Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, “a genius on the level of Beckett” (Teju Cole)

Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories—originally published from 1985 to 2012—offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians.

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane’s reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting “Land Deal,” which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to “Finger Web,” which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to “The Interior of Gaaldine,” which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.

No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how—and why—we read.

Release date: April 3, 2018

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 560

Sample

When the Mice Failed to Arrive


One afternoon in one of the years when I used to stay at home to mind my son and my daughter and to do the housework while my wife was away at her job, my son was caught in a thunderstorm. The storm broke over my suburb at half-past three, which is the time when schools are dismissed.

I had been alone in the house since half-past eight that morning, when my children had left for school. All afternoon I had watched from my windows while the clouds gathered. I had thought of the storms that broke every few days in summer over the city where I had lived from my fifth year to my tenth year. That city was a hundred miles inland from the suburb of Melbourne where I lived with my wife and my two children. In the thirty-three years since I had left the inland city, whenever I had seen the sky darkening by day I had remembered the storms that gathered outside my schoolroom window in the 1940s.

The storms of those years had always arrived at mid-afternoon. When a storm was overhead the teacher would have to switch on the lights in the darkened schoolroom. Before the first lightning flashed, I moved as far away as I could move from the schoolroom windows. At home I used to hide from lightning by lying on the floor under my bed. At school I could only press my face against the desk-top and ask God not to let the lightning strike me through the windows. I never thought of lightning as striking a group of children. I saw in my mind the zig-zag of gold stabbing down from the black clouds and piercing the heart or the brain of the one child who had been marked out for dying on that afternoon.

When I thought of myself being killed by lightning, I dreaded the confusion this would cause. After I had failed to arrive home at the usual time, my father would search for me along the streets that I had promised I would follow every afternoon. (Before my first day at school I had promised I would never turn aside from McCrae Street, Baxter Street, and McIvor Road. On the very few afternoons when I left those streets and walked for a little way along the creek, I supposed as I walked that my father was hurrying along McIvor Road while I was down among the bulrushes. My father had set out from home to meet me, I supposed. He had come to tell me that our house had been burned down or that my mother had been killed, but we had passed one another without knowing. On those afternoons I had almost turned back from the creek to make sure that my father was not somewhere behind me and walking away from me. And even while I wondered whether I ought to turn back, I thought of my father’s arriving at the school and then turning back towards home but this time leaving the streets and walking along the creek for a little way because he thought I might have been loitering there whereas I was just then going back towards the school by way of the streets and passing my father again unseen.) When my father could not find me in my usual streets, he would think at first that I had turned aside to watch the water in the creek flowing swiftly after the storm. He would go down to the bank of the creek, and while he was looking for me among the bulrushes a priest from the presbytery next to my school would ride his bicycle along McCrae Street and Baxter Street and McIvor Road on his way to my father’s house to tell my father, who was not at home, that his only son had been killed by lightning.

I prayed that I would not be killed by the storm and that my father would not be lost and confused during the hour when the clouds had passed suddenly away to the east, and when the twilight that had seemed about to turn into darkness had turned instead into a bright afternoon with wet leaves flashing in the sun and steam rising from roofs. I prayed, and I was always spared, and I walked home while the gutters were flowing and the last of the black clouds were rumbling above the eastern horizon.

While the gutters flowed and the wet leaves flashed and the steam rose from iron roofs, I understood that I had been spared, but perhaps only for two or three days. The lightning that could have killed me was stabbing at the dark-green treetops far away past Axedale and Heathcote. By midnight the gold zig-zags would be shooting harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean. Days or even weeks later the clouds would settle quietly among the mountains of New Zealand or of South America. But somewhere behind me while I walked eastwards towards my home, another storm would soon arise.

I thought of each storm in summer as beginning far away to the east, in some bare paddock in the district around St Arnaud, where I had never been. (When I looked just now at a map of the state of Victoria, I saw that I have avoided all my life the countryside east of Bendigo. I was able just now to trace with my finger, beginning at Bendigo and moving north-west to Swan Hill then south-west to Horsham then roughly east to Castlemaine and then north to Bendigo, a quadrilateral enclosing more than five thousand square miles that I have never set foot in. Near enough to the centre of this quadrilateral lies the city of St Arnaud, whose name, whenever I heard it as a child, sounded like a preliminary snarl of thunder.)

When I thought of the beginnings of a storm, I saw a dark cloud rising from the earth in the way that the evil genie rose from the jar where he had been imprisoned for hundreds of years, in one of the illustrations that I often stared at in the pages of The Arabian Nights Entertainment.

