Positions
by Edmario Lesi
Two girls watch a YouTube video of the accident that removed me from Never Never—a reality TV show wherein teenagers are stranded in a remote part of northwest Queensland. The girls sit against a bookshelf, and the smaller of them rests a laptop on her overturned school bag. I push a library cart through the social sciences aisle, and when the girls reach the video’s climax, I trundle to the circulation desk, where I unglue my fingers from the cart’s handlebars and stare at the parquet flooring.
I was medically evacuated from Never Never on the evening of my second day. The heat had dimmed my senses. We’d slept on sheets of bark. I staggered into a campfire and charred my bare feet. The accident gave rise to outcry over Never Never’s unsafe conditions, and within a week the reality show announced its cancellation.
I don’t mention Never Never often. But during a date with a pediatrician whom I met on a hookup app, I propped my phone against a plate and showed the clip of my accident. We sat at a silver bar table wet with sanitizer. The pediatrician drank from a Weizen glass, and when beer foam caught on his moustache, he dabbed his face with a handkerchief that he drew from inside his peacoat. He watched the video solemnly, furrowed his brows and cooed. “Ethan,” he said, when the video ended. “You really hurt yourself.” I wrenched off my jumper and turned away to lay it over my chair. I regretted playing the video and was eager to lessen its gravity. He asked about Never Never’s premise, and I told him to imagine a fusion of The Real World and Survivor. “But I’m drunk,” I added. “I hate this. Take everything I’ve shared in the past thirty minutes and forget it.”
He invited me to his apartment, and I woke the next morning on his fold-out sofa, the AC mounted above the front doorway effusing humid air. My phone, a water bottle, and a pack of Alka-Seltzer were arranged on a Perspex table.
For an hour I stand at the circulation desk and edit a PowerPoint my supervisor has asked me to present to a class of Year Sevens. There’s a slide on the Dewey Decimal System, and alongside the subheadings for Art & Recreation I place an image of a paintbrush. Keyboards patter at a row of carrels where dim lamps glow upon girls’ bowed heads. They wear green blazers, knee-high socks, and shirts with the school insignia stitched to a corner of their breast pockets. I think of the girls who watched my accident and wonder if they’ve left.
My supervisor emerges from her office with a plastic tub in the crook of her arm. She unclips a matching fork from its lid, and the smell of microwaved fried rice spoils the antiseptic, church-like atmosphere. Jenny began working at the library six months after I was hired by Lydia—an elderly woman who suffered a stroke while printing posters for the student conference room. Lydia now receives palliative care at her stepson’s home in the Adelaide Hills. Last week I brought her flowers, and her stepson set them sideways on a marble-top lowboy in the entrance hall, then ushered me out and, with a catch in his throat, insisted he was uncomfortable exhibiting his mother in a state of such profound weakness.
Unlike the previous library director, Jenny is close to my age. In the past year we’ve attended each other’s birthday parties, enjoyed after-work drinks, and once saw a contemporary production of A Doll’s House wherein Jenny’s husband played a gender-swapped Nora Helmer. On Christmas Jenny gifted me Pride-themed designer perfume that came in a rainbow-coloured box to which she affixed a sequined card expressing her gratitude for our newfound friendship. I read the card and grimaced. I like Jenny, but not enough to reciprocate the force of her enthusiasm.
After snapping shut the lid on her tub of fried rice, Jenny asks about the pediatrician. I exit my unfinished PowerPoint and tell her that yesterday morning I received a phone call from Mischa while he shopped for bedsheets at the homewares store across from his hospital. He wanted to know if I preferred any fabric over another.
“That’s adorable,” Jenny says, raking her pin-straight hair. She tells me the best part of a new relationship is the mutual enthusiasm and attentiveness. Often those qualities fluctuate, but for her and Liam, she realizes now, there is still the excitement of unsolidified love. He’s the most attractive person she has ever been with, and therefore not the sort of man she thought that she would marry. She clamours for a stack of books in the return chute.
“He’s so great it’s unreal,” she says.
