Chapter one

Chiara moves to New York to study a Masters in Philosophy in the winter of 1999, hoping for new experiences and new friends. Finding a flat-share nearby in Harlem, she sets about her new life in America.     

However Chiara is troubled by a shift in her mental patterns; lost memories; a twisting and disturbing imagination, accompanied by a frequent loss of a sense of time.

Fearing a subtle madness settling in her mind, she is floundering until she meets Hooman, an idealistic International Lawyer trying to change the status-quo, until he is diverted by her unconventional life. Together they discover each other and the source of Chiara's changing perceptual experiences. It seems that the world they knew, didn't exist to begin with. A new world, one both disturbingly beautiful and sublime rises up to meet them.

The arrival; the future is behind me

The sound of the cabin ping found her ears. Snapped out of a reverie she looked up — the seatbelt signs were now off. People shuffled in their seats and a domino of seatbelts undone clicked at random in the cabin around her. Passengers searched for books and other paraphernalia to pack into carry-on bags. Her mind had been absorbed in the colours and texture of dirty snow, which rimmed the edge of the aircraft taxiways and airport buildings, as the plane had made its way to the terminal. Patches of snow were luminescent, as they held the light of the evening sun, on this New York winter’s day.

Taking her bag down from the overhead compartment, she checked for all her travel documents. Rummaging around the bag revealed feta cheese, olives and Lebanese bread, bought by her brother to avoid plane food; the feta had broken through its packaging and crumbled onto her cheap 35mm Russian camera. Examining the camera, she wiped the metal casing clean with her sleeve.

The aircraft door opened — she heard the pressure-pop — and everyone milled into the isle. Through several people ahead, she caught a glimpse of first class, where the exit door was located. The captain and cabin crew were assembling, preparing for a pleasant but ambiguous round of departing goodbyes and smiles. Dividing their — typically effervescent — ‘Goodbye, bye, goodbye, have a nice stay,’ so on and so forth, over a few people at a time. Preparing for the reciprocal ‘Thank you, bye,’ she wondered what would life be like if we were never paid to be nice to each other. A world of smiles financed by selfless motives, rather than self-preservation and the inspiration of trying to make a monthly rent cheque, but was it true? If she could strip away motive to the last fundamental, what could then remain; was there really a selfless instinct in the human psyche, with absolutely nothing to gain?

With that last thought held in perfect stillness, unanswered, a rapid montage of images pushed into her thoughts, all human facial gesture, in layers of semi-transparent overlay, merged into a single shape, a collective blurring smile. The montage then halted abruptly, in the form of a woman's lips heavy with make-up and over-white teeth. After only a brief moment — as if someone had hit a play button — the woman's smile disappeared, morphing back into a diversity of human smiles and other variant facial gestures, smearing continually until nothing was apparent but a skin-tone, fading gradually into a deep brilliant white, which spread and expanded, enveloping the full panorama of her vision. Into that white, she witnessed herself disintegrating in all directions — her body familiar in shape, yet made of thousands of illuminated pomegranate seed pixels. Ripening, pods of light unhinging from her, then shot off — one by one, falling away into that deep abiding light until nothing of her remained.

Shuddering, as if her body rejected the panorama in her mind, she brought herself out of this uninvited vision by thinking of the trivial in-flight movie. Simultaneously, she had been inching unconsciously towards the front of the plane, which brought her nearly level to the exit door.

Her mind appeared to have been submerged for several minutes, but the rational part of her knew that it had passed in less than ten seconds. In that short time, she could not remember walking along the length of the isle.

In the past, these unbidden moments of mental abstraction and intruding montages had been triggered by obscure and old fragments of memories, apparently insignificant, until they came to the surface — pointing her conscious will in new unintended directions. Like recently, when memories from childhood had arrived, they came with what seemed no logical relationship to her current train of thought — triggered by a smell, a colour, a word or even the shape of an object. However, this one, in atypical fashion, had arrived with no more than just the idea of the human smile. The patterns in trigger events, which gave rise to the visions, were evolving.

Maybe these are just subconscious associations. They’re probably random and unrelated; she had tried to convince herself.

Whatever these occurrences were, she felt suspicious of the increasingly whimsical nature of her mind’s activities, which was developing an independence disconnected from her conscious will.

A person at her rear nudged forward, trying to exit the plane with suppressed impatience. Her eyes focused on one of the flight attendants, who bore a smile of doubtful sincerity. A passenger passed in front of the stewardess with the plastic smile and when the passenger moved away, Chiara realised she had seen this stewardess, it was her smile in that vision of only a moment ago; the form of the woman's lips, her over-white teeth and lipstick colour with the lushness of a tropical flower. It was exactly as she had seen it, but she pushed the possibility away. Her rational mind was not ready to accept this.

A smile does not always communicate its most common meaning, like ‘I am happy,’ ‘I like you,’ ‘that was nice of you;’ it struck her how incredibly flexible human expression can be. We communicate one thing, but we mean another entirely. A smile then is only a referential shape, two pieces of flesh pressed into an up-curved line, a vector which points to a collection of impressions of joy or not, whatever the case may be. It was a prearranged symbol externalised, directing people — as a signpost does — to another place and as such, did not really exist in its own right, any more than a flat picture of a smiling person in a painting exists.

