Damon’s Aestivation

Damon’s last venture into the house was six weeks before when late one evening he had discovered that not only had the batteries in his torch died but that there was no oil left for his old lamp either. Thereon he’d stocked anything he might need in the shed, gratified that he had successfully forged a resemblance of the surf-bum existence that he had had back in his early twenties. This was his sole, short-lived, glimmer of satisfaction, however. Back then, it had been fun and exciting. This was all about coping.

In those halcyon days, he had bought a campervan with the money that he had saved from working down the mines in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, and then had lived solely on one hundred dollars a week. His working visa had run out, but he hadn’t cared; he had had no intention of working anymore, and with fifteen thousand dollars saved in the bank, he had stayed illegally in Australia for nigh on three years, bumming around the eastern coastline, surfing and sleeping in his van. He had had the time of his life.

This garden reclusion had gone beyond trying to mimic those times; he was now involuntarily entrenched there. Instead of sitting at the open door of the back of his campervan, facing the sea, waxing his surfboard, Damon now sat in an old broken rusty wheelbarrow, looking down the slope in his garden towards his greenhouse and vegetable plot, cleaning his spade. As he lay there with one leg dangling over the end, and the other leg resting on one of the handles, he gazed at the sky. With his hands resting on his spade, like a guitarist strumming his most loved trusty instrument, he said reassuringly: ‘We have to wait for the best time for digging, you know, my old friend. When the time is right, we’ll be back out there’.

He nodded to himself and surveyed his vegetable plot. The oppressive heat of the sun in what was turning out to be the hottest June on record was doing nothing to help him return to sanity. He was waiting for the tide to turn and for the waves to get bigger. He would know when the right moment had arrived. The dirty white T-shirt that he had dampened and placed over his head had long since dried, and the water that had dripped over the front onto the broken solitary wheel had evaporated, with only a tiny amount having soaked into the dry earth below to aid the scorched yellowing grass.

Hearing Damon now singing an old indie song from the early nineties, a neighbour might have ascertained that he was now in cheerier spirits and that he was coming to terms with the misfortune that had befallen him earlier that year. The reality, sadly, was that his singing wasn’t borne of happiness but from a trance-like state of temporary self-removal from life. He was in complete denial of the death of his family; in fact, he had for so long tried to forget about reality and set himself back into the past that he was now experiencing a complete pattern of slowing time. If the gardening tools and plants with which he held conversations could indeed listen, they would realise that his methodical count to ten, while watering each tomato plant, took in fact thirty seconds.

The month of June slowly progressed, and the heat became so oppressive that Damon found the tent becoming unbearably hot. At the hottest time of day, even the shadiest parts of the garden were over thirty-five degrees and to top it all Damon was thirsty. He had squeezed every drop out of the water collectors. It hadn’t rained for nearly four weeks and he had drunk the last cup of boiled water that morning. Damon refused to go into the house, but he figured the garage would hold no memories. It would be a damn sight cooler, and he suspected that there might be the odd plastic bottle lying around with some water inside. Feeling somewhat ashamed at having to abandon his tools and plants, he defended his decision to them by reasoning that he wasn’t actually going into the house. He took the spade with him, just to be sure.

Once inside the garage, he lay on the concrete floor and revelled in its coolness. It soon felt too hard, so he broke down some old cardboard boxes and used these as bedding. He was thankful to find inside one of these boxes an old two-litre plastic bottle whose water contents, although not fresh, had a rather pleasant distant Coca-Cola taste. The garage was dark; both the large electrically operated main door and the normal-sized door into the garden were modern ones that completely sealed the garage against even the brightest outdoor light. Dawn had woken Damon up every morning before six o’clock recently, and still dozy from his afternoon nap in the sun in his old wheelbarrow, he lay down on the cardboard boxes and fell asleep.

For the next couple of weeks, Damon stayed in the garage. His mind entered a strange fuzziness and his body lost all energy. His heart may still have been beating and his organs all functioning correctly, but Damon was hardly what one may call alive. He was like a snail one finds in the garden that upon closer inspection is only a shell. He had transitioned through despair into denial and had now continued down this long dark tunnel into a void of nothingness, and the dark garage suited his inner state. His sleep-wake cycles approximately doubled, adjusting to a forty-eight-hour cycle: thirty-two hours of slumbering wakefulness followed by sixteen hours of sleep. Without thought or effort, he fasted. This aestivation was the ultimate manifestation of the depths of his depression. This continued for almost two weeks until his sensory deprivation caused hallucinations, starting with geometric shapes or points of light, and then getting more aberrant with visions of his children getting in and out of the car. He withstood these, using what reason he had left to reassure himself that they weren’t real: ‘it’s not here Damon - far too much junk these days to get it in – really is - outside on the drive’. He couldn’t bear the sound hallucinations, however. First, he heard the sounds of their voices. He covered his ears, but still they grew louder. Elise’s cuddly bear music played over and over. The attached string, designed to slowly play a lullaby and induce sleep, never retracted back. Its maddening, never-ending loop forced Damon into a scream of forthright distress, breaking him from his trance-like state, and it drove him to finally leave and step back outside into the garden.

