Deliberate Turbulence: A Red Line Has Been Crossed
"Walk the land so it will remember you." Indigenous saying.
"We grant you the gift of eternal life." Spiritual convocation.
"He's not as powerful as we thought he'd be," they said, and he just shrugged. Sometimes he didn't understand the process any more than anyone else did.
Sometimes it all made perfect sense.
There was turbulence beyond the horizon, not invisible, just gathering. "We are here because you are here. I am here and you are where you are."
There were drifts from the local police station: "Minor property damage". But that night was quiet in Oak Flats, just as quiet, if not censorious, as everywhere these days, bunkered down, people struggling to make ends meet. Another circus of an election.
The problem was: Australians had lost all faith in each other, and the decency of each other. In such circumstances, when the entire edifice of state was rotten, people turned if not inward then towards their closest circles, family, old friends.
Vittorio who had graced the Piccolo Bar, well it was a café in the day, where drag queens and every hero of the Kings Cross demimonde would gather late at night, where tragedies and loves were born and scandals erupted out the door of the tiny café, while others smoked joints on the low wall opposite.
Where he had celebrated his 16th birthday in the company of a now long dead lover who had later been arrested for his fascination with under age boys, such as himself.
It was a place to be seen and born and loved, as crazy as they were, for their bohemian nature and their destined, for their fortuned fabled lives to take over, for characters who could never survive in Sydney's unforgiving suburbs could bloom.
The day before he had sat on a Sydney train opposite a tranny, well, what was the right word these days, as she groomed herself in the mirror, laughed to herself and put on a wig, her entire life consumed by identity and transition.
Everything had changed.
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