Chiara could see two worlds. A world of fleeting and transitory surface and its counterpart behind the face, a subterranean world, an invisible empyrean with truth in all its beauty and ugly terror held tightly within.

As she stepped up with the tone and expression of a “goodbye” prepared — for whichever stewardess might acknowledge her first — a child, backing away haltingly from the captain, trod on her foot. Chiara stopped and the line pushed passed her. The child moved forward to adjust his balance and without losing gaze, stared intently at the captain. She observed the red tread marks — made by the child’s shoe — fade back into her skin. The crew, ignoring Chiara and the child, continued waving and nodding at people; the two of them, encapsulated in a sphere of their own, were jostled like bubbles in stream of passing passengers. The child, unperturbed by the maelstrom of blurring legs, stared, mesmerised by the captain's starched uniform — an imposing blue skyscraper figure. Overwhelmed, the child stepped away again. Turning around he arched his head up at Chiara, blurting ‘Mum! Mu…,’ before falling silent.

The child blinked a few times, searching Chiara's face. The section of the line of passengers, which included his mother, had moved onto the gangway.

Chiara smiled, crouching down she said, ‘you’ve got the wrong mum, I’m afraid.’

‘Over here John, come,’ his mother called. He stood fixed, unmoved by the instruction, staring at Chiara with an open mouth and a blank look spread across his face. A few seconds passed, then in a sudden jerking movement launched his body into a frantic run, cutting and weaving through peoples legs, shouting, ‘Mum! Mum! I saw the captain of the aeroplane. I saw him. I saw him Mum.’

Chiara looked up, finding the stare of the stewardess with the plastic smile, who gave a shrug and winced.

‘Cute.’

‘Definitely,’ responded Chiara, getting up and shuffling past with a wave and her expected ‘goodbye;’ maybe she wondered, we both felt impelled by the situation to say something cutesy — unwritten social expectations.

Interactions in life, as with the evasive nature of facial expressions, were in many cases on social autopilot, with only slight degrees of manual override. The stewardess was expected to smile and be happy, Chiara was expected to be relatively polite and wave or say thank you; like when someone asked how you were, the preferred answer was “I'm fine” even when you weren't fine and that's why she liked the unpredictability of what had transpired. It allowed her to break away from the mould of trite social expectations, even if she couldn’t be absolutely sure of the true motives of the stewardess. In this case, a collision with a child in its expanding world was a catalyst. In one moment, existing in what she assumed was familiar, and then with an unforeseeable future, flung towards the unknown and ever-renewing vivacity of the present.

An urge welled up within her to spin around and embrace the stewardess; this was a fantasy, she could never act on it. The invisible hands of her culturally-tamed self held her shoulders straight and pushed her out the plane door; nevertheless — if she were able to act — she expected naively in that embrace, to absorb by intuition all the hate and love, the disappointment and happiness in a lifetime. Her fantasies of past times were similar to this one, grounded in a desire to deny reality its corruptible face.

Stepping from the plane into the air brought focus to her thoughts, narrowing quickly to the shock of bitter cold which enveloped her body. Another miscalculation, but this time of the weather. Living in Australia’s warmer climate for most of her life, her body had no solid memory of this kind of temperature; Melbourne could be cold but not like this. The air mimicked the sensations of the industrial food storage room in her brother's restaurant and the drab décor of the gangway reinforced the sentiment. She half expected to see large hams and cow carcases hanging in the gangway.

After the short walk to the main building her skin tingled in numbness, especially because she walked onto the plane in Melbourne with her Birkenstock sandals and had no change of shoes.

Already the minutiae she saw spoke with the dimension of a new planet. The immersion into an alternate culture she had anticipated was unambiguous. In the plane, American accents — with the characteristic New York nasal pitch — had rung out and as she chatted to the customs officer checking her passport, the din of difference grew; her accent becoming clearer, more distinct — defined as it floated in an air of otherness.

The airport wore a skin older and shabbier than her expectation had envisioned: like the fixtures in the wash room; the dreary coloured walls and grime in corners where the floor and walls met. Even the models in advertisements were slightly dated, definitely nineties, but with a thin overlay of the fifties. Her own appearance too was shabbier somehow, duller, blunt at the edges. Looking intently into a mirror above a washbasin, she laughed at herself. Of course she looked less than salubrious, this was a long-haul flight and what else should she expect. She surveyed the effect of summer on her skin, it was tanned, with a greasy film. Refreshing her face with metallic water and scraping the oil off with scratchy paper towels, she then slapped her cheeks; giving herself a broad Cheshire cat smile as she left the wash room.

Waiting with fellow travellers at the baggage turnstile, she looked down at her faintly purple feet, acknowledging the faded green lino they were standing on. Tracing slowly up the shoe-scuffed stainless steel edging, to the black rubber conveyor belt, with its sectioned pieces floating past — her eyes saw seconds on a watch-face, mesmerising, but empty. Her teeth chattered. In a lazy attempt to warm up she jumped from foot to foot for a minute before giving up.

