The Last Days of Kali Yuga Read online

  The Last Days of Kali Yuga

  Paul Haines

  The Last Days of Kali Yuga

  Copyright © Paul Haines 2011.

  Cover art copyright © Dreamstime.

  Layout and cover design by Shane Jiraiya Cummings.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Brimstone Press, Perth, Western Australia, May 2011.

  Print edition published by Brimstone Press, April 2011 [ISBN: 9780980567717].

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  No reference to any living person is intended.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Except in the case of short-term lending, if you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ***

  About the author:

  Paul Haines was raised in the 70s in the wrong part of Auckland, New Zealand. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in the frozen, drunken depths of Otago, he wound up working in computers and was eventually lured by sex and money to Australia in the 90s. Vowing to never call it home, he now lives in Melbourne with his wife and daughter.

  He is the author of the award-winning collections Slice of Life (The Mayne Press, 2009) and Doorways For The Dispossessed (Prime Books, 2006). Paul survived the inaugural Clarion South writers workshop in 2004, and he has won the Aurealis, Ditmar, Chronos, and Sir Julius Vogel Awards and made the James Tiptree Jr. Honours List and the Locus Recommended Reading List for his writing. He is also a member of the Melbourne-based speculative fiction writers group SuperNOVA.

  Lately, he’s been struggling to fight cancer.

  More information on Paul can be found at: www.paulhaines.com

  ***

  Praise for Paul Haines’s work:

  “Take a slab of Hunter S. Thompson, add some Philip K. Dick, and throw them into a blender for a while. Add a little dash of Brothers Grimm and a spoonful of American Psycho and what do you end up with? Paul Haines.”

  – Strange Horizons

  “Paul Haines knows what it is to be human, in all our cruel beauty, with all our vile dreams. His stories tear the masks off our civilized faces and expose the raw, bleeding apes cowering beneath.”

  – Sean Williams, New York Times Bestselling author Stars Wars: The Force Unleashed and the Books of the Cataclysm series.

  “Paul Haines has an unnerving sense for the softest, most secret corners of the male psyche, and in this collection dissects them with excruciating skill.There is no better horror writer working in Australia today.”

  – Max Barry, author of Syrup and Jennifer Government.

  “I’m just not sure that I ever want to shake the author’s hand; rightly or wrongly, I have the sneaking suspicion that I know where it’s been ...”

  – Chuck McKenzie, HorrorScope

  ***

  Dedication:

  For my family.

  ***

  Contents

  Introduction: Who is Paul Haines?

  Doorways for the Dispossessed

  Malik Rising

  Her Collection of Intimacy

  The Light in Autumn's Leaves

  The Festival of Colour

  Burning from the Inside

  The Punjab's Gift

  Hamlyn

  I've Seen The Man

  High Tide at Hot Water Beach

  The Last Days of Kali Yuga

  Taniwha, Swim With Me

  Father Father

  The Sky is Turning Black

  The Feastive Season

  They Say It's Other People

  Yum Cha

  Her Gallant Needs

  Wives

  The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt

  Acknowledgements

  ***

  Introduction: Who is Paul Haines?

  Paul Haines is a mysterious figure. He's an award-winning Kiwi author ... or so we're led to believe. You can check out Wikipedia for all the superficial facts about this Paul Haines. But does that explain Paul Haines, the bloke in stories written by the author of the same name; the bloke who revels in all things nasty, disturbing, and disgusting? Paul Haines the character rarely appears in this book, although you'll find thinly-veiled versions of him in many stories, particularly his 'backpacker horror' stories. However, he is front and centre in this collection's original, the painfully raw "The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt".

  So who is the real Paul Haines, the man or the monster? The author or the character? Authors and editors closest to him offer insight into this perplexing question:

  People say that Paul Haines has bad taste. Try telling that to those he cooks for. Try telling it to the beneficiaries of his music collection culls. Try telling that to Paul Haines, the cannibal gastronome of his "Slice of Life" story suite, who knows just the right cuts and how they're best served. In the thick of the muck, Paul's fiction explores highbrow themes like the mystery of conception, the unreliability of perception, and the violence of redemption. Paul is a principled aesthete and a candid man of honour.

  Paul is the guy who, at the first Clarion South in early 2004, kept my broke arse supplied with booze. As us ferals partied after six weeks of reprogramming, he bought two beers at a time as if my thirst was his own. This was a sincere morality adapted from the macho drinking culture of his uni days. He couldn't let an orifice go dry, not when he was in a position to lubricate. And he refused my indebtedness: I owed not him but future poor lads in need of a drink. Pay it forward, with a twist. Of lemon.

  This decent bloke is, of course, the same warped creature who makes readers squirm and cringe with his surrealist black humour, his confused, cruel, hungry, horny, unhinged characters and their equally fucked-up worlds. His exposed backpackers wander through the disorienting East or the degenerate West or somewhere else entirely, preyed upon by the powers-that-be or their own shadowy natures. Many of these characters go by the name of Paul Haines. I have often seen people recoil in his presence as a result of his work—and he's quivered with satisfaction in response.

