I'm falling from a great height, feet first, I see the ground below and fall through it too as if it were differently coloured air. Was the foreground moving or was I? I open my arms and glide up on wings.
. Multiple screens scroll multiple scenes. A white bird emerging from molten yellow, an enormous breast tawny in a half-light, a mushrooming nuclear cloud. Incandescent light filaments kinked and shimmering. Anonymous naked women offering themselves in endless variation.
"Tony, Tony?"
Born into day. I land in a film of skin, caught, bones slide into place.
"Tony?" Nick stands in the doorway. "Have you got your costume yet?"
I put my feet on the floor, at night they're webbed and in dreams I fly.
"No."
"It's five o'clock. Party Hire shuts soon."
Silence.
"Life goes on Tony."
"I know."
"See you tonight then."
I pad across creaking floorboards to the shower.
****
"I want something that flies… by night," I say to the woman at Party Hire. She crinkles her nose and frowns, freckles pool.
"A vampire?"
"No."
"Batman?" she asks. "I've only got one left." She shuffles through musty racks and pulls out a limp grey bodysuit. "The rubber suit's copyrighted, we can only offer the one from the old TV show."
I can't help sighing.
****
The suit is too big, it bags against my body. I strap on my motorcycle boots but balk at the cowl and leave it on my bed. I wrap the cape tightly about me and trudge down the footpath.
"Life goes on," Nick had said.
Houses and cars loom in the night like ornaments in a material dream. Television sets glow in dingy rooms. A helicopter approaches and hovers overhead, it circles lower to the ground then moves away ugly and unwieldy, a galleon in a space where birds should be.
"Life goes on," I say out loud. My feet moving forward one by one, but slowly, with misgiving. My heart rattles in my chest like a loose bone.
The urn with her ashes, I picture them floating up in the air. Is her journey interstellar? Or suburban, descending insignificant as any other dust motes.
My father's face in his coffin. I wanted to look closely at his hairline, did small tacks hold that mask in place? The lips hard together wooden with disappointment. There was no face for my sister. Her body a burst of entrails in the wreckage of her car, this illusion that metal has strength, that it is a protective pod. Bizarre, her two legs perfect below the knees, and so my feet continue to the party because of a nebulous connection. Her message, take your legs and walk.
The path to the house is broken concrete, weeds seep inky black from the gaps. I go up the steps and into the lounge. The curtains are made of saris glittering with sequins a tracery of gold threads unfurling. I want to cry. A mermaid, five or six years old, sits on the sofa watching television. She winds her long hair around her forefinger.
"They're out the back," she says without looking at me.
"Can you walk in that tail?" I ask.
She giggles. "Like a penguin."
The hallway is lined with tapa cloth. I see myself approaching a mirror at the end, the image is blurred and framed in lime green fake fur. I see the silver backing has deteriorated into a mosaic of lines. A toilet flushes and a door opens, light floods the hall.
"Bathroom's free," Marie Antoinette says. She walks past brightly, her ringlets don't move.
I follow her out through the kitchen into an overgrown garden. The helicopter is overhead again, its searchlight slips through the blackness. A tall bonfire burns at the bottom of the garden, black dots dance in its orange flames.
Is it right to cremate bodies? Shouldn't we smell them decomposing, know maggots are blossoming out of their flesh?
"I need love," I think. Longing, such longing for them, for who I used to be before they died.
The fire crackles and shadows move about quick and flighty. Abraham Lincoln chats with Xena and Marilyn Monroe. The devil rests against his trident, around his head is a crown of horns.
A shaggy gorilla waves to me. Nick. I go to him and he takes off his primate's head, shakes out his blonde hair.
"You missed the fireworks," he says. "In fact, you're very late." He squeezes my shoulder awkwardly.
I feel grateful and smile at the gorilla face squashed in the crook of his arm. "I walked."
"All the way from home? Dressed like that?"
"Yes," I laugh.
"Nick," a voice calls from the kitchen.
"Back in a second Tony."
I move around the bonfire and see a Greek goddess. Pale skin, white drapery dappled mango by the flames. Smaller than she should be, shorter. She has bare feet. Her head is tilted to one side, her neck. I follow her gaze and see white geraniums growing out of a broken teapot.
"Flowers by fire light," she says and straightens.
"There's a cactus that flowers only at night," I say. I notice her skin is white, but unpowdered. Naturally white, and that it holds the light in a way the fabric she wears does not.
"Are you Batman?" she asks.
"Yes, and you?"
"Whatever I could make of a sheet."
Greek goddess, I want to say.
"Greek goddess, if it didn't sound so grand. If I wasn't five foot two instead of six foot two. A gargoyle, perhaps," she smiles to herself.
The mermaid waddles up to her, her tail iridescent green and purple. "Mum, Uncle Damon's leaving," she says, and together they skirt the bonfire and go up through the garden.
I follow at a distance. I go into the shadows beside the house and move toward the front. I stop at the end and watch her hug the devil. He gets into a car, takes off his horns and reverses out the driveway. They wave. The mermaid takes small steps back to the house. The mother leans on the fence and looks up at the sky, she's humming.
Embarrassed, I step back. Then I'm walking toward her. I lean on the fence too. She smiles at me briefly. I become aware of the soft summer air, wisps of clouds, cicadas sound in my ears and I close my eyes.
She touches my eyelids, I catch her falling hand and hold it to my cheek. The warmth of it. Just this moment, this warmth. She pulls my hand to her mouth and kisses it. A double sensation of falling and filling.
"Goodnight," she says and returns to the house. The television is switched off, she crosses the hallway holding the mermaid's hand and they enter another room. Moths dart madly around the porch light.
I turn to the sky. The bone in my chest is now suspended in small waves of possibility. A hedgehog scuttles out of the shrubs, it clicks across the road and I staccato-step behind it.
A cat peels onto the footpath and jogs. I jog to the shops where an old car graunches its gears and travels by in second. A low breeze sweeps the pavement unsettling dust and scraps of paper. I hold the edges of the cape then lift my arms so it can fill with air.
At home again I move in darkness to my room and kneel beside the bed. I pull out my sister's urn and carry it carefully to the car.
It's three in the morning, the streets are empty as I drive to Mt Eden. I leave the car at the bottom and walk as if in a procession, soberly, to the top, to the most distant streetlight. I shake the urn and ashes swarm in a halo around the light, a galaxy. They hang in the air for a slow moment then sink in loose togetherness into the black depths of the crater. I cry. The sky begins to drizzle. A green smell rises.