Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 37
Pernod. I read somewhere that when
someone is attracted to another, their pupils
dilate. I put on my dark glasses. Indeed,
the light was blinding in the café, where
skylights had recently been installed.
I was saying to her, to this foreign
woman, that hypothermia, like reading,
is so important in shutting out the world,
like hibernation, sleeping in the frozen
happiness of books. She confided to me that
her husband practised something opposite.
As the town librarian, she said (I heard it as
libertarian, but that was a matter of hearing,
a choice for the foreigner, tuning in and out
of differing registers), as town librarian, she
was saying, he busied himself with getting
rid of books. Digitising and disposal were
his job descriptions. He did not read. I could
see the reason for his not reading and for
the holocaustic disposal of books. It was his
reason for experiencing external realities
rather than involving the imagination in
them, and by isolating himself, he was
sacrificing himself to voluntary blindness
and the immolation of ideas.
I addressed these thoughts To The
Householder. Of course, she had invited
them. After all, I am the postman. But they
would remain unread since I wrote in a
microscopic hand on the inside of envelopes
which I manufactured myself, having done
a course in origami – no cutting or pasting,
just folding – a dove, a crane, a flower –
and then the testing of unfolding without
tearing, when she would toy with discovery
and misreading. But this never occurred.
I would find these folded micro-doveletters thrown intact into the bin, without
deconstruction or de-origami, without the
butterfly-dust of love disseminated over her
eyes, my miniature script remaining heavily
useless and sticky with affect.
A week after his last visit from the police,
her house was for sale. The shutters were
closed; there were no children in the yard;
no dogs barked at his approach. The
letterbox was filled with real-estate
leaflets and junk mail. He imagined there
was something left for him but there was
nothing. He did not find out for quite a
while that after losing his job, the librarian
drove to the lookout that final time, passing
his own house on the way, traversing a route
he knew well. Perhaps he threw my paper
flowers into the pond to expand them, but I
do not think so. People simply do not trust
books anymore and look at the misery of
those writers who stir up grief like I do,
delivering disorder on my linear rounds.
LUMEN
Quin had heard the shot. He told himself
it was a gunshot/shotgun; a backfire from
which he was lucky enough to escape.
Professor Brian Castro is considered one of
Australia’s most important authors, having
won multiple significant awards for his novels,
verse novels, poetry and non-fiction. He is a
former Chair of Creative Writing, and also a
former director of the University’s J.M. Coetzee
Centre for Creative Practice.
Chinese Postman was published in October
2024 by Giramondo Publishing.We have five
signed copies of this novel to be won by readers
– details on page 29.
Photo by Isaac Freeman, Lumen photographic
editor, at the author’s Adelaide Hills home.