* * *

In all his life my father never bought a book—for himself or as a present for another person. But a few books came into his possession from time to time. One of these was the book we called the Arabian Nights. Until I was thirteen years old, that book was the largest and the oldest book I had looked into. As a child I stared at the illustrations: plump, squat men with beards and turbans; giant Negroes with curved swords; donkeys cruelly burdened. I understood that the young women in the illustrations were meant to seem beautiful, but I was repelled by them. They had the huge dark eyes of Jersey cows, and their noses seemed to grow straight down from their foreheads. In the cities where all these people lived, the streets and lanes were narrow and gloomy; away from the cities the countryside was rocky and desolate; the sky, whether clouded or unclouded, was always grey.

I suppose the illustrations in the Arabian Nights were printed from some sort of engravings on stone or metal. But I know no more today about the carving of pictures out of metal or wood or stone than I knew when I sat in front of my father’s book and thought of the Arabians, as I called them, as living all their lives threatened by storms. Today, if I happen to see in a book one of the sort of illustration that I call, rightly or wrongly, engravings, I remember myself having felt sorry sometimes for the whole of a nation called Arabia because its women were unattractive and its weather seemed always stormy afternoon. Or I remember myself having rested my eyes sometimes from focusing on donkeys or genies, and having tried instead to discover the cause of the greyness overhanging everything Arabian, at which times I began to see hundreds of fine lines forming an impenetrable mesh between me on the one side and on the other side the turbaned Arabians and their cow-faced young women.

From the time when I first learned to read printed words, I wanted to read the whole of the Arabian Nights. I wanted to see far into the strangeness and the greyness of Arabia. One afternoon in a year when I could still read no more than scattered words and phrases, my father came up behind me and warned me that I would learn nothing of benefit from the Arabians. He warned me that the Arabians did without shame what he and I and the people of our inland city avoided as the worst of sins.

One day in my tenth year I read for the first time the whole of a story from my father’s Arabian Nights. At that time of my life I read books only in order to look for details that I could include in my dreams of myself living as a grown man in a mansion (with a lightning conductor on every chimney) behind a high fence of strong and interlocked wire in the bushland between Bendigo and Heathcote. One room of my mansion was going to be fitted out as a private cinema. On many a hot afternoon when the people of the districts surrounding my mansion were looking up into the glaring sky for the clouds that would be the first signs of a storm, I would be in my private cinema. The blinds on the windows of the cinema would be sealed against the light from outside. Modern electric fans would whirr in slowly swivelling cages. At rest in my cool twilight, I would watch what I called true films showing men and women doing without shame in far countries what the people in the districts around my mansion avoided as the worst of sins.

Of the story that I read in my tenth year I have forgotten every detail except one. I have not forgotten that a woman in the story, wanting to punish a certain man, ordered her slaves to strip the man and to flog him with the pizzle of a bull.

For long after I had first read that detail, I tried to believe that the stories of the Arabian Nights were not wholly fanciful. I tried to believe that somewhere in some country on the far side of the grey cross-hatching in books, a woman might once have looked at and named without shyness or shame the naked pink object that I pretended not to notice if it protruded from beneath the bull that moaned and shoved against the tall fence around the yard where my father’s brother milked his Jersey cows while my father and I watched during our summer holidays. And after I had enjoyed the delicious shock of supposing that a woman might once have done those things, I dared to ask myself whether a woman in some story I had still not read might have put a delicate finger to the object while it rested in the hands of one of her slaves, or might even have curled all of her fingers around the object and lifted it away from the slave and then—and here I winced or hugged myself or gasped—stepped daintily towards the man who had been cowering naked all this time with his back to the woman and with his hands in front of his privates, and brought the long and quivering object down on his white buttocks.

If, on the far side of the grey world of illustrations in books, such things as these had been enacted even once, I thought, then I myself might one day watch such things being enacted—not merely in my mind while I read some antique book but on the screen of my private cinema, in my mansion protected by tall wire fences.

* * *

In many of the white spaces around the grey illustrations in my father’s copy of the Arabian Nights, someone had stamped with a rubber stamp and an ink-pad, many years before I first saw the book, a black annulus enclosing the words: Library of H. M. Prison, Geelong.

My father had been a prison warder for twelve years before I was born and for two years afterwards. The last of the four prisons where he had worked during those fourteen years was the Geelong prison. In the month when I became two years old, my father ceased being a prison warder and moved with his wife and son from the city of Geelong to the city of Melbourne. During the last days of the fourteen years when my father was a prison warder, I was looking often at what is the only sight that I remember having seen during the two years when I lived in Geelong and what is also the earliest sight that I remember having seen during my lifetime.

