We made it to the park by eight. The winter sun was filtering through the far trees in a wan, lemon trickle, the thin clouds sheets of white. The cool sky a rubbed-at blue. The grass squelched beneath our feet and elsewhere, thinned from wear, the earth stretched grassless and muddy and, in some parts, released a thick mist.

It was windy today, unsettling in the way of bad dreams; my cheeks chafed at sudden violent blasts. We found our usual place on the eastern side of the structure, maybe a hundred metres back from the high fence. As usual there were hundreds there already, taking photos or just looking up agog, hands stuffed deep inside their pockets. We could feel the crowd’s buzz and hear the rushing wind and the drones, of course, way up at the top of the structure, still adding rocks, boulders and even underwear.

“I know I’ve said it before, Stace, but wouldn’t you think they’d call it quits?”

She looked up awestruck, as if it would go on standing.

I must say, I almost willed it to be over with. I wanted my life back again. The paradox wasn’t lost on me, but still, I tried to believe I could have it back once the last piece had fallen and the great volcanic cloud of dust had dissipated, if dissipate it even would.

Stacy didn’t feel the same. Hers was a plain vanilla grief, as she called it, for the structure’s oblivion. We’d been dating now for two years and while we didn’t love each other, thankfully, we shared a good, pleasant life in a house near the park. All things going well, that is as long as we didn’t fall in love or come close to doing so, I’d ask her to marry me the year after next.

Just then, Gary walked up with his kid, Em, and their dog, Rick, and we said hellos and laughed. We’d stood with Gary most of this week and were happy to see him here again. 

“Where’s Mel?” Stace asked.

Mel was Gary’s wife.

“Staying in,” Gary said.

“Feeling unwell?”  

“Nah. Just over it.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know how anyone could feel that way with the structure about to collapse and the park alive with anticipation, but I said nothing because I wasn’t the type to judge, partly, and partly I wanted us to move through the crowd to get a closer look.

“Come on.” I looked down at Em, her blonde hair messy in the wind. “Wanna go check it out?”

She took my hand.

We shouldered through the crowd, Stace and Gary behind us. Rick snapped at my heels, his wet nose every now and then finding a patch of skin between my sock and the hem of my jeans.

“This is fun,” I said to everyone. I was excited. I was a lot of things this last month but each day as I got close to it, I was always very excited as if the structure gave off a pulse of energy that entered my very bones.

It rose into the sky, this gigantic column made of stones and items of clothing, mainly underwear. Everyone had a different view as to why it wasn’t holding shape anymore and the most obvious one, the one I couldn’t help buy into as well, was that it was built by too many people, a big pile of random Jenga accreted over time, each piece chucked on top with no blueprint or design, a haphazard drunken process. That was part of its charm too, its mystery, and for want of a better term, its cultural import. People had slogged it out time and again to ensure it would always be like that, despite periods of opposition. It would always have the right to stay as it had stayed. Random. Additive. Free.

But the danger was clear now. The warnings we’d heard from certain academics, “iconoclasts” until recently, had against our fervent hopes proved accurate. Now we had to brace. Make what preparations we could to protect ourselves from the consequences of this vast mesmeric structure falling to the earth. It was guaranteed. It would fall this week or next or even next year, no one knew when but fall it would. In our park!  Sure, there were other parks. In far-flung places, there were maybe other structures. But how could their possibility even slightly affect the impact, and the power, of ours?

You weren’t supposed to touch it, partly out of taboo (and the taboo was partly about the underwear). A few idiots had tried and suffered badly. Mostly nobody dared. We revered it like a god. We didn’t have a god, but we knew about religions, how dangerous they had been, and we knew, rife as they were with all the human passions, they invariably led to wars. Fast forward – I’m really no history buff – and now we had the structure. It signified hope. Cohesion. A willingness to forego. And yes, we’d built it without a plan, a mishmash of rocks and that damned underwear, but the details didn’t matter. We’d found a way to honour it.

“What would happen if we climbed it?” Em was looking up.

I gazed towards the apex, narrowing to a point beyond my sight, and told her we couldn’t, that it was enough to stand here and admire what history had created.

“I’d like to swing from it like a pirate,” Em persisted.

“Well, that’s a grand idea“ said Stacy, “let’s do it,” and off they went, little girl and my one-day-wife, pretending in the park.

After a while, Gary spoke. He gazed at his sneakers, muddied a bit like mine, his small heap of a dog wheezing beside them. “I have a really bad feeling, Ed.”

I was taken aback by his tone. Its shameful private note.

“That’s normal,” I said.

