The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (12 page)

I begin to sleep in, spend hours in front of karaoke dating shows on the flat screen, eating too many sandwiches. I go for long walks through the empty city and feed my crusts to the geese. I go entire days without working at all.

Mr Wang still calls me every Friday.

‘We are close,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Almost there.’ I feel slightly annoyed.

‘I am thinking about names,’ he says. ‘I am thinking about Simena. Ubar. Helike.’

‘I like those,’ I say.

‘How are your designs going?’

I have done nothing for days. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I am still working on the bike paths. I can get a full plan to you later this week.’

‘Take your time,’ he says, ‘I want everything to be perfect.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Also, we have the go-ahead for another industrial zone in the north-west.’

‘Another one?’

‘Another one.’

It will need workers, transport, retail zones, utilities. I sweep the chocolate bar wrappers from my desk and unroll a new sheet of paper. I begin to suspect that Mr Wang wants the city to stay empty. That we both do. With this thought I feel a shudder in my spine. I know I am going to be here forever. There is no function to this work except its destiny of growth, no purpose to my being here except as a prisoner.

After staring at the fresh sheet for a while, I ring downstairs to the concierge. There is a wave of static on the line and then a voice says, ‘Miss Bourne, what would you like?’

‘Listen,’ I say in a low, urgent voice, ‘what was here before?’

There is silence on the end of the line. Then a hushing sound, tinny and close. A machine.

‘No past,’ she says. ‘Only future.’

I think about this for a moment. I lift the phone over my head to stretch my arm, then return it to my ear. When I return it the splashing static sound has cleared.

‘Can I get a massage?’ I say.

‘Certainly.’

I scrunch up the blank sheet and reach for the remote control.

Extra time

Graham’s house gets dark early.
Thick trees shade its western edge. They are the neighbour’s trees, but they offer no protection from the neighbours. In the afternoons the children next door erupt like corellas in unruly din. The man who lives there, the father, likes to grind metal. The epic of his usefulness drills holes in Graham’s afternoons.

Graham is not useful. He has no interest in conducting
repairs. He is fine with atrophy.

There are eight digits ticking down in a corner of
Graham’s desktop.

He knocks his can of soft drink against the computer screen, and a little of the liquid spills. He dabs at it with his sleeve. The fabric soaks it up, it will probably stain, but he doesn’t mind. It’s just a little spill, that’s all.

When Graham goes out to get the mail in the afternoon, the glare astonishes him. The light here is unforgiving. Graham considers this, decides that it’s not quite the right way around. The light doesn’t lack forgiveness. What it lacks is contrition.

The grinding noise pauses as the next-door neighbour observes him. Graham intends to say hello to the neighbour, but has left it at vague nods for months and now there is no escaping the awkwardness. Whenever he looks up the man is in a dense cloud of sparks, hidden beneath his safety glasses, intent on grinding. Graham tries to avoid the man’s masked eyes. The man has been complicit in this until now.

As Graham gets his mail out of the box, he glances up at the house across the street. The curtains are closed. They are always closed, though they used to be open. You could see a woman in there, carving stone. Graham knows because he watched her through his front window.

At first Graham thought that she was a sculptor, a stonemason, because she spent her days carefully chipping away at a large rectangle of pinkish marble. She worked in good natural light, in a white room, with little else but the chair, the block, and a bench. Her tools were manual, and she straddled the block between her strong thighs, bracing the stone against her body. It all looked like some kind of artistry.

For a time he also thought she lived alone. Over many months he watched the carving stone shrink into nothing. Then the boyfriend appeared.

The boyfriend came into the room and stood behind the woman, holding her shoulders as though she would float away without his weight on her.
They both gazed blankly into the street.
There was nothing left of the marble.
Although it was dark inside his house, Graham let his curtains fall closed.

The next day, the house across the street had its curtains closed too.

No one comes or goes from these houses much, but that is not unusual. No one here goes to work any more. They don’t have to because of the accident.

Six years and two hundred and twelve days ago, there was a spill.

For the first two of those six years, the town doubled in size. The lawyers, politicians, scientists and disaster tourists kept them all busy.
The hotels employed many of the recently unemployed, and the media attention distracted the rest.

The class action settlement gave the residents plenty to live on for the rest of their significantly shortened lives. The company promised sustained infrastructure in its wake, free rent
ad mortem
, discount fuel and food and water, cheap broadband, all the doctors money could buy.

Despite the conditions, many chose to take the money and go. In the week of the court settlement, the sudden bloating of the town happened in reverse: a regurgitation that ejected bile and stomach lining and lawyers along with the sick. Some chose to live elsewhere, closer to family. Some left because they could not bear to remember. When settled in new places, these people became evasive about their previous home. Some even changed their names.

