by Ryn Shell
Linton discovered that the patients did not use real names, although he easily recognised most of the faces. If you had to undergo dozens of painful skin grafts, with the restriction of not walking for the six weeks that followed each of those until the graft took, then you might as well do it while playing chess.
His inconsistent opponent was one of the leading comedians in the country, a man who publicly expressed gaiety while his private life was one of dark moods and booze. He played chess with a shot glass in one hand. The glass was filled with Black Douglas Scotch regularly on the hour, every hour, by his special nurse.
“There are hospitals, and then there are hospitals.” Gaiety man moved the white pawn from in front of his bishop forward two squares.
Linton moved a black pawn forward to clear the way for his queen to move diagonally.
The comedian pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and moved the white pawn from in front of his knight two squares forward.
“I don’t understand what I’m doing in such a place.” Linton slid his queen diagonally to the edge of the board where it was lined up diagonally with Gaiety man’s king, and with no piece to cover the king or attack the queen. “Checkmate.”
While the two years in skin graft treatment didn’t exactly speed by, it was bearable due to the social club atmosphere, and massive doses of the magic morphine. Then in the following year the morphine became the monster, and Linton discovered he had much in common, after all, with other guests in residence in the establishment.
As with others who recover from the trauma of burns, the final process included withdrawal from a therapeutic drug addiction. Having been required to keep parts of his body or limbs relatively motionless while skin grafts took, Linton found that once his skin had healed over, he needed to learn to walk again.
The insurance payout on his truck had been generous, and Linton wanted to understand the country more in preparation for resuming truck driving, so he completed several correspondence study units on geology.
When he thought of the photo of his brother’s wife and the boy, or recalled her voice, his head hurt. An inner voice told him he had been intimate with his brother’s wife, and that troubled him. In the private clinic Linton became a high-functioning alcoholic.
Exactly three years after arriving, Linton picked up the rock he’d used as a doorstop and placed it in the brown paper bag with his few belongings and prepared to be discharged.
He shunned the idea of finding a residence and took possession of a beautiful bright burgundy twenty-four–wheeler truck and a Malvern Star bicycle. The bicycle he had sent by a courier to the Esperance Hospital, addressed to the young man who had been the paperboy in 1979.
Linton stashed the chunk of Skylab on the dashboard and covered it with maps of where he planned to go. He blocked out all the confusion of limited memory of the past. Filling the new water bags at a truck service centre, he bypassed the coffee sweets and the stimulants marketed legally as diet pills. He bought a bag of nuts to nibble on during the trip, and he decided never to touch another drop of Scotch—and he didn’t. He planned to not take any bad relics of the past with him into the future.

Six years later.
For Christmas, 1988, Rose gave Carl, Helen and herself a gold-paper-wrapped parcel. “These are with love from your dad.”
They opened them in silence. The birthday and Christmas gift said to be from their dad (which were bought and gifted from their mother without his input) had always been treasured.
Each parcel contained a leather locked satchel and a key. Helen cried out with joy when she unlocked hers and drew out a matching leather-bound journal and a gold-tone ballpoint pen and pencil set.
“It is for writing to your dad,” Rose said.
“I absolutely love it.” Helen flung her arms around her mother and hugged her.
Carl scowled and pushed his satchel aside unopened. “Why would I want to write to Dad? He never writes to me.”
“That is exactly how you should start the journal, Carl.” Rose took her satchel to the desk in front of the window. “Ask your dad that.” She set the satchel beside the vase of sunflowers. “You know, I think I’ll paint that.”
“You can stick mine on the desk and paint it too. I’m not writing to Dad.”
Helen picked up her pen. “I am,” she said. “I’m not a grumble-bum like you.”
Carl looked over Helen’s shoulder. “What are you writing?” He gave her a brotherly hug.
She shut the book. “Not telling.” She hugged him back. “Secrets.”
“That is what it’s for, Carl.” Rose said. She sat down at the desk and opened her journal to the first blank page. “It is for the secrets you want to share with your dad. It’s for those questions you have for him that only he can answer. If you do it and are open in your mind, I know that if he can send you the answers, he will.”
“You think he’s sort of like an angel, Mum?” Helen asked.
“No. He’s alive, or I would know it.” Rose touched Helen’s shoulder and smiled.
Helen drew a smiling face on the first page.
“I’m hoping that if you all write to him, he’ll pick up our thought waves.” Rose gazed through the window, across the garden, imagining Linton there. “Sort of like us all sending him radio wave signals and wanting him to be the receiver and pick up our messages.”
“You’re nuts, Mum.” Carl put the journal on the desk. His voice croaked. “I don’t want it.”
“It will be in here when you want it.” Rose opened the bottom drawer of her desk and placed the gift it on top of stationery.
Later that night, Carl snuck out of his sister Helen’s bedroom after reading a few pages of her journal. He took his satchel from the bottom drawer of his mum’s desk. Having thought about it all evening, Carl’s head was crammed full of things he wanted to talk about with his dad.

Carl’s Journal.