On Saturday Jenny hosts a dinner for our summer book club, and I arrive with Mischa—whom Jenny begged that I invite—at the windowed door of her beachfront townhouse. In my tote bag I carry a bottle of non-alcoholic wine and two copies of the essay collection we’re meant to discuss, the contents of which I relayed to Mischa on the tram from Rundle Mall.
“Perfect,” Jenny says, when I pass her the wine.
She directs us to the kitchen, where Liam chops a watermelon into uneven chunks and stacks them on a stoneware platter. Sunshine beams from their glass-panelled lounge and flares the surface of the fridge. The English teachers who founded the book club sit at an L-shaped island adorned with seashells and Glasshouse candles. They gossip about the newly appointed head of the humanities department, whom Cynthia observes wears wired earphones almost constantly, like a teenager. Her colleague Jasper giggles into his palm and says something imperceptible. I ask Jenny if she collected the seashells herself, and Liam sidles beside me to set down the watermelon.
“I did,” he says. “You like?”
I finger the back of a clam and hear Mischa clear his throat. He compliments Liam on the seashells, then pops a cube of watermelon into his mouth. “This is all very nice,” he says, a bead of pink liquid wetting his stubbled chin.
I look across the island at Jenny, who lifts a pane of cling film from a dish on the dinner table. After I leave Liam’s side to assist her, she strokes my shoulder and tells me that Mischa seems anxious. Her hair is fragrant with cooking oil, and a strand of it briefly enters my mouth. I noticed Mischa was anxious on the tram, when his knees jittered with such intensity that his copy of the essay collection slid from his lap. He has only met Jenny and Liam once before, at a garden party celebrating Jenny’s thirty-fifth birthday.
“He takes some time to warm up,” I explain. “He’s fine.”
We sit for a dinner of baked haddock, stuffed peppers, couscous flecked with pomegranate seeds. Jenny has composed a playlist of banjo-heavy country songs, which boom from a pair of standing speakers on either side of the room. She asks us to describe our favourite part of the essay collection, and when Mischa comments on a passage where the author recounts her craniotomy, I open his book to the appropriate page. His foot prods my ankle then, and I twitch at the surprise of cool rubber.
He and I retreat to the balcony with Jasper and his girlfriend Eve. The more enthusiastic members of our book club remain at the dining table, where our assigned text lies between empty plates and smudged glasses, bits of food dirtying the woven placemats that Jenny told us she bought during her and Liam’s honeymoon in Rwanda. Laughter blares from inside, and a coy-looking smile animates Mischa’s face. He tells me he’s relieved we escaped further discussion of the essay collection. I say the book was mediocre, anyways.
Eve sits up to pry a cigarette from Jasper and complains that the kind of discussion occurring over there—she juts her chin at the sliding door that separates us from the dining room—is not about its supposed subject but the ego of its participants. “They just want to make up opinions,” she says, her voice dwarfed by the sloshing beachfront. She twirls the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger. Then, leaving her deck chair to throw its butt from the balustrade, she tells us she last read a book seventeen years ago, when she took an erotic novel from her father’s bedside drawer and devoured it, furtively, on the evening of his funeral.
“Isn’t that depressing?” she says.
I lean forward to look at Jasper, unsure whether laughter or sympathy is the response Eve wants from us. I shuffle toward Mischa and rest my palm on his thigh. With my other hand I text him the hedgehog emoji, which is our mascot for social unease. The message lights his phone, and he chuckles when he sees it. I tell him I’m going to the bathroom and, as I stretch from my chair, he lightly grazes my earlobe and asks that I get back soon.
Liam opens the bathroom door the moment that I approach it. He smells like tea tree handwash, and under the hallway spotlights his face is gaunt and difficult to read.
“Ah,” he says.
“Hey.”