The company has also changed its name to escape the stigma, changed it three times with the various mergers. It now has a website entirely devoted to its good corporate citizenship. It doesn’t hide from the disaster – it compassionately responds to it. On the website there are pictures of the smiling remainder of the town, enjoying the infrastructure the company left behind: an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, a bar with a tropical motif. Lifestyle, the website says, in aquamarine italics.

Many stayed. Aside from the proffered lifestyle, it might have been curiosity that kept them there, sipping their non-toxic piña coladas in air-conditioned comfort. Curiosity or simply inertia. For Graham, it was a visual problem. When he tried to imagine his life elsewhere, his mind became a fog, as though he had cataracts of the future.

In the unrepentant glare of afternoon he loiters at the letterbox, fingering his fortnightly cheque. In the early days, committee-forming, hopeful types opted for collective investment of the compensation money. Graham was never very hopeful, but neither was he inclined to administration. He gets his dividend and asks no questions.

Graham stands a moment longer at the mailbox, beaten down by the harsh light, and waits for the stun to work its way out of him. He glances across the road, but the woman hasn’t reappeared. He wonders if she’s left town. A pity – he wanted to ask her about a tombstone.

He turns to go back to the house, and the grinding stops again. The neighbour pulls his safety goggles off, puts them on the bench in front of him. He wipes sweat from his face and looks at Graham. For the first time, he opens his mouth. He speaks as though there has never been any awkwardness, as though they have always had these little talks. He says,

‘Got your cheque then?’

‘Yes,’ Graham says, and rests the weightless object in one hand. There is a peeled silence. Feeling the discomfort settle on his collarbone like fallout, Graham forms a question.

‘What are you grinding there?’

The man looks blankly at him for a while, then describes a small arc with his left hand. He uses the angle grinder to amplify his gesture, like some bionic deaf-mute, Graham thinks, but he offers no interpretation.

Between them, steel lies bent in a set of angles. A frame of some kind the man is constructing, or dismantling.

‘For the kids,’ Graham says, taking a punt. The man nods, and lifts the safety goggles from the bench, only to heft them in his hand, balancing the grinder. To Graham it seems fundamental that he equalise these mismatched objects. It would not be out of place if the neighbour were to conduct an illustrative experiment, like Julius Sumner Miller.

But he only says, ‘A man has to work.’

Graham nods sagely, although the maxim has never resonated with him. He’s comfortable, his needs are satisfied. At this point in his life, labour seems superfluous, even self-indulgent.

After the plant closed, Graham found he enjoyed the idleness. He spent a lot of time on the internet, mainly as a voyeur on social-networking sites. He watched a lot of football. He went to the local film nights and the car boot sales and even the bars at first, but has slowly eased himself away from this sort of thing. He thought of these activities as sort of like an insect walking up the inside of a wine glass. At a certain point, no matter what effort you make, the upward slope becomes too steep, and you are better off letting yourself slide into the syrupy dregs of grog.

However, because of your instincts, you can’t just lie at the bottom and allow yourself to atrophy.

Atrophy was a word the doctors used. It was embedded in the advice he read in one of the company pamphlets, back when they thought they might find a fix. ‘Affected
persons may experience atrophy,’ it said. His doctor
explained it was something that happened to your tissue, the flesh wasting away through disuse. In evolution it happened, over time, to the human appendix, and the wings of certain beetles.

The doctor told him that he should try to keep busy. Take his mind off things. Graham nodded, but he wasn’t afraid of his mind. It had already settled on the image of the wine glass. The picture was strangely soothing.

‘Well, have a good time,’ Graham says. He waves his compo envelope at his front door. ‘I better get back to it.’

As he re-enters his house, Graham feels the cool, conditioned air cling to his skin and for once the relief is mixed. The darkness of his house has always appealed to him, but now it seems gloomy. He seeks the glow of the computer.

No one has messaged him in the last six minutes.

At the top of the screen, the countdown blinks gently. It’s formatted like the countdown of a televised football game. Graham designed it himself. It counts down the seconds, the estimated seconds, until his death.

There are still eight digits. It’s in accord with his doctor’s last prognosis. It could be sooner. It could be much later. He might go into extra time.

He does keep busy, though not in the ordinary way. He keeps his mind off his future with thoughts about his past. Graham has no cataracts of the past. There are certain times he sees with perfect clarity, times like his last day at work.

It was a bright day, bright like many days here, and, although he was working inside, behind perfectly good blinds, he chose that day to raise them. He chose that day to gaze out at the well-lit plant. He stunned himself with the glare of the sun, so that when he looked back at his monitor, he didn’t see the warning light at first.

