CROSSING THE DESERT - Daniel Ray

Illustration by Andrea Ocampo // https://www.instagram.com/ancrioca

Alice is in the study translating Proust into Arabic. It’s eleven pm. Her husband isn’t home yet. (He has a work dinner. He is a lawyer.) The study is small and hot and smells of the chicken soup she ate at her desk. They live in an apartment block on the corner of an intersection in Sydney, and the window is shut because of the traffic. Occasional beams of light fall through the blinds like ladles scooping shadow. To translate at her best, she needs a specific kind of smooth quiet in which she reads aloud, allowing the steady march of syllables to metamorphosize in her head. When everything flows, she feels like a windowpane high in a church: the absolute point of diffraction.

Alice isn’t a purist. She uses a variety of English translations, occasionally cross-checking them with a French dictionary and edition, which she translates into Arabic. Instead of working from start to finish, she skips sentences and paragraphs and pages—even whole books—which she will get back to eventually. Translating Proust is a hobby, a leftover of academia, a faint aftertaste that refuses to leave; it reminds her that language can still be beautiful.

Alice works as a translator for the government. At university she studied literature and languages, and took the only job offered to her after she dropped out of her PhD and was released from the psych ward. The pay is good. There is a competitive salary. In the too-empty and too-white office, she receives stacks of papers, which she translates into another online document and prints out. She imagines she is merely transforming one stack of papers into another stack of papers, devoid of human element. The information which is redacted helps with this. But sometimes there are whole lists of names—lists of people, who she (naïvely, one supervisor described it when she mistakenly told him) imagines dead. People treat her as if she retains nothing, as if she is only a series of chemicals converting configurations of letters into other configurations. To some of the higher-ups, especially, there is nothing other than English. Arabic is like an invisible ink she must bring to a candle flame, making meaning bloom from nothing. To survive, this is what she tells herself: I enjoy translating; Language is harmless; Somebody else would do it anyway; A job is a job is a job.

If the documents aren’t too classified, she works from home. This is normally the time she uses to see Steve, so the next day her work is doubled, but she works quickly, so nobody seems to care. It’s been nearly three months since Alice and Steve started having sex. Isn’t there an inherent limit to affairs? A point when the two of them will have squeezed every drop of pleasure, like water from stone, out of each other’s bodies?

There is a chime from the phone, which is nearly always off silent in case she needs to translate something urgently. Maybe it’s because of this that she sleeps fitfully: worried Steve will text—although she has told him not to—and that her husband will wake up before her and check her phone. What would happen after this she cannot imagine, as hard as she tries. It is a possible impossibility. The notification is an unimportant email, and she places the phone face down on the desk.

Alice is currently translating passages from Swann’s section where he falls in love with Odette, although her memories of the overall plot are hazy. She hasn’t researched or read Proust since grad school. She is doing everything in process. She is trying to relax more.

Her memories of Proust are mostly of sensation. Numerous times during grad school she came home drunk into her too-cold or too-hot share house and numbly flipped through a few pages until sleep reached upwards with its blank fingers. She remembers, then, thinking of the title, In Search of Lost Time and wondering: What does it mean to search (recherche)? What does it mean to be lost (perdu)? And what does it mean to give up the search of something lost (because to be truthful, she has never made it to the end)?

And now, here in her study—because by thinking, by working, Alice has made it hers—she is thinking of that disastrous conference where she met her husband.

It was the final year of her PhD and she had no thesis to speak of, only a document filled with fifty-thousand words of notes. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend at the time—a pimply-faced grad student studying depictions of masculinity in comic books, and an amateur comedian who proudly bombed at open mics. (When she’d broken up with him, they’d eaten stuffed green olives with their fingers from the jar and watched the sun lower itself onto the rooftops.) Alice flew into the city at night; she remembers the dark dripping of trees, the soft smell of rain, the gleam of cobbled streets like fish scales, traffic’s dipping lights, the gleaming lemon trees.

She presented on the first day in a room with a large beige podium and three Rothko prints hanging on the walls.

The thing about love, she began—the thing about love and sex—was that they were either endlessly exciting or immediately tedious. This was due to the aesthetic repetitions, the potential configurations of naked bodies that ricocheted like equations. Isn’t it funny, she said, how after every failed love there was either the hope that elsewhere, possibly, things might change, this time for the better, or the knowledge that this failure was doomed to happen ad infinitum?

A dusty cough. She already got the sense that she was venturing away from the topic at hand.

One thing which shows how terrible love is, she continued, is how jealousy is emblematic of it. As Deleuze says (she thought Deleuze says—she hadn’t read Deleuze in years—she didn’t even know why his name emerged, all at once, randomly, like a snail from her mouth) it is the jealous lover who is most habitually attuned to life, who can wander into beautiful and terrible hallucinatory spaces, chasing the quickly disappearing maybe-flash of their lover like the gold-bright tail of a fish.

