Craig Smith

Predawn streets cup pilot light shopfronts -

newsagents, bakeries -

embers that ignite a city's slow awakening.

Adria hasn’t yet served the previous day its unconscious dues, circling back to the shared rooftop garden (after takeaway Thai) as the moon rose, staring into the void (a preferred leisure) still there at sunrise, work unfinished, body yearning for close, she takes the elevator to the bakery now for metabolic reparations, fuel for undisturbed repose.

Morning.

Against all better judgement, yes it is.

What can I get you.

Cherry-blonde tumble, tousle, librarian glasses, light cheek freckles, white polo shirt up to new year sapling collarbone.

What do you recommend. Don't answer that, how about a cheese and bacon roll, hold the roll. I'm delirious, I'm ok. And where do you get arms like that anyway, gyms should replace dumbbells with rolling pins and whisks.

Auburn mess, scrappy beard, flour hands like cloud gloves.

Did you see the moon earlier.

That's kind of personal, isn't it. We've only just met.

I knew a woman once -

Here we go.

- who was congenitally blind.

Continue.

One night when she was young her mother commented how big the moon was. She replied, what do you mean, is it not always the same size. Her mum said no, the moon appears  bigger or smaller depending on where it is observed in relation to its distance from the earth.

The moon changes size.

Yes. That was something her braille textbooks had ignored.

I have a nephew who calls a full moon an apple moon and a waxing or waning moon a banana moon.

Two moons. So why are you delirious.

Can't sleep, can't work.

What do you do.

Oh you know, this and that. At the moment I'm working part-time as a travel agent for space tourism.

Which moon do you recommend.

Moons are out this season, they're going through a phase.

So what do tourists do up there.

They float around for thirty minutes and look down at the blue marble we're on and question the finite period we're given to conjure infinite variations of sweet nothing. At the end you get a t-shirt with the milky way on it, or it could be lint, depending on the box it comes out of.

How much.

Ten thousand dollars, but remember that includes the shirt.

Max looks at Adria mathematically.

Ten thousand dollars for thirty minutes.

Give or take.

I can get that by the end of the day. How often do flights take off, how long is the waitlist.

Adria crinkles her nose and takes a bite of her cheese and bacon roll. She chews and watches Max as he walks from behind the bread cupboard to step onto the street, looking up into the sky at the mulberry backlit stratus.

He walks back into the shop.

Who do I give the money to.

Do you really have a spare ten thousand dollars.

I can get it by the end of the day, I -

Yes.

- can organise something.

Okay. Well, listen it's been a gas.

Tonight I'm scheduled to fight a local guy, a cop -

Excuse me.

- for five grand, but I reckon the guy organising it would double the winnings if I agreed to fight two guys at once, and won, which I would.

What am I listening to, what is this crazy talk. Are we just being absurd right now, you know I'm fine if that's the case. What are you, a prize fighter. What is this, your dough-jo.

Yes exactly, in a -

I was kidding.

- local tournament run by some guys from the port ranks. I'm going to make a couple calls and get it set up. Ten gees. You should come along and watch.

Wow. As fun as that sounds, to see the baker who gave me a cheese and bacon roll and yarned about the moon as misperceived by a  blind acquaintance step into a, what is it, a ring, I'm -

Not really a ring, just different apartments around town, King Street, Hunter Street, on a rotational basis. They clear floor space and stand well back.

- going to bid you good luck and reconsider my morning food options going forward. God speed.

Adria winks and saunters out of the bakery in a slow-motion fall that maintains its gravity all the way into the elevator and her apartment where she spills onto an op shop chaise lounge. An unnamed roommate is pouring juice and toasting a bagel in the kitchen and she says to Adria see you later on and Adria mumbles mfmahuanowha and rolls off the lounge and the roommate shuts the door on exit.

She exhales her body off the floor and lingers

airborn like dustlight before smooshing

her face against a harbour-facing window to

follow the swan dive wisp of a seaplane

dip its pontoons into the coal terminal basin.

A warm shower, that's the next logical step towards sleep.  She's followed all the recommended procedures so far:

- don't sleep

- elevate to the rooftop after a serving of warm Pad Thai

- stare vacantly into the void

- feel hungry

- talk to a strange baker about moons and prize fighting

- spill onto a lounge, mumble

- view seaplane

Now structured raindrops descend a matrix of grout

across her trajectories (Adria's phrasing)

stirring foam with sulfates, memories want conspire

therefore towel, so cotton, moreover zzz.

Max has passed serving responsibilities over to his younger brother so he can step out the back and get on the blower to set up a two on one fight. Everyone from the organisers to the guy he was scheduled to take on are sceptical - might not this give Max an unforeseen advantage, perhaps it's not that easy to be part of a duo fighting someone, especially a slugger of Max's reputation on the circuit. But when Max offers to put some money forward to add to the kitty for his two opponents if they win it pretty much settles things, that and when the organiser gets a call back from one of the toughest opponents Max has fought who is keen for a shot at revenge, the event is locked in, seven o'clock tonight.

