Max & Maxine

Maxine

“Remember when the dogs killed the neighbour’s chickens?”
Maxine’s head looks small against the starchy hospice sheets. Her eyes are pale and watery. Her mouth flickers and she chuckles through her nose.
The dogs had a solid morning routine. Wake up. Breakfast bones. Yawn and stretch. Pad down to the back fence, launch themselves against it repeatedly and bark fanatically.
The chickens had been quick to realise the dogs couldn’t get them, and as a result they tended the fence line with care, unperturbed by the antics next door. Max and Maxine stopped reprimanding the dogs because they felt that their pets were being provoked; the ‘damn chooks’ were clear rabble-rousers. When Maxine accidentally left the fence ajar the dogs were down next-door’s drive in seconds, bounding towards their prey, red-eyed and murderous. The racket ran through the valley; clucking, barks, bird-bits raining. When each bird was adequately disassembled, the soldiers padded home grinning broadly through the feathers in their teeth. The neighbours had been out that day.
Maxine snorts and grasps Max’s hand.
“Remember how we pretended not to notice?”

They lived in a nuclear neighbourhood of kids and tricycles in the backyard and good conservatives; where it was common to grow children and plant gardens. Max and Maxine moved there late in life; no one really knew where they had come from, and they liked to keep to themselves. They had lived as an autonomous unit for more than forty years — the two making one. Since their arrival Max led a serious campaign in the grassland backyard, with rough hands and ceaseless humming he transformed shambling lawn into raised beds, roses, fruit trees and bird baths — and an ever-growing populace of tribal sandstone sculptures. Chisling rhythmically with safety glasses donned, figures crept out of the rock. They were not aesthetic statues posing for appreciation, but rather sentinels that watched you — as if they possessed souls. Max tried to sell them for exorbitant prices, but no-one seemed to be interested, and their hold over the backyard steadily increased. Maxine often felt that they looked on her as an intruder, and though she openly laughed at Max’s fervent rants about the dying art of stonemasonry, she would never mentioned this effect. As domestic queen and furniture arranger her domain was indoors, with the ornaments, paintings, books and indoor plants. On sinking sun, as shadows stretched out, Maxine would sit and watch Max chisel or weed; humming excessively in his partial deafness. Their talk was scant, but the silence came from understanding. It was a retiring life — grey hairs pushing up and fizzing — cultivating their heaven-on-earth.

“Let’s go home Max.”
“We’ll get you there in a few days.”
“I miss the dogs.”
“I know.”

Maxine had been knocked down as the dogs bowled up the stairs to their dinner. The orthopedist who examined the ex-ray curtailed any explanation; stating bluntly, “I think we need to run some tests, it looks like you have bone lesions in your x-ray”.
“Multiple myeloma”, he later informed them, “is a cancer of plasma cells that are normally responsible for producing antibodies. Abnormal plasma cells collect in the bone marrow and interfere with the production of normal blood cells.”
Max sat with his legs crossed, his hands crossed over them. Maxine fingered the tie-dye sling he’d fashioned from one of his old bandannas. He said that they would like to know the prognosis. The doctor looked from Max to Maxine.
“With therapy and a stem cell transplant, you’re looking at four and a half years”.

Max poured over medical textbooks and books on alternative therapy, from the ‘Oncolex Encyclopedia of Cancer’ to the ‘Dr. Breuss’ Cancer Cure’. The words ‘treatment’ and ‘therapy’ and ‘symptoms’ and ‘antibodies’ and ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘how are you feeling?’ played a sickly, repetitious duet between them. Maxine had an ‘episode’. She spouted grand designs. “Let’s get out of here, buy a van, sell the house. We’ll take the dogs. We’ve never been to the west coast.” She was propped against one of his sandstone creatures, rubbing Coco’s belly with her foot, looking out at their garden. He shut the textbook and leaned back in his chair, pushed his glasses up his nose. “Chemo first.”

She looked around at him, her creased face still smiling.
“Ok, but you know hospitals kill people”.
“We’ll buy a van once the treatment’s done”.
Maxine was resigned to let the faulty plasma cells run their course — Max was working for the cause of longevity. Eventually Maxine ceded defeat as a reaction to the fear in his eyes. She knew that if it was he who had been given the prognosis, that fear would have been hers. Max packed a bag, mostly with books, to guide them through the waiting room hours.
Their routine altered. The cycle of hurried footsteps, polished cement floors, stark walls, the box TV in the corner, the window that didn’t open, the whispers, the tapping, the beeping, the checking of stats, the taking of blood; the clinical circus. Day after day. Maxine said it was like trying to breathe in a block of cement. Tufts of hair collected on her pillow. Max made daily visits, bringing hand-picked bouquets from the garden. “How was your day?”

