It’s about a bath in an old factory beside a marina

              on the outskirts of the everywhere anywhere.

              It’s about a concrete underpass and the torque of a small engine. It’s

              about the right eye and a radical-pair reunion. Electromagnetic flight

              paths of migration. It’s about Number

              how it’s a resonant skin that warp wraps the everything anything. 
              It’s about that night Owen grabs me from the street corner

              drags me into the ambulance and drives me hanging his head out

              of the window vibrating a storm into the distance. It’s about

              that night Owen says It’s Time.
                                                        And all the Numbers in that.
              His hair stands on end and mine too as I lie in the back

              strapped to a gurney. The ambulance has a police scanner

              tuned to the frequency of the police talking

              about looking for an ambulance so I think maybe this time someone

              will find me – but nobody ever does.
              Owen’s small like a small boy but strong like a big man.

              He’s like the boy I saw that time behind the Cobb & Co. mail stop.

              There was this rotten piano beautifully out of tune round the back

              and I walked away from it down to a little pathetic stream

              and there was this boy there. I asked him what he was doing

              and he said he was dragging dead soldiers out of the river.

              He was sweating and kind of staggering under their weight.

              There was no body but him down there. 
              Owen is like that boy – a lot like him. And like the other boy

              in my art class, the one that painted the picture of the huge wave and

              the tiny surfer and a shadow beneath it all. He said

              the tiny surfer was him. I said is the shadow a whale? He said

              he didn’t know what the shadow was but his cold sores did. 
              The next week he painted another picture, all in red.

              It had a man in it looking through a telescope

              and he left a big empty circle

              in the sky and said next week I’ll fill that in

              so you know what he’s watching. And next week he filled it in

              with a naked lady and looking more closely

              you could see the red man was wanking. 
              Owen is like that boy too – a lot like him. Powerful and jittery

              like an electric storm coming in over a marina

              on the outskirts of the everywhere anywhere

              making waves in the everything anything. 
              After we have driven we come to the factory and the factory

              is a lot like the factory I visited once with the performance collective

              Shagging Julie. We were going to use it in a show

              about Owen but then we didn’t, because we didn’t do the show

              because we couldn’t get any money to do it. Owen puts me in a

              porcelain bath tub and I keep the bathtub company and he says We

              are only lifted briefly from sequence into breath. A disturbance

              in the infinite resonance. He repeats this over and over and won’t

              shut up so I cannot sleep. Wind currents blast waves in earth’s

              magnetic fields. The sea has risen. Owen’s brought in the tide

              and with it a whale from out deep, circling in the marina

              singing base obliteration.
              Owen looks out the window. I’ve got this whale now

              but I don’t know what to do with it. Owen always has problems

              with motivation. That’s because he is really just a kid

              down by the river collecting bodies and a painter

              covering canvases in red – Owen has never made any sense

              but I just can’t seem to give up on him. He keeps reappearing

              14 years now – we’re like some radical-pair, oscillating.

              We’re like migratory robins guided by the magnetoreceptors

              in our right eyes. 
It’s time.
              The day is shadow cloud with rain. Street lamps remain on

              their hum accompanies the everything anything

              a latent harmony crying the whale circling in the storm singing

              the sharp edge of vibration. The meagre resistance of skin. In side out

              side claw at one another. Owen’s a map on my retina. Desire grinds

              against my iris, visionary surface of the mind. I am a break

              in a smooth arc of porcelain. I breathe lightly.

              The earth is a giant magnet guiding me home.
I’ve called the birds.
              His voice. A beacon. A regular pulse in earth’s spherical harmonics.

              I think briefly of Number. There is only wOne Owen, but really there

              have always been two. Form bleeds through itself. I crawl over the

              porcelain rim amidst gravity. The whale finds my resonant frequency

              linked by its hum to the steady vibration

              of the metal walkway an extension of the building I wade

              through shades of atoms down into night. The sky is blistered

              by stars. I feel the melody of the spheres as they spin in space aware

              of minute fluctuations in tone. He holds the creature

              in his arms. The twitch of its talons. The spasm of its beak.

              Its frenetic dissolving heart. 
I am not a kid anymore.

                                                                                    I know Owen. 
              He places the bird’s right eye over my right iris. The world’s metallic

              frame deviates, photons morph symmetric patterns fluctuate with

              magnetosensitive infusion, a radical-pair reunion. Resonant sonic

              boom vibrates my key note into waves

              of ultraviolet light: 370 to 565 nanometers in length.

              The world gets bright yellow, then darkens toward the shade

              of nicotine on his fingers clicking in my face.

              He’s standing over me. Not a kid anymore – 24 perhaps?

              Looks like he’s made of wire and cigarette burns.

              Flexing the kind of muscle that comes from missing meals.

              He leans back on the pushie he’s motorised

              with an old lawn mower engine. We watch others hooning

              across the parkland beside the falling down back fences

              of falling down houses.
              They circle back and fly through the concrete underpass

              beside the storm water drain where an alco slips

              on a submerged shopping trolley trying to drag something

              onto the cement shore. He ends up awkwardly perched

              on the wire frame, a small stream laden with chip wrappers

              flowing around his shins. He used to sit up on the hill

              under the trees watching kids play in the carpark

              till the cops moved him on.
              As the bikes pass their unmufflered engines vibrate

              my ear drums. They hang a finger at Owen and he laughs

              yells Still not as fast as mine and then more softly

              Gotta get the torque just right. I think about Number. Owen, its all…

              Don’t you fucken even. There’s not a mystical bone in his body

              that hasn’t been broken. He hates all this radical-pair reunion shit.

              Hates that I keep coming back to him

              obsessing about the kid he never was. 
              Anyway I’m off. His mates have stopped beside the bottlo

              to wait for him. Late afternoon light refracts off millions

              of tiny shards of broken glass on patchy asphalt. Silvereyes

              pick at fallen chips and spring rolls looking at each one

              with sideways heads. The boys flick bottle caps at them

              they rise momentarily then settle again. 
              You got a 10er? I check my wallet and hand him a 20.

              He stuffs it in his pocket and lifts his leg over the bike.

              You know it wasn’t even a whale anyway right? He starts his engine

              and yells the rest through a cloud of greyblue smoke. It was a shark

              and when those bastards come for you there ain’t no singing.

              He releases the breaks and takes off.
              In the concrete underpass the alco is waving me over.

              I ignore him and walk up to a road.

              There’s a bus shelter with Troy 4 Stacey 4 Ever

              burnt into the perspex with a lighter.

              The last bus out leaves at 5.15 and I’ve missed it.

              In the distance, on the outskirts of the everywhere anywhere

              I can see the factory and walk towards it.

              Hopefully the ambulance is still there – it was last time.