His shift finished, Max changes in the bathroom

and begins a steady jog westward,

sidestepping craters in the alley, faking through

a chainlink fence, damask horizon

powdering brick spires, gasworks and fish co-ops

in disintegrating shadows between

him and his destination, a field out the back of an

import export customs processing

yard, between there and a rail line, empty sheds

of corrugated iron overflowing with

jilted lines of elephant legs and cardiac swoon, no

painted linguistic splash, post game

verb drippings, only images that remind him how

he threw his body down speedways,

crunched through neon petal gambits by way of

empty bus stabilities and made light

stream in an unmitigated data flow like dynamite,

with eyes like sliced lemons, sweating

dusted sugar entropy - he'd made it as a contender.

Better living through geometry, that's a classic Max motto, watching the weather, sensing pressure drops, repeating iconographies, the body language of insects, city ostinatos that reveal behavioural loops, how the key to winning a fist fight is less about watching your opponent dance and more about listening out for fluctuations in audience jeers, how collectives anticipate more than they know, the data contained in the particles of their breath spittle, it tells you to step north-east and throw a haymaker at a dimple.

Jogging down King Street he detects a potential symmetry and shifts his weight for a left turn onto Perkins to land outside the old Victoria Theatre and in the face of guess who - Adria, tartan head scarf, navy blouse, double take.

Hello stranger.

You're stalking me, this is an unexpected turn in events. Did I not pay for the breadroll, did I not fulfill my end of the bargain.

Do you work here.

I mean, that's a bit of a leap.

You spend time here and they give you money.

Well when you put it that way.

She shows him around the cavernous gloom of the converted theatre, blue folds of high luminescence peeling through divisions where pigeons still nest, necklacing a burgundy carpet draped across stage boards. Here a television talk show format has been established with the standard guest couch, chair and desk alignment. Adria explains that she is a writer for the show, a new production. They are preparing to film the pilot episode next week.

Who is the host.

A bit of an unknown, he's done some community radio, he'll do.

How's the material.

It's a difficult birth. Shall I tell you what I've got so far.

Shoot.

I'm working on a game. Local celebrities, guests and audience members will be invited to participate each week. The premise is this: the host pretends to be a real estate agent selling a very expensive luxury home. A participant is invited to a viewing of the house, but what they want - the point of the game - is to find ways to stay in the house forever without buying it. For example, someone might say to the real estate agent: can we just stay another fifteen minutes so I can see how the sun looks at this angle through the kitchen window. Fine, fifteen minutes, that's no trouble. But then they say they would love to smell how home made bread wafts in the kitchen, they are close to calling the bank to make an offer on the house, can they just make a bit of food in the kitchen to see if it feels right. And then the excuses keep on. Can I invite my dog over, can I ask my parents to knock at the door so I can feel what it would be like to have them come over, can I just see what the sound of traffic is like of an evening from the bedroom, can I stay for the public holiday over the long weekend to see how rambunctious the locals get, can I plant an apple tree in the front yard and see how long until roots start to take hold, quality soil is very important when buying a house, and so on. The player wins a prize if they can keep the host -  the real estate agent - agreeing to their ridiculous demands for two minutes. A big digital clock starts counting down from the moment the host says, Time to close up. So, what do you think.

I think I would ask if I could raise children there, to rule lines above their heads as they grow, to see how our collected memories feel as they fill up the rooms.

That would definitely give you a couple more years, a decade maybe, to try the house out to see if it fits. You'd probably even win a prize. You're oddly sweet, in a punchy sort of way.

Speaking of which, I need to go train. You're still coming, aren't you. Seven o'clock tonight, just down from here actually, King Street, out the back of the Lucky Country, third terrace along. Come upstairs, the door will be open. You'll know it's the right place when you step inside.

Listen mister, I'm just a simple girl trying to write interactive talk show folly -

You'll dig it. Three working class men beating into each other for money. Now that's comedy.

I'm scared and confused just enough to know I can't miss out on whatever you're involved in. Seven o'clock, I'll be the one hiding behind my hands, trying not to get blood on my shoes.

Amazing, I'll take you out for curly fries afterwards.

It just keeps getting better. I'd better get back to work, I have a skit about awkward bakery encounters that I'm putting together. You'll never believe it, the inspiration is straight out of real life.

Afternoon in the city treads duskward. Myna birds tweak, parking meters capitulate, bank loans are stamped, trams become toylike, lanterns unfold from the centre of the page creasing up into cathedral peaks, treefinger latitudes, ramen petting, stir ember fade fiasco, settle smudge.