‘I’m definitely under-dressed,’ she muttered softly, watching her steamy breath fade in the air. Beyond foggy breath, her eyes saw what she guessed were locals; they wore big puff jackets. Some wearing ungainly snow boots.

Besides her sandals — worn even in more severe Melbourne winters — she had thought her cloths were fairly well calculated — a turtle neck top and worn-out 1972 leather jacket. Nor were her faded jeans any real protection from the weather.

Even though her body was now beginning to warm — by comparison to the air leaky gangway — the dominance of cold was still in every part of her mind; her thoughts drifted back to seeing vast stretches of snow several hours before landing and she wondered why she had not considered the possibility of cold. The plane had flown over broken ice sheets, floating on the Great Lakes, then gliding over what must be Chicago, or Detroit — she couldn't remember now. At the time, the flat whiteness appeared expansive, barren and dead. Yet in the same instant compelling, pretty; if it were at all possible for death to have a sunny disposition, then that was it — but the snow never communicated its cold. Neither had it expressed any kind of temperature, hot or cold. It was just a picture of curiosity, with no other context than her detached imagination. The comfort and protective envelope of the plane's interior had masked the obviousness; she was going to have to cope with the snow up close.

‘You look a little cold Darling,’ an older voice vibrated behind her.

She turned around, ‘yes I’m afraid I didn’t think about the weather.’

A lady in her sixties smiled, nodding at her feet. Chiara responded to the woman's facial expression, ‘yes! I know… I don’t know why I wore these.’

‘It’s minus five wind-chill factor out there dear, you had better put something else on or you’ll get frost bite or something.’ Staring longer than needed, Chiara speculated whether the woman was inquisitive about the missing toe on her right foot, or just alerted to her cold feet by the purple hue. The hope, was that nothing would arise from the woman's questioning stare. Especially as the sensation of cold as a focus in her mind was closing down all other competing thoughts; she didn’t want to talk at any length, if just to conserve energy.

Bags spilled onto the turnstile, she searched the oncoming baggage. The old lady behind her hadn’t taken the conversation any further and no sooner had her wish been granted, than an undertone of guilt tugged at her. Turning around again, she took the woman’s ageing face more firmly into her memory. Chiara put aside for a moment her own principles of not conversing in what she termed “banality extraordinaire” and tried uncomfortably to think of something trivial but accommodating.

‘Are you from New York?’

‘No dear! My son and his wife live here. I visit twice a year to catch up with the grand-kids; you know how it is, Christmas, get-togethers and all that.’

Chiara nodded, wearing a weak smile, not sure what “you know how it is” meant exactly. However, she liked the idea of a Christmas with ice and snow in abundance, if she could escape the current cold and view the snow from a warm distance again.

The woman continued, ‘I got on the plane in Los Angeles.’

‘Oh yes I remember seeing the city centre from the air. It looked quite polluted.’ After a short pause, ‘it reminded me of Melbourne… on a bad day.’

‘Is that in Australia dear?’

‘Ye…’ the woman cut her off.

‘Oh I’d love to visit there someday and see some koalas... or kangaroos.’ ‘Yes… people seem to…’

‘Do people over there have them for pets? Koalas.’

‘No… they are really supposed to be in the wild.’

‘Really! Oh… Why dear?’

Chiara could see the conversation moving into realms ridiculousness — the arena of a tourist brochure of somewhat poor quality.

Not wanting to burst the old woman’s illusions, with a few cuteness-debunking remarks about how grumpy, sweaty and tired koalas really are, she balanced a few phrases in her mind. Settling for, ‘well… some people think they don’t make good pets;’ koalas spend most of the day asleep and if you were to use them as a pet — Chiara was tempted to say in joking sarcasm — then the only useful thing she could think of, was to place mini-baguettes under their arms — a kind of animal powered food warmer.

The concept of koalas not making good pets, did not immediately register with the woman and when it did sink in, the old lady responded with an accepting but partially befuddled look, ‘oh! I see, I suppose so.’

It occurred to Chiara that maybe Americans had a different view on the environment, or was it just this American in particular or perhaps their ecology was more robust than Australia’s. She filed all this away under, “Americans and their environment”, issues for future investigation.

Facing the turnstile once more, she concealed a smile as she watched to see if her bag had emerged from the belly of the plane yet. A succinct image materialised in her imagination. She saw the lady sharing coffee and jam scones on a delicate antique sofa with three large American black bears; the banter congenial and all were rather convivial. The slow creep of eccentricity, or is it just the phenomena of ageing? Which sometimes comes with quirkiness as a package deal. Disconnecting from the world ever so slowly, before you notice, you’re drifting off into the ether, a bubble — a small world of your own distorted bias — a human time capsule preserving a former time in history. On the turnstile, a recognizable tattered red backpack trundled around a corner. Why does it matter though… if you have a collection of old folk to share your bias; we all live in our own enclosed and slightly distorted worlds. We seek people to confirm our prejudices and we call them friends.

Like the child on the plane, children's identity expands and absorbs the world external to it. For older people it contracts, as they pull away from the society and its concerns.

