Ethereal Drift

I don’t know whether it was an initiation. There was no ceremonial frame, no moment in which an experience clearly began or ended. And yet there was this sense that something passed through me. Not knowledge. Nothing that could be possessed. I associated it with permeability. The image of a door that no longer quite closes.

In the Outback, my awe of creation took on its own colors. At the same time, I struggled with the bizarre feeling of responding inappropriately to what appeared before me. Inappropriately in the sense of being possessive, appropriating. As if I could have claimed even the smallest thing in the desert. Everything in me was Europeanly ordered. Thinking in lines, concepts as tools, fully calibrated toward analysis. The Australian bush felt like a mentor who did not argue with me but simply stood beside me and said: you cannot grasp it, but you can leave it be.

I know that much of what I felt hovered dangerously close to kitsch. My gaze did not lose its imprecision even in guided, supervised encounters with archaically dimensioned forms of existence. Like all tourists, I had to be careful not to take what did not belong to me. I remained a guest. And yet I felt touched by something older than language, older than my doubts, older than my ideas of how knowledge works. Perhaps it was the colors of the desert that told me this—nuances between sand, dust, heat, and shadow. Colors that do not need to prove anything. They reminded me of something I had never seen before, yet somehow recognized. And perhaps it is not about understanding it at all. Perhaps it is enough that it changed me.

*

We left Alice Springs early in the morning. A haze lay over the landscape, barely more than a fleeting veil, a final breath of the night. I was driving. We spoke little. Was it melancholy? Already I was constructing a version in which all of this lay in the past. I was remembering the Outback while still living it. The ribbon of asphalt along the Stuart Highway stretched on. Hours without variation in the landscape. Only heat and red dust settling everywhere. Spinifex, termite mounds, a kangaroo carcass. A bleached cattle skull.

We reached the desert outpost of Tennant Creek. The sun was low, the sky shifting from flaming orange to hallucinogenic violet. Night fell. Even in the dark, the day’s heat shimmered above the road surface.

I registered nothing but cinematic effects. Every scene felt familiar from films—so unreal, almost ghostly, was the place. The town amounted to a cluster of buildings with rusted corrugated-iron roofs, closed gas stations, shuttered shops.

The motel parking lot was empty except for a few pickups that looked as though they hadn’t moved in years. The bed was a narrow cot. On the screen of the dead television a note was taped: Enjoy the stars, not the screen. The shower was not inviting enough for an erotic interlude. Disappointingly little water came from the rusted showerhead. I missed the comforting feeling of being freshly washed. As I was about to get dressed, you abandoned your feigned indifference. A glance was enough. The room became the backdrop for a moment of total presence. Our desire broke open. No staging, no foreplay. Your hands on my ass, my breath at your neck—our bodies found each other without detour. The bed squeaked in protest, as if the springs were objecting, but they held. Our currents flowed into one another. We merged at the apex of our desire and thanked each other with a daisy bouquet of belated tenderness. I was amused by the contrast with the fingernail marks on your back.

For dinner, we simply crossed the street to a pub opposite the motel. From the outside, it looked like a workshop from the early twentieth century. A sign read: Cold Beer – Hot Meals – Locals Only (But You’re Alright). Behind the bar stood a woman with short gray hair who greeted us with a washed-out nod. It could have meant anything. Perhaps it was even friendly. No jukebox, no television, no Wi‑Fi. Men sat at the tables in shorts and boots—truckers, miners, farmers. Some contented themselves with canned beer, despite the foaming tap. We joined in, ordered a Carlton Draught from the tap and steak with fries without asking for a menu. There was only what was written on the board above the counter anyway. No frills. The meat bled, the fries were crisp, the jumbo bottle of ketchup carried no label.

Here, even Carlton Draught was drunk from cans, like Victoria Bitter and XXXX Gold—served in little foam sleeves, stubby holders.

A Blue Heeler lay bored beneath the pool table.

The next morning we set off early. Nothing held us in this managed wasteland. We turned onto the Barkly Highway, heading east now. The road was straight as if drawn with a ruler. The monumental monotony seemed to cry out to weigh on someone’s soul.