Through these diminishing colours Adria footfalls Perkins onto King and Crown through a narrow brick corridor, pressed on one side by the band room of the Lucky Country, warm up bass arpeggios phasing through the mortar, with dim lanterns hung against the opposite wall where second storey apartments congregate above street traffic. Out front of the landing of the third apartment along is a bird cage with a cowbell hanging inside. This is the place, but is Adria really going to go up there, into whatever is happening up there - this is what she says to herself, Adria, are you really going to etc, and then she thinks, well etc, and she does.

The first thing Adria sees at the end of the hallway is an open plan living room with traffic cones set up at six positions around the middle, not dissimilar to the clay and rice straw bales that designate the dohyō arena for a bout of sumo wrestling. At the boundary of these cones two dozen plastic lawn chairs were set up, more then half of them already occupied by mostly professionally attired men in their forties and fifties.

Adria elects to sit by herself and readies a few disarming comments to anybody who should choose to sit next to her and offer small talk, but fortunately this isn't necessary as Max pretty much immediately walks out and takes up his position opposite her as two other men, similar build to Max but a little older, one dressed in gym clothes and the other in board shorts and a singlet, stand in front of him at ten and two. The lights dim, a cowbell is struck and three men become one stack of muscle and flesh, like a Lucien Freud oil painting of Leigh Bowery compressed into Francis Bacon's 'Triptych' (when I say 'like', I mean precisely).

Blinking fists mod a

quick response space

invader uppercut to

the opposite of care

(polly want a wacker).

His footwork is undeniable, his haymaker a blessing. Max throws the bodies of both his opponents out of the ring, into the kitchen, where they dampen against the tiles. He isn't even out of breath. Max exits the room.

During the fight he made eye contact with Adria for only a single frame of the twenty four per second that comprised her cinematic attention, and for all the world he looked not like a baker, nor a prizefighter, nor even, as cliché might imbue, a wild animal, which he was far beyond during this fragment of gaze. His eyes, it would occur to Adria only later as the room was emptying of spectators, were that of unbridled fiction, a generative voidbeast, event horizons gesturing towards some collapse of the real, the world as thrill and aberration, a static horror residing within the gap between a pinwheel rolodex of academic intelligibility and cataclysmic bliss.

He scared her antiquely,

yesterday's baseline fears,

like the sun going down

on the last prime number.

They walk out together without saying a word. He presses a thick envelope into his backpack and she presses her eyes to the ground. He opens the door to Big Als where they take a booth of burger tomato red vinyl and order fries. The jukebox is playing an electro vocoder cover of The Smiths' 'There is a light that never goes out' by a Berlin based duo.

Masticating in relative silence for, say, ten minutes, Adria swallows a chip and chimes -

I have a recurring fantasy that I have been called in to a meeting at some high profile marketing company. They have been tasked with creating a campaign to put up a billboard announcing a new stage production of Lord of the Rings starring Christopher Walken as Gandalf. They have been scratching their heads for weeks trying to conjure the perfect tag line for the poster, when I walk in and say, "Everybody's Tolkien 'bout a new way of Walken", and then turn on my heel and leave the room, knowing that I have just presented them with marketing perfection. You know the song 'Walk Right In' by The Rooftop Singers, from the Forrest Gump soundtrack. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, as impressive as this fantasy would be if it were ever enacted, it would still be less meaningful than what you did in that apartment tonight.

Max wipes his lips and says, that's very kind of you to say, and the best part is, now I have enough money for the space tourist jaunt. So, how do I set it up, should I call you in the morning and make a payment, set a date. How's it work.

The look on Adria's face is the antinomy of Max's eye contact during the fight. He wipes his hands on his pants and says, let's head down to the beach.

They cross an empty road and ease down a sloped path that salts alongside the beach and onto the cities public baths. A single pear shaped globe hangs from a wire above the pool. Long spectator steps curve around the corner of the water, with coal ships, like watch batteries on a clothes line, just visible on the horizon.

Sitting on a bench is an astronaut.

From the change rooms a tall figure

in tan robes steps out,

dragging the sonic equivalent of

loose change

along the concrete perimeter. It is

a rope with alarm clocks

tied at intervals, clanging, ticking,

and Max stares.

The robed figure leaves the clocks

poolside as they wade

to the pool's centre, beckoning

the spaceman.

Gliding into moonlit ripples our

astronaut glides across

to the billowing robes and waits

for immersion.

They are submerged with a hand

to the helmet, the robed

figure pushing them backwards

with one hand

while pulling the alarm clocks

in with the other,

dragged to the pool's floor

to cry out,

they ring now like whale words,

ambient pulsations,

horologe resonance chimes,

water music,

and the astronaut stays down

amidst the chorale

while Adria looks at Max

for meaning,

so, transfixed, Max says that

the baptism is now

complete, the astronaut can

go into space.

Let's say that Max and Adria walk back into the city after this spectacle and as they come to a busy crossroad, a steep gutter, one puts their hand into the warm crescent of the other, palms and fingers latticed, gravitating like the spontaneous contraction of muscles around the heart, while star systems above them fight for obscurity.