‘But then... I suppose that’s a generalisation...’

‘Sorry dear, what did you say?’

‘Oh… nothing, I was just thinking out-loud.’ Diverting their conversation, Chiara asked, ‘can I help you with your bags?’ Her backpack slipped over her shoulder.

‘Oh that is kind of you, but I’ll be just fine.’

‘Okay then! Nice to meet you… and I hope you have a nice stay with your son and family... this particular year.’ Searching her own motives, she wanted to be truthful and sincere.

‘Yes dear and you have a nice time here in the Big Apple and don’t forget to put on some cold weather shoes,’ the old woman nodded at her feet again.

‘Yes… yes I will, thanks… bye.’ Waving, she turned and walked towards the arrivals exit. Chiara tried to imagine what she must look like, from an older person’s viewpoint, probably equally bizarre with these sandals. She chuckled internally, shaking her head; she did feel connected to this stranger, even in this transitory nugget of the comings-and-goings of strangers.

§ § §

To people of a variety of persuasions, Chiara was more than odd. Her brother Paul had charted her personality from their childhood. Oddness however, was not recognisable on first impression. Only over time did any inconsistency in her personality appear obvious. A casual observer could apply the label of nouveau-intellectual hippy without much effort. However, there was a dimension of Chiara’s personality able to transcend labels. Only her closer friends saw the discrepancy between appearance and world-view, being that she was many divergent people rolled into one; scruffy hippy was an external, a persona she wore only some of the time, not the core of her psyche. In the right circumstances, she could be conservative and because of this, no one was quite sure what her world-view was in its totality.

Further to her social eclecticism, was her treatment of every personality as public property, an anthropological resource for open research. If you had not been plumbed before — being fresh material — you were ever so subtly drilled, ‘so... what is it like to be you?’

Threads of conversation beginning with “what do you do for a living?” were to Chiara as fascinating as munching cardboard — dubbed, polite suburban chitchat — however, what you felt about what you did, was more interesting, but even this had its limits. Paul listened uncomfortably as she summed it all up — as if quoting directly from a Ph.D. — at the table of one of his dinner parties. The room went predictably silent after she pontificated, ‘humans never like to talk about subjects with no easy or immediate answer, it’s a fear of their own mental darkness. For that reason, most conversations between people are highly prefabricated, falling into neat and comfortably circular patterns of cliché.’

Only friends who were closer could stand the intense, shifting and polarised nature of her personality; they had developed a tolerable resistance to it, but continually feared like Paul, that Chiara might come out with a highly inappropriate response in the middle of an unrelated topic, thus killing with utter precision any congenial suburban mood.

Paul aired his concerns in her early twenties. ‘You know, some of our friends find you difficult to fathom, or more, they think you need to relax a bit. You know, chill out and settle on one thing for a while.’ A sidestepping way for Paul to express his real thoughts, which were, she should try being more conventional — consistent at the very least.

‘I’m not mixed up you know, I just like to see how it is to be in other peoples skin. I want to be objective… empathetic; it’s a way to understand myself.’ He didn't respond. He was still considering her words, so she added something further to strengthen her point, ‘or at least the universal human archetype in me.’

Mild frustration and sadness washed over him, ‘but you know, you can’t be anybody but yourself, we’re all limited Chiara. Each person is a piece in a jigsaw, we are limited... but we fit with each other. It’s not bad to be fixed in one kind of way. I mean everybody is different anyway, let them take care of it for themselves, you don’t need to explore what other people feel or think.’

In support of his viewpoint, she responded, ‘you know, I can’t be anybody else anyway, because I can’t absorb everyone’s feelings or perceptions. Some people repel me, even when I want to accept the difference between them and myself. I can’t, I feel too... absorbed, over empathetic and I have to pull myself out, before I drown in them. The breadth of human personality is sometimes... just too wide for me.’

Paul lost the façade of his patience, ‘this is what I mean Chiara! People find this kind of conversation too intense; it isolates you. Not to mention that you’re a walking fashion-week half the time. One week you're in tie-dye skirts, the next you're Bob the builder. Why can't you make up your mind and stop dressing like the next random stranger you meet?’ He regretted his comment and tried to change direction, ‘well maybe it’s not that bad, but people don’t know... what you are.’ That didn’t come out any better, tears formed in her eyes. He hugged her.

‘You don't like who I am.’ Paul couldn't ignore the look of hurt-surprise on her face and he knew her own words were a revelation to her — a first time acknowledgement of his real mental subterrane.

‘Yes of course I do,’ was his halting reply.

But this was a lie designed to soothe her feelings, when placating his guilt was the real goal, albeit subconscious. ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear or say, I will always love you. You’re my little sister, that won't change. It’s only when other people say… you’re a bit,’ now thinking of the right word, a quick check revealed nothing particular, ‘err…’

She offered, ‘odd.’

‘No… no just… artistic. You're a very interesting person Chiara.’ this again was a lie; “odd” was definitely the more appropriate word. He felt her body slump slightly in his arms.