I was looking down from the high landing of a set of wooden steps at the rear of my parents’ rented house in the suburb of Belmont in the city of Geelong. I was looking first at the fence of grey palings at the bottom of my parents’ yard, then at a row of sheds with grey walls and whitish roofs in the next yard. Each shed had at its front a wall of wire-netting. Beyond the wire-netting was a grey-white blur made by dozens of hens moving about in their crowded shed.

While I looked I also listened. At any moment of the day, many of the hens would have been silent. Those hens that were making a noise would have been making one or another of the several different noises that hens make in company. But from where I stood high above the sheds, I heard at every moment of the day a shrill and continuous sound as though every hen in every grey shed was forever complaining.

In each of the many places where he lived after leaving Geelong, my father kept a dozen or more poultry of the Light Sussex breed. Behind every house he lived in, my father fenced off three-quarters of the backyard so that his birds could have what he called a place to stretch their wings. My mother and I complained sometimes that the poultry trampled the grass and turned their yard into dust or mud, but my father would never lock his hens in a shed.

During the nineteen years of his life after he had left Geelong, my father seldom talked about the fourteen years when he had been a prison warder. Once, I asked my father where he had got the strange grey raincoat that he wore around the backyard on rainy days. He called the thing his oilskin and cape, and he told me that all warders wore such things in prisons on wet days. He said he had forgotten to return his oilskin and cape when he had ceased to be a warder.

One night when I was in my thirteenth year, I heard a radio program about a man who had killed three young girls in districts near Melbourne during the years just before I was born. I thought while I listened that the man and the girls were fictitious characters, but at the end of the program my father told me that what I had heard about had mostly happened. The name of the murderer was Arnold Sodeman, and he had been hanged in Pentridge prison, in the suburb of Melbourne where I was later born. My father had been one of the warders on duty on the morning when Sodeman had been hanged. When I asked how Sodeman had looked and behaved just before he was hanged, my father told me that Sodeman’s face had turned a grey colour such as my father had never seen in the face of any other living person.

Until he died, my father kept among his shoes in the bottom of his wardrobe a piece of wood about the length of his forearm. The wood was slightly tapered and painted black. A circle of strong cord ran through the hole that had been drilled through the narrow end of the wood. The piece of wood was the truncheon that my father had carried while he was on duty at Geelong prison.

When my father had been dead for more than twenty years and I supposed that most of his friends had also died and that I would never learn any more about my father’s life than the little I already knew, I read a short paragraph about my father in a printed leaflet.

The leaflet contained assorted details from the history of French Island in Westernport. About ten years after my father had died I began to notice newspaper articles describing French Island as a place for tourists to visit, but for fifty years before then, part of the island had been one of the four prisons in which my father had worked during his fourteen years as a warder.

I read from one paragraph in the leaflet that my father (whose surname had been misspelled) had been responsible, about ten years before I was born, for introducing to French Island the pheasants that still flourished there at the time when the leaflet had been compiled. My father had bred pheasants in cages at the prison and had released their young in the scrub around the island.

After reading the leaflet I wanted to know who had supplied to the compilers of the leaflet the item about my father and the pheasants. I learned from one of the compilers that the item had come from a woman (described as frail and elderly) in a suburb of Melbourne. I then wrote to the woman.

The woman wrote to me in faultless handwriting that she had known my father slightly. The item about the pheasants had come from her sister. When my father had been a warder in the prison on French Island, her sister had been living with her parents, who were farmers on the island. Her sister and my father had been good friends. Whenever the writer of the letter had returned to French Island to visit her parents in those days, she had supposed that my father was courting her sister. However, her sister had later left home to become a nun. The sister was still a nun. When the writer of the letter had told her sister that a leaflet was being compiled to inform tourists about the history of French Island, her sister had urged her to pass on to the compilers of the leaflet the information about the man who had introduced pheasants to the island.

The letter-writer had named in her letter the order of nuns that her sister had joined and the convent where her sister still lived. I knew about the order of nuns only what I had heard as a boy: that the order was an enclosed order whose members never left their convents. The nun who had been a good friend of my father had lived in a convent in a suburb of Melbourne since the year in the 1930s when she had left French Island, where my father was releasing young pheasant hens and cocks in the scrub. In all the years since then, the nun who had once seemed to her sister as though she was being courted by the man who later became my father would have received as visitors to the convent only the nearest members of her family. The visitors would have sat in the visitors’ room, and the nun would have spoken to them from behind a steel grille set into the wall of the room.

