Forty-Seventeen by Frank Moorhouse

Night’. It had been misreported. There was no explanation of either code name.
    He felt something lift from his whimpering psychebut still could not work on the White Knight project.
    He rang Milton. ‘They had it wrong,’ he told him.
    â€˜But Jesus,’ Milton said, ‘you came within one letter of being hit by the laser.’
    â€˜I missed by one letter – a kay. I’m A-Okay.’
    â€˜Don’t joke – that’s the way it works. There’s a lot of stuff coming out on that sort of thing from Hungary.’
    That week while contemplating beginning work ‘on the treatment’ (and his new life) he fell down writhing with pain on the floor of his office amid the struggling indoor plants.
    Gripped with agony, he called a taxi which took him to the doctor and from there he was taken to hospital for emergency surgery.
    He came out of the operation with tubes in his mouth, nose and penis, and with a drip in his arm.
    They gave him Pentathol and he saw a sun-filled field of yellow flowers and it beckoned to him. It was, he thought, death beckoning. No doubt. He considered it, saw his great-grandmother and grandfather standing in the field beckoning, but for no obvious reason decided this time to say no he wouldn’t go yet into the never-ending warmth of that sun and to death’s corny field of swaying yellow flowers. Not yet.
    He then fell into a deep sleep and did not die.
    He convalesced on his own in a small quiet hotel. He could not go to Belle’s house because she was not someone you convalesced with, her life-urge was over-vigorous, and she had once said that she was into ‘scars’.
    The months of August and September he spent in Canberra, the seat of government, on IAEA business. While in that city a Senator Knight rang and wanted to talk to him about nuclear waste.
    Of all the senators why Senator Knight? He told himself that it was White Night now that he had to watch – the Knight business was all over. But he went to the appointment cautiously.
    Nothing of note occurred.
    In August, still in Canberra, he read a poem in the magazine Quadrant written by Evan Jones. He did not register the name Jones until he had entered the poem.
    Sometimes he read poems because he knew the poet, sometimes because of the title, sometimes he just grabbed a poem and read it as a random sample of ‘poetry being written now’. He had read this poem as such a sample.
    It was titled Insomniacs but he was not an insomniac, that was not the reason he read the poem.
    In stanza three he read:
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    Insomniacs, bless them, are never afraid of the dark:
    bad nights are called ‘white nights’ for that dull white
    which lurks behind their eye-lids, dingy, mean.
    Nothing at all like innocence, purity or peace,
    signalling that all the nerves would like to break.
    Something in the whole being is at war.
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    He put down the magazine. Oh oh, something was still going on. The laser was still searching for him.
    That night and for a few nights he sweated after going to bed, fearing that his sleep would now be disrupted – that that had been the message of the poem. Could you die from sleep deprivation?
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    His two companions in Canberra were named Lewis and after a heavy drinking bout with one of the Lewises, in the week he read the poem, he became ill again with hepatitis.
    He could hardly move from his bed, pinned down with an immense lethargy. He found that he could now do nothing else but sleep.
    It had got him, the laser.
    That night while lying in bed with his new sickness in his rooms at University House he heard music from a radio carried on the wind and he heard the announcer say that the piece of music which had reached him on the wind was called White Night and that it was played by Kenny White and his orchestra. The wind dropped and he heard no more.
    While lying there during the next few days he wondered why his two companions in that city –