A spill. A little spill.

The system had other safety nets. He was never found culpable, or negligent. He wasn’t even summoned to the inquest.

All his job required of him was to raise the alarm. To press a few keys and alert someone he’d never met, someone who might not even be a person but a mechanism. Instead he watched the light on his screen flashing gently, and it calmed him.

Graham looks at this memory for a short time every day, takes it out and handles it. Every day he tries to find a crack in it, but each time he fails. The surface of his conscience is as smooth and unbroken as a fresh egg, or the inside of a glass.

Outside, the neighbour’s children begin to scream.

An innocent man

Mike leaves his house dressed in a blue coat, white pants, boots, a white sash, and epaulettes, his sword by his side. He hums as tunelessly as a wasp.

His small son watches Mike march down the footpath.

‘Could have been worse,’ says the boy’s mother. ‘Could have been trains.’

‘Can I wear Spiderman?’ the boy says.

‘Spiderman’s in the wash.’

She peeks out into the street as she closes the front
door. A black van passes the edge of her block, like a slow-crawling beetle, and she shakes her head. This used to be a nice neighbourhood.

The General collects Mike at precisely twelve noon, as promised. They drive out to a big park, where they unload their weapons and carry them to a place behind a hill. From here, the city skyline can only be seen through a curtain of trees.

This is Mike’s third battle. The General has been doing this for years. It’s always the Napoleonic Wars, but the battles change.

Today the men separate into groups. The enemy, the Prussian side, hike to the north. The General takes the rest across to the east, leaving Mike and one other man behind some bushes on the way to await orders. The strategy is the same as last week: split up and outflank the other team.

Mike waits with his teammate, a reserved tech-support worker named Alan who is dressed, like him, in a blue coat, and also carries a sword. Alan has told him that he had the sword specially made by a friend. The friend has a forge in his backyard. Last week Alan gave Mike the guy’s number and suggested that Mike might want to upgrade his sword to something ‘a little more period’. Mike got his sword from an army disposal store in the city. It’s not exactly right for the Napoleonic Wars, but Mike thinks he got a pretty good deal.

The General is supposed to come over the next hill and signal them to move on the other team, who are approaching from the north. Without the signal, they can’t act, and they know the Prussians will be ambushing them soon.

The General is late. Mike watches a trail of black ants crawl through the grass at his feet until he can bear it no longer.

‘Couldn’t we just phone him? Something might have happened to them.’

Alan looks at Mike incredulously. ‘Phone him? In 1812? I don’t think so.’

‘Don’t you think rules can be compromised for the sake of . . . of the social good?’ Mike says, dredging up an undergraduate language he thought he had forgotten. It seems like the right way to talk to Alan, who seems like an undergraduate.

‘It would be inauthentic for me to have an opinion about that,’ his companion says. ‘Anarchism hasn’t been invented yet.’

‘Neither have digital watches,’ Mike points out.

His companion pulls his sleeve down.

‘I don’t want to discuss theory with you. I want to defeat Prussia.’

Mike goes quiet and watches the ants. Alan is right. The re-enactment of history is a genetic imperative. It’s just like the social insects. In a swarm, the individual is replaceable, but not meaningless. Meaning is only derived from context. It is existence outside the hive which is meaningless. History has no requirement for the individual, only the swarm. Mike thinks the individual is a recent invention, possibly an anomaly.

Mike was always interested in history, but he dropped out in second year to focus on biology. He works in the lab of a big biochemistry company. His wife suggested that he join the office soccer team, but since Mike doesn’t like sports or his co-workers very much he shrugged off the idea. He found this group on the internet one afternoon when he was supposed to be writing up statistics, and sent them a quick email.

To his surprise, the General got back to him within minutes, attaching an application form and list of equipment, including contact details for suppliers. The General has a day job too. Mike doesn’t know what it is, but he’s sure he executes it with the same abrupt efficiency.

This is why he is so concerned that they have not
received their orders. If something has happened, if the
General has been called to a family emergency, for example, he will have taken the car with him. Mike lives in an outer suburb with bad public transport. He could ask Alan how he got here, but he doesn’t want to risk another lecture on authenticity.

A sharp V of fighter planes zooms overhead, chased by a sonic wake like the compressed buzz of a million bees. It must be a display flight, thinks Mike, patriotic garbage for kids to encourage them to join up when they’re old enough.
Romantic visions of participating in some real historic
moment might have led him here, crouched behind a bush with a tech-support worker on a Saturday afternoon. But when he searches his mind, he finds no desire for a pivotal role. If he had lived in nineteenth-century France he probably would have been a cheesemaker, or the guy who sold cheap swords in a dimly lit second-hand shop. At best a common soldier. Mike is satisfied with this lack of ambition, because it supports his social theory.

