Australia

I decided to go to Australia; it was that or suicide. I bought a plane ticket and packed my things. Halfway through packing I decided to clean my apartment. At the end it looked as spotless and bare as a monk’s cell. I thought if I was going to vanish I might as well have the courtesy to arrange my life in a manner convenient to those who would come after me.

I booked a taxi and went to the airport, then checked my bags and passed through security. I hadn’t brought much. The advantage of an overactive death drive is that it clarifies how much of what you own is actually important. I had three Long Island Iced Teas at the airport bar and staggered down the gangway when I heard my boarding group called. I passed out in my seat and didn't feel the plane take off. 

When I woke up it was dark out. Everyone else was asleep. The man sitting in the middle seat was watching Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation through his headphones. I pressed my cheek to the window and felt the cold. I thought about how vast the world was, how hostile, that all we were was a few hundred apes in a pressurized tin can hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. I thought about how quickly the fantastic turns mundane.

The sun started to come up. I tried to calculate the time zone differential and failed. We parted the clouds; through the window there was nothing but sun and sea. The world looked primeval, unfinished.

I went to the bathroom and snorted my last 50mg of ketamine off the sink. I made it back to my seat before it hit. I felt my mind untether itself from my body, to expand out until it fit over the frame of the plane, until I was hurtling through a totally blank space, bracketed by the ocean and the sky. I felt serene. I wanted the sun to step inside me, to scrape away what was left of myself.

From Sydney I took a plane to Perth, then a cramped Cessna to a place called Gascoyne Junction. I got off the plane and walked the length of the airstrip, staring at the thin knot of buildings surrounded by badlands and dust. On a tourist information board I read that Gascoyne Junction was the least religious place in Australia, with only 33.4 percent of those surveyed reporting any religious affiliation. This amounted to about 50 people.

I bought myself a can of Foster’s from the Visitor’s Shop and wandered five minutes to the edge of town. A dirt road plunged straight on to the south, terminating at the horizon. The land on either side was flat and sunbaked, stippled with scrubgrass and the occasional squat tree barely taller than I was. I had read in a guidebook that scientists believed that human habitation in Australia had begun some 50,000 years ago, with proto-Aboriginal groups crossing a land bridge from what is now Indonesia. I thought about how even after fifty millennia there were still places that no human eye had ever seen, ground upon which no human foot had ever tread. In that moment I thought that it was very easy to believe in God in a place like this, just not a God who cared about human beings.

I rented a car and drove west, towards the coast. For a while I fiddled with the dial, honing into whatever faint radio signal I could catch from this far out. After I heard the opening notes of Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ for the third time I shut the radio off and drove in silence. I watched the landscape roll by, untrammeled and endless. I felt the emptiness all around me, opening itself for me, embracing me. I drove into the sun. If I could have, I would have taken a prybar between the atoms of my body and wedged them apart, until my body was so diffuse as to pass through the denser matter of the car altogether. I imagined myself discorporating, all my thoughts becoming quieter as I grew less substantial. Eventually I would spread out to encompass all of Australia, then all of the world. At such time I would be everywhere and nothing.

The sun came down, and the night reasserted its rightful sovereignty. The stars were tremendous. I pulled to the shoulder of the road and got out. Above me I could see the whole belt of the Milky Way, like smoke spilled across the sky. I thought about the fact that our galaxy was one hundred thousand light years across. Some of the photons that now collided with the rods inside my eye had been cast millenia ago, before the light of human consciousness had first touched this continent.

I got back in the car and ate my dinner. Tonight’s fare was an oily stick of dehydrated jerky, a half-deflated bag of something called Twisties, two more cans of beer. I had mostly stopped eating in those days. I was weaning my body off of food, obeying the command of some long-buried ascetic impulse in my subconscious. I watched my weight with detached curiosity. It seemed fascinating to me that the substance of my body could change; that the atoms which comprised me could, quite of their own volition, abandon me and become something else. My body was a permeable membrane, a fickle and temporary arrangement of molecules gradually succumbing to the entropic principle which undergirded everything that was.

I started driving again. After a while I got bored of the road and jumped the car out onto the outback. The suspension shook like I was clinging to a mechanical bull. The world reduced itself to what was visible through the twin cones of my high-beams. Spinifex and gidgee congealed out of the dark and dispersed. Galah and kookaburra watched me pass from their perches, their eyes glinting lapidary by the headlights.

Grey fur broke the darkness; I slammed on the brakes. A kangaroo drew itself tall and eyed me through the windshield. It was an old bull, its hide mottled and scarred with the mementoes of survival. Its forepaws were drawn close to its chest, giving it a strangely monastic quality. More broke the darkness, fanning out behind it, circling the car, peering through the windows. I watched their ears pivot, watched the anxious movement of their tight little mouths. My imago entered into the black-box of their skulls and did not return. I stood in the presence of an alien intelligence and could not justify myself. We sat there for a while, both of us waiting for something and not knowing what.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why. It felt like the right thing to say at the time. That was the only thing I could think of saying to anything conscious; what I would say to some extraterrestrial wrenched through a million light-years of star-dappled nothing to crumple at my feet: I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry. I wanted to bless them but my body was no fit vessel for a God I didn’t believe in. After a while they bounded off into the night.

I got back on the road again and made the engine scream until I reached the coast. There was a tiny fenced-in parking lot, a ring around corroded metal sign holding a plastic squeeze-bottle of vinegar for jellyfish stings. The moon bleached the world: white sand, black water. I stripped naked and left my clothes in the car. Rocks bit the calloused soles of my feet.

I picked my way down the path down the coastal terrace. My passage ushered along little landslides, rivulets of powdery sand and loosened stones bouncing down the incline to follow me. The beach had the feeling of wet clay between my toes.

When I entered the water I did not feel as though I had immersed myself. Rather, it was as if the weave that comprised my body had loosened, that the substance of myself was dissipating outwards, that my body was becoming synonymous with the medium in which it was suspended. I looked up at the moon, vast and blank and eternal. The water moved and I moved with it.

After that I just floated for a while.