He walks backward, locks the door behind us, and sits on the closed toilet seat. I peer at the mirror to scrape off an orange stain on my shirt collar, and in the reflection I notice him gazing up at me, his puffy mouth darkened from the artificially coloured wine. When Jenny first introduced us, I thought Liam was attractive but in an uncanny, girlish way. His eyelashes touch his eyebrows, and the tip of his slight, upturned nose burns red from chronic hay fever. It surprised me that after we grew close the features I first found off-putting became the ones I most ardently fetishized. I try not to compliment him on his appearance, but once, while I drove him from Thebarton Theatre on a rainy afternoon, I glanced at his green-lit profile and blurted that our relationship would never have developed if he were any less physically attractive.
He reaches out to finger a belt loop that sits above my left hipbone, and in low voices we make small talk of the book club, the warm weather, how the sun only set an hour ago. After a pause he unhooks his finger and tells me he and Jenny are getting a divorce. He waves his hand back and forth as though fanning away a bad smell.
“It has nothing to do with this,” he says.
“Of course,” I say.
He coughs on his elbow, then springs from the toilet and kisses me. His palm lands on the back of my neck, and I’m so delighted by its warmth and largeness I forget the gesture is not an expression of lust. I tell him that I still need the bathroom, and after he leaves, I open one of two windows high above the mirror and tip my head so the crisp air blankets my face. The steady thud of country music reverberates through the walls. I let my fingers throb under a jet of hot water.
In bed Mischa asks if Liam was drunk. Though he had a glass of the wine we brought, later in the evening he came onto the balcony with a can of vodka, which he chugged while Jenny and I washed dishes. “You should have seen him,” Mischa says. “He kept laughing and touching Eve’s arm.”
“That’s sad,” I say.
“It is,” he says. “Sorry. Did that come off insensitive?”
“No.” I place my hand on his blanketed lap. “It’s just—he was sober for a very long time.”
Mischa kneads the skin between his eyebrows, then pulls the bedcover over his stomach and scrolls through his Facebook feed. I see a post announcing a charity event, a ten-year-old girl’s birthday party, and an infographic with animated brown people who have no eyes or hair. From the open door of his ensuite bathroom wafts the smell of shower steam. I reach for his heat-pink neck, and he raises both shoulders as though expecting to be tickled.
I told Mischa I was involved with Liam the morning that I drove to the Adelaide Hills. It was Mischa who suggested I visit my former boss, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone. Waiting for coffee at a bistro overlooking a lakeside park where a bride and groom were having their photos taken, I called Mischa and explained that I didn’t get beyond the stepson’s entrance hall, to which Mischa stammered, loudly exhaled, and told me to wait a second.
I watched the bride yank a leaf from a root climber and press it into her partner’s forehead. They were keeled over, laughing, when Mischa asked if I was seeing someone else. I told him the truth in more detail than I think he anticipated, and Mischa said that he couldn’t understand why I would ever pursue an affair with someone I felt lukewarm about. In the placatory voice I had heard him adopt while consulting his child patients, he said that I didn’t seem to consider other people’s feelings.
“Liam’s, Jenny’s, mine, even Lydia’s.”
A patch of sunlight broke through the trees, and I leant forward to avoid its heat. When I looked up, I saw the bride and groom had disappeared.
“I barely knew Lydia,” I told him. “And she’s basically dead anyways.”
“I don’t like your reflexive meanness thing.”
“Sorry. I’m trying to be honest.”
“When we met, I thought you were really sweet.”
“People think that because I’m self-deprecating,” I said, scratching away the yellow moss that dotted the edge of my table. “As if hating myself would somehow preclude me from hating everyone else.”
A waiter brought my coffee in a shallow mug that rattled in its saucer as he set it down. The spilled coffee pooled around a pair of sugar cubes. I raised the volume on my phone and, in the background, heard the rustle of Mischa’s over-starched lab coat, an announcement booming from the PA system, and the soft burble of the children’s channel playing on the TV above his desk. I said that I would stop seeing Liam.
On Monday I teach a class of Year Sevens the basics of library usage. I considered asking Jenny to conduct the lesson on my behalf, but yesterday evening she texted to tell me she had caught the flu and wouldn’t return to work until Thursday.
