Hollow Earth

by John Kinsella

  So that’s her, over there? asked Ari as they stood in the supermarket, waiting their turn at the checkout. Though five or six self-checkouts were free, Manfred refused to use them because they put people out of work. Yes, that’s her, moving towards the fruit and veg section. She hasn’t recognised you? No, she won’t. I don’t look the same now. Why, Manfred? Because I am a shadow of my former self.

  95.

  No visible means of support, said the copper. Are you pimping, selling drugs, or hacking? None of the above, officer.

  96.

  They needed money and they hated money. There was selling, but not drugs: blood and semen. Ari and Zest could sell no body fluids, for obvious reasons. There was pornography. There was labouring for Manfred’s old flame. It seemed the most just way to earn. The cleaning products peeled the green of the Hollow Earthers’ skin and made their noses run yellow snot. They had horrific nightmares. Manfred’s old flame didn’t ask for sex or make any overtures and she exploited them all just the same as she did her other workers. She showed no surprise when he came asking for a job, though doubted him when he claimed they’d been in a relationship for three months. Really? she said, I’m sure I don’t know you. They stayed on Boog’s floor and spent all their income on drugs. Boog and Nina loved to hit Ari and Zest up – their blood was bluish when pulled back into the syringe. Trippy, said Nina, who liked to think of herself as looking (and behaving) like Rosanna Arquette in Pulp Fiction. It’s ichor, said Boog, who probably did a classics degree before taking to the street. They needed to be other places. They resorted to other methods. They got where they needed to go.

  97.

  ‘Intruder alert!’ I love the exclamatory and the emphatic and the imperative, said Zest. But what do we do with it once it happens? Hide? Where? The caves of Hollow Earth are relatively shallow and will easily be scanned and penetrated by the technology of the surface. Is this where the Freethinking Fundamentalists lurk? the Inquisitors will demand.

  98.

  Love? No, we do not ‘love’, Manfred, you know that! Yes, we do understand what it means – now, after exposure to many of its forms. And we know there’re more, but we are sure we do not ‘love’, Manfred. We do not love you. We do not love each other. We do not love ourselves. We are lovers who don't love the way you want love to be. We can 'love' something and not love. Maybe you'll never get it.

  99.

  Havoc and hagiography. Zest compared mutual aid, as it manifested in human and animal communities of Hollow Earth, with evolutionary theory and its application on the surface.

  100.

  Nina hung a dress she’d picked up in Denpasar across the doorway and put a red bulb in the ceiling socket. She littered crystals around the shelves and had a pack of tarot cards in the middle of the card table she’d pulled out of the back shed. Amazing, she said, amazing this was never hocked. Not amazing, said Boog, it wouldn’t have got five bucks at the pawn shop, and not getting five bucks means it wouldn’t have got anything. I find that reassuring, said Nina. Send in Zest first, I’m going to read her – I’m going to get to the truth, look into her past, her future, her soul. I want the nitty-gritty. She’s not a her, Nina – why do you keep insisting? She’s a sister, Boog, a sister with a secret. And if I can’t get anything out of her, I’ll work on Ari. Manfred’s a dead loss.

  101.

  Manfred said: My great-great-grandmother was removed from her mother, who’d been abandoned by her father, a sailor. She was removed in Melbourne and fostered out to a family in Ballarat. A mining family. A gold family. Her path was to domestic service. Her path was to the Western Australian goldfields. She was a displaced person they called ‘Australian’. She searched out an entry through a mine shaft in the drylands beyond Kalgoorlie and was lost. She knew there was a better way, a Hollow Earth. Walking the mining town streets, she talked about her father sailing over the equator. The line never ends, she said. Her skirts were filthy with ancient dust. The sea was hundreds and hundreds of miles away. As the shafts beneath the desert filled with water they mocked the reality. Mocked wealth. It’s the sea, she said. The salt, too, will come. We are returning from whence we came. All of these lives in the blasted rock. The gold myths, the gold stories, the gold fever. For decades later, whenever there was an accident in a mine within a hundred-mile radius, they said it was the Lady trying to break through to the Underworld. But she would only have been there as a comfort to those trapped or injured in mines – never wishing to drag them under with her.