Driving the car, on the way to Melbourne Airport, Paul remembered the words and feelings of that time quite vividly. It had been seven or more years since that conversation, yet it felt to him to have been like only a year or two; it was amazing how years could smear and contract. He knew now that he had been superficial in his assessments of her personality, but more recently old fears about her stability resurfaced. Some of Chiara’s colleagues at Friends of the Earth, where she worked as a volunteer on occasion, had commented to Paul. Initially these remarks seemed straightforward enough — innocent joking — however, veiled in humour, they were intimations that they thought she was sliding mentally.

A particular day and a few specific words were stuck in his memory. Chiara had brought one of the volunteers into the restaurant; the guy was straight out of a cookie-cutter commune in the Byron Bay hinterland. With the standard tie-dye uniform on, he'd boasted that every article of clothing he was wearing was made of hemp and if it hadn't have been the wrong type of hemp, he could smoke his soaks. Paul didn't understand why the guy had thought he would be impressed by this fact, but one thing he said when Chiara was out the back did strike him at the time. ‘Your sister. She's a real head trip man. Her mind... its like some uneasy tangent in space.’

Only two years ago she underwent an operation. It was a form of carcinoma; he too now saw the noticeable changes in her character. Still not recovered fully, tiredness and depression punctuated periods of relative ease; it was hard for her to find a rhythm in each day. A tendency was emerging; of becoming disconnected from the world. A sign of her disconnection, was that she had forgotten several mutually memorable times they had spent together. Initially he thought this was just depression, but instinctively he knew it had to be more than this. Once, she even managed to lose several months. It was as well he had photos to prove it, otherwise, she wouldn’t have believed him.

§ § §

Walking through arrivals, Chiara diverted her gaze from faces in the crowd, feeling a mixture of self-consciousness and doubt. If she had told Nava about coming here, she would have a friendly face to look for in the crowd and a warm car in which to zip away.

Nava was the only person from her past living in America. But possibly, this was the better way, not imposing and facing her journey alone. False heroics maybe, but then starting over in New York was a way of severing links and moving forward and she wanted to abide by the spirit of a cut from the past. Although forward? That was in question; she knew she wanted change, but did not know the specifics of “what or how”, she puzzled over all this. Her plans had only encompassed external changes, like moving to New York and continuing her study; instinctively though she knew this would not necessarily move her along internally. Nevertheless, coming here would be a small first step — the rest will follow — and if things did not work, then it wouldn’t matter; she would stay a while, until her study completed, then perhaps move on to Europe for a period.

Chiara had kept in regular contact with Nava until a year ago, when the emails had stopped and Nava had given up contacting her. She supposed that if she did call her, Nava would be glad to see her. Pushing the thought away, she tried not to think of calling her.

Arriving at the main exit, she stopped to think, what next? The automatic doors opened and closed periodically, as people left for destinations unknown. The snow was heavier now; it was dark. From within the terminal building, she hadn’t noticed the night arrive and looked at the darkness in mild shock, until she remembered vaguely seeing hazy red, brown and greyish Manhattan buildings as the plane turned over a dark sea before touching down — it had been just the beginning of dusk, when the plane had descended from the sky.

Chiara's mind was continuing to skip fundamental beats, like not realising that snow was cold or night follows dusk. It was these simple things fading, which most alarmed her.

Air carrying heavy snow sporadically wafted through the automatic doors as they open and closed. She asked herself, ‘should I call Nava... or maybe... her brother,’ who’s work number she had, but who's name she couldn‘t remember. She knew only that he was living with Nava, ‘or do I just catch a taxi and find a hotel?’ A yellow taxi pulled up. Her eyes wandered between the people leaving the taxi and the slow drift of heavy snow floating into the foreground spotlights from a dark backdrop. Staring intently at the snow, her mind assumed a posture of stillness.

The driver gave change to his passengers and stepped onto the pavement, surveying the length of the entrance area before looking straight through the doors to meet Chiara’s stare, she smiled, returning his gaze with a mini wave.

‘You want for a ride?’ He shouted through the closing doors, but she didn't answer. Instead she waved again.

Finally, he came through the doors, brushing the snow off his jacket as he walked. ‘Did you want a cab or are you just saying hello? I wasn't sure.’

‘Do you know of any cheap accommodation near Columbia University?’

‘I think so... I am not sure of the exact prices, but I've been told about a place on Upper West Side… it’s close enough, to Columbia.’

‘Great! Let’s go.’

‘Okay... can I help you with your pack?’

‘Thanks but I’m okay.’

Throwing her pack in the back seat, she slipped out of her sandals and began to trace a small circle in the snow collected on the sidewalk. ‘It’s so soft and powdery, wow... it really feels nice,’ she glanced at him with childlike glee, scrunching her face from the cold.

Looking at her circle and bare feet, he commented wryly, ‘If you continue like this for much longer you won't feel anything.’ he grinned, then added ‘you obviously don’t get to see much snow… can you still feel your feet?’

‘Can’t you tell, I’m shivering… of course I can feel my feet... just… anyway… sorry for the diversion but at least it seems you are amused by my little adventure here.’

Warm air in the car enveloped her body. Rummaging in the backpack she found protection for her feet — a pair of well-worn brown builders boots; her boots accommodated two pairs of socks and still had room to rattle around on her feet.

