The nurse returned. She took my blood pressure and weighed me and listened to my breathing. Then I sat on the chair in the small room where she’d left me. I watched my bare legs swinging. They did not touch the ground. I had no underpants on but I clutched the spare pair in my hand. They had told me to bring a spare pair. It occurred to me that I had never worn a medical gown before, and I wondered what it would feel like, this thing that I was about to do. I wondered if it would hurt.
My heartbeat made green shapes on the monitor. Rising and falling. A beeping. The clamp on my finger. Three figures moving above me. Somebody placed my feet in metal stirrups. Legs spread. The swell of anesthetic before the black.
Count backwards from five, honey.
Five, four, th—
I was gone.
And was snatched through time into pain. Alone and wordless and clutching at the orange juice offered by a nurse, and searching for some sort of comfort in the fluorescent lighting and antiseptic of the room in which I’d woken. They lifted me into a seated position and told me to keep my blood sugar up. I set my eyes on my lap, but I didn’t see myself or my body, only the pale green atrocity of the hospital gown.
I became aware of a sound that I discovered was being issued from me.
A howl.
Full of a grief I could not describe or examine, could not put words to, or name, I cried. Behind the curtain. Alone. For the first time. For my. For the thing I had lost.
FLOOD
The pressure got low. In the north of the continent the clouds gathered, spun, and began to take form. The rain came down and swept over the tropics, tearing up everything in its path. Lounge furniture in trees, downed power lines, crocodiles on the median strip. Borroloola first, then Kowanyama, a pirouette over the Gulf of Carpentaria, and then a monsoonal flow that sent it tearing down along the Pacific coast towards the cities. The storm rumbled through the north—dark, wild shapes that came in and out of focus on the horizon like a lover met once in a dream. To be on the safe side, the Queensland Premier ordered the preemptive release of water from the Wivenhoe Dam.
But it didn’t matter much when the waters got wild. The rivers peaked. The levees breached. Water spilled over the banks of the Burnett and the Logan and the Mary, all the suicidal region’s veins now opened. Bundaberg evacuated, Kogan and Tara cut off. Landslides on the Burnett Highway. A state of emergency stretching all the way down to Brisbane and heading south. Helicopters flew over the roofs, and gum trees peeked out from the roiling, snake-infested waters. They plucked the lucky few from the rooftops. By the time the floods reached Brisbane the Premier warned the state that the city’s water treatment plant would need to be shut down. He advised his citizens to conserve their liquids. It was rumored that some parts of the city would run out of drinking water within three days. As the flood swept south across the state line and into New South Wales all the records were broken. A thousand-year flood, again, when there had been a thousand-year flood only three years earlier. How high could the waters possibly rise? How heavy the rain?
Some hideous auspice, this, or proof of God’s displeasure, or else just simply bad luck. The Prime Minister conceded that it was indeed “a tough period.”
And so the waters crept. The ocean bled into the land. Salt water seeped into the crops. Rivers not rivers. Homes not homes.
Two bodies recovered from the waters near Burnett Heads were found bloated and rotting and were described as difficult to identify. A three-year-old boy was hit by a falling tree at Gordon Park and died. Elsewhere, a man drowned when he was swept away by floodwaters in the Oxley Creek. The Oxley Creek, named in honor of my ancestor, who stoked the fever of belief in like-minded men, the belief that out there in the continent there was water, and that the water would save us all.
I had by then stopped seeing many people outside the hours of work. Maeve and Clemmie were my closest friends, but I kept them at arm’s length. That summer, every source of comfort felt potentially threatening. When I picked up my phone and typed out messages to Lachlan it was with all the desperation of reaching out for a drug you thought you’d once renounced.
But I was not lonely for company. I spent time with plenty of strangers.
I had discovered, during the summer, that sex came quite easily. There was a friend of Maeve’s boyfriend who still lived at home and snuck me in past his sleeping parents’ bedroom door. There was a man whose name might have been Jonathan who I met at Kelly’s at three in the morning. There was a man with a slicked-back pompadour who lived in Enmore. I slept with him every week for a month, and then when I got bored I slept with his best friend. There was a guy from Maroubra grinding his teeth on MDMA. There was a man who followed me through the beer court and down the long bathroom corridor at the Marly. There was a filmmaker from Melbourne who texted when he was in town. There was somebody I met at a party in Leichhardt whose name is lost to me forever. He broke into a car and went down on me in the back seat.
It was possible, I had come to realize, to be touched every night of the week by a different man if I wanted to be. As long as I didn’t say much and I looked OK, there was always somebody that would have me. And I wanted to be had. By many. It didn’t matter who. Take your shirt off, babe, and Good girl, and Let me see you touch it, and Close your eyes. They all merged together, and I didn’t close my eyes, didn’t want to, even when it stung.
When I thought of the men I saw them assembled as statues in a long gallery. I was fucking my way towards something serious in that silent, marbled place. I was accumulating bodies.
Most often, these were the sorts of men who, if I had been interested in avoiding men it was clear it was best to avoid, I would not have gone near. They had a kind of eroded beauty to them. Rough. Older. Hair growing on their shoulders and chests and backs. Acid had eaten into the bronze of their features. They had scars, raised veins, and faded tattoos. But none of that mattered, and I wasn’t afraid to approach them.
I wanted to be undone. I wasn’t interested in protecting myself. Besides, none of them affected me for longer than it took for the hangovers to fade. And so it didn’t matter what I did with them during the nights I went to find them, and it didn’t matter what I let them do to me.
In February, one of these men, Mark, pressed me up against the wrought-iron railings outside a party in Centennial Park held for an obese white rapper from New York who was then touring the country. I had been invited to the party because Maeve’s boyfriend thought they needed more women. Across the road from the house, against the viridescent darkness of the park, Mark had kneaded my breasts while the railings dug into my spine. This is unreal, he said, again and again until unreal ceased to have any meaning. As though he had not touched breasts in some time.
Mark had brown hair flecked with gray. He was a full decade older than I was, and about to move to the Northern Territory to work as a social worker on an indigenous settlement. The night in Centennial Park would be his last weekend in the city, and so I agreed to see him in Coogee the following evening.
I met him beneath the pines along the waterfront. The air rushed up from the beach, and out on the water the surfers bobbed gently on the waves, clocking the breakers. Seaweed was tangled along the sand.