CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

was the only novel I read the summer I turned seventeen, I said, and I read it nine or maybe only eight times, it's a very big novel, a bible. And that was a hot summer, and kids with baseball bats drove around the country-side sabotaging picnics and bbqs, and the gunslinger sun pistolled and raked the baseball pitches in Centennial Park into acres of burnt bristling grass and, not stopping there, no, baked the earth so hard you could see your reflection in the dirt. And the scuffed balls bounced high across the hard yellow fields. Eleven old people died in their homes around our town if you count the dusty farms over to the east as part of the city. Later that summer I saw a seagull drop out of the sky. The bird’s wings had simply stopped moving, it must have believed itself to be an albatross. Or maybe it was just heat exhaustion. Trying to cool off in the basement, I watched a television adaptation of Crime and Punishment. I was in love with a dark-haired girl who had spent the spring sitting on the front steps of her parent's verandah, but the heat had driven her indoors, and there was no point in me being outside. My favourite song that July was off a compilation album from Asthmatic Kitty. "Go To The Crossroads" is two voices chanting tags from Dostoevsky over clashing piano lines and static, it's beautiful, it fades to black with the repeated diminishment, "Blood on our hands," four words circling high and away and falling down again. I got a tattoo at the end of August, lanky copperplate reading CHRIST IS RISEN across the top of my chest. Three hundred dollars on my body forever. Must have been the heat. I’m not saying this was a good decision, me getting that tattoo, but the sun had seared Rodion Raskolnikov into my brain and I was only seventeen and mostly missing the point of Crime and Punishment.