by Iain Ryan
The man comes to the driver’s side window. ‘Doctor Bridges?’
‘That’s me. Are you Harlan?’
‘I am. You can park over that way, just take that left-hand path up there into one of the spaces. I’ll take you the rest of the way. There’s parking up at the house but none of it’s covered and they’re predicting hail.’ Harlan points up at a circling green bank of cloud.
My designated parking space is in front of a large aluminium shed about the size of a regular house. A series of roller doors line the shed, facing the drive. I’m waiting by these doors when Harlan arrives on a motorised golf cart.
‘Archie can’t drive anymore but he won’t let us sell the cars,’ he says, motioning to the shed.
‘How many does he have?’
‘Too many. For someone who doesn’t travel far, he’s pretty keen on cars. There’s one for every day of the week and two for Sunday.’ He looks at my banged-up sedan. ‘What’s that? A ninety-eight Corolla? A ninety-nine?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know, one of the groundsmen is due to service our fleet today. I could get him to give yours a look, if you’re interested? We wouldn’t want you breaking down in the rain on the way back.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, yeah. It’ll be fine. It got me out here.’
‘OK then,’ and Harlan revs the golf cart. ‘Hop aboard.’
Up on the hill, the Moder residence is more modern than expected. The talk is that Archibald has lived up on the mountain for years but the house Harlan is driving towards is less than a decade old. It’s a strange building: a three-storey A-frame, long across the roof like a scalene triangle. The walls are a mix of brushed steel and stonework with large eaveless windows. The lights are on inside and, as the cart rounds the building, I can see people in there. A woman stands in the kitchen; another (shorter, in a white tracksuit) vacuums a side room. In the corner of an upstairs bedroom, two men stand at the window, surveying the gardens: one of these men is a doctor – a stethoscope lays draped over his shoulder – the other is much younger, with brown hair, wearing the same tan polo as Harlan.
‘We have a few guests today,’ Harlan says. ‘Thus the early appointment.’ He swings hard on the steering wheel, bringing the cart down a corridor lined with ferns. ‘Here we are.’
I follow him through a door and upstairs. As we arrive at this second floor, he says, ‘Do you need the bathroom?’
I tell him I do. I need to go but, more importantly, I need an unobserved moment to get my dictaphone recording. I’ve brought two with me. One to show Archibald – should he agree to be recorded – the other running on the downlow just in case. I didn’t come all this way to walk away empty handed.
Stepping out of the bathroom, I glance down the hallway, wondering about the doctor and the young man. Is Moder sick?
Harlan reappears. ‘You ready?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
He takes me to a wide-open room with views of the tapering mountainside. In one corner, there’s a plush-looking set of lounges and, reclining on one of them, I can see a silhouetted figure.
‘You OK over there, Archie?’ says Harlan. ‘You want the lights on?’
‘No, no.’
The figure waves a hand.
Come.
Harlan smiles and points a little bow in Archibald’s direction as he backs out.
I don’t feel nervous until I hold my arm out to take Moder’s hand and see that I’m shaking. Seeing Moder up close, I’m flushed with recognition. He’s remarkably well preserved for seventy-odd. Still a thin man but not frail. Still bald but clear skinned and soft-looking. While his face has sagged a little, it’s hard to notice past the dark fixed eyes. The only surprise is the small silver earrings he wears, one in each ear. Other than that, he is still the handsome man of his author portraits. The man, I suddenly remember, my sister planned to marry. Dora’s first crush.
‘Good morning,’ he says. ‘It’s Erma, yes? I hope the drive wasn’t too much for you.’
‘Not at all. This is a beautiful house, Mr Moder. Thanks for inviting me up.’
‘Mr Moder is my father, god forbid. Everyone calls me Archie, dear. Now, sit down, sit. Do you need anything? I have coffee but I can call down for water or tea?’
‘Coffee’s good.’
There is a pot on the table between us. I watch him pour it out. Unlike me, his hands are steady.
‘How long have you lived here, Archie?’
‘Oh a few years now. Yes, a few years.’
We both stare out the window a moment. The mist has turned and rain silently sleets down. In the distance, I can see someone hurriedly pushing a wheelchair along a path by a grove of trees.
‘My neighbour has a clinic up here,’ says Archibald. ‘They use the grounds. My guests find it odd but I’ve grown quite used to it. It’s nice to have people around, even if they are the sick and frail of mind.’
‘And you practised too, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Psychotherapy. I had my own clinic right up until the fifth or sixth book, and even then I still saw the occasional client. A lot of authors dream of going full-time with their writing but I was the other way round. I found it hard to shake off my old life, even when the money became hard to argue with.’
I blurt out, ‘I feel like I’ve so much to talk to you about.’
‘I’m surprised people still care, to be honest. Especially someone such as yourself.’
‘Oh no. I grew up with your books. I loved them. They meant so much to me. I remember when my sister and I found out you were Australian, it was in the paper, we couldn’t believe it. It was such a big deal in our house.’
