The Knife Sharpener (34)

34.

‘Stop overthinking everything, Paul,’ his wife had said. ‘It isn’t worth it.’

            Empty words. He had gone and made himself a Star.

            After Oscar left, there was abject stillness and quiet. Paul could feel swelling around his eyes and lips. Dried blood all over his torn silver robe. His hands chained above his head. Slumped into the floor on a tangled leg. Bruised with at least one broken finger.

            Same dampness and Band-Aid stench. Distant hint of topical gel. The train thundered past intermittently, rattling the floor. And it was almost pitch black. Deep into night. Only a sliver of lamp light dribbling in from the rear of the carpark, into the gully, reflected into the cage. Oscar had switched off the single globe they usually left on for him down there.

            Candle glimmer when the Church had been an excuse. A joke no one laughed at but was familiar with. Made people feel good to privately share.

            ‘Some time to reflect, eh?’ said Oscar when he left. ‘Look within yourself. Repent. Get closer to the universe. Soon we will slice the duration, Bearer. Loose star dust everywhere. Better days for all. Like they used to be.’

             Used to evenings in the cellar. Small rodent sounds in the walls. Outside the backdoor. The dripping plumbing. The infinite boredom of it. He usually had a light, though. Something to cast shadows in the gloom. A source of vague interest for the bugs it attracted. Sometimes he could even hear the distant chatter of the denizens of Chapel St. The security guards at the 24-hour bottle shop upholding their right to serve and refuse.

            Floating on concussion and pain. They’d lost the knife though. Small victories.

            Paul had been the Star around which his friend’s orbited. The Church a play at being a cult, but with none of the extremist stuff, the freak ideology. The mass poisoning. The terrorist atrocities. The feral pet yetis. The sprite worship. Only the sense of community. Of meaning through real contact. Their singular belief had been a thin veneer concocted by Paul to be a glue to their relationship; a guideline no one had to obey. It served the purpose of giving everyone an excuse to continue to show up.

            We worship the Star and all Its potential. And from Its potential we realise our own.

            No one bowed down to him. Nor did he expect it. It was self-deprecation. A play on the self-help guru-ism that Paul had fallen for regularly in his thirties when he tried to make more of his life as a divorced, childless, middling teacher of high school English. A frustrated writer of sterile realist Raymond Carver-like fiction, with titles like: Can You Hear the Fairies, Again? Brunswick Vigil. The Muscular Electrician.

            Shivered. Tried to keep his eyes open for a bit longer.

His wife said he had all the tenacity of sieve. She was mostly right. Gonna lose a fight, here. On come the concussed dreams, sweet only because they’re better than this drab reality coated in the – how could he put it? Austere foreboding of a suburban drama, though grander. More Russian, perhaps. Like religious. Whose god, kind of shit. It was all about religion, in the end. Oscar’s religion versus Paul the Stars.

Painful cackle through, yep, a broken tooth. Long winded, that writing. Not like him.

Paul wanted to block the holes in himself that kept letting stuff go too easily. Be less the colander his wife claimed. That caught all the dirt, but let through his ambition and the students who mocked him for his nose. Of course, his wife too. And, now, the Violentiam nutters who’d done him in. Scared the others off when they saw the self-actualizing they’d been practicing, incorrectly actualized the cult that laughingly claimed as their own. Made it bona fide.

Back then, after she left and he wrote pages of straight prose about drinking and not communicating, he attended and read about all the self-help. Tried to be self-critical. Raised his eyebrows at the right time. Took notes. Cried and leapt when required. Took daring risks occasionally. Backed right out of them, too.

The Secret. A Projection of Desire. Means of Focused Meditation For Self-Betterment. Visualising Success. Grow Your Mindset. Goal Dance. Constructing A Better Self. Beginning With The End. Climbing The Summit.

They didn’t help. He missed a life he wasn’t sure he even had. It was this mirage that made him rethink things.

The fallacy of these courses and lectures – their vague verb heavy titles with a frequent lack of definite subjects – was their inability to let people see what good they already had. They always sought to make something. Build on it. Picture and strike.

Paul, though, began to see that there was power in being okay. He was okay with his status as a perfectly perfunctory educator, never a life changer, but dependable to the last exam. A writer of middling talent who would never publish yet enjoyed the pursuit. The bachelor life worked for him, too. He told himself. It was all about acceptance and repetition.

He was a Star and you’re okay with who you are. Sieve or not.

Falling further down the wall and his shoulders ached from being chained above him.

The Star made the Planets in his orbit understand that his potential was never any more or less than their own. They got together all-around Melbourne to celebrate exactly this. To drink and talk about their lives as things happily unrealised, though still just beginning. Told one another over music, through complaints about stuff they didn’t understand, conversations about politics and Ministry – it’s all alright. No better time to be alive, in fact. Ignored and left to your own devices. To figure out the bloody Medias.

Paul had them embrace their privilege. They helped him embrace his own. All the troublingly inane responsibility that comes with that. Life shouldn’t be this easy. But it really was.

It was a sarcastic play at being religious zealots, whose most cultish behaviour was the occasional key exchange swing party. A little orgy to brighten the spirits. Rub the oil in and turn the spit. Baste and start again. Maybe that was a cook-off. Paul’s addled brain. Probably, both.

Try and convince their friends to give it a go.

He moaned. Ribs creaked.

Someone invited Oscar. Paul never found out who.

Oscar didn’t get it. From the moment he waddled in. He couldn’t giggle at his own absurdity. He was too angry about his success. Too busy saying someone was trying to take it apart. The therapy of the Star and the Planets didn’t work on him.

But Oscar maintained a fascination with Paul. Called him Star reverentially.

Oscar codified everything. Wrote it down on A3 papers in thick black pen from his store.

Oscar found the building on Chapel. Mounted a convincing case for keeping the meetings consistent. At one locale. He plastered his scripture on the walls. Really emphasised the Church of it all.

Oscar started making it too serious. Dismissive. Asked people what their potential actually was.

Paul kept expecting him to crack a smile. So he kept drinking and cavorting as Oscar brought in his own people. Turned some of Paul’s. Others just left, seeing the extremism manifesting amidst the Tim Tams and cheap tea, coffee, and shiraz Oscar insisted everyone bring to the meetings. Pierre brought those awful orange cream biscuits.

It was no longer gin and chips.

It was a PTA meeting and everyone was shitty with the principal.

Oscar elevated Paul to a kind of metaphysical status, though one under constant amateurish philosophical examination.

He wondered if there were stars out on Chapel. If Oscar thought the same way about them that he did Paul. About their possibility to bring the past to now. Or now to the past. Too far away though. The nostalgic voices of Oscar’s disciples depended on something present to blame and use. Not a gaseous entity forever away.

Tthe proselytism was happening. They came for Paul at the end of what Oscar insisted was a congregation. Forced him into a silver robe and chains. His old Planets long gone.

Oscar had the knife then. He brandished it and declared the Church now named: Violentiam Movetur Sidus; or, the Church of Violence Against the Star.

            ‘Soon,’ Oscar had said then. ‘We start again.’

            Paul shivered and tried to stay warm.