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The End of Everything

Russell Kelly

The Sun Hates Us. Sometime this year it reached down out of space and burned my son's eye to white. Just a simple thing, he didn't feel any pain, and it didn't take a second. One moment he was watching the way his soccer ball bounced around when he kicked it, and the next the sun put some nucleus in his eye which grew so slowly I didn't even see it until it turned his eye the colour of milk and the world blinked out.
     Jack still has one good eye, but he cannot stand to be in the sun because it hurts the other, the milky one. The light still gets through it apparently, like a big empty cinema screen, way too bright. He has become a child of the shade, waiting indoors for clouds to appear. Always looking down, seeking the protection of tree and hat, annoyed at the sun and the way it makes everything seem harsh and unlovely.
     I look at the sun differently now, too. I used to be fascinated by the thought that the sun was permanent. The same sun described by every poet who picked up a pen; every general's glorious victory. The same sun painted with awe on cave walls. I used to believe that. But not now. We changed it. It still puts out heat and light, but by the time they travel through space to Earth, and down through the atmosphere to the ground, humans have corrupted it. We've made it something very dangerous and personal to ourselves, and I've heard it suggested that one day we may even be able to ruin the sun at its source. The thought doesn't seem fantastic to me any more.
     Jack's photofobia is something we're both learning to cope with in our own ways. He must wear his extra-dark sun glasses everywhere, I can't even see his whole face. In my memory he has a strip of black plastic over his eyes, and only his mouth is there, hard and determined, chewing rocks when I should be providing him with food. This, of course, gives him an ultra-serious demeanour. He is so much more older than me, but he's hardly old enough to talk.
     Jack sees things through his glasses that I cannot see. The way houses can become exhausted, where rust begins. On a fishing trip he saw the leaf-shapes left in a stream by departed fish. The river looked just the same as it always had to me, cold and clear and fast-moving, but there was some invisible sickness in it. It was completely empty right down to its bugs and larvae. Being a hot day, I was about to drink from it, was actually on all fours between two rocks ready to drink straight from the stream, and then I saw the quarantine sign and the health warning. There was no reason given on the sign for the quarantine. Could have been a hundred reasons. The sun bounced around inside the water, all that empty space. I wished it was twenty years ago and a different stream, so that Jack could have seen what I'd seen, but that too, seemed less distinct now, less important than I'd remembered. Jack was standing, looking at the river through his sunglasses. The gradual tiredness.
     Jack would enjoy it here today. He has been on the Manly ferry before, and he would tike the slimy tang in the wind and the spray of the waves on the prow. I should have brought him on this trip to Sydney, but I had to get away. I was going crazy looking after him, so much time, every hour of the day, all centered on bringing up a child who sees through things. It's like he says goodbye to everything he sees. Not a see-you-later, but a permanent goodbye, like he doesn't expect to see it again. I've left him at his grandmother's house. I wish he hadn't stood at the window, holding back the fly-blown nylon curtains. Last time he did that, he didn't leave the curtain for over an hour after I'd driven away. I've come all this way to find a spot in the sun where no one knows me and where I can be free of responsibilities.
     The ferry is full of people heading over to the beach for a swim. There are so many nationalities on board I feel like I am representing something. I pause in the reading of my book and count how many languages. There is Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Croatian, Greek, two English accents, and a French-Canadian. I feel like I am on an ark.
     My book is about extinct birds, full of heroic stories. To see the roll call, all the old etchings and impossible engravings of creatures that have long departed. Their stories of ending make me conscious of every breath in my lungs. I look through the dumb pages and see the last images. Each one drawn with painstaking accuracy and yet all slightly comical, slightly wrong, like whoever was drawing them had only a feather and a charred breastbone to base their drawings on. Each case history of extinction has a last sighting, a Last Place. The book is full of brutal accounts, of people wanting to claim a place in history. There are ironic photographs of proud hunters with guns and dead things. I read the story of the great auk, a northern-hemisphere penguin, which was last recorded on the island of St. Kilda, Scotland in 1821. It was captured alive and tied up for three days before being beaten to death, suspected of being a witch. I put the book down. People are laughing around me, but I don't know what about. Amid the mumble of people talking in many languages I think about that auk, tied up, aching for the sea, and its vanishing kind, and for some reason it's suddenly wearing a pointy witch's hat, and its spells of escape and illusion have failed it, and there are bootfalls coming closer, closer, and the light of a flickering torch.