  102.

  Drag them under? asked Zest.

  103.

  Nina told Ari that Manfred had inherited a fair bit of cash after his father’s death. Ari said, I knew his mother had died and left him money, but I thought his father had vanished from his life? He had, said Nina, but then he went and carked it wherever and the money – a lot of money – found its way, eventually, to Manfred. He’s probably still sitting on a pile. Ari kinked an eyebrowless eyebrow and said, Nah, I think he’ll have gone through that by now – he looks and sounds too desperate for it to be otherwise. Inside, she prided herself on her mastery of idiom. Language might be easy come, easy go, but she loved its bullshit, nonetheless. Well, said Nina, when he hit paydirt all those years ago, Boog was quick to get in on the act and help him invest it in his veins. She laughed. But Manfred checked himself into rehab after six months and got straight and went off God knows where for ages … really, till you guys surfaced. Ari was increasingly interested in economics, and commerce, and specifically money. She said, tripping one night, It’s a pity we never had heaps of money in this manifestation where money so matters – how much more interesting it would have made us. I mean, it makes for such difference in people, doesn’t it? All that covetousness, all that crime. I mean, it’s a real turn-on, isn’t it? I just like it so we can score, said Nina. Don’t tell Zest I said all that, said Ari when she’d come down. But Nina and Boog thought Ari was totally fucked up from poly(glot/phonous/morphous) drug abuse, and just rearranged her words in their own heads till it made sense. Yeah, they said. Yeah.

  104.

  When Ari had sex with Boog and Nina she made sure both were so off their faces – and that took some doing – that they wouldn’t remember it. Ari was slipping up, but she still had some grip on her identity and the vulnerability of herself and Zest and Hollow Earth. Boog asked why there was so much green discharge in the morning – the sheets ‘all slimy’, but Ari produced a pot of green slime (a sound investment) and said, We just got a bit messy last night, Boog, don’t you remember anything? Yeah, sure, it was great … we’ve gotta do it again! Sorry, said Ari, but we’re off this afternoon – Manfred has got the wanderlust again. Ah, lust! drooled Boog. I love things when they get primal. Ari loved joke shops. And costume shops. Party hire.

  105.

  I will miss watching football matches on Saturday arvo, said Ari. I will miss the red-tailed black cockatoos, said Zest. I will miss the crowds raging at the umpires, said Ari. I will miss the vacant blocks with their hardy plants, said Zest. You have polarised, said Manfred with a worried look.

  106.

  I just heard the third hammer blow from Mahler’s 6th! said Manfred, disturbed. It has reinserted itself, fought its deletion. There are issues of respect involved in this. I’ve never seen you look so worried, said Zest, but Ari got off on his distress.

  107.

  I want to visit some of the houses and temples of religion, said Zest. I am bothered by God, said Ari. They both said to Manfred, in a now rare moment of single-voicedness: You are a wild colonial boy, Manfred, and that’s no compliment – we see now that you actually came to Hollow Earth to plunder us psychically and to take us to the surface as mental specimens. Your mother left you with no choice. It was the first and only time in his existence that Manfred felt like ending himself, because he was so ashamed that they would think this. It shortcircuited his sense of a moral self. He couldn’t see himself that way, and this inability or clarity or whateve
r pulled him through. He needed to throw himself into the volcano to absolve himself, but not as part of a death wish. The volcano meant life.

  108.