  To read his fiction is to question the character of Paul Haines. His stories are plenty unsettling even without those infamous self-tuckerisations. His dystopia "Wives" with its brutal misogyny is simply the latest and finest in a long, disquieting stream. But when he does decide to give his protagonist his name, the disturbance multiplies.

  It is a venerable technique that the likes of Chaucer and Dante up to Dick, Ellis, and Kaufman have experimented with, and Haines self-inserts with the best of them. Uncareful readers will confuse the protagonist with the author or perceive a monstrous ego at play in this literary autofellatio. All the better for Haines.

  Paul Haines is not a wish-fulfilling Mary Sue; he is a fully developed, viscerally scarred character. Paul Haines is not a didactic author surrogate; he preaches nothing but the wages of existence. This is no cameo, no proxy, no Narcissus. By projecting himself into his narratives, he becomes the willing victim of his readers' own projections. He wallows in the viral dispersal of his proper name.

  Paul expects academic wankery of me, so how's this for a dubious homonymy: there is a Greek verb phainesthai, which means "to appear"; it is the root of phenomenon and phantasm and incorporates the sense of both pretence and manifestation. Phainesthai is to appear in a form undecidable between truth and falsehood, fiction and reality. It's what Paul does. Against vivid exotic backgrounds, the character of Paul Haines dissimulates with a fierce honesty.

  The SuperNOVA ad
dendum to the Turkey City Lexicon will include phainesthai, or perhaps simply haines, to refer to self-insertion as literary extreme sport. This is how it will be used in the crit circle upbraiding of wannabe writers: "If you're gonna to try to haines it, newbie, then don't shy away from the verdict. You gotta put it all on the line."

  Haines puts it all on the line. The man has travelled, has lusted, has feared, has hurted in unimaginable ways. He laughs and cries as life bends him over and drives its toxic probe up his arse. He tells us all about it. He shames common delusion with his clarity of observation and frankness of expression. He gives the finger to death, to our decomposing bodies, to our poisonous world in exemplary fashion. He has struggled, and he has fought to flourish, too. He creates and fathers and loves.

  Today, there are no more vulgar drinking sessions. Paul's colonoscopy punctured that blokey utopia. It forced him to vegetables and administered chemicals, forced him and others to a painful knowledge of the world as it is: singular bodies, each desiring and broken in its own way. The world according to Haines.

  He and his character deserve the sweetest of revenge.

  — Matthew Chrulew

  I love how when readers meet Paul Haines for the first time they are surprised and relieved at how 'normal' he appears.

  He is indeed normal in many respects: personable, warm, generous and funny. He's an audiophile and he likes wine and good food. He has a beautiful wife and a lovely daughter, and he lives in a nice house.

  But underneath it all, Haines is a very complicated man. Readers, don't be fooled. I have long suspected that the real Haines harbours thoughts that look a lot like those of the Paul Haines character in his fiction.

  And this is exactly what makes him such a great writer and it's what excites me so much about his writing. Haines inches the reader out along a ledge, drawing from his own life and experiences with such authority and power that you are prepared to go along with him even as he expertly manipulates your emotions and shows you the true emptiness, brutality, and horror that lies in the hearts of men.

  I co-edited an anthology called c0ck, the concept for which was in large part inspired by Haines's writing: his clinical ablation of the bullshit that surrounds masculinity to present a wholly compelling and wholly terrifying glimpse of the white heterosexual male.

  When I was editing his story "Father Father", I emailed him to make sure he knew the implications of the last line. He wrote back almost immediately, adamant it should be kept in. There are no wasted words in a Haines story, and of course, its effect was entirely intended.

  Paul Haines is not a character. He's far more complex than that. Unlike most of us, however, he doesn't deny his darkness. He accepts it and acknowledges it in his fiction. His integrity, courage, and honesty make his writing ring with an undeniable truth that gives us an insight into the beast that is man.

  — Andrew Macrae

  Paul once told me, several years ago, that he considered himself unlucky. At the time, I remember I had to agree with him—this even though I didn't believe in luck (and also reckoning without his beautiful family, the fact that he had the good fortune to live in first world circumstances where he's not starving, has a roof over his head, etc. etc.). I had to agree simply because although he was sensible and well-organised and hard-working, things kept going wrong for him—a long list of mishaps—sometimes big, sometimes not, always unfair.

  A few years later, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. This was after visits to a GP who said it couldn't be cancer because he was too young. And before the perforated bowel caused by the clumsy endoscopy. Followed by the secondaries in his liver, then his lymph nodes; his bad reaction to the chemo; his ghastly skin affliction—and so on.

  Those who consider themselves unlucky are those who believe they are unworthy of whatever misfortunes befall them. So if you feel you're the victim of bad luck, it might be more a sign of a sense of entitlement, as it's termed, than an unwarranted degree of misfortune. Indeed, it's possible you deserve the bad things that have befallen you (this statement is meaningless, of course, justice being just a human construct, unreflected in the world at large).