There is a short bang, like a car backfiring.

‘Bloody hell,’ Alan says. ‘Would you look at that.’

One of the planes has dropped out of the neat V and begun to dive. It appears that the pilot has lost control; perhaps one of its engines has misfired. The plane stutters and lifts itself back into the sky with the elegance of a blowfly. There are more short, sharp bangs, irregular, like popcorn. Mike is sure he can hear vaudeville gasps and cheers from the other side of the park, and remembers the General.

‘I’m going to go over there myself and see what’s keeping them,’ he tells Alan, who shrugs and does not get up. The planes disappear into the blue haze.

Walking alone in his costume past the deserted children’s playground, Mike feels foolish. He wishes his son was with him, dressed as Spiderman. The boy isn’t able to go out much these days; the alert level has been orange since the attacks, which means it’s not supposed to be safe for women and children any more. But Mike chooses to take the directives lightly.

When he sees the men lying between the trees up ahead, Mike begins to run.

The men lie splayed in their blue coats in the lush grass, like a still from a period film. The bright sunshine gives them hard, dark shadows. The image distracts him for a moment. As Mike picks his way between the trees, he realises he should yell out to them. He can’t remember the General’s real name, but when he reaches him it no longer matters. The man is dead. They are all dead. Red on blue on green.

The stillness is disrupted by the planes, coming back for another pass. Mike throws himself on the ground and rolls against the nearest body. Strangely clear-headed, he pulls the dead man over himself and lies suffocated in the dark of the other man’s coat. The body is still warm.

Gunfire hitting the earth is not vaudeville, not popcorn, it vibrates through the ground and he closes his eyes like his son: if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The planes drone away and he lies there for a long time, until he thinks it is over. He rolls the weight off him, glances at the man’s face. He does not recognise him. Only the General has lists of who these men are, their families, where they live.

He remembers the car keys and crawls over to the
General’s body, feels in his pockets. Gulping against the smell of fresh blood, he finds the keys. He sheds his own coat, and thinks about pulling it over the General’s face, but stops himself. He drops it on the ground and backs away. He has left his sword beside the man he used for cover.

Mike walks as calmly as he is able across the park. They will have the area under surveillance; he must look innocent. He knows he should return to Alan, find the Prussian team, call the police and report the bodies. Instead he makes a beeline for the public toilet, walks inside and checks his face for blood. His shirt is stained, so he removes it, and wishes he could shed the period trousers as well. He washes his hands and face. He glances up at the
cctv
camera, but someone has smashed it.

He walks into the sunshine and feels a sudden urge to return to the dead men, check their pulses. Perhaps it was just an act, perhaps the Prussians got there first and even now the men are standing, wiping tomato sauce from their faces, and discussing next week’s battle.

His mind is still seeking a reasonable explanation as the car park comes into sight. It is full of police cars and the unmarked black vans used by the military police. He can see the distant red jackets of the Prussian team as they are bundled into these vehicles. He wants to cry out, explain to them that this is a game, that no harm was meant, but a sudden suspicion stops him. They don’t just shoot people like this. There must have been more to the group than he thought. Only the innocent have nothing to fear.

So Mike turns back, cuts south through the trees, and runs until he comes to a stormwater drain at the edge of the park. A couple are walking across the other side, pushing a pram, and they look at him with suspicion as he marches along the bank. He glares at them, checking their appearance; they look normal enough. The baby smiles, the moment of mutual suspicion seems ridiculous, and Mike waves at them with a grin. They walk more briskly.

He will follow this drain to the sea, come out somewhere different, an ordinary man on a beach, and call his wife from a payphone. They will gather their things and move to a better neighbourhood, perhaps another state. They will pull the boy out of preschool.

Mike shakes his head. They will stay in their home. He has done nothing wrong. He is an innocent man, and he will be safe.

As Mike walks along the bank of the algae-ridden drain, he thinks about slime mould. Slime mould is the earliest evolution of complex life. It is a cluster of tiny organisms, but it behaves like a single animal. At university he studied the way the micro-organisms communicate with each other, with a biochemical process. He wrote his honours thesis on it. The social insects work the same way, he thinks, and so does the human brain. The re-enactment of history must be a genetic imperative.

This algae is a pollutant. It has taken over the whole river system. But it has no will, no centre, only a sum of hungers. He sees a spill of orange growing under a bridge, the colour of the alert, bright and sucking, and thinks how strange it is that life can take on the appearance of rust.