  The Robber Baron spirited his followers, his Underworlders, a message of immanence. Spiriting was only just replacing the web in its faux multidimensional version, but HLH was at the cutting edge of it all. The colonisation of the spirit world was the prelude to the conquest of Hollow Earth. Manfred was an old man when he returned to the surface for the second time, and had no idea that unless he opted out, his spirit could be read – legal in all countries other than the micro nation of Kangaroo Island. Ignorance is no defence, noted HLH, as Manfred’s spiritual readings came loud with protest and confusion. HLH’s partner, Fling, was particularly skilled at spiriting, and decorated the incoming effluvia with stunning calligraphic designs. In many ways they were an old-fashioned couple – ‘old-fashioned’ being deployed in the exponentially knowing way all such recycled expressions of the era were. You had to be on your guard in the spiriting world, for nothing was surer than the spirit crowd holding you up for abuse if you betrayed the codes of the zeitgeist. The old colonisations were put in their place by the newest decolonising of digital encodings. Having your product and eating it too. The tasty yum-yum sensation of ectoplasm.

  109.

  How do you simply stumble into a war zone? Manfred asked himself, but loud enough to be heard by Ari and Zest, also huddling behind the embankment, shrapnel fizzing into the soil. The sound of artillery was deafening, but still they picked up his words as a loud, painful irony out of tune with the ecology of the moment. They were surrounded by bloody body parts trailing bits of cloth, like Halloween decorations, but couldn’t put them together mentally to make them into human bodies.

  110.

  Manfred had to collect wood from the shed. He’d been off school for two months with his ‘illness’ – his loneliness his difficulty his ‘anti-social disposition’. Piling the cut limbs into the wheelbarrow, he reflected on the assault on his imagination that had made him ill. You cannot turn a science class into an episode in a fiction, his teacher had said, punching him in the chest. And you do not bring your own semen in to study under the microscope to see if you are fertile yet! And you don’t cover your textbook in doodles of dragons. And you do not destroy the marks book to make everyone equal! He didn’t need to count the pieces of wood in the barrow. He knew, and he remembered the journey of every piece from the pile to the embrace of the rusty metal hollow.

  111.

  The fumes enveloped them and they started to vomit and cough and their eyes burnt. Their bodies convulsing. Manfred knew they were on the diluted end of a gas attack. Poison for all biologies. That’s illegal, he would say later. And Zest would say, Legal and illegal war. That will never translate in Hollow Earth. They will not be looking to the surface for deliverance – they will see it as the flat above whose overflowing toilet is going to spill down through the ceiling and pollute theirs.

  112.

  Before. Before they’d left Fremantle. Again. Before they’d left, Ari had gone groupie, besottedly following the punk revival band Goody Two Shoes from gig to gig, astonished that they paid her no attention whatsoever. I have a right to be noticed, she said, hurling herself around the house – a fixture now that they were all at Nina and Boog’s and she was occupying the big bed in the back sleep-out with Manfred and Zest. One night, the lead singer of the band dropped Ari on the front doorstep and banged on the door, calling Boog out, saying, What the fuck, man? Keep your pets at home! Next day, as they all found each other in the kitchen, Ari’s and Zest’s faces were stained with glitter tears. Boog said, What the fuck! and showed them a hundred photos of Ari topless, breasts odd-angled and recessed-nippled. (The nipples of Hollow Earthers only activate and emerge during lactation, which happens outside the male–female binary; all Hollow Earthers have the capacity to feed nestlings, should they choose to, which Ari never would.) You’re a social media hit, Ari! You are becoming, said Manfred. I am sad, said Zest. And Nina added, So am I. Boog packed a cone for Ari, handed it over, and said, Just because I am not described, my drooping features unravelled and not epitomised, doesn’t mean I’m just a cipher, Ari. I have grey hairs on my chest, I have a hole in my left lung, I have poor hearing in my left ear, and my hair is matted because it doesn’t matter. My body is my testament.

  113.

  Zest studied the pressed flower that had been between the pages of the The Gideons’ Bible she’d taken from the motel. Why would they do that to a flower, and why would they place it in Isaiah? she asked. It has lost dimensions, it has lost the light. She’d really taken to flowers and bees and birds and the Tanakh and the Old Testament and the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Upanishads and and and.

  114.

