Dust

Cafe Locked Out: For Rachel Douglas

One of the most effective tactics in a war is to injure soldiers, not kill them. It takes out 2 other soldiers dragging them to safety… the industry built around disabilities is rendering the western world broke financially and physically drained…make no mistake we have had an attack every bit as bad as Hiroshima but hardly anyone has noticed.

~Jason Cornick

Dust

"Amidst the chaos, there was order, but amidst the order there was engineered chaos, for the mess whispered of opportunity. What if there was treasure here, something of great value, hidden under the clutter, something that your life sorely needed which every other peruser had failed to find? There were piles of saucepans, a tangle of fishing rods, and communities of mass-produced ceramic figurines, who’d once adorned a mantle or a glass cabinet, watching their aging owner watch their immense widescreen TV, like a thoroughly content, albeit morbidly obese, female version of Winston Smith. Until one day the gods retrieved them—maybe with a little Big Pharma help—until now, under a thickening layer of dust, these figurines silently waited for one of the shoppers, who occasionally turned them over to check their base for a stamp of authenticity, of which they had none, to save them.

And this vast labyrinth didn’t include the studio he hadn’t opened as yet.

The owner stood before us with the sway of an old drunk, but without the sweet smell of grog. He’d built this place through passion and hard work, and lots of lifting and piling and other means of sorting that he kept catalogued in his head. We’d bought an old, but well-built, camping stove.

'There are two hoses in there,' he said. 'It gives you the option of using a small glass bottle or a large one.' He didn’t need to open it to check. He just knew. Thirty-eight bucks.

For three years, his Vietnamese wife, half his size, had had to do the lion’s share of the manual work, for the jabs had left him paralysed with an ailment he’d never heard of before: Guillain-Barré syndrome. It was so rare that when he was in hospital, a senior doctor had used him to test trainee doctors.

'What’s wrong with him?' was the test. So one by one they checked his vitals, had him wiggle his toes, and asked him questions. None of them got it right.

He spent six weeks in hospital and another few months in rehab before managing to make it back here, where he laughed as he recalled using a shopping trolley to aid him down his town’s main street, for he was too embarrassed to use what the physiotherapists had recommended: a walking frame. He was a shell of his former self. You could feel it in his energy. It was as though his soul had suffered from a quake, and years later was still vibrating, trying to find an equilibrium that he had clearly accepted would probably never happen.

It got him down now. Out of the five stages of grief, he’d reached depression.

'And I didn’t want it,' he said. 'But if I didn’t take it, they wouldn’t let me open the store.' And this was more than a store; this was his dream. Single-handedly, before marrying his new bride, he had physicalised his dream and brought pleasure to many. This was what the State had threatened him with, before the Prime Minister, ScoMo, would later state, 'No one was forced. It was a choice.'

'And I can’t see,' he said, with that same baffled smile which has become a cultural norm. 'At night, I can’t see.'

Down the street, in a café, I met up with four women. One of them I had interviewed before, but I felt I had rushed the online interview, which I thought, since I was here, we could dig deeper into. I wanted to do this because the story was still haunting me.

The story was about her middle-aged daughter, a woman who had not only willingly complied but had actively made sure her family did too. Trouble was, her daughter’s second jab had left her crippled by tinnitus.

Tinnitus is a common affliction that annoys many with its endless ringing in the sufferer’s ear. But it was different with her daughter. Her ringing was loud; it was deafening, and incurable. Torturous. The doctors had been unable to help, and so finally, out of exhaustion and sheer desperation, she ended up booking herself into a mental home, where she was hoping to see a psychiatrist to help her recover from her complete nervous breakdown. But the shrinks were in such high demand there would be an eighteen-month wait.

A distance too long for her to traverse, so she chose to voluntarily leave us instead. She did so alone, and apart from the interview, which her mother had recorded with me, she had now all but vanished from the public discourse, like something spilt onto a kitchen bench can be wiped away with the dishcloth of Australian history.

As usual, many of the shop windows were still adorned with the fading stickers of the pandemic, shop owners displaying to the Government, who was no longer looking, that they were good people.

But this woman in the café, her mother, who told me she took it so she could go out and do things, did not want to talk anymore. Her daughter’s tale had been wiped clean; no point to digging her pain out of Covid’s trash.

And while all this was going on, so many were watching the latest news on Trump, as though that news was the only news that mattered.

'They’re getting away with it,' I told her mother.

She smiled back, with no smile in her eyes, which clearly meant, 'I know.'

We could have stayed, hung around the town for a day or two, to see if anyone else would talk, but the road was calling, and these stories were everywhere, like those figurines waiting under the dust on his shelves, hoping to find an ear, before the wake of his illness would force him to close the store."

~Michael Gray Griffith

4.17 am

Some beach South of Sydney.

26/02/25

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