Las Vegas for Vegans by A. S. Patric Read Free Book Online Page B

with that long, loving friendship. But we don’t know each other. We have never met.
    I close my car door and walk across the bitumen to get my ticket. I return to my car and place my ticket on the dashboard. There’s another spatter of raindrops and soon it will come down in a torrent of ice-cold Melbourne rain. When I pass the car window beside me, I don’t look over at her again, sitting within the warmth of the interior.

THE PROFESSIONAL MOURNERS
    It’s been a long time since Leni knew who she was. Since she could look around herself and understand where she was, and what world this was. Because no-one ever knows what a finely crafted box of precision mirrors the brain is until it’s dropped. Until your hear the rattle in every thought, you will never know how many reflections there are in just that one name—Leni.
    But she was born Magdalena Goode. No middle name. Which was a strange choice by her parents, wasn’t it? She felt like there was something in error about her through primary school. She had no secret name. One to be embarrassed about. Or one that had a story to it. No crack to fall between—the family name and the school name. It was just Magdalena Goode, until everyone forgot it was Magdalena Goode and it just became Leni. Leni, and her secret name became the whole thing. Somehow hidden within plain sight.
    A man comes and goes. Adjusts her blankets when they don’t need adjusting. Her hair over the pillow. His palm on her forehead. She knew his name but it’s gone now. Now she knows him by his shadow. His smell and the sound of his breathing. It’s the space his body takes up in the air above her bed. When it comes and goes.
    They spend hours together and neither can bridge the gap of a few millimetres. Words get lost in the fibre of flesh and the clutter of bones, or just get trapped in those pink murmurs of separation. Mouths empty of everything but noise. But he goes on sharpening his tongue and looking for a way to cut through to her buried heart … which never was a thing hidden in her head like it is in him.
    Leaving the hospital room and returning, as though he was escaping and being recaptured in this cage where she is the bait. This man who lifts her hands to his whispering lips, as if he could pray with her palms but not his own.
    Her forgetting is almost complete now. But forgetting isn’t the same as never happened. Because everything that has happened, keeps on happening somewhere in the grey whorls of her brain. Or is it happening somewhere else, and her brain is like the stuff within the box of a radio? A thing of mirrors, barely understood circuitry and unexamined microchips and unimagined star technology. Seeming like she is just stuff in the box because the frequency is all she can ever hear. The one radio announcer. Speaking into the room from eyes open to eyes closed. Getting hoarse now. Getting down to whispers against the microphone, and then just breath. Breathing. Letting in the voice of the world with death.
    A phone is ringing outside in the nurse’s station. Tugging on the tendons between her muscles, and then settling her bones down into their sockets. Three times the tug and settle. There’s a perfection of tone in those three sounds. The delicate balance of emergency and a simple soft request for connection. The sound of two voices about to meet and merge on barely breathed puffs of air. She wishes she could hear them talk, about whatever they have to talk about, and in letting it go, finally finishes with wishes.
    Forgetting everything, but all of it still there, somewhere in the stuff-filled box. Almost done even with that.
    There’s an image of Egyptian professional mourners that she can see like it was cast out from the flickering projector of her fluttering eyelids against the hospital walls. Those women from the tomb of Pharaoh Ramose becoming her mourners, shedding their paid-for tears, dancing around her