We haven’t heard from you for nine and a half years, not since that night when you and Uncle Trevor saw the space junk burning up. Some think that Mum’s gone a little crazy. I guess her telling anyone who will listen that a spaceship took her husband hasn’t helped, especially if her real husband-by-law, your brother Trevor, stands beside her.
People are beginning to accept Uncle Trevor being in a committed relationship with Alvin, but they still find it hard to accept that when Mum speaks of her husband, she does not mean him. It’s left to me and my sister Helen to explain that Mum is not saying that little green men from another planet came and whisked our dad away. We don’t know what happened to you. Mum is convinced that someone from the government or NASA does.
The newspapers from the night of your and Uncle Trevor’s truck accident gave reports of a sonic boom and lights as the space junk came down. Uncle Trevor said the two of you witnessed it. He cannot remember much about it.
I read that NASA’s public affairs assured the world that the space junk contained no radioactive material. I hope that was true.
It was when Mum combed all the newspapers, searching for news from the time when you disappeared, that she put her interpretation on things. Sure, she saw things a little distortedly, what with being pregnant and you going missing. She also had the business to run and Uncle Trevor returning home injured about when Helen was born.
Mum believes there was a cover-up of the damage that was done by Skylab because there was no objection from anyone in Australia, other than a fine sent to the United States for four hundred dollars for littering. That was treated as a joke by the United States government, and they have not paid the fine.
NASA claims that Esperance, in Western Australia, where up to seventeen pieces of space junk rained down on one house, was just a tiny remote town, when in reality it is a major port town for the region. That irks me. Mum’s right that NASA played that down. NASA’s reports, even today, call Esperance a remote tiny town—as if it were of no significance. I bet that resident
s of Esperance, whose homes were pelted with up to seventeen pieces of space debris, might disagree.
Much was made of the story of how seventeen-year-old Stan Thornton scooped pieces of Skylab off the roof of his Esperance home and profited to the tune of ten thousand dollars, no doubt with the assistance of officials seeking to minimise any bad publicity by highlighting a great public relations success story.
Stan caught a flight to San Francisco and collected the prize for the first piece of Skylab delivered to the San Francisco Examiner’s office within seventy-two hours of the crash—all without a visa to the United States. He certainly got outside assistance. It would have been cool if you could have done that.
Newspaper clippings Mum has kept say that people who announced they had found bits of Skylab had the pieces taken from them as property of the United States. They said that Western Australians stopped reporting their finds and kept their souvenirs quiet. Uncle Trevor believes that you might be one of them. Does that have anything to do with you going missing? We cannot understand. I want to blame someone. I get mad with you sometimes and I snap at mum too.
I guess those charged with the unenviable job of managing the Skylab descent path looked at the expansive wheat fields of Western Australia and the limestone plain you and Uncle Trevor drove across and saw it as sparsely populated—a perfect place to dump their litter. What’s a sonic boom or two between friends?
Well, you get the idea—what Mum’s been through. She’d have had to be nuts to think sanely and not be bitter. She writes letters to the Esperance and Perth Hospitals, to newspapers, the police, politicians, and space officials, demanding answers and asking for assistance to find you. Mum’s never given up hope.
15
Rose’s journal entry.
I often ponder over the days prior to your leaving. It will be a decade next winter. Just before you disappeared, the United States government gave up on spending a small fortune every day keeping a malfunctioning and obsolete spacecraft in orbit. This would appear, at first, to have nothing to do with us here in Australia. Your dad gave you his truck, and you and Trevor accepted a freight contract.
You and I being apart, even temporarily, wasn’t what we wanted. But the truck driving was good paying work and a means to our goals. We weren’t thinking about outer space; we just wanted to be out of debt and able to build our own house.
Our children have grown since I last saw you. Helen has almost reached puberty. A young woman, imagine that. Carl is now a nineteen-year-old young man and will attend his university graduation soon.
I had six precious years with you. Aside from those I’ve brought our children up on my own. Do you plan to leave me to muddle up and down the roller-coaster ride of Helen’s hormone-hostage teen years with me as the sole supporting parent? I need you, Linton. Your brother has his partner, Alvin, and I need more than a pair of housemates and children for companionship.
I’ve tried to stay as I was in my twenties. It’s as if the world moved on around me, and I froze at the time when I realised that you were not coming home. I still dress and wear my hair in the same decade-old style. Heck, I force my mature body into the same girlish jeans. I try to stay the same as you last saw me so that when you walk in that door, looking the same, we can go forward and pretend the gap between never happened.
Heaven help you, Linton, if you have aged and moved on past me when I find you. I’ll not be able to ignore the desertion if I see the years we have been apart when I search your face for answers. Yes, I know—I should have had a few more therapy sessions with my doctor.
Doctor Marinovich said that in a year’s time, I could have you legally declared dead. Sometimes, I just hate that beast of a man.
What I’ve never understood is why you left us. I made a half-hearted effort to go back into therapy. Then I decided that being screwed up suited me just fine. I function at my best that way. Nutcases make things happen. It’s only insanity if your issues prevent you from functioning.