When Damon emerged from the garage, he found it hard to shake a sensation of an altered sense of reality, convinced that the plants and trees of the garden were in motion and that his tent was constantly changing shape and size. He staggered towards the pool, looked at his watch, registering momentarily that it was already the last day of the month, and just let himself collapse into the water. He sank to the farthest depth of the bottom of the pool, remained there for a full minute and thinking decisively for the first time in weeks about what he was doing, he sprung up to breathe again.

Outwardly refreshed, he went to a water collector and, discovering to his surprise that it must have rained sometime, he drank greedily directly from the tap, not caring about the water’s cleanliness. He then stumbled over to the bench by the plum tree and fell upon it, dazed. After a while, his brain made sense of what had happened to him, but he felt like he was trying to create a whole idea out of lots of partial ones. Something was wrong, he could just feel it. He felt like he was going to die. His brain was trying to construct reality from the scant signals available to it; it was like he was uploading a fantasy world from one of Martin’s video games into his brain. Flashes of images came to him: he was falling, falling backwards, and something dangerous was behind him. As he looked up, he saw Daniella, and he felt repelled. He didn’t understand why he felt this way, but instinctively he pushed away from her, against the back of the bench so hard that it tipped over. The bench fell backwards and Damon landed heavily onto the ground behind him, banging his head against one of the rocks that formed the border of his patch of strawberries.

He immediately lost consciousness. The image was clearer now. He saw the kitchen cupboards and heard the furious piercing screaming of his wife. Her mouth paused, frozen open, and her eyes seemed as large again as the days when they had first fallen in love. As he looked into her eyes, he saw the anger instantaneously dissipate and the love that she really did hold for him inside come to the surface. As he fell so too did a silence fall upon the kitchen; nothing could be heard and the contrast with her screaming only a few seconds earlier was evident to the children in the sandpit and conceivably even to the birds just outside the door drinking from the bird table.

Damon felt himself in a heightened state of awareness like his mind had entered some hitherto untapped source of intelligence; he could hear a lawnmower in the distance outside, he saw a small spot in the ceiling’s corner that he had missed when painting a few years before, but most of all he saw Daniella and although the distance between them was increasing as he fell, he felt close to her again. It seemed as if tears were already welling up in her eyes in the knowledge of his certain death. He, like everyone else, had always heard that in the final few seconds, one’s life flashes before one’s eyes but the truth for him was that he saw his beautiful, loving wife before him, as she was when they had married, in the early years of their relationship. He saw her galloping towards him as he waited by the fountains in the Place des Quinconces in Bordeaux; her smile so broad that her accompanying cheeks reflected the light of day as if the star of our solar system had been itself waiting since its birth for that very moment, forcing a special burst of sunshine that radiated upon them as they kissed, the soft texture of her lips and taste of her lipstick leaving a taste that his tongue wanted to savour for so long that he kept his eyes shut hoping the moment would last forever. The warmth of her kiss and the lipstick taste had etched itself into the fabric of his mind as much as the stain it had left on her glass, just one of the many marvellous clinking glasses that sounded on the terraces of that square, a happy sound that accompanied the glory of their love. Her hair smelled like a thousand acres of fields of wild berries, all contained within one wonderful curly, glistening, lush mesh that swept and washed like endless waves over her shoulders. She was all these things: every sound he loved, every smell he longed to experience again. He had known her as she was then, and he held this image of her as he fell. The argument had been so ugly and futile compared with such a wonderful beautiful recollection of such equally wondrous times, and these were the final memories he held as he fell onto the open dishwasher, onto the knives innocently waiting to be pushed in for washing, but instead lying sadly in wait for impact, without any actual desire to do what they were destined to do: to push into his flesh and kill.

For dirty knives that have lain in wait

In lines in a greasy grey basket

Does there exist such a thing as fate?

They are only to be cleaned and are certainly unfit

For cleansing a love that now displays only hate

One slight slip is all it may take to transmit

The resentment that’s left, and now it’s too late