* * *

I remember meeting my son at the front door on the afternoon of the storm and taking his schoolbag from him and giving him a towel from the linen cupboard to dry his face and his hair. I remember making a cup of cocoa for my son while he took off his wet clothes and dried himself in the bathroom. I went into the bathroom afterwards and picked up the wet clothes and put the shirt and the singlet and the underpants in the laundry basket. My son stood in the loungeroom in front of the gas heater wearing his tracksuit and drinking his cocoa while I arranged his pullover and his trousers on the clotheshorse in front of him.

My son accuses me sometimes of having forgotten important details from the years when I used to cut his lunches and make his cocoa and tidy his cupboards and wash his clothes and read stories to him at night. I told him one day lately the very words that he had said to me on a certain afternoon seven years ago while he stood in front of the heater in the loungeroom and drank his cocoa, but he looked at me as though I had dreamed of the dark afternoon, of my twelve-years-old son being caught in a thunderstorm, and of the mice that had failed to arrive.

* * *

While I was writing the paragraph above that begins “I remember…,” I should have remembered that I would not have made the cocoa while my son was taking off his wet clothes. I would have waited until my son had done what he did every afternoon as soon as he arrived home. I would not have begun to make the cocoa until I had heard from my son’s room the chugging and the hissing of the apparatus that he called his machine.

My son was an asthmatic who took medicines every few hours of every day. One of the medicines was a liquid that had to be inhaled in the form of a vapour. Three or four times a day my son sat for ten minutes with a mask of transparent plastic fitted over his nose and mouth. His medicine was in a plastic cylinder attached to the lower part of the mask. A rubber tube connected this cylinder to a pump powered by an electric motor. The pump forced air up the rubber tube and into the cylinder. How, I never understood, but the compressed air turned the liquid medicine in the cylinder into a vapour. Most of the vapour hung in the mask and was inhaled by my son, but some of the vapour escaped around the edges of the mask and out through the ventilation holes. When my son had first seen the strands of vapour drifting and curling around his face, he had called them his whiskers.

* * *

During his first five years my son was often in hospital. On every day when he was in hospital, I sat beside his bed through the morning and the afternoon while my wife was at work and my daughter was with neighbours.

The hospital was built on a steep hillside, and my son’s room was on an upper floor. At one side of his room a glass door led to a veranda overlooking the valley of the Yarra. The season was always late autumn or winter when my son was in hospital, and the days were often foggy or rainy, and no one went out onto the veranda. On those days I would sit beside my son’s bed, staring through the windows and across the veranda and trying to see the hills of Templestowe or the bushland around Warrandyte through the fog or the misty rain.

On foggy or rainy days I read to my son from his favourite books, from his sister’s books, and from new books that I bought for him every day. I kept him supplied with paper and coloured pens and pencils, and if he was too tired to use them I drew pictures and made paper models in front of him. Each day on my way to the hospital I bought another Matchbox car to add to his collection. He and I put stuffed toys under the green coverlet on his bed and called the green mounds hills and undertook long, rambling journeys with toy cars through the pretend-landscape.

If the weather was fine and if my son was not struggling for breath, I took him out onto the veranda.

From the parapet of our veranda to the floor of the veranda above was a wall of strong wire mesh. My son and I pressed our faces against the wire. Sometimes the boy would be standing beside me and sometimes he would be riding piggyback with his chin resting on my shoulder. We stared at the motor traffic on the road far below, at the trains crossing the bridge over the road, at the girls in grey and blue uniforms in the grounds of Our Lady of Mount Carmel College, at the green hills of Templestowe, and sometimes—if the sky was quite clear—at the long dark-blue hump of Donna Buang, thirty miles away where the mountains began.

On the veranda my son was usually cheerful and looking forward to leaving hospital. He would talk to me about the things that he could see on the other side of the wire. I would wait for him to ask me the two questions that he always asked when he thought about the future. I would wait for him to ask why he suffered from asthma while so many other children breathed freely, and to ask when he would be free from asthma forever.

I had a stock answer for each of my son’s two questions, but I did not merely answer in words. I had been trained as a primary teacher after I left secondary school. I had ceased being a teacher in the year before my son was born, but for ten years before then I had taught classes of boys and girls nine or ten years old. When I talked to my son or my daughter I liked to make use of my teacher’s skills.