“Hmmm, let me see. I woke up to pain everywhere and feeling nauseous. I vomited in the sink. I finished Brave New World and John the Savage hung himself.”

Max stopped asking about her day. Instead he would think of things he could tell her as he drove to the hospital; ways to pull her out of the dreary now. One day he wore a dress and painted his face with makeup. She surveyed him with an old spark in her eye. “I almost forgot you used to do that.”

A couple of weeks after the stem cell transplant, a bald, withered Maxine came home. She said she would not go back to that sick asylum again. She wanted to stay on the back-room sofa, her face turned to catch the sun, a novel in hand, a dog in her lap. Max checked on her regularly, helped her to the bathroom, handled her medication. He often found her in a room, standing still, staring vacantly into space. She took to leaving funny notes in odd places. Max found one in his breast pocket that said, “You’ve got me in your breast pocket”, accompanied by a little stick figure labeled ‘Maxine’. Another one in his shoe, “Feet first”. Another one under his pillow, “…And our little life is rounded with a sleep”. It was a game she had played when they first moved in together.

One afternoon while Max was out, the dogs escaped for a quick dip in the neighbours pond; a bog of thick, stagnant, water with a writhing ecosystem. A knock sounded and there was Judith from next-door, trying to restrain a slime covered pooch in each hand. While Maxine lovingly washed the pond gunk from his fur, Coco bit her wrist. Through the small wound a microscopic cell of bacteria found its way into her bloodstream, where it multiplied fast and free, unhindered by the disabled immune system. Max came home to find her violently ill. He picked her up, her body hot and limp in his arms. He drove to the hospital with the hazard lights on.

She kept floating in and out of consciousness, somewhat delirious and angry.
He would later remember how her face glowed phosphorescent, and how her words wore down to one sentence.
“Let’s go home.”

Max

It was july. The fruit trees were brown and empty, frost glazed the windows, breath came out in white puffs. Max, Coco the terrier and the statues guarded the fort; the other dog had died just after Maxine’s funeral. A film of grime and dust collected in the unused areas of the house.
Max had become increasingly withdrawn, his hours piled in sandstone blocks, humming and chatting to Coco. He would rise at dawn to take a stinging yellow piss, brew a coffee and throw chunks of kangaroo mince to the resident magpie family. They were smart birds, sometimes he coaxed them to eat from his hand, though he lamented their shit on his statues.
He would spend the day carving. He became obsessive. The garden sentinels multiplied. He even began to house them inside, their lifesize forms taking stand anywhere with enough space. He experimented very little, again and again he recreated the same angular figure; with a square pillar for a body and Aztec qualities. Each was subtly different but they all maintained a distinctly guarded character. In the evening he would sit on the back porch and face his garden, the statues gazing up at him, Coco at his feet.

The next-door’s kids had grown into teenagers, and when the parents went on holiday there were loud drunk house parties. One night got particularly out of hand. Max tossed around on his sore back, feeling the bass shudder up the bed frame. The street front was littered with smashed teens and glass. The loneliness of having none but a white terrier to complain to, pounded him with each throbbing beat.
A week later Judith’s youngest daughter crept into his garden and stood there sheepishly. Max popped out of the shed and screamed hello. His hearing had deteriorated markedly.
“I came to apologise for the party”.
“HEY?”
She repeated herself with added decibels.
“Someone routed you out did they? Well, you know, when the cats go away, the mice come out to play.”
She blinked at him. This wiry apparition of the aged loner, his safety goggles and grey fuzz of hair shooting up before her; surrounded by a small army of sandstone formations.
“Well, sorry about the noise”.
As she left by the back gate he realised that it was the first time he’d spoken to another person in months.

It was two years, eight months and nine days since he had woken in the plastic chair to the absence of response. Maxine not there in the hospital bed, or the back porch, or the marriage bed. The time had tolled heavily. The death of her was also a death of him, the smashing of his mirror. He put his guilt into expression by never leaving the haven that she so pointedly wished to go back to — where she had wanted to die.
The doctor surveyed Max warily.
“You have prostate cancer.”

Max waited until the eve of Maxine’s death.
He scrawled a poem
“Life portends to cycles
and mundanity
and monotonous
repetition,
our satisfaction measured
against the revolving days.
Death is finite,
full immersion.
The weary ceaseless bend yearns
to snap us,
and imminently will.”

Standing in front of the mirror Max powders his face white and paints his eyes with black eyeliner. He dresses in a black suit with long coattails.
It is the hour of Maxine’s passing, freesia and jasmine perfume the wind, wisps of cirrus cloud streak the sky, Coco stumbles around his feet; the garden is jubilant for spring. His old hands are steady as he ties the slip-knot.

They found the old man hanging from a high beam on the back porch, his dog yapping and jumping at the dangling feet. A poem in his pocket. A smile on his lips.