‘Oh, thank you. It’s been quite a long time now, Erma. Quite a long time, but I still get letters about the books, you know. No one really remembers me as their therapist, and I was a good therapist, but with the books, people still seek me out. It’s very strange to think, ha, well, the books were my career in the end. But then, they were also only a small part of my life on the whole. There was so much more. Family, travel, work, other writing and what have you. Still, I’m very flattered people continue to read me. I was always very proud of whatever success I had with writing. Very proud. It was bloody better than people said it was, back in the day.’
‘Archie, would you mind if I recorded our conversation? I should have already turned this thing on.’
‘Oh, be my guest. The other one did.’
I put the dictaphone on the table. ‘Yes, well—’
‘What happened to her? She was a funny girl. Lovely to look at, but something … something strange about her too.’
‘She died, actually. Suicide. It’s very sad. Didn’t Harlan pass that on? That’s why I’m here. She died without handing over the interview.’
‘Oh, I see. Harlan never tells me anything bad. They coddle me too much, way too much. I’m always telling them that.’
There’s a pause. Moder stirs his coffee.
‘OK. First question. I want to hear how you got started with gamebooks. Did you read the British stuff, or did you come to it from Dungeons & Dragons? How did it start?’
‘My wife,’ Archibald says. ‘My wife was the one. She discovered role-playing. She was the one who put the idea in my head.’ Sadie Moder is dead. She died in the eighties. No one knows how exactly. I don’t have a single photo of her. ‘She liked to play games, Sadie. It was something she inherited from her upbringing. She was quite poor, you know. Famously poor, in fact. A Wilson before she married me. My mother used to describe things as “even too cheap for the Wilsons”, that sort of thing.’
‘And she discovered Dungeons & Dragons? Or was there something earlier than that like Chainmail?’
‘I can’t rightly remember. She liked to dress up. That was part of it. But she was always very interested in fantasy and she loved dragons and Tolkien and that sort of thing. Dungeons too. And monsters, magic. The o
ccult. Always very interested in the dark side of fantasy, my wife. She was a very unusual woman, a wild red-headed beauty. I loved her dearly. We were happy together. We had to work at it, as one does, but my marriage was one of the better ones. Are you married?’
‘Me? God no.’ I force myself to smile. ‘So you wrote the first Zone Mover book for your wife?’
‘That’s right, yes. For her and Rebecca, our daughter.’
‘I didn’t know you had a daughter.’
‘Oh yes. Children are a blessing. Rebecca is gone now too but you’ve met my son.’
‘Harlan?’
‘That’s right. What else is on that list of yours?’
Over the next half-hour, Archibald Moder stares out the window and, almost unprompted, gives me the answers to my first five questions in long steady declarations. He’s obviously ready to talk. Rehearsed even. He tells me about his debut, The Rock Mines of Basida, and the path he took to create the gaming system (a derivation of The Forest of Doom, a first edition mailed over from the UK by an uncle) and how his debut was submitted and edited.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I wrote the early books for young people. They were the people buying the damned things, and besides, I quite like young people. It was only later on, once I’d made my money, that I started writing whatever I pleased.’
‘And when was that? I’ve always thought of The Unknown Warrior as your first book for adults.’
‘That’s where I’d peg it too. That was eighty-seven. A big year.’ He averts his eyes. ‘I lost my wife that year.’
‘How?’
‘She committed suicide, like your friend. It was … it was a terrible business. My wife was quite ill. Mentally ill. No one could save her. No one. I’m sure of that.’
No one knows this.
‘How do you feel about The Unknown Warrior now?’
‘Oh, it has its problems but it’s still a favourite. Probably my overall favourite, if I had to pick. The main character, as you probably know, is my only reappearing creation. I was quite obsessed with the barbarian for a while. I figure you know who I’m talking about. Sero the barbarian? Sero is the only thing that got me through those difficult times. It’s funny to think of someone I made up as a close friend, especially someone so … so vacant. I mean what is there to know about Sero? We don’t even know what gender Sero is, after all.’
‘Did you leave that deliberately open?’
‘Oh yes. Sero doesn’t belong to any of us. Sero is everywhere.’
‘It wasn’t a pitch to female readers?’
‘That too.’
I take a punt. ‘Did your daughter like the character?’
‘I’d lost her too, by then.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘This is life, Erma. People come and people go. That’s the hard part of getting older. You’ve got to live with other people’s choices.’
‘Sorry. What does Sero mean to you?’
He laughs. ‘Have a guess. You should have worked it out by now, you’re the scholar. No, better yet, what does Sero mean to you? Tell me that. Indulge an old man.’
‘Chaos, regret … I move around with it. I can’t pin that character down, even for myself. It’s weird, I’ve been dreaming about Sero lately. Your turn.’
He laughs again. ‘I don’t know. I just wrote the thing. I can tell you this, Sero is where I put my, well, my violence, my anger. For me, that character is the zero, the base level. It’s in all of us, don’t you think? It was certainly in me after what happened with Sadie and Rebecca. To lose one’s daughter, then one’s wife. I wrote those books to contain myself, to capture all of that trouble, to put it some place safe. It all went into Sero. You have to put it some place, Erma. You really have to, if you want to survive.’