  Manfred was at Glastonbury, 1995, and the skies were hazy. It is dry, he thought, and Veruca Salt hit the stage. He applied his mental universal translator to ‘Seether’. English defaulted and boiled his skull, as he throbbed with the mass, nimble and frenetic on mushrooms. He screamed to his dead mother and the clouds let loose. For him, it was the eternal sunshine. The crowd roared with laughter. I am Isaac, I have not lost my faith, he cried.

  115.

  When Manfred was starting university his grandfather passed and his grandmother invited her friend Beryl to share the house with her. Beryl had been a family friend for fifty years, and had often stayed over while Manfred was living in the front room and attending the local school. Beryl usually stayed in the sleep-out. Was this how Manfred had told the story to Zest and Ari the first time, down in Hollow Earth, or had he rearranged the details? His face heated with embarrassment that he might have got the facts wrong. But he was convinced he was right. One weekend – he was maybe fourteen (or was it nine?) at the time – his grandfather went down south on a job, and Beryl came over to stay. Grandpa had offered to take Manfred with him, but Manfred had the sulks and didn’t want to leave the garden or his room. Manfred often sulked, unable to penetrate the bunker in the way he wanted. Grandpa left on the Friday afternoon, and Beryl arrived that evening in time for dinner. She helped Grandma with the dishes, and they both sat down to watch a video while Manfred didn’t do his homework but sat in his room doing sketches of the bunker. He had acquired a bottle of sherry for ten dollars from an associate at school, smuggled it into his locker and then home to his room in his schoolbag. Little sips. He didn’t want to lose control, he didn’t want to get caught out, though Beryl knew he ‘nipped’, as she’d confronted him over the ‘stench on his breath’ once when he’d done it before, and then demanded the bottle, which she took to the sleep-out and demolished. Our little secret! she said to Manfred. On the Saturday morning, with a sore head, Manfred scrubbed his teeth and blew his breath into his palm to smell it, then went out into the garden and sat under the lemon tree, staring at the conduit to Hollow Earth. He felt horrendously depressed and no birds went near him, though magpies sharpened territorial beaks on his misery. Then he wandered back inside to make himself some toast. Grandma and Beryl hadn’t shown their heads. The sleep-out was near the kitchen, and when he heard his grandmother call out from behind the door, Mercy, O mercy! he rushed to the door and threw it open, to see his grandmother arched naked over the naked body of Beryl. Grandma just looked up and said, Oh, Manfred, she’s dead, my love is dead. She died in her sleep. But when was it she passed? It certainly wasn’t then because she moved in permanently with Grandma after Grandpa died. No, Manfred had seen Beryl naked and dead then suddenly alive, springing up in the bed and colliding with his Grandma — like an electric shock had run through her. And as soon as she realised she was naked, and that Manfred was standing there, Beryl had screamed and said, Get out of here Manfred! Grandma had looked so lost and bewildered.

  116.

  Manfred was aware his life seemed to stream alongside history, trying hard not to truly intersect with it. I have no social circle, he said to himself. I have no real interests. I h
ave sores on my penis from masturbating. My sheets embarrass me but Grandma says nothing. I keep a journal in which I record what I see in the garden – birds, insects, flowers opening, and impressions of what’s happening below ground.

  117.

  Manfred developed an aversion to overhearing people toileting. Their pissing and flatulence upset his sense of personal intactness – if he could hear them, they could hear him. He toileted in out-of-the-way places, whenever possible. And then in Hollow Earth, he discovered toileting was a public act accruing much social cachet. He warned Ari and Zest that on the surface they must do so in private, though realising they would emit their wastes together and expect him to be part of it, whenever possible. When Zest was arrested for urinating in public, on one of those beloved vacant suburban blocks, Manfred, meeting bail, told the police that Zest was born ‘elsewhere’. They nodded with a kind of prurient disgust. A fine with no recorded conviction. Zest took up urinating in Nina and Boog’s rental back garden – not even stoned would they tolerate the digging of holes and shit-fertilising, even with the covering-up. In Ireland both Zest and Ari – Ari adapting more earnestly to surface ways – bogged in bogs.