On the veranda of the hospital I said first to my son that every man was given an equal amount of suffering to endure during his lifetime. However, I said, one sort of man was given most of his suffering when he was only a boy. (At this point I would describe with my hands, in the air above my son’s head, a shape that was meant to represent a dark-grey cloud. I would then fling my hands apart to represent the cloud breaking open, and immediately afterwards I would flutter my ten fingers in the air above my son’s head to represent heavy rain falling on the boy.) The other sort of man, I said, had no suffering to endure as a boy. (I lowered myself a little way towards the floor of the veranda and tried to suggest a boy skipping lightly and carelessly.) Years passed, I said, and the two sorts of boys had grown into men. The first man, the man who had suffered as a child, was now strong and healthy. (I lifted my son onto my back and rushed towards the wire and made as though to tear it apart.) The second man, however, had not been prepared for suffering. When suffering threatened this man, he fled from it and tried to hide from it and lived in terror of it. At this point, I set my son down on the floor of the veranda and moved back from him and became the man who had not learned to suffer early in life. I looked up into the air. I saw my own hand describing a broad circle just above my head, and I understood that the circle was a black thundercloud. Then I saw my own hand, with the index finger outstretched, darting downwards again and again through the air around my head. I understood that bolts of lightning were flashing all around me, and I fled.

The veranda of the children’s ward had become, over the years, a dumping place for toys and furniture. Whenever I answered my son’s question, I took care to be standing in a certain place. When I played the man who was frightened of suffering, I had only to scamper a few paces to the disused hospital bed that stood in the corner of the veranda. Then I crawled under the bed in order to escape from the lightning. But the bed had no mattress or bedclothes on it—above me was only the network of fine steel that formed the wire base for a mattress. And my mime would always end with my grinning at my son from under the bed, as though the man who had fled now considered himself safe, while out of my sight just above me the index finger of one of my hands jabbed and probed at the gaps in the sagging mattress-base.

In answer to the other question that my son asked me, I would try to be cautious. No doctor had ever said more to my wife or myself than that a certain proportion of children experienced significantly fewer attacks of asthma after reaching puberty. But sometimes I would read in a newspaper about a runner or a jockey or a footballer who had been a severe asthmatic as a child. I would stick a photograph of the man to the door of our refrigerator where my son would see it every day.

In the winter of my son’s seventh year his asthma was more severe than in any previous winter. Yet in the summer before that winter I had thought I saw signs that my son was on the way to overcoming his asthma. In hospital during his seventh winter, when he asked me the second of his two questions I became reckless. I told him that the worst was now over at last. Every year from that year, I told him, he would become stronger and his asthma weaker. Five years from that year, I told him, our dream would have come true: he would be free from asthma and breathing easily.

* * *

Fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I spent every afternoon alone in a room with the blinds drawn. The room was the loungeroom of a rented flat that had been described by an estate agent as a luxurious, fully furnished, self-contained flat suitable for a young business or professional couple. I lived alone at that time, and the rent for the flat was forty percent of my net earnings, but I had chosen to live in the flat because I was tired of sharing bathrooms and toilets and kitchens with the queer, solitary men and women of the boarding houses and rooming houses that I had lived in since I had left my parents’ house five years before.

The flat was at ground level, and the windows of the loungeroom overlooked a gravel driveway and part of the street and the footpath in front of the block of flats. I kept the blinds drawn in the windows of the loungeroom of my flat because I wanted neighbours and passers-by to think I was not at home.

Fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I was a teacher in a primary school in an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. The outer suburb had once been a seaside resort separated from the suburbs that were then the outer suburbs of Melbourne by paddocks and swamps and market gardens. As late as the 1950s, the place where I taught as a young man in the 1960s was still chosen by some newly married couples as the place for their honeymoon. The block of flats where I lived with my blinds drawn was in the older part of the suburb, where the honeymoon couples had once strolled. The primary school where I was a teacher was on the edge of the suburb, on the side of a hill from the top of which it was possible to see not only Port Phillip Bay but also, far away in the south-east, part of Westernport and even, in clear weather, a grey-blue smudge that was a corner of French Island.

Most of the children of the school where I was a teacher lived more than two miles from where I lived. When I had first moved into the rented flat I wanted none of the children or their parents to know that I lived in their suburb. I did not want the children or their parents to know that I spent every afternoon and every evening and nearly every Saturday and Sunday alone in my flat. I did not want the parents especially to wonder why I seemed to have no friends either male or female or to wonder what I did during all the time while I was alone in the rented flat.

After I had lived in the rented flat for a few months, some of the children in my own class learned where I lived. The children were three girls nine years old who happened to be riding their bicycles along my street one Saturday morning when I was walking home with my weekend’s shopping. The girls and I spoke politely to one another, after which I expected them to ride on their way. Instead, they followed me on their bicycles, at a distance of about twenty paces.

When I was inside my flat and the front door was closed behind me, I peeped around the closed blind and saw the three girls standing on the footpath and looking towards my flat. A few minutes later, while I was u