We break for morning tea under a rear awning. Wafer biscuits with cut fruit. Harlan appears briefly. Archibald’s next appointment is running late so we have a little more time together. ‘Good,’ says the old man. With Harlan back out of sight, Archibald lights a cigarette and blows the smoke out into the grey rain. He takes a sip from his coffee and says, ‘My GP told me I should quit smoking and that I should quit coffee. I told him, I might quit smoking one day, in my old age.’ He winks at me. ‘But I’ll never give up coffee. I think I’d rather die.’
On the way back upstairs, we pass a closed room on the second floor that emits a soft electronic bleeping. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hangs on the door, and above that there’s a list of emergency phone numbers. Archibald walks past the room without comment but as he moves slowly along I have time enough to hear the gentle wheeze of a respirator inside.
As we drill down into the second half of Archibald’s career, he starts to ask me more questions in return. I get what I need for my book – and it’s more than anyone else before me – but a strange mood settles over the conversation, a refocusing of sorts.
Archibald taps the armrest of his chair and asks nervously, ‘Do you write?’
‘Only textbooks. Boring textbooks.’
‘Pity. All writing takes is a sustained interest. Patience, I guess. You can learn the rest of it. If you’ve written a textbook, you’re all set.’
‘Maybe. I want to ask you about the period after the series ended. Have you written anything since River of Dying?’
‘No, that was the last one. The end of the gold rush. Over the years, I’ve pecked away at things but it never amounted to much.’
‘Was it writer’s block?’ I figure it’s best to get this over with.
Archibald thinks. ‘Not really. Do you have trouble with that?’
‘No. What I do is technical. Would you say you decided to give up writing?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure. Why does one start or finish anything?’
‘Did something happen?’
‘No, no. I just … I suppose I found other things to occupy my time, you see. I got sick of writing the series long before they cancelled it. There are only so many questions you can ask the reader after a time. There are only so many branches you can make. It gets repetitive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As the author of these kinds of things, you’re constantly called upon to create all the scenarios where the reader can choose one thing or another. But there’s not much to it. Right or left. Fight or flight. Go to this place or follow that path. Et cetera, et cetera. That’s the part of it I didn’t want to do anymore. I got sick of providing options.’
‘But they’re not really options, are they? I mean, you’re still in control of the story.’
‘Oh yes, absolutely. I guess I got tired of pretending. Isn’t that odd. I’ve never told a woman that before.’
I don’t know what he means by this.
‘I didn’t tell the other girl any of this,’ he adds, as if this explains things. ‘Her name was Jenny, yes?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I think she was more interested in herself than anything I had to say. Which is fair enough, I guess. Young people can be like that.’
‘I … ahhh—’
‘You know, she told me some things about you. I should say she was more interested in you than herself. I should clarify that. Do you want to know the real reason I agreed to sit down with you this morning?’
‘Uhm, sure.’
‘She told me you slept with her boyfriend. All her boyfriends in fact, one after the other. She told me that. Isn’t that an odd thing to tell someone like me, a stranger? She told me a lot of things, actually. She had a lot of … well …’
‘What?’
‘Anger.’
‘And she told you this?’
‘She told Andrew the whole story. Or maybe it was one of the others. She stayed for a couple of days. Did you know that? Oh, I thought she might have said.’
I don’t know who Andrew is but I’m flustered by all this. I blurt out, ‘What did she say about me exactly?’
‘She told me that
every time she met someone, her boss ended up hitting on them. That you were borderline pathological—’
‘That’s not—’
‘She painted you as some sort of villainess. She said you threatened her, to make her come up here. Roughed her up. I was intrigued to meet this so-called monster, I have to admit.’
‘Look, Archie, that’s a load of nonsense. Jenny was … She had a lot of problems.’
‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. It was only when I saw you on the television that I even remembered all this. It was on the news the other week. You and your friends holding up those pictures of all those missing girls from the university. Terrible business that. But I saw your name on the screen and I thought to myself, I know that girl, she doesn’t look anything like a monster to me.’
‘I’m sorry you had to deal with Jenny bothering you. I really am.’
‘It’s fine. I think coming up here did her a lot of good in the end. She needed a break, I guess.’
‘How many people live here? I saw a younger guy on the way in. For some reason, I thought he might be a grandson or a nephew or something.’
‘No that’s probably Andrew. He’s a friend of Harlan’s. He’s been living here of late. Harlan gets lonely from time to time. He likes to have people around more than I do, which is fair enough. He was a student too, you know.’
Andrew.
Andrew and Harlan.
There’s something there, right back in the outer reaches of my mind.
Archibald leans forward. ‘Jenny told me you have a sister in Melbourne?’
‘What? Ah, yeah. Just the one. She’s younger. Dora.’
‘How much younger?’
‘Oh, not even a year. We’re like twins.’
‘Twins?’
‘Virtually. Less than a year apart. It’s a weird situation.’
‘How so?’
I don’t know where to take this. I shrug.
‘Are you close to your parents?’ he says.
