Adam Ouston
Bedford Downs Rorschach
Thus Spoke Spud (after Ben Quilty’s Bedford Downs Rorschach)
‘If you want to know about the Infinite,’ said Spud cupping his nose as we sat in Emergency, not allowing the blockage to get in the way of larger themes, ‘I can tell you about the Infinite.’
‘The fuck you know about the Infinite?’ said Willie through clenched teeth, wincing on the f’s (his jaw was broken and would need wiring).
Spud, looking up at the tear-jerkingly white ceiling to stem the flow of blood, pinching the bridge of his nose, expelled a long ‘Uggghhh’. It was unclear whether this was in response to Willie’s attitude or the pain. To which, after dabbing his nostrils with a bloodied and balled-up, once-blue-but-now-purple Ipswich Rod & Reel t-shirt, he added:
‘The fuck wouldn’t I know about it!’—the bunged-up nasal passage making him almost impossible to understand. ‘One minute I was standing there ready to go a few rounds, next thing I was curled up on the road having the piss beaten out of me. Something happened in between. In the darkness. Something extraordinary.’
‘Mate,’ said I, ‘you’re concussed.’
Emergency was busy. It was a Saturday night, and other than the three of us, there was a guy in white jeans and a khaki silk shirt who’d dislocated a shoulder in what must’ve been a nightclub brawl, a teenage mum clutching a screaming baby, an old wino bleeding from the eyebrow and mouth, and a toothless, skeletal woman threatening to unleash her bowels all over the beige lino if she didn’t get seen immediately.
‘A few rounds?’ I said, my upper lip split right through and hanging open (I’d seen it in the doors as we came in). ‘More like you hit a lamp-post trying to get away.’
‘Ha ha,’ mumbled wincing Willie, bringing his hand up to within a centimetre of his jaw.
‘I mean after that,’ said Spud, ignoring me. ‘In the time before I came to. I had a vision.’
‘How many you reckon there were?’ said Willie.
‘Nine. Ten. Something like that,’ said I.
‘One second I was thinking, “It’s on,” next I was on another plane,’ said Spud as though he was now taking himself through a particularly complicated mathematical equation.
‘Mate,’ said Willie, ‘you’ve copped a knock to the scone.’
‘Just don’t fall asleep,’ said I.
The doors peeled back and they wheeled in a guy on a stretcher fixed up to a drip with the ambo saying something to the nurse about alcohol poisoning, blue curacao and Dopey Smurf.
‘There are levels of consciousness,’ said Spud with the universe in his voice, straying into dangerous territory.
‘The fuck you know about consciousness?’ said Willie.
‘More than you,’ he said. ‘You ever blacked out?’ he asked Willie, who shook his head. ‘How ‘bout you?’
‘Not sober,’ I said.
‘Well, this was different. I was on the Other Side.’
‘Still are,’ said I.
‘There was a wall,’ said Spud, his free and unbloodied hand now extended into the middle distance like someone doing Shakespeare. ‘A thundering black wall, as though wrought from night itself. Of such size and heft as to imply impenetrability. But it was not the case. Not at all. I reached in. It was soft. It gave. I knew that if I went in slowly, carefully, I would be able to pierce whatever substance the wall was made from. With my hand a closed pincer, I began with the fingers, then the knuckles, wrist, forearm, elbow. I was afraid at first—afraid of losing my arm; who knew what was on the other side—but as I inched inwards, my confidence grew. It was much colder there, on the other side. Or maybe it was the wall itself that was cold. My hand began to ache immediately, as though I’d reached back in time to Mawson’s Antarctica. Still, I leaned into it because there was something to be drawn out. That much I knew. As my ear met the dark wall, slick as a whale’s eye, I could hear it. A high-pitched pleading—something crying for help, repeated over and over, Help me! Help me! Help me! They were human words, but it wasn’t a human voice. It was distant. Lost. When I couldn’t reach any further, my fingers touched something. I grasped and tickled it closer. It was small and wet. I drew it towards me, wincing with the effort. Then I opened my palm. I was holding my own nose, blood dripping through my fingers and splashing onto my white trainers. Look!’
His shoes were indeed spattered with blood, like a painter’s with paint.
In my shame, I said nothing. Sitting there, I felt smaller than the nose in Spud’s hand, now black with dried blood. Such shame and embarrassment. I’d howled, not like a wolf but a coward.
‘The Infinite was that wall. Nothingness. No sound. No colour. Absolute darkness,’ said Spud, now looking in my direction as though he knew that his wall was erected of my voice, as though he had seen—perhaps from above—my cries for help. My unwillingness to take the hundred blows. He’d reached right into the blackness of that night and felt the frigidity of my cowardice, touched a knowledge that, in the end, I would be the first to crumble, to break down and shriek, to fold.
Adam Ouston is a writer living in Hobart, Tasmania. His debut novel Waypoints was published in 2022.