That fool psychiatrist told me that I am at my sexual peak at forty, and I should be in a relationship before my hormones decline. Idiot! I am in a relationship. I’m in love with a memory of a fool ass of a husband, who others believe took off because of mounting debt and responsibility.
The quack I sought guidance from told me that, “Unsophisticated men with a rural background often hide the evidence of psychosis from those they love.”
“Bullshit.” I paid Marinovich’s outrageous fee and cancelled further appointments.
He cautioned me that I would carry the cost of my disbelief, anger and grief forever if I did not continue with his counselling.
“Well, bull to that too,” I retorted. “You can find some other sucker to pay for your exclusive country club membership.”
Doctor Marinovich gave me one of his bore-into-you gazes to halt what I am sure he viewed as an expensive eight-course-menu meal ticket, me, from daring to leave before booking in for another financial fleecing.
He said, “You need to work through that anger burden with me or else…”
“You need to work through your God complex,” I snapped. “I’ve more positive things to do with my time and what little money I have than keep seeing you,” I told him. I also have better ways to channel my frustrations than by talking to a shrink. And that’s why I’m mounting my own search for you, Linton.
Look out! Carl is old enough to drive and share the adult responsibilities with me, and I can home school Helen as we travel. As soon as Carl’s final exam results come through, the kids and I are coming to find you. There will be hell to pay if you haven’t got a darn good excuse for deserting us.
16
Slipping back to be with Linton years earlier was a large part of every day that Rose lived. She had moments when she managed to keep her mind in the present, some of the time, and got better at it after taking up painting again at the advice of a friend. She tried the recovering alcoholics’ approach of living in the moment, one day at a time.
As with many children of parents with dependencies or mental illness, Rose’s children formed a protective buffer for her.
“You are doing a fantastic job, Mum,” Carl and Helen would tell her when she lived a full day in the present with them. She was living more in the present because her mind was being taken over by her newest Linton-related obsession.
She planned a search effort for Linton, one that would take Carl and Helen and her through central and outback Australia to trace Linton’s journey over the Nullarbor and along the east and west coasts.
While nine-year-old Helen slept, Rose involved nineteen-year-old Carl, Trevor and Alvin in the “find Linton and bring him home again” plan. The background music matched Rose’s shirt and attitude—one decade old.
Carl flopped in an easy chair. “We need to learn more sophisticated ways to search for Dad,” he said.
“Not all missing persons want to be found,” Alvin cautioned. “Don’t let the search for Linton take over your life.”
Trevor grimaced. “Too late for that advice.”
“Mum,” Carl said softly, “we shouldn’t allow our wanting to see Dad disrupt Helen’s schooling and friendships.”
“I’ve got it all worked out,” Rose said. “I’m going to use my marketing experience and art to get us into the craft shows in the big towns, and then we’ll pick up the show run around the country. Helen can play with the other show exhibitors’ children, learn so much about nature first-hand, and I can teach her all she needs to know at her age.”
Carl needed to say it too. “Maybe Dad does not want to be found.”
“Maybe,” Rose agreed. “But don’t you want to know for sure?”
Carl looked to where his hands clasped together, interlocking, twisting, uneasy in his lap. He was scared to find out if his dad wanted to know him or not.
“It’s the not knowing what happened to him that I can’t live with. Can you see that?” Her piercing eyes demanded an affirmative answer.
/> “I understand, Mum.” Carl met her gaze. “I stay awake at night wondering about him. I’d be doing better at school, I’m sure of it, if I just knew—”
“Your face—” Rose swallowed. “If you see me staring at you sometimes—”
“I do.” Carl winced. It makes me feel a bit awkward. I wish you didn’t.”
“I shouldn’t and I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“Yeah, I know. Everyone says I look like Dad. Well, I don’t think so. I want to go and find him, just so you’ll stop staring at me when you don’t think I’ll notice.” Carl laughed. His eyes twinkled in good humour.
Rose touched Carl’s knee and gently squeezed it. “I know this hurts you.”
Alvin grimaced as he tossed a salad. “Do you even want to know him after he deserted you with a young child and one on the way?” He sniffed. “It’s ready.”
Glumly nodding his head, Trevor removed a pizza from the wood oven.
“Yum.” Carl exclaimed as the air flooded with savoury aromas. He stood, hurried to the sideboard to grab and hand out plates. Trevor and Alvin passed around the pizza and salad bowl. Everyone helped themselves to generous servings.
“Well, I can discover the answers we need by finding Linton.” Rose twisted her pizza to stop the mozzarella cheese from dripping. “I’ll not get those answers from Doctor Marinovich’s therapy sessions. The only way I can look forward to my future is to find Linton and reassess from there where we all stand.” She turned, seeking Carl’s approval.
“Let’s do it, Mum.”
Rose coughed, and tears sprung to her eyes. She put her pizza slice down. “We have been going about our search for Linton the wrong way. We’ve relied on other people too much, and they don’t know Linton as we did.” She swallowed hard to dislodge the last mouthful. Her throat had gone dry as she’d caught a mental vision of Linton up in the tractor cabin. The smell of olives and anchovies were replaced in her mind by the distinctive aroma of sunshine-warmed wheat. “What are we missing?” Rose asked.