     That oily torch the texture of the great excursions associated with each new discovery in the New World. Each extinction seems to have a common element which the ornithologists never quite tackle: why is it, that seemingly sane European explorers of noble birth and high moral distinction, descend into such an orgy of killing whenever they are away and anonymous on foreign shores? Freed from the responsibilities of home, a taut string suddenly gone slack. In my naivete, I try to think of one word to summarize the last six hundred years, then I erase the word. It's overrun anyway. The Europeans fall about the place with clubs and guns and cruelty and each rise and fall of the club is a way of subduing, a way of possessing, of owning. They slaughter birds, animals, fish, trees, people, landscapes. They do it to define this word. I recognize the people in these stories. I know with certainty that my forebears have killed at least one of everything.
     The pages turn, and all those birds look out, their colors slightly and marvelously different from any I have seen before, their eyes steady and unblinking. My book falls open at the page for the dodo, the dodoor, dodaers, the walckvogel, the sluggard, the lubber, the ugly bird. They were three feet high and fatter than turkeys but they moved about as fast as a tortoise, even when their colleagues were being clubbed to death. To look at the painting you would not think that such an unusual creature could have ever existed. I look at the painted eyes for a suggestion of a harbor, I want to see the curving reflections of jungle, tropical fruit, white sand and the green ocean, and out to sea, never before seen and beyond comprehension, the reflection of the first ever sail, approaching. It occurs to me that the dodo's eyes could belong in many other creatures, in many other places. If this were my last day on Earth, if I had to leave and take only one image with me, it would be this one. I look at the dodo's eyes for a long time and the voices around me are like strange insects in a forest.
     Through the ferry's open windows I can see the Sydney Heads, so close together, and maybe not that much changed in recent times, if you exclude the viewing rails on the North Head and the lighthouse on the South, and between them I see something which rocks me to my core, makes me look around for reassurance that others can see it too: between the heads, ploughing heavily but determinedly in from the sea and into the harbour, is a sailing ship, mariners in the rigging, and the sun glinting off polished brass and new paint. It's the Young Endeavour, a replica of the flagship of Captain James Cook who first claimed Australia for the English in 1788. And I have a very special seat to see what it must have looked like, for that ship to come sailing through the heads, with nothing modern nearby to put it into context. It's tiny, all frail wood and flimsy cloth, and yet it seems infinitely more important and substantial than even the rocks of the heads themselves.
     On the ferry, the passengers have left their seats and are pointing and talking excitedly and taking photographs of the brig as it swings between the heads, just as it would have entered two centuries ago, but to an entirely different harbour than the ones that stinks and glows around me now. I get this very perfect image, of a ship against the horizon, between the sheltering heads of a harbor, and it is at the end of an incredibly long and dangerous journey but it's made it, and now its insides are bursting with things that want to get out. But I see it from the perspective of the watcher.
     By the time I reach Manly and the top of the cliffs of the heads themselves the Young Endeavour is only just in view bumping its way slowly among all the ferries and yachts and tugs and ships of various sizes and purposes. Shortly its sails are furled, and I lose sight of it in the general enormity of humanity. I take in the panorama. Stretching in every direction, is a thrown-together collection of buildings and skyscrapers and television aerials and electricity poles and highways and cars, cars, cars and glass that sit on the landscape and hold it down. From up here I get the impression that if the wind blew hard enough it could scatter the buildings like embers.
     There is a clean wind blowing today, coming from sea out beyond the line of oil tankers and container ships where nothing is. The sun is biting on my skin and it seems like all the buildings and ships are blank, without detail. The sun is causing sores on my head, but the wind is tugging at them, wanting to pick them off. I peel the magnificent coloured plates out of the book of extinct birds and release them. The scarlet macaw, the great auk, the passenger pigeon, the dodo, solitaire, the pink-headed duck and hundreds more I've never heard of. There are so many, you would not believe. All the extinct birds are taken up to a great height and they fly over the harbor in exultant colours, some above Sydney and gone, some out to sea. I can see them all hurtling away, away, away.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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