Interiors – by Zac Picker
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
1.
Nobody tells you that the universe is smaller inside than outside, he thinks.
Shad is slurping tea in the boardroom upstairs — vanilla and chamomile, with some of the honey that one of the old professors had left in the canteen before they retired. Shad's research group is in there discussing something boring. It’s all boring. The tensions, the questions, the answers. He leans back in the chair. This smells like bullshit to me, he says, and the postdoc chuckles.
Back in the old days, Shad used to look up at night and think about how it all seemed so big. It was a kind of secret psalm, he thought. Layers of learning stacked on top of each other like an upside-down pyramid projected from his head, stretched into the foggy distance of the firmament. Lying on the cool evening grass, he could feel it in the fuzzy spots behind his eyes.
Now, after a degree and most of a PhD, Shad has never been so close to the edge. And looking up, it’s just — well, he can imagine most of the picture. Smaller inside than outside. Shad sees it as ethereal hands, reaching into his skull, squeezing his brain like a dirty sponge. The hands search for the last of the good juice, of the ebbing black awe in the night sky. It trickles down his face in thin brown streams like primordial waterfalls.
Most of the good physics has already been done, Shad figures. All that’s left is combining old facts in new ways. He’s written a few papers like that, but secretly, he thinks it was mostly fiction. On the side, Shad writes actual fiction, for a bit of spare cash — but every story he writes is mostly real.
Have you brought a paper to discuss this week? his supervisor asks. No, he says. It was all shit, he says. He promises to bring one the following week.
1. a.
He realises that the neighbourhood is smaller on the inside than the outside — the walk home is shorter every day, the coffee-runs quicker, more forgettable. It’s not even four in the arvo and he’s already bundled up to leave his office. Checking his phone, Shad sees his Scottish family have just woken up and are wishing his brother happy birthday in the big WhatsApp group. Shit, he forgot. Everything is so fuzzy, he thinks. Static.
In the back roads that lead past trendy terrace houses, Shad watches the last drops of the golden winter sun dancing through the gum leaves. It’s very pretty, he thinks. Maybe I should take acid more often, he thinks.
A small dog bites the ankles of a larger greyhound in the park and they run long ellipses on the grass near the cemetery.
He stops to look through the fence gaps behind the Oporto near Newtown Station, where the pink sunset reflects in the long catenary curves of the trainlines. This would be a good insta, Shad realises, but he doesn’t want it to look like he’s trying too hard with his shitty phone camera so he zooms in until the picture blurs in long lavender smears, like an uneasy oil-painting. The right blend of irony, trendiness and artiness for this neighbourhood, he thinks.
Further up the hill Shad buys a chicken snackpack from the Turkish place that has actually-good hummus. This ritual is for the shit days, he tells himself, but he’s eaten too many the last few weeks and is starting to feel sick of the indulgence. Shad reckons himself a vegetarian so he eats it quickly in secret, greedily.
1. a. i.
People never talk about the house that’s smaller on the inside than the outside. They fantasise about that Doctor Who shit, Narnia closets, worlds-within-worlds-within-houses, breathtakingly endless. But most houses are not like that, and for Shad, it is like the hallways are trying to close in on him as he removes his coat and shoes in his smaller-inside-house. He feels slow and sticky, like those dreams where you are swimming through the air and going so slowly. Or maybe like cave diving, Shad thinks. He remembers that he left an extra tank of air in his room so he shimmies through the tiny gaps in the rocks that used to be the staircase to the second floor.
There are deadlines coming up, writing projects due on Monday night. They want fifteen hundred words on anything — but probably, they want something relatable about life in Australia, because that’s what editors usually want. The big eucalyptus out the window is nice, Shad thinks. Maybe they want to hear about that. The spindly, grasping gum branches shake and rock in the breeze as an airplane passes low overhead. It feels like the tree can hear the deep rolling thunder of the jet engines, twisting and swaying in its drowning. Its roots loosen the burnt-red bricks that line the backyard. To Shad, it feels like a great gasping.
I don’t know much about Australia, to be honest, Shad thinks. Everything is so fuzzy these days. I can’t remember well. The ten years he’s been here feel distant and fake — in his nightmares, he wakes up in Kansas, at his old school.
1. a. i. 1.
His bed, too, feels smaller inside than outside — Shad stretches out diagonally and his toes still hang off the end, cold and frightened. Ever since his friends had bedbugs, Shad has woken in panics, scratching at nothing on his leg. That night, his girlfriend stays over and tells him he’s doing a good job, but he doesn’t know how to take the compliment. He still feels like something is missing – like he’s missing. He can’t find the right words for it.
Once when he was young, back in the Midwest, Shad put a snowball in the freezer to save for the summer. A few months later, he checked back on it, but it had sublimated into nothing. This pops into Shad’s head as he begins to doze. He whispers the story to his girlfriend, but she’s already asleep. They turn over together and she puts her arm underneath his neck. In the night, she steals the blankets.
1. a. i. 1. a.
Dreams, expectedly, are smaller on the inside than the outside.
Shad wakes in the night to scribble what he can remember on his phone before the fuzziness steals them away. They call, gasp, for the big questions he can’t find in the chalkboard truths of science, or in the sunset fence gaps of the cool part of town, or in the psychedelic posters whose blu-tack edges warp in the coldness of his room, or in the soft kisses that valley in the small of his back like water searching for a riverbed. No one actually wants to listen to someone else’s dreams, he remembers. They’re always boring, at best. Maybe we’re not really supposed to remember them.
1. a. i. 1. a. i.
The fuzz, too, is smaller inside than it is outside. Shad dreams that time is a rotary dial, caught on a loop. A looptail g,
in gasping, grasping. Deep down, Shad knows, he is looking for a reason — a reason for these feelings, a reason for the smallness, for the softness of the slipping memories, for the soft buzzing under it all. In his dreams, Shad is running for the train, but it doesn’t matter if he catches this one or has to wait for the next, panting and embarrassed. The fuzz is warm, small and narrow, so narrow he can see past the edges of the fine crevice etchings he carves in the night, pink light peeking through the gaps, through the tunnel walls and the railway ties and the sinking lost awe, sublimated, snowballing, hungry — deep down, Shad knows that really, he wants to feel this way. The thought scares him — but there are no more layers to bury into. ▼
Image: Alex Mao
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