Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  Ivy wanted an answer.

  Coming down the ladder, Sam feels her weight distributed across her limbs. She sees herself from below, an insect. Hand over rail, foot down, the body follows. Her head’s tenderness is planetary, the hood encloses it. The round steel bars press into the soles of her sneakers, and her hands are numb and rusted. She goes through the actions laid out in front of her. All motion is a kind of falling.

  As she approaches the ground, its details begin to loom. It is the same as before, and it isn’t. There’s no fog. There’s no-one waiting. The grasses fizz a little, and they shimmer, but that’s just in her eyes, or the back of her brain. Whatever faulty circuitry has made her. She’s only electronics, chemistry. A bundle of meat and nerves.

  Her knee buckles when a foot hits cement, under the last rung of the ladder. Safe, but her legs nearly fold against the ground. Sea legs. The cement doesn’t move, but it feels unstable.

  She glances at the Big Thing. The cracked eye stares from its setting, expressionless, level with hers. It hasn’t changed, but something has. She takes a step towards the edge.

  And there’s Ned, waiting where he was supposed to. She blinks. He’s older, different, but it’s him, kind-faced and a little idiotic, his fingers pressed against the edge of the slab, a decent suit on, the yellow shirt.

  ‘No,’ she says. She steps back, and her hood falls against her neck. Her hair is dripping, stuck to her face with sweat and water. There’s the water; it was never rain.

  It can’t be so arranged. Her eyes scan the barn, searching in the gravel. There’s no-one there. An open door, an empty room. Let it be empty.

  He lifts his hands from the cement and moves to help her. She ignores the offering, steps down steadily without assistance. She knows how this goes, of course. How it always goes.

  Or if not always, at least this time.

  Because it must be, it has to be, everything in place. The infinite glistens in the minute.

  She opens her mouth and tastes the air. It is untainted. She knows what’s coming.

  After this, there is a pause,

  46

  there will be a hesitation,

  47

  and then everything will move too fast. Time will seem to dissolve around her. She will be aware, in the hypersensitivity of the after-ache, of the shapes her lips are making. Of what they might look like from a distance, the two of them running. Of the damp hair plastered to her forehead in a crosshatch, and the white chalk curling its tentacles through the bars of the gate. There will be no time.

  Sam will feel the second tremor rising through the cement beneath her sneakers. It will crack and shatter. An arm will fall from the Thing’s patched periphery and smash. She will look over her shoulder at the puff of white dust it expels like a tribute.

  She will bear her own weight. She will not let him take an ounce of it. Her voice will not be her own. But she will almost hear it again when she swears.

  Ned will reach for her. ‘Come on,’ he’ll say. He’ll look kinder than she remembers him. More himself. But he won’t be himself. He’ll be someone else, someone she has never met. A man with a whole new past he will go on to explain in time, unless there isn’t time.

  ‘Don’t breathe,’ he will say. He will lean into her. Sam won’t be able to not breathe. She will inhale, taste ash and asphalt, won’t let go. There will be a sound like the earth belching, and she’ll hear it. This will all be happening.

  The ground will settle, she will walk straight. She will not be able to stop herself from feeling afraid. All the time in the world breaks down into this sickness. An infinity of wrong decisions, particulate in air. One million tiny, subatomic mistranslations.

  No choices. Only salvage, and excuse.

  She will keep her mouth shut and follow.

  The earth will rumble out its indigestion, burp what it’s been forced to swallow. All that compression, all that waste. Sam will taste something sour in her throat before she remembers she is not supposed to be breathing. All the things she should have said will inflate in her mouth, and they will refuse to disperse into the atmosphere. She will live on what remains, the oxygen left in her lungs. Her eyes will fizz, her mouth will burn. She won’t be able to hold her breath forever. Soon she won’t be able to see the hand in front of her face. But she will keep going forward. One foot in front of the next. What else is there?

  Everything will go white. Everything always has. It will appear, like it always does, to be ending. She will feel something in front of her in the fog. Her hand against warm metal or warm glass. The glass will move, and Ned will push her. He won’t waste his breath.

  They will drag each other into the crawl space of the back seat. Ned will try to fit himself against the door, far away from her. She will take his shoulder in her fist. He will be breathing, and he will find her eyes and nod; she will inhale with a gasp.

  ‘How much time,’ she will croak. Heart hammering. Lungs like water.

  ‘A few minutes,’ he will answer, in a near whisper. He will pull at the orange box that flashes a red light against his hip.

  There will be so much of it. The whole earth will disappear. It will be hard to know if there will still be anything left afterwards, if they will live. She can only see so far, only so close, this interior.

  ‘Who are you?’ she will ask.

  ‘Not now,’ he will say.

  ‘If this –’ she will begin, but he will shake his head.

  ‘There’s time. This is only a warning.’

  She won’t remember this, not until afterwards. The upholstery of his car will smell like decaying plastic. She will lean her face into its artificial skin, breathe its leaking hydrocarbons, and they will smell like home, like childhood, life. The young are plastic, she will hear. She won’t know when. Only that everything breaks down at last, even this.

  He will rattle the orange box on his belt loop. Its numbers will flicker up, then down. The red light will slow, and turn orange, then green, blinking fast; then it will slow some more. There will be daylight again, and an outside.