She went on to speak for a bit about Dickinson, Plath and Proust, spouting quotes she’d memorised, jumping from writer to writer, looking up at the Rothkos—their lopsided horizons—wishing she were somewhere else.

At one point she realised she’d stopped speaking; in the quiet more people were looking away from her like sunflowers who had suddenly found a richer, sharper source of light. And all at once, she was reminded of something her ex-boyfriend had told her: a term in comedy called crossing the desert. A comedian tells a joke, and it is funny. The joke is like an oasis. But then the comedian says it again, the joke or the bit, setting out once again into the desert—the desert which is ceaselessly unfunny—losing the audience, trudging through uncomfortable silence, the occasional heckle, repeating it until they finally cross the desert into a pay-off which is infinitely funnier and more profound than the last.

She realised she was all alone in the desert—that she had been there for quite some time.

Thank you, she said.

Silence like a piercing, supersonic note. Then a confused smattering of polite applause.

A long-haired man in the audience with silver-rimmed glasses, the only person who was still looking at her in the eyes, asked her a question which began with, What I think you’re saying is. He was Australian, too. Alice tuned out until the end, a short clause ending with the sound ah, which dropped like a splashing stone. Too embarrassed to ask him to repeat the question, which was really quite long, she just nodded her head a few times and said, Yes, then left the podium and walked straight out of the room.

On the final day, he—Rob—came up to her and said, You didn’t answer my question.

No.

Would you like a coffee?

Yes.

I meant would you like to grab a coffee with me?

Yes. With you. Yes.

They were just friends to begin with—and for a long time after that. By chance Rob was planning to move to her city after he finished his PhD. He told her he was getting out of academia as soon as he submitted his thesis. He had a double degree in English and Law, which she told him she thought was a strange combination. (The coffee shop was almost full. They had a tiny booth in a corner with dusty red curtains and jagged graffiti tags carved into the wooden sill. The coffee was dark and bitter and gathered a film from Alice’s lip gloss. Outside, it had begun to rain again, and as she listened Alice watched the droplets collect on the pane.) Rob couldn’t stand the insecurities of academia, the cut-throat competition where everyone needed to one-up each other, where everyone, at all times, was evaluating your invisible CV.

A good thing about law is that it has none of those things, she said.

He laughed. That was one thing he liked about her presentation: she talked about what she wanted to talk about and didn’t care about anybody else.

Well, she said, hiding how much she was hurt by this statement, and thinking about her ex-boyfriend, Bombing is an art I do exceptionally well.

Rob told her he used to have waking visions. In these visions, which could be about something as simple as rain slanting under a streetlight, he would feel a strange keenness, a sharp cut of something, and he would be filled with first a presence of something else—maybe the divine—and then an awful absence. Contrary to what it sounded like, this was actually a good thing, he said. Visions of idealism were a young man’s game.

To explain himself, he showed her a Philip Larkin poem on his phone. He’d screenshotted the poem from some website, and she had to zoom-in to read it. In the poem, Larkin—for it seems obvious the speaker is Larkin—sees a young couple and thinks about them fucking and wonders what birth control they’re using. But the crux of the poem is its ending, which are these high windows which deny any epiphany of meaning, which look out on and offer nothing. Isn’t that terribly realistic? he said.

I think it’s terribly sad, Alice said, but couldn’t quite explain why when he asked.

It's those windows I see whenever I’m looking for the courage to do something new, Rob said. There is something freeing when nothing matters.

She talked about her thesis. It was on—was going to be on—love and happiness and drug-use in nineteenth-century poetry.

That’s a lot of ands, Rob said.

Well, there are a lot of things I want to write about, she said.

She also talked about her ex-boyfriend, whose name was Angus—first, over coffee, his eccentricities—how Angus rarely cut his toenails, believed in the benefits of semen retention and listened to Joe Rogan—and then, after Rob had moved three suburbs over where starry agapanthus lined the streets and they were properly friends, about the sex: his direct way of asking for it, and his short, darting tongue. Talking about him this way, she learned that memory, for her, often seemed to have a way of smoothing things over, rounding the edges to make something much more beautiful than before. There was something erotic and dangerous about talking about the past: like placing a piece of sea glass in your mouth, trusting it wouldn’t cut you.

The one regret she had about her presentation, she told Rob later, was she didn’t say how love is like happiness in that it can never be present tense.

They both had to check out early before their flights the next evening, so they arranged to meet up in the morning and visit some museums. With their luggage—his small and black, hers blocky and red—they wandered through lit-up exhibits of near-translucent celadon porcelain. Rob told her he was an artist, too, and he spoke what he knew as they walked, voice soft and calm and measured. Alice fell into the pulse of his voice, the hiss of the suitcase wheels and the rhythm of her steps. She was being unspooled.

