It was 3.00 a.m. when I woke, then drifted off to miss the kookaburra chorus. I woke again before the dawn. How cold it was at that time, with the covers shed, in the tropical winter, with the space beside me vacant as she wandered in search of the morning star. It was from the east that I imagined she came, when I looked for her return. I was hurrying by then. I forgot to take my second coffee in its flask. I noticed its absence as I backed down the drive and out the gate, which opened, not so much enabling judgement, of the quick and of the dead, as to facilitate my exit. For lack of caffeine, I was slower off the mark. The market was so slow in this hiatus between years that my superannuation firm did not update the value of the units of the high growth fund between the first and second of the year, to which it reassigned my balance., In these last days of the western empire, balance was no longer something of which I could claim knowledge through lived experience. I rode out, troubled by intuition nagging at me as though, ill defined, there was one thing of which I could be sure: the reckoning would come tomorrow. 

*

I failed to write last night about the place I found at the end of the road, the spot by the river, where the stars were bright, away from streetlights, where it could be possible to land a flathead, given a rod to cast, bait, time, patience and a fish willing to bite. The confidence I felt in this experience contrasted with my memory of a lagoon in the last days of the dry, when the panicked fish skimmed and jumped out of water scarcely deep enough to cover their bodies, exposed to predatory birds and the cruelty of the Capricorn sun. The rains came again and with them, the regeneration of the estuary, across which the mangroves sheltered the fingerlings in the breeding grounds. Now as I lie, I imagine myself fit and able to travel to lay myself down on those banks, where my rod and its cast might comfort me.

*

I woke with a headache and a sense of having somehow slept after balancing the distribution of funds derived from a fortnightly salary across three mortgages and various credit obligations. At least there was a pain aux raison to pop into the microwave. Throughout the day the headache waned, then waxed ascendant once again. I comforted a younger member of my staff abused by an arrogant doctor. By chance, I spotted my childhood friend, the Professor, walking determinedly towards the light, down a not-so-narrow corridor. He stopped when I called out to him. I learned that he had recently returned from America, unwell. A bout of pneumonia followed what turned out to be a nasty dose of Covid. I was glad that he had not passed over. I promised, when my grief was over, to invite him home for dinner. I have been told that, in the midst of a near death experience involving a dark tunnel, it’s best to strive to reach the light. After work, I drove to the pool. Following the first kilometre of my swim, the light failed and the dark came over.

* 

The ache this morning seemed more than ordinary muscular fatigue, something viral, the kind you might have even after the ‘flu’ vaccine. The head congestion had persisted longer than expected for a cold, enough to make me want to stay in bed, which I managed, just in time to eat another pain aux raison before work. On the highway, it was necessary to pass a truck on the outside of a bend. The potential for my car to leave the road and flip was experienced as apprehension in my chest, familiar since the survival of an accident, recurrent with the passage of forty years, which my body remembered. By mid-morning, after patient consultations, I experienced hunger. My body’s message: that a pain au raison alone may not be sufficient. Last night I found a mound of earth in a corner of our garden, one that may have been a turkey’s nest. I recently learned that, when eggs are laid, the temperature of the mound determines the offspring’s sex. I must remember to eat an egg for breakfast.

* 

I baked bread this morning. With an extra sachet of yeast and improver, the dough was bound to rise in a buoyant market, after a little kneading, salt and a melted pat of butter. The loaf came out of the oven, crisp and brown on the outside, fluffy and light within. I had never been so successful baking bread. There was time to sit under the Japanese bough, as I would with my love when she was yet alive, behind the bamboo creaking in the wind, to enjoy coffee, a slice with cheesy beans and the memory of an egg. Then the beeping of the dishwasher began, the incessant beeping, with a sucking sound, the red light flashing at the base and the F10 error message displayed on the control panel. The stop switch failed. Turning the supply off at the power board killed the fridge. I took too long to find the electric plug hidden behind the waste bins. The on-call plumber recommended cleaning out the drain. I disconnected the outlet, sucked and siphoned out an inch of soapy fluid into a bucket, but to no avail. The dishwasher was kaput. A trip to the electrical store resulted in a serious blow to the fiscal surplus.

*

Today was service-wide orientation day. It was mandatory, like all the videos and quizzes I’d done in advance online, repeated as face-to-face presentations in the auditorium. Then I was press-ganged into an assessment of my skills in basic life support. No dummy died, in spite of deep compressions to the chest and simulated shocks with the defibrillator. During lunch break, I passed two prison officers leading a black man in shackles, one before him, one aft, down the corridor to sit and wait. Everyone in uniform was corporately blue: nurses in shifts, doctors in scrubs, security officers, police, paramedics, ambulance and correctional officers. True blue, bluer than the sky. I returned to my team, went to see a young man who had been damaged in a road accident. He was much more relaxed today, quiet and able to smile, but soon after I visited, the ward called to say that he’d been screaming. Outside, it was beginning to rain, with cloud partially obscuring Mount Stuart, behind which the prison lay. I drove to the pool and swam during peak hour. I had to share a lane.

*

There is little wisdom in hindsight, as much as in the small measure of my body’s shrill cry: ‘I told you so!’ Just what it told me, or when, I am not at liberty to say, nor arrogant enough to claim that my unease in these last days could have been a true cognisance of the disease of which my dis-ease was harbinger. As I write, I fear that what little capacity I possess, to offer anything approaching narrative coherence, may already have entirely dissipated. I cannot say which of the possible sources of exposure was the one, or what it was they carried, that was the vector of transmission. Was my susceptibility implicit in my pining for the starlight that the absence of my love became those nights after she first passed? Was its spawn already thriving in the mud of the riverbank on which I sought nocturnal comfort, rising through the damp into my trainers when a vehicle departing through a puddle splashed me?  Did I ingest it in the baker’s flour of that pain au raison? Or were the snails that fed the brush turkeys nesting in my garden the source, and hence my nemesis, after the birds’ faeces passed into the soil and into the ground water? Did they come into me as I siphoned the residue of malfunction in my dishwasher? Was the thing itself a gift brought back for me from America by my old friend, the Professor? Had I somehow, even without remembering, managed to eat an egg? Or was it the sharing of that lane in the public pool that became my undoing? I have lost interest in the stock report. The vicissitudes of the market seem now to be of little relevance. I cannot discern any correlation between the fluctuations in the Dow Jones Index and the pattern of chills and fever that rack this vessel which, when they pass, will no longer be animate, except for the presence of the pathogen that will thrive in what remains of me. The campaniles of this small empire crumble and fall to the enemy within, my own internal infestation.