  ‘It’s safe to go out now,’ he will say, ‘but wear this.’ He will hand her a flimsy paper mask.

  ‘Safe,’ she will say, letting it fall from her hand. The word will seem as empty, as fragile, as a soap bubble. She will pour her body from the car and crawl out onto the asphalt. She will breathe deeply, in spite of him. She will not hesitate.

  Outside the sky will be as huge, as indifferent, as pale and damaged, as patient as an ocean. She will crawl over the asphalt towards the body on the road. White dust will cover the body in the thinnest sheet, like canned snow.

  Sam’s hands will reach. These hands will be too large, too far apart, clumsy and too slow. It will be too late. Too late long ago.

  But she will feel the flaking paint of the barn against these hands again, feel the gravel press into her toes. She will feel the back of her pyjamas hanging limp against her heels, and the pull of time’s spring tide, dragging her back into its water. She will feel it turning, and know that none of it has yet begun.

  For her, this won’t be happening at all.

  Time turns like soil, not wheels, soil, not water, soil.

  It will pass; all of it is passing.

  Sam will touch the blonde hair. She will see white dust on the eyelashes. Her mother’s face covered in the stuff. It will look so clean.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she will say.

  A hand will reach and touch her back, and she will twist away from it. She will crouch over Ivy, her own hair falling like a black curtain over the white. She will find her pulse.

  ‘There’s still time,’ she will say. She will breathe her breath into another body.

  The white dust will fall from Ivy’s cheek, her shifting eyelids. It will shift beneath breezes, over grasses, against the street. The ground will shrug off its sedi
ment.

  ‘What is this stuff?’

  ‘Deterrence,’ he will say. He will touch the machine at his hip. He will say, ‘Look.’ He will say, ‘This is all necessary.’ He will say, ‘I can explain.’

  He won’t have to explain a thing. Because the sun will flicker and die. Sam will turn her head, look up at the sky, and the sky will spell it out for her in black and white.

  Up there, in that patient permanence, a strange oracle will appear. Sam will touch her finger to her temple just to feel the blood there. Because at first it will seem like a cloud, and then like a drone. And then there will be birds again, a miracle of birds returning.

  Thousands of crows will fill the air. Wheeling. And they will make the sign of deliverance.

  ‘You’ll work for us,’ he’ll say, in certainty.

  Sam will blink at the bright light between the dark. Not a word, not a promise, but a brand.

  ‘My headache’s gone,’ she will tell it, her eyes wide open.

  1

  That is how the loop will close. But even if it must, none of it has happened yet.

  She faces the barn now, eyes searching for herself, for half her life rewinding. She won’t have long. Somewhere along the base of that blue wall, there are clean heels, the curved hem of pyjamas. Gravel against skin.

  ‘Sam!’ she calls, her voice hoarse and loud in her ears. Sam, now, she has time. Acres and acres of it. Only she doesn’t know. She stumbles over the field, searching, swearing.

  She has to start somewhere.

  Her stomach turns, nausea returning. It rushes away from her like floodwater, and she raises her voice. It was always the same mistake, surrender. The past is not so irretrievable.

  ‘Sam!’ she calls again, and the young man beside her has stopped, his mouth hangs open.

  He reaches for an elbow, whispers: ‘We don’t have time.’

  ‘Don’t fuck this up, Sam!’ Her voice cracks. Then everything does. The fabric of years, the stitch of minutes, comes apart in her hands. The sky crackles with an eerie light. The whole weak joke of order is unravelling.

  ‘Sam!’ The fingers of fog twist through the bars again, and her own hands remain as empty as they always have been. She has already turned towards this gate, but she remembers now to turn again. The universe spills out around her, a jumble of infinite possible mistakes. Infinite possible. Infinite.

  Laughter comes unbidden, like a gas bubbling up through water.

  Sam won’t hear a thing.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The epigraph, reported as the Pythia’s last statement to the Roman Emperor Julian’s emissary Oribasius, is probably apocryphal; this translation is taken from Joseph Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978.

  The writing of Dyschronia was supported by a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and another from Arts SA, particularly galvanising in years where public funding for the arts was under threat. I am grateful to these institutions and the people who support them. A residency at Bundanon in 2012 was pivotal in finding this novel’s shape, and I thank the Bundanon Trust for their generosity.

  Thanks to Ali Alizadeh, Alice Grundy, Alex Kelly, and Matthew Lamb for your various encouragements and well-timed interventions. Thanks to Jacinda Woodhead and all at Overland journal. Thanks also to Geordie Williamson and Mathilda Imlah at Picador for lifting this creature out of the sea.

  And thanks to Hannah May Caspar – for Ferris wheels, and everything else.

  About Jennifer Mills

  Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). In 2012 Mills was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and in 2014 she received the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. She is currently the fiction editor at Overland. Mills lives in South Australia.

  Also by Jennifer Mills

  Gone

  The Diamond Anchor

  The Rest is Weight

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

  First published 2018 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Jennifer Mills 2018

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760558604

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group

  Epigraph taken from The Delphi Oracle: Its Responses and Operations with a Catalogue of Responses, by Joseph Fontenrose, © 1978 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.

  Used by permission.

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