As the taxi exited the terminal over a steep ramp, it lifted imperceptibly into flight at the crest and from that higher vantage point a white and organic modernist building came into sight. Terminal Five glowed in the night like an otherworldly pod and she regretted not being able to have a quick look at the interior, but it was nice to see an original building in three dimensions, rather than the flat lifeless picture remembered from years before. At the conjunction between seeing the real building and remembering the picture in an art history book, a sensation arose similar to that of meeting a famous actor for the first time. This was her own personal movie, the ultimate reality TV show, but with a cast and audience of one; she could sense herself becoming comfortable with its continuing narrative.

§ § §

The ocean and the desert although seeming dissimilar — in possessing physical attributes of an opposite nature — shared certain very personal metaphorical associations, which bound them inextricably close in Chiara's mind. They always struck through the three main prongs in her life, in one way or another. These were art, philosophy and sociology. Every time she thought of a way to explain or explore an idea, she was led back to the desert or the ocean in direct memories or indirect association and the three bled into each other fluidly, like dots of pure colour on an over-wet sheet of watercolour paper. The new colours born in the overlap between these dots of mental pigment interested her most.

The first time she saw the desert properly, was in her teens, on a high school art trip to Hattah-Kulkyne National Park — an isolated and fairly unknown desert reserve in the northern state of Victoria. The first thing that came to her mind, as she stood on the peak of a large sand dune, looking into the countless other dunes receding into the horizon, was how it reminded her of the ocean. This was a large sandy ocean in freeze-frame and she stood on a red wave. The ocean — with its endless waves rolling into shore — represented film and motion-time; and the desert, stillness and photography, in distinct frozen slices of still-time.

So, in the desert was the beginning of her interest in art and philosophy rolled into one; she had begun seriously taking photographs after this trip. In photography and film, were ideas about different kinds of time — stillness and motion — and although theses were expressions of floored linguistic dichotomies, they were at least temporarily constructed beginnings, which would later lead to more mature ideas. As one of her science teachers had pointed out, ‘nothing is in absolute motion or stillness,’ each was encapsulated in the other — so nothing was ever purely dualistic and so life could not be so neatly rationalised or divided into pure categories.

In another memory, was the birth of the idea that two seeming opposites were the expression of one phenomenon. When she had collected seed pods, her teacher had explained that these seeds could only be germinated by the seasonal brush fires, which spread though the desert periodically. For the tree to be born, its seed must be destroyed in fire.

On the side of a dune, she lay the seed pods into a rough square of nine and took a series of photos, pondering how birth and death were creative and destructive realities expressed in the same process; being that there was no distinct beginning or end to either, even though to her, most people seemed to divide them quite distinctly in everyday conversation. Over time, simplistic expressions of concepts like these and the natural limits inherent in language, led to misconceptions and misplaced value judgements.

The metaphorical life in her desert pods, led from philosophy into sociology, because when she looked searchingly into her own culture, she could see the more obvious manifestations of death, but not so clearly birth. A global society was being born, but she could not guess its future shape. The inadequate nationalistic, political and religious paradigms, these were the manifestations of death, or they seemed to be. After she had taken her photos, she took the seeds back to the campfire and scorched them in the coals. The following day she had buried them near their original location.

American culture had been to her, a culture of default inheritance and some invasiveness in Australia, but her exposure had been limited to international news, cheap TV shows, Coke and some history documentaries about the civil war and other such subjects. These media phenomena had always been at a distance. With her move to America, she could now view the foundation of these products and their cultural existence in situ.

Like the incongruous history of the place, her feelings about American culture weren't straightforward either, they shifted around periodically. A delicate balance was continually in motion; and another desert metaphor existed which illustrated her incongruity perfectly. It was of scooping wild honey into her mouth, from a beehive hidden in a blackened tree stump. Attacking the honey with long blades of grass, she had sliced her tongue badly; in the peculiar taste of blood and honey, was her metaphor for citizenship and cultural inheritance.

Distaste for what typical western culture stood for, was rooted in imperialism and all that it represented throughout history. The decimation of diverse indigenous cultures suppressed with monistic capitalist culture — supposedly democratic for those who could pay for it or were born into it rightfully. Australia was a good example of these cultural inadequacies, but it did not possess the raw juvenile power of America and for that, America seemed somehow worse and more attractive.

All the great works of art, architecture, music and literature coming from Europe and North America had enriched world culture, or so it seemed.

On closer inspection though, she found that even art was marred in one way or another, nearly always tied to a line of aristocratic patriarchy. She could never enjoy art fully without first exploring its origins. ‘Nice painting, but had the artist beat his wife to a pulp and why were all “The Greats” men. Where are the great shes?’ She asked classmates at university. Even though more recent times had somewhat corrected this imbalance, history stuck in her guts like a dull but constant pain.

Once dissected, everything was imbued with an ironic bitterness, because nothing was innocent and who had the time to analyse everything they saw, touched or consumed; it took an exhausting amount of effort to place oneself continually in an objective cultural position. But she was drawn to America, despite these indissoluble issues.