  But in Paul's case, it really is unfair. He really doesn't deserve this grief. He's a good guy. Not a saint, but a good guy. He works hard, and he's generous and smart. Everyone likes him, except for those who don't—and remember what Confucius said about never trusting the man whom everyone likes. And he is trustworthy. I trust him implicitly, and I have issues with trust. And he's a decent man, even when he's being appallingly indecent (I'm talking about his writing; he brings an unflinchingly honest point of view to a genre still notorious for flinching from emotional honesty).

  I can't put it better than that. Think of some good guy you know, then think of lots of horrible things happening to him, and you have Paul.

  But it's not all bad. Physics tell us that the apparent flow of time is just that—apparent. Time's arrow is an illusion, an artefact of the thermodynamic nature of consciousness. Every moment is eternal; there's a rhythm to the universe, and the rhythm is a single beat that lasts an instant and forever. We can take comfort that when bad things happen to someone good, at least the sweet moments of their lives aren't as evanescent as they seem. Further, this element of existence has allowed statistical physicists to generate what have become popularly known as 'luck maps', charting the bright points of our lives to delineate the swathes of misfortune, the existential dark matter—an endeavour in which Paul himself has been instrumental, his circumstances helping in the development of a science that promises to determine the very shape of adversity. Although many who pursue this goal have met with

  EDITOR'S NOTE: The text ends abruptly here at the moment the author sustained the paper cut that led, after an improbable escalation of calamities, to his own death and the serious injury of fourteen bystanders.

  — Adam Browne

  Paul Haines: a handsome, confident and overly hirsute Kiwi who easily takes you in his stride and tells you how much he admires your work while his mantelpiece sprouts yet another award. When I first met Paul, he wrote what I called fairytale porn and backpacker splatter, the latter including visceral tales like "Shot in Lorelai", "The Punjab's Gift", "The Last Days of Kali Yuga", and "Doorways for the Dispossessed"—exciting, alienating adventures to reveal the gritty, 'what would you do?' side of (your) human nature, yes, you—because he does involve you the reader—you are his plaything and he shows you that your self-assured readiness only makes it sweeter when he twists the knife.

  Paul's early stories included a series of dark backpacker adventures far off the beaten track, and in these one would wonder—did that happen, did he do that? Is this an extrapolation based on reality? How much of an extrapolation—where does the fact end and the fiction start? How does he know so much about things so tawdry and tacky? These questioning, ambiguous glimmerings in early works were the first steps down that Damascene road that now has him creating narratives where the reader skates along a razor's edge of truth and delusion in point-of-view character nightmares. A staid and well-tamed married man who goes on far fewer holidays than in his troubadour youth, he now vicariously, voyeuristically writes himself into the text, openly names the protagonist Paul Haines—a truly unreliable narrator—like a challenge, like a slap, to create horror fiction on one level, whilst simultaneously conjuring a metafiction in which the reader is caught by the ambiguous reality of the point-of-view character and the point-of-view author, putting his hand up, saying 'it's me, it's me, I dare you to think it's me', bringing a human face to depravity, humanising the 'other', because he writes in the first person brutal: sometimes brutal violence, sometimes brutal honesty, but always with the question 'who is the first person?'

  'I don't do that stuff anymore,' Paul shares like a twelve-stepper about the backpacker splatter, but if that is true his other great love—fairytale porn—is his secret nose candy: from the open spoof of "Doof Doof Doof" to sinister takes on Hamlyn and the festiv
e season, this love that should dare not speak its name has since devolved into his depraved and ongoing tales of The Interferers. Always a genre unto himself, Paul Haines now has the honour of people describing others' stories as 'Hainesish'. Ladies and gentlemen: Haines fiction.

  — Brendan Duffy

  If I had to choose one word to describe Paul Haines, it would be 'honest'. If I could throw in an adverb, it would have to be 'fearlessly'. I'm lucky to call Paul a good friend, and I've been fortunate enough to publish a number of his stories: the 2004 Aurealis Award nominated "The Gift of Hindsight", the 2007 Ditmar winning novella "The Devil in Mr Pussy", and "Wives", which so far has won the Ditmar, Aurealis, and Vogel awards and made the honour list for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. I guess we've been good for each other.

  But apart from winning prizes, there's another reason I seek out Paul's work and why, I think, people tend to gravitate towards it. It comes back to that 'fearless honesty' again. I've heard people say of Paul's stories that they couldn't bear to read what they were reading, but they couldn't bear to stop. Paul's a writer's writer. He does what a lot of us wish we could do: he lays everything bare. But his work is never self-indulgent. Self-referent yes, Paul often appears in his own stories, but that works, and his words demand to be read—even if they make you feel squeamish—because what you get with a Paul Haines story is an essential distillation of the human condition. His stories hurt because they are true, the emotions are real, the situations are real, the crushing, inescapable conclusion is real. There are very few places you will find fiction that is so fearlessly honest, that will touch that guilty, shameful, secret place you don't even show to your closest loved ones. That will let you know there is another human being in this world who feels like you do, and who knows what it is to be human.