The Year Sevens fill a dank computer room where they sit semi-obscured by Mac desktops, the crests of their ribboned ponytails backlit and unkempt. I stand before the smartboard and await a group of latecomers who throw off their gym bags, collapse into their seats, and pass around a plastic bottle of water, which they glug, heaving from their PE lesson. A girl in the back row elects to turn out the lights. She hasn’t changed out of her sports uniform, and a yellowish grass stain covers her shirt. “Now we can see the PowerPoint better,” she explains, returning to her swivel chair.
Working through the presentation I pause intermittently to lower the temperature on the AC unit. When I reach the last slide, the girl in her sports uniform quickly lifts and drops her arm. “Crap,” she says, ducking behind her desktop. “I thought I had a question, but actually I don’t.”
The room bubbles with laughter, and the students’ homegroup teacher smacks her palm on a filing cabinet. She wears a stack of wooden bangles that fall with a clunk to her elbow. Pushing them onto her wrist, she asks that I re-explain the library’s online database. I show an earlier slide in the PowerPoint, and the girl in her sports uniform affects a hoarse, bronchial cough—a low-pitched hacking that is disruptive, but not so obvious in its disruptiveness that the teacher or I have good reason to stop her. At the end of the lesson, I walk past the back row to switch on the lights and realize she is the student who watched the YouTube video of my accident last week.
While the class floods toward the exit, the teacher calls for a Bailey Gramp to stay behind. We gather before the smartboard, where the Thanks for Listening slide of the PowerPoint spreads across the teacher’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Bailey says. She pulls one strap of her gym bag onto the end of her shoulder. As she looks at the ground I notice her scalp is pink and almost radiant from sunburn. The teacher tells Bailey that her behaviour is disrespectful, and Bailey’s mouth contorts into a grimace. I think this is a genuine expression of remorse, then Bailey tilts her head, and I realize it’s only a parody of it. Her mock contrition reminds me of the hammed concern I elicited often as a teenager, and briefly I see myself from Bailey’s position, as an adult less powerful than he imagines himself to be.
I leave the library earlier than normal and, on the walk to my parking space, I observe Bailey and three other girls gathered at a drinking fountain outside the school gymnasium. A pop song blasts from a portable speaker on a bench where they’ve piled their sunhats. They take handfuls of water and douse each other’s heads, blissful and relieved from the heat.
I think of Bailey and her friends while I wait in the armchair outside Mischa’s office. I’ve brought him a sandwich from a deli in the strip mall across from his hospital. It warms my lap, and on the brown paper wrapping are splotches of grease and dried tomato sauce. I squash the sandwich under my forearm as I reach into my laptop bag and extract a set of earphones. I open the YouTube clip of my accident and skip to the instant I scorch my feet, which I recognize now is difficult to properly witness, because one of my castmates extinguishes the fire with a heap of damp clothes, and the footage is whitewashed with smoke. In the few seconds during which I emerge from the upheaval, I’m shown on a stretcher, squealing girlishly into my fist.
The night after I told Mischa about Never Never, he saw my feet were scarred, and I explained that it was my reaction to the injury, not the injury itself, that I more often agonized over.
Mischa widens his door and smiles. “Ethan,” he says.
I feel him examining me as I drop to the sofa opposite his desk, above which plays a children’s show wherein fables are enacted through intricate dioramas that seem to be made from recycled textiles. A felt rabbit bobs across a hillside, and I track the tortoise shuffling slowly on a trail behind it. When I look again at Mischa, he is crushing a sheet of brown paper, which he then tosses into his wastebasket.
“Thank you for this,” he says, licking a scrim of grease off his thumb.
I hear myself complain about the weather, and Mischa remembers that only a couple of months ago, in the dining tent at Jenny’s thirty-fifth, the air was so cold we left our seats to stand under a patio heater near the exit. Mischa’s peacoat was spread across both our backs, and I asked how long the arrangement would last before one of us became uncomfortable.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Edmario Lesi (he/him) is a PhD student of creative writing at The Australian National University.