Since the early eighties, Australia had seemed to be drawing nearer to American culture, more than at any time in the past. One indication of this was the shrinking Australian middle class and an growing obsession with material possessions. With more wealth would come more poverty and increased vulnerability at the margins of society, a distortion as she saw it, in the fabric of the community, the signs were there. Soon — she had once postulated, waiving her arms about at some hapless political students at Melbourne University — the only difference between the two cultures would be the accent, another American success story, ‘Bing!’ the sound of a rubber-stamped cultural franchise. ‘McAustralia, McEl Salvador, McRussia, McChina,’ and the list went on; there was the crux — why did those almighty stars and stripes have so much gravity? Enough to draw much of the third world towards it in aspiration; each new nation given a cheap American flag t-shirt, a slap on the back and a pocket full of lifestyle dreams. Not all perceived that hidden inside the dream were delusions and false promise. Chiara wanted to see this with her own eyes, highlighting the fact to Paul a few days before she had left. In an exaggerated Southern American accent, she borrowed a phrase from a movie she couldn’t remember the name of, ‘I want to get up close and personal...’ reverting to her normal voice she continued, ‘and anyway it's the details I want to see — they matter. Things you can never know unless you go to a place; it’s an immersion experience I want.’

Paul responded, ‘but life is the same everywhere… just about. Why do you want to go there? It's nothing special.’ However, it wasn't only that she needed to experience the special phenomena of the place; it was far more personal, even if she wouldn't admit it to herself. She needed a new mirror, a larger surface on which to project her image.

§ § §

Leaving the airport confines little was visible, only the highway with white sidelines twisting and curving on a glistening wet backdrop. Occasional dim orange street lamps highlighted patches of snow-bound New York suburbia.

‘Are we near Manhattan yet?’

‘Soon… yes, we are getting close to the Tri-Borough Bridge.’

She was drained but not sleepy; the warmth in the taxi and the hum of the engine was soothing. Tilting her head onto the frosty glass, she watched the patterns of water dripping down, merging with each other and she drew shapes mindlessly where her breath left its mark. Inside each drawn shape on the glass, it was fascinating to observe large clumpy flakes of snow melt on impact. Gradually snow fell heavier and thicker, building a slushy crust.

Various sensations inside the taxi, although distantly associated, triggered Chiara’s memories of childhood holidays during long Australian summers. From the back seat of her parent’s car, she would stare for hours, as all the minute variations in the road lines flowed into a dancing blur; the feeling of wind and sun, her hair rhythmically whipping her face and the loud rush in her ears, as she stuck her head into the stream of air. Playing a game while her ears were buffeted by the air, she always tried to make out muted conversations between her parents; their voices competed with whatever music was playing on the car stereo. Her father would go through phases, playing the same music over and again, until the cheap car stereo ate the tape. Demis Roussos was a Greek singer who Chiara initially hated — because of the incessant repetition — but now tolerated, only because of the associations with her parents and these long trips up the East Australian coast. Ever and ever, forever and ever you'll be the one that shines in me like the morning sun… the song played away in her mind for a while. Its sentimentality taking deeper root, despite her resistance to it, before fading into the sound of the taxi engine and an image in the side mirror of her parents car – air pressure forcing streaming tears out of twelve-year-old pipi shell eyelids. It was a world of blurred and abstracted water mixed in sunlight. In the present, she replicated that earlier time by squinted her eyes. More orange street lights went by rhythmically in a dark sky.

‘You’re from Australia right?’ Chiara acknowledged the back of the taxi driver.

‘Top marks for accent recognition.’ He smiled and looked at her in his mirror.

‘I have some Australian friends here, so I have a general idea of what you guys sound like… I'm Paul.’

‘My brother’s name is Paul.’

‘Oh really.’

After a short silence she asked, ‘do you like driving taxis?’

‘I'm a composer, when I have the time left over from this job.’

‘You don’t teach for a living?’

‘I’m not very good at explaining myself… I am not sure what it is that I do sometimes.’

‘I can identify with that… so composing makes you happy I suppose… yeah?’

‘ “Happy” is a way to describe it… Manhattan is coming up on the left… if you want to see it at night.’

‘Oh right, thanks… you know, this will be my first night viewing.’ she exclaimed with a touch of exuberance in her voice.

The car turned onto the bridge, merging into the end of peak hour traffic.

‘Seeing this city in the flesh now, it’s unique for me... and I suppose it's unique in history; it will never happen again. You are here as a witness. Seeing me see New York, if you know what I mean?’

There was no answer and she looked for a response. His eyes floated in the mirror, she commented whimsically, ‘you know, I guess everything is unique, so... I’m seeing you here — in the taxi — driving, these are our own personal moments in time, together… shared by no one else but us… don’t you think that is kind of interesting?’

‘I guess so… but, I think I have different perspective.’

‘Oh yeah! What’s that?’