“I keep thinking we stuffed it up.”

“Of course. How can we not think that? It’s normal,” I repeated, hoping he wouldn’t think me banal or dismissive, which is how I felt.

He looked away through the crowd, as if for someone who might rescue him. “Mel and I are having problems, Ed.”

I didn’t know what to say. I could already feel the skin tightening at my neck. I’d never fought with Stacy, or anyone in my family. I lived a good, peaceful life, like most people I knew, and for that was forever grateful. Gary needed help? Okay. It’s just, I wasn’t the kind of person who should be expected to give it.

He turned to me and, with confusion in his small, troubled eyes, confessed that he and Mel had fallen in love!

How strange at their age, especially as they’d been together so long now and had never looked like coming close to deep affection, let alone love, passion, wantonness. It just didn’t happen to people like them. It might have, decades ago, to certain fringe-dwelling hippy types gilled up on psychedelics. In all my life, I’d known only a handful of true lovers, fleetingly thank God, at the necessary distance. I’d learned too what had come of them (ruin, loss and exile) and had felt ashamed for them.

In fact, I didn’t really believe him; it was so unusual to be in love, statistically. Perhaps he’d mistaken the feeling for something else, which could happen in times of stress or great change, such as now. He perhaps hadn’t thought of this but when I asked him, he shook his head. They both had thought of this, through countless sleepless nights, as they sought an answer to this riddle now ensnaring their hearts.

“Goodness!”

“It’s not what I expected, Ed. Not now at nearly fifty. We never wanted this. We did everything we could to avoid it. I chose her and she chose me, believing it wouldn’t happen. We had Em on the basis that it wouldn’t. We were out in the garden, late one afternoon. She was kneeling in the rose bed. We were talking about the structure. She said she thought it was the worst thing that would happen in our lives. That its fall would end something with such finality she wasn’t sure anyone would cope with it. I said I agreed but maybe we would be okay. I didn’t believe my own words. I don’t know what possessed me, but I reached out to touch her in a way I hadn’t done before. She turned and looked up through her hair at me, in a kind of sleepy daze. I could smell the earth on her hands and the sweet dampness on her breath and we stared for so long that by the time we kissed, the light had almost drained entirely from the sky.”

I’d already heard too much and the thought of hearing more, of what might’ve happened next, unsettled me to the point of scrunching up my face. He suddenly seemed to realise. He touched his open mouth. Then he asked softly to be forgiven. “I’m out of line.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ve gone and pushed the friendship.”

He had, but what was to be done about it?  “Look. Let’s go and find the others. We’ll just forget it ever happened.”

He looked at me and nodded, purse-lipped, as if that might be doable. But when we turned to walk through the park, he shook his head, grabbed my arm and told me that he loved her in a thick, gravelled whisper that, to be frank, scared me witless.

*

I didn’t tell Stacy as we made lunch that afternoon, although I thought about nothing else. She stood hunched above the benchtop, slicing through tomato. I was over by the sink, drying plates and watching her. I imagined doing what Gary had said he’d done with Mel. I pictured how Stace would turn and look at me with piercing surprise, searching my face. I conjured how I’d feel, stripped of reason, a man become a spinning top, close now to disaster. The thought alone clamped me shut so tight I knew I’d never do it. How could they have made such a terrible mistake?

We ate lunch and then I mowed the lawn. Our house stood on a small rise. Through the gum trees at the back, you could see the lonely leaning figure of the structure, a grey finger in the haze of the suburb. Even from this distance I could see it sway, a bigger range of movement than usual, a wider arc.

I finished mowing the lawn and killed the engine. In the silence of the afternoon, I heard a small, sharp yelp inside the house. I ran across the lawn and up the steps to find Stacy sitting in the kitchen and staring at her palm smeared with bright blood. Beside her lay a pair of nail scissors. “What happened?”

“I nicked myself.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not at all.”

I got the dressing stuff and a bottle of disinfectant, then knelt beside her chair. I held her wrist gently. “This might sting.”

“It’s okay.”

Something about the way she said it, scrunched shut her eyes as I poured the fluid on her wound and turned her heard away, made me think of love again. And how crazy Mel and Gary were! I looked at her, my girlfriend, whose hand was now bandaged and whose eyes had opened on my own, and felt a rush of gratitude. “Marry me,” I said.

She said she’d think about it later.

*

A few days after that, we were back beside the structure. It was swaying so much now that for the first time in my life I could see the tip bend over us, casting a cold shadow on the ground, shedding chunks on the outskirts of the park. They’d cordoned off an area there, where people stood beyond a ring of fences as debris piled up, ancient undies steaming in the daylight. Next week, no later, they’d close the park entirely.

