating together, gone to the zoo together, hung out and listened to music together when they were older. In a way, he had been her first love.

            Xanthe remembered the last time she had seen him. It was in hospital. He was lying in bed wearing a beanie because the chemotherapy had denuded him of hair and there were tubes coming out of his nose. Late stage aggressive leukaemia. For the first time in her life, Xanthe felt uncomfortable to be in the same room as Andy and wanted to get out of it as fast as possible. Nevertheless she made an effort to sit next to him, be brave and smile. Andy reached over and put his hand on hers. There were so many things I wanted to do, he told her. Live for me. I can’t do it for myself. Andy succumbed not long after. He was seventeen.

            The sparks spiralled up from the bonfire. Mark came strolling back around it towards her, the firelight casting a red sheen across the side of his face. It was as though he was on fire. In his eyes, he had a look disconcertingly like triumph.

            “We’re going to be going soon. Do you want to come back to our place with me tonight? What do you think?”

            The sparks soared up from the dying bonfire, twisting and turning, and at last vanishing into nothingness.