‘Well, I create my music by stringing together several well-known tunes — classical or pop or whatever — and I mix them together in such a way, that they border on that fine line between recognisable and unrecognisable. I call it “the edge of cliché recognition” or cliché frustration, as some of my friends say. It's like a song or a tune you know, or several, whatever, but you just can't place it. Or maybe you do know it, and try to preempt where it's going, but suddenly it goes somewhere you don't expect. So because of that you think it's new and creative, but even that new place, even that, it's not new. Nothing is. It's just cliché within cliché — add infinity. ’

‘That's interesting… a kind of conceptual music,’ after a short pause she added, ‘that's very Postmodern of you.’

‘I suppose so... Anyway, I have no idea what Post-modernity is. Notations of originality and creativity are what interest me... and if that is Postmodern, then so be it.’

‘Hmm, I like it. I like the idea — whatever it is.’

‘I've often wondered if the whole of our life experience isn't anything more than just a pastiche of clichés, where nothing is new. A friend of mine said the other day, it's like the second hand, in a watch, it just goes around visiting the same place over again. Living in a circle, you might soon forget you had been there before, because every side looks the same.’ His reference to a circle reminded her of the circle she had made in the snow. She asked herself why she had chosen to make a circle. Why not a square or triangle?

He waited for her to respond to his words, but she didn't. Chiara stared vacantly at her boots, so he continued.

‘It's like, all children growing up will have very similar experiences. Every human being passes through the same milestones and in the end, it becomes circular; a child worries about wetting his pants and so does some old-duck, in some Godforsaken retirement home.’ Chiara continued to stare at her boots and thought about the stewardess, the child on the plane and the old lady at the turnstile. She knew it. All our lives share common themes; there was freedom, creativity, yes, but if a person managed to escape from one circle of limitation, it was only to find themselves in another circle, larger maybe, but a circle. Circles within circle, that's all she could imagine. The driver reinforced his concept once more, ‘yes... we all live in closed little worlds with circular thoughts and concerns.’ If there was a way to escape it she didn't know it; his argument duplicated almost exactly her thoughts on the plane, of life on social-autopilot underpinned with weak and petty suburban concerns. And if she was honest, she was no better than anyone else — she was neck high in it.

He had held up a mirror to what she had always believed — she should agree with him — but now, in defiance of herself, didn't want to admit it, because that would be some kind of self-defeat. In an epiphany, she realised that she had always held two quite incompatible sets of beliefs; like some invisible tautology, which seemed horribly obvious now that she acknowledged it. One part of her took life as closed, predictably conservative, whereas another part needed to move into a horizon of unimaginable newness — if only her mind had the force to take her. She finally began to answer him, but feeling a degree of pretence, conscious of her own contradiction.

‘Well I wouldn’t take it to that extreme... maybe, but I know what you mean…’

‘Sorry to put a damper on the “unique history” thing you've got going there.’

‘That's okay... Hey... do you think I could drive the taxi for a while, just to the hotel? You could show me the way. I'm sure I could get us there.’

‘Huh... you’re kidding right? Ha... No way, besides I can’t stop on the bridge. And I can't believe it, but I just had a fleeting thought, that I might actually consider it.’ She smiled as he continued, ‘boy I must be bored or what.’

‘I bet you couldn't predict I was going to ask you that. Mind you, it's not the first time I've asked a taxi driver, but at least it's not clichéd — don't you think?’ Still, she hadn't removed her own doubts; her words carried an undercurrent brittle and disingenuous.

He laughed at the surface of her words, ‘of course, yes. Well... you have rounded off an uneventful day... at least. Most of my rides aren't half this interesting… but hey, the view,’ he pointed ‘you’ll miss it.’

‘But I wonder if I can enjoy it now, with my sentimentality. I think you're right. I’ve seen this view in books and movies before. It's a trashy way to start my time here, I guess.’

The traffic slowed. They stared through the steel cables on the bridge. ‘You know, maybe I'm wrong, this is a great view. She closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them, she tried to perceive the panorama of the city through the gauze of snow, in the abstract, with no reference to either past or future, an escape from cliché — just a collection of colours and shapes — but her mind imposed an order on it all. ‘I can’t help myself, it looks new to me, expansive. Alien, but in a way known and familiar’ Chiara opened the window, just enough for a breath of cool air. Already this place exuded an intangible allure, the temptation to give in to this feeling was concrete, despite the implications of their conversation. The haze of snow fell into the car’s interior through the gap in the window, melting on her warm face; ‘you don’t mind if I…?’

‘No go ahead.’

She wound the window open fully, resting her head in folded arms, leaning on the windowsill. The flakes hit her face with more intent now and she imagined layers of snow forming, until — inside the contentment of this moment — she would be cocooned. The traffic began to move again.

The effect of their conversation had lifted the taxi driver from his grind and she noticed a tangible change in the inflection and tone of his voice as he commented philosophically, ‘I‘ve seen it so much that I don’t see it anymore. I'm blind to it now, but maybe I need to forget it. I mean, so I can remember it again and see it new… are there people out there? Or maybe they are just empty rooms, with the lights on. I've often wondered.’

Chiara replied with enthusiasm, ‘yes… yes I like that idea; this is a place with many rooms… stacked vertically… like boxes of light and with a possibility of inhabitants who live out an existence in a bliss of cliché.’ They laughed.

Copyright ©  Dimitri Tishler                                                                       top

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