What did you think? he asked after they had left.

She felt a flash of irritation. Pretty, she said, voice husky. It was the first thing she had said for more than an hour.

There was another museum a ten-minute walk away. The air outside was cold and bright and the traffic was loud. It was like a separate universe—like moving between a museum’s exhibits and its gift shop. He made a point of stopping at the traffic lights.

At the second museum, they weren’t allowed to bring their luggage (only then did Alice think it was strange that the first museum had let them carry it around), so they left their bags at the front desk with the guard. The light was blue, glinting off the cases filled with more porcelain, shapes sleek and curved. Rob spoke to her about these objects, too, and again she fell into the rhythm of his speech, his accent reassuring her of home. Her blinks came slow and sleepy. She felt as if she were underwater watching bright things undulate past.

When they left the exhibition, her suitcase was gone. Rob’s was still there, looking like a full stop at the foot of the guard, who told them in English that he hadn’t seen a thing. She couldn’t find it in herself to care. There was no arc of causation; the suitcase had not been taken or moved, it had simply ceased to exist. She felt half-asleep. She watched as Rob argued with the guard, becoming more and more frustrated and gesticulating wildly, while in her mind moon jars still floated by like jellyfish.

Now, in her study, Alice wonders if all memory is Proustian: memory as A. P. (after Proust). Alice’s favourite word in Arabic is زيتونيّ. It means olive-brown and comes from the word for olive (زيتون). She likes the way it sounds—the buzzing z, and the short, sharp ending between her tongue and roof of her mouth. It always reminds her of her ex-boyfriend: the break-up: eating olives watching the sunset, which makes her think of the conference and Rob, then, inevitably, Steve... Language helps make everything feel present. There is a non-linear link to infinity. Alice has the overwhelming feeling of not having enough time for time.

So, trying to be mindful, she focuses on the words in front of her, reading them out slowly, feeling their calm weight on her tongue until they almost slip out almost of their own accord, attached to each other in long, delicate chains.

There is a noise. She turns. Her husband—Rob—is standing at the door in his suit, holding a cake with blue icing prickling with unlit candles.

Happy Birthday, he says. Sorry I’m so late.

Oh, she says. Thank you.

He comes over and kisses her. He tastes oniony.

The time’s after twelve.

Somehow, she has forgotten. She has turned thirty-five.

⁕⁕⁕

On the weekend, when Alice visits Marin, Sian is crying. They are framed in the doorway like a Renaissance painting, Sian at Marin’s hip, hair pale gold and separated into individual curls high on her head like roses. Spit bubbles over the front of her lip. Her cheeks glisten wetly. Her eyes are wren-blue. She is delightfully androgynous.

Once she gets going it’s hard to make her stop, Marin says. She smiles down at Sian’s red cheeks. Isn’t that right, baby?

Alice and Marin hug. Marin smells of chamomile and sweat.

Happy Birthday, Marin says.

Marin’s house is somehow both cluttered and bare. Alice dodges an array of toys strewn on the floor. Washing up is stacked dirty in the sink. Two bunches of feathery asparagus tied with purple twine rest in water.

Alice and Marin met in an elective Classics course in undergrad. The only women in their tutorial, they were often talked-over and ignored despite the efforts of the whip-thin, lantern-jawed tutor who, in Marin’s words, lacked a backbone. Whenever anyone other than Marin spoke, Alice picked a spot on the wall and focused on it until her vision seemed to warp and the whole room started to dissolve into static. Or she’d brush aside her fringe until it was lank and greasy, listening to the loud voices of men competing about who had read and watched the most—who was the most cultured—and the room itself, which was always too warm and smelled like sweat and dust and pine cleaning products. In it, Alice’s mind seemed to be pushed back into her body: she could feel her thoughts crowding her stomach like hundreds of glittering goldfish. But she’d listen keenly to Marin and watch the way she squinted—one eye larger than the other—and how her mouth grew pinched when she paraphrased someone else’s argument or read out a passage as if she had tasted something bitter. Alice would sometimes think, If only I sounded like her, but at the end of the sentence there was a lacuna like in Sappho, punctuated by square brackets. If only what? Winter? Silence?

Now they sit outside on the trampoline. Alice enjoys how she can feel Marin and Sian’s minute movements as if she is a spider in its web. They drink tart, cloudy lemonade in wine glasses garnished with mint. Sian lies belly-down. Alice marvels at her pudgy toes. Snow peas twine up the chain-link fence. A plum tree litters its fruit like punctuation on the ground.