I said to Stacy, “Look.”

She turned her head. A couple was embracing on the grass, sitting there and kissing with scant regard for decorum.

“They’re not the first I’ve seen this week.”

“Oh?”

“I saw a couple yesterday on my way to work. Grossing each other out at the bus stop. And Anna, my tennis partner, said she saw a few herself, on the train.”

I didn’t know what to think.

“They’re hoping it will pass.”

“Who?”

“People, I guess.” Stacy shrugged.

“Is the structure causing it?” I felt bad to drag the structure into this. But it was critical we tried to understand. And time was clearly running out. “Or is the affection causing the problem with the structure?”

I looked around. Sure enough, I saw another couple twisting tongues beside a tree. And another one, hands grabbing at their bottoms – the blind searching for a light switch on a wall.

A large chunk of the structure crashed noisily to the earth.

*

When I was younger, I saw a man kiss a woman on the mouth. She hadn’t expected it, I could tell. She stood back and shook her head at him, her thin mouth a straight line. I’d heard that this could happen from my parents. If ever I was unlucky enough to witness such a scene, I should look away at once, they said. More importantly, should I ever feel an urge inside my own body, in my belly or my chest, to touch a girl or boy, I should walk towards the structure. I didn’t need to make it to the park per se. I didn’t even need to sight the structure. As long as I walked in its direction, I would feel a kind of peace. And when after long enough of returning always to the structure, I could find a rock and throw it on myself. In dire moments, when I felt activity in my groin, I should remove my pants at once and deliver promptly my underwear to the structure. And in so doing transform my peace into a powerful resilience that, with luck, I might pass onto my own child.

To comfort me on my long journey towards this state, they reminded me the urges weren’t true anyway, not humanistically. They led dangerously onto greed for more urges. And greed, in all its states, was anathema to harmony. This last bit, I knew of course already. It was the first thing we’d learned at school.  

And so, whenever I felt the urges (unpleasant as they were), I walked towards the structure. Like others before me, I learned to add my rocks, my pants, piece by addled piece, to shed what I knew I mustn’t feel.

*

The next day, it happened. A historian and a scientist announced they’d found a way to keep it standing. Perhaps not all of it, but at least its core, its base and most of its spire. I don’t pretend to understand their methodology. It had something to do with the underwear. They were the key to the structure’s contiguity.

It took a month, and three massive cranes, not to mention helicopters and armies of high-vis, but it worked. The structure stopped swaying. The bits stopped shedding from its shaking walls and people, critically, were free to add without fear, at the base, and even using drones. Upright it stood again, with the solidity we had come so thoroughly to depend on. If it was smaller, or narrower, you wouldn’t know. It looked normal. Great, even, like it always had.

There were parties all over, days-long festivals in the park, news crews encamped, and then a big finale evening with fireworks and hot dog carts. Eventually it all stopped. And things returned to baseline.

I went for a walk with Gary shortly after.

“It’s quiet now. It’s nice.”

He looked at me. He seemed relaxed. “It’s over,” he said.

I thought he meant the furore of the structure. But he added: “Me and Mel.”

“You’re getting divorced?”

He laughed. “I mean the way we felt,” he said. “It’s passed. We’re back to normal, Ed.”

*

I told Stace, who agreed the news was good. And consistent, she said, with the general reversion. A term commentators had deployed about the way, the structure now secured, the madness had abated. The reversion. The generalised dissipation of temporary love.

We watched a movie, ate dinner, and lay apart in bed. It began to rain. The rain made a melancholy drizzle on the windows whose shadows replicated on the wall beside the bed. I watched the black squiggles imitating rain, their vibrations so earnest as to almost make me cry.

She quietly told me, yes. She would marry me. I smiled in the darkness and gently went to sleep.

*

The next day, eating breakfast, I saw the structure through the kitchen window. It was firm, almost strident, in its reaching. History books were full of this, I remembered, great threats erupting, the world gone awry, but ultimately things restored to equilibrium. I closed my eyes and pictured on my blackened lids the splendour of the structure. The way it rose up. Its slate-grey surface and its jutting asperities. The chunks and the undies added over time. I’d like to say I was grateful. And maybe I was. But a tiny doubt remained, as though I couldn’t quite credit Gary’s reversion. Of course, I might’ve been projecting. But if I was, onto what? The structure? I didn’t understand it. I wondered, were there other structures, and if so, had their subjects managed even slightly to comprehend theirs?

Image: Don Ricardo