The Sawdust House

David Whish-Wilson was born in Newcastle, NSW, but grew up in Singapore, Victoria and WA. He left Australia aged eighteen to live for a decade in Europe, Africa and Asia. He is the author of The Summons, The Coves, True West and four crime novels in the Frank Swann series: Line of Sight, Zero at the Bone, Old Scores and Shore Leave. His non-fiction book, Perth, part of the NewSouth Books city series, was shortlisted for a WA Premier’s Book Award. David lives in Fremantle and coordinates the creative writing program at Curtin University. Published with support from the Dorothy and Bill Irwin Charitable Trust To my parents, for the roads there and the ways back. Better calling death to come Than to die another dumb Muted victim in the slum Better than of this prison rot If there’s any choice I’ve got – Muhammad Ali, Dublin, July 1972 My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach … – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” PROLOGUE SAN FRANCISCO, 1856 Further from San Francisco. The Vigilance Committee, moreover, we have the fullest assurance, had determined to sit in perpetuity, until not only the city of San Francisco, but the entire State, should be subjected to a thorough purification. Our informants state that they have prepared a black list, embracing the names of about one hundred and eighty of the most notorious murderers, thieves and black-legs, all of whom will be required to quit the country, at short notice, or contemplate the contingency of summary judgment before the tribunal of Judge Lynch. Among their names are said to be the following: “Dave” Broderick, from New York. Yankee Sullivan, from New York. Charley Duane, (“Dutch Charley,”) from New York. Billy Mulligan, (“great on the pistol,”) from New York. Bill Lewis, (boarding-house keeper.) Colonel James, (lawyer.) Ned McGowan, (judge.) Daniel Aldrich, (black-leg.) Evening Star, Washington DC, Friday, 20 June, 1856. It is only when the waning moon comes out from behind the clouds in the hours before dawn that I feel the stirring of certainties and directions that recall the follies of recent years. The jailor is asleep outside my cell, snuffling like a boar. My fellow prisoners are asleep, even Cora, whose blue terrors have not abated one bit since his capture and forced abstinence. My mind quietens, my nerves settle, I am one man again, subject to gravity and time. The clarity that I feel now is both beautiful and terrifying. I look back upon my years and feel as though I’ve been absent from my own life excepting the voice in my head that keeps winding toward silence. So irreconcilable do my earlier performances of myself seem that I pity him the role that he must play over and over – inhabited by a ghost of himself and by the ghosts of others, and none of his own making. I do not interrogate this new voice nor its way of seeing, for I have no wish to return to the shaken, timid, uncertain man that since my arrest I have become. The voice does not belong to any of my aliases or anybody I have ever known, although I sometimes hear within it the gentle melody of my friend the poet Whitman when he were most deeply transported by his words, the words of every man and woman swelling within him, and which in my solitude swell within me. An image that I keep returning to, despite myself. Me – preparing for battle, my body no more than a manifestation of the will that possesses my mind to the exclusion of all else. Such a fierce and sharp blade it is, too – the transubstantiation of fear, hatred, self-hatred, love and self-love. I soak my fists in vinegar blocking out the banter of my mates and my wife, the wailing of my infant daughter. I starve myself to feed my will, and the pain that consumes my bones, sinew, muscle fuels my will. The images of my opponent’s face are a manifestation of my will fading to nothing before its certainty, focus and direction. When I walk into the ring toward the scratch I am almost entirely absent. I am instead a combustible vapour made of nerve-sickness and dread that fuels the rising balloon in the shape of my body. My feet do not touch the ground. My naked skin does not feel the prick of cold air or the weight of humid air. My ears roar with silence. My eyes dance over my opponent like light over water. It is this feature that I do not understand, because it is during my absence from myself and all of history and every consequence that I have felt most alive. I speak of a point past the shade of death – a place before the corporeality of birth. I watch myself pound and be pounded upon, smiling and bleeding into the gouging, tripping, bone-breaking image of myself that is both myself and my opponent who I have become, and who has become me. It is myself that my fists annihilate, and his pain that I feel, and both of our lives have led to this pure moment so ugly in appearance and so pointless that it has transcended its ritual of hastened dying and has become death itself. Witness the baying crowd, eyes flickering with pity and grievous malignancy observing the coming of death to themselves and all who will follow them, and all who have already passed over, to where my opponent and myself batter every death and all deaths – stepping one foot into life and one foot into death like dancers in a fire. It is this story that I wish to tell the poet but I know that the voice born of a language other than my own cannot be spoken aloud, and sadly – I lack the skills to write it. I envy the poet his facility, for I suppose that the act of writing is no