They talk for a bit about Sian, who’s nearly three months old. Marin says the nights are the hardest. Sometimes Sian refuses to sleep, and Marin will be alone in bed and be woken by a noise, and for the briefest of moments she will forget her daughter exists and terror will turn the shadows by her bed into strangers.

Marin says, Parenting is odd. I thought there’d be this monumental change, that everything would mean something different, but it’s mostly the same. I’m just tired all the time.

I’m tired too. Sans baby. I can’t imagine how you feel.

How’s work? Marin asks.

Fine.

Marin asks about Alice’s affair.

It’s surprisingly a lot of effort.

Is it worth it?

I don’t know.

I don’t even think about sex anymore. I’m in awe of you.

You shouldn’t be.

Marin gives a strained laugh. Then silence. Eventually she says, Ah, we have what we need, though, don’t we?

I suppose so, Alice says, although she is unsure if it is true, unsure, even, of what it is she needs.

They go for a walk in the neighbourhood. Sunset: the sky is grainy, crackled pink. A man, backlit, stands on a roof, head upturned as if he is sipping colour from the air. Marin stops outside a blank-faced house next to a tree.

Ugh, this post-postpartum thing has gone to shit, she says. I need to pee.

Here?

Why not?

Can’t you wait?

No.

Oh, God, okay.

Marin hands over Sian, surprisingly heavy and clammy, then crouches behind the tree and casually shuffles down her pants. Alice looks away as there is the immediate trickle and sharp scent of urine. She is reminded of their elective Classics course and the end of The Táin.

Two long-faced teenage boys come up the path. One points out Marin and laughs. Sian starts to cry. Alice steps in front of Marin, shielding her from view, and remembers when they used to steal fruit from the campus grocery store, Alice blocking the sight of the security camera while Marin stuffed persimmons like globes of sunlight into the pockets of her coat.

Alice rocks Sian on her hip. Their weight shifts together as if they are dancing.

⁕⁕⁕

Alice is in room two-nine-seven alone drinking a glass of wine. One thing the affair has taught her is that time isn’t linear. As their meetings draw closer, she feels the minutes in her throat like drumbeats increasing tempo. Time curves, widens, yet becomes taffy-like and too-slow. It is like she is passing by a black hole.

Steve hasn’t texted, which is how they communicate. In person, it’s as if their speech is all used up—like opera singers who go around during the day in silence. She re-reads their texts sometimes, imagining them as artefacts MFA students have found and turned into blackout poems: I’m / heading in / sleep and / eating / dark.

Steve arrives fifteen minutes later: a sharp triple-rap on the door. His eyes are red and watery. He doesn’t apologise for being late, just walks over to the window, shuts it, pulls the curtains closed, then takes off his clothes and slips into bed. That’s something Alice likes about him: an economy of movement. She has always found the simple erotic: everyday things which have been reduced to the shortest, clearest arc, compacted into their barest forms like shell into opal.

Alice undresses too, and gets between the sheets next to him, enjoying their shock of coolness and how they ripple beneath her. The alcohol bubbles beneath her fingertips. As always, she is almost surprised that she sees no vision of her husband she cannot simply push away and forget.

It is only later, when she will walk alone to her car in the eerie darkness throbbing with the staticky hum of cicadas, that she will feel something: not shame, but some type of loneliness which is punctuated by the facts of her marriage and affair.

⁕⁕⁕

Alice drives home fast. She has stayed out too late. It starts to rain—too slow and thin for her wipers. Fog coils off the road. Something appears around a bend, and she slams on her brakes, seatbelt cutting into her sternum. It is not a kangaroo. It is a deer. Since when did they even live around here? Its neck is long and silver, its eyes wide and black. Alice thinks she has never seen anything more beautiful or more ominous. Eventually it turns and disappears in darkness.

Her husband wakes when she slips into bed. For a moment, she expects him to say something, to ask, at least, where she has been, but he lies in silence except his rasping breath, eyes two lamps burning into her.

Alice wants to say, I’ve been sleeping with somebody else, but I’ve had enough now. She wants to say she has been thinking about quitting her job. She wants to say she’s going to talk to Marin about moving in with her and Sian. Or maybe she just wants to be silent, long after he falls asleep, crossing the desert until all this is funny, until the joke lowers itself like an angel to hover above their heads in the still, black air and everything is okay.

---

Daniel Ray lives between Naarm and Queanbeyan in so-called Australia. His writing is published or forthcoming in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Island, Westerly, Overland, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Sunder, The Suburban Review and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competitions, and is currently working on his debut novel, supported by a 2024 Create NSW Grant, 2024 Writer's Space Online Fellowship, 2024 Roderick Centre Fellowship and 2024 Faber Academy Writing a Novel Scholarship. He is a PhD student at La Trobe University, researching queerness and affect.