Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Tessa Kum

  I.

  Forty-four seconds ago, I heard a knock at the door.

  Forty-two seconds ago, I considered ignoring it.

  Twenty-seven seconds ago, I answered it.

  “Tessa Kum?”

  Here we go.

  Again.

  _NOTICE OF RELOCATION_

  Dear Ms. T. Kum (CID# 19800806-F787-A/C2/M3-2009),

  Re: the Revised and Updated Collective Unconscious Research and Privacy Act (2009), Equal Opportunity Act (1995), Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001), Thought Artefact Identification and Spatial Differentiation Act (2009), and the Department of Human Services (Housing) and Deep Research and Ethical Oversight Committee Co-operative 2009.

  Thanks to your assistance, the first stage of the Cultural Identification Program has been a resounding success. The joint efforts of DHS and DREOC in recognising and classifying each of Victoria’s rich and diverse cultural zones has yielded excellent results. We are now able to begin extrapolating artifacts in the psyche of the collective waking conscious, specifically those stemming from cultural structures. As such, our understanding of the collective unconscious and the human condition is deeper than ever before, and continues to grow.

  Your support has been greatly appreciated, and with the insight gained from the initial CID Program, it is now possible for the community to take the next exciting step.

  You have been identified as being of Asian Stock (second-tier Chinese/third-tier Malaysian). Our records indicate you have already taken up residence within one of the designated Asian Cultural Zones (Box Hill, SE CHINA, Third Precinct), a neighbourhood reflecting your lush and vibrant heritage.

  Psychic Waypoint Tower #ACC217 has returned anomalous readings in the nocturnal waveband in your area. The nocturnal waveband—a state of the art new initiative—monitors the unconscious while asleep, gaining us valuable research data into the true unconscious with no disruption or inconvenience to you. Further investigation has pinpointed you as the aberrant mind within PWT #ACC217’s field of surveillance.

  Your true unconscious is not compatible with the specifications laid out for an Asian Cultural Zone (Box Hill, SE CHINA, Third Precinct), as stated in the Collective Unconscious Research and Privacy Act (2009).

  New accommodation in a more suitable zone has been found for you.

  It is our responsibility to lead the world forward in this new and exciting era, and it is with pride, humility, and determination that we accept this responsibility. There has never been a time of greater unity within our nation than now.

  Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

  Together, we are building a better future.

  DREOC officers are of the same breed as ticket inspectors. Even in plain clothes, they’re easy to pick. It’s written in their posture, the heavy armour in their voices. They know they’re unpopular and they’re bracing for pent-up and projectile vitriol. It’s building in the four of them now as my gaze is dragged along the sentences. The further down the page I get, the wider they hold their shoulders. They’re blocking the light.

  Half the breath I have been holding comes out, not a sigh, and I look up at the wall of muscle around me.

  “Do you understand?”

  The officer asking curls down toward me, a name tag on his coat announcing him as Colin Brown. He looks like a Colin Brown. Clean-cut, neat, and with an odd mix of apprehension and confidence—they outnumber me, but he doesn’t want to be here. Ancient acne scars and outgoing ears make him look younger than he is. He taps over his PDA without doing anything.

  “Certainly. We’re building a better future.” I fold the letter and run the seams between my fingers, and that action releases me from their attention. They disperse around the room.

  Colin’s sarcasm detector isn’t switched on. “A better future. Exactly. Let’s see here.” He scans his PDA again. “Our records indicate you are of Asian stock.”

  “So you keep telling me. I assume that’s why you moved me here to an Asian Cultural Zone, right?”

  He won’t look at me. “You sound like you disagree.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  In the kitchen his companions coalesce, murmuring and shifting impatiently.

  “You know you can contest a cultural classification—”

  “I know. I have. Several times.”

  Colin winces or smiles or attempts to do both and ends up with a face of dishonest wrinkles. He changes the subject. “You seem prepared for this. Were you contacted by DREOC, by any chance?” He gestures at the boxes crowding the room.

  “No.” I clasp my hands before me and dig my nails and my anger into my palms. “Your agents forcibly removed me from Northcote and placed me here three weeks ago, and I have not unpacked. Doing so would mean accepting a classification you have no right to force on me, accepting the creation of the zones and my nonconsensual relocation, accepting that it is now illegal for me to see my family and friends, accepting that I have let the bad guys destroy my life, and I accept none of these things.”

  “Oh.” Colin taps his PDA once, twice. “Well.”

  I think Colin would be more comfortable if I were yelling at him.

  They have a truck waiting downstairs.

  Fifty-eight minutes after I open the door, every trace of me is removed from the apartment I refused to call home.

  I have no idea what road we’re on. They’ve taken me through Asian, Mediterranean, British, Sub-Continent, Pacific, and East African Cultural Zones, and now we’re out west. I don’t know the west. It’s almost a foreign country. They do things differently here with big houses on small blocks and not a tree to be seen. The night sky sags over the rooftops, pushing everything down against the dead lawns.

  “What was it that singled me out for this special treatment?”

  The checkpoint falls away behind us, the glimmer of razor wire in the spotlights slipping back from the road and stretching into the darkness, the border between some African and Middle Eastern Cultural Zone. There are no Indigenous Cultural Zones this close to the city.

  Colin winds up the window, the car weaving in the lane. “Ah. I don’t know if I should tell you that.”

  “It’s in my head. I already know.”

  He taps his thumbs thoughtfully on the steering wheel and finally digs his PDA out of his pocket. “It states here you dream of the end of the world—” he quirks an eyebrow, it’s oh so amusing—“which is not within the acceptable parameters laid out for Asian stock, Chinese and Malaysian inclusive, according to the Collective Unconscious Research and Privacy Act (2009), with particular reference to the Herman-Biscuit Paper, and made legislation last week. Specifically, the inclusion of zombies—” He pauses and reads over that again, his mouth moving silently. It’s a good thing it’s a straight road. “Zombies? Really?”

  Every morning I wake up full of terror and adrenaline after spending my sleep running for my life. Some mornings, I wake before the zombies corner me. Some mornings, I don’t.

  Mum told me, sitting at the kitchen table with two cups of tea and DREOC bold and unstoppable on the front page of The Age, that it was an unsubtle metaphor my unconscious or subconscious or whatever-conscious was employing to act out my waking fears: an unstoppable and uncaring force would invade and destroy my world and stand on my lounge room carpet in dirty shoes and acne scars and smile weakly at me while doing so. At the time I thought she was projecting.

  Who knew zombies were against the law?

  Some disquiet stirs in the back of my mind, doubt cast on my doubt. They really can read minds. There are no walls left in the world.

  “That’s an odd thing to dream about.”

  “Apparently.” I stare at him with my dark Asian eyes.

  He flicks me a nervous glance without turning his head and licks his lips. He isn’t someone who can sit in silence. Unfortunately, he’s no good at making conversation.

  “Well, I mean, it’s odd for a M
alaysian to dream about. You know, it’s not all that exotic, and Malaysians don’t have zombies. Um. Do they?”

  “I’m not Malaysian.”

  “But our records—wait, we’ve been over this already. You’re Chinese. Sorry.”

  “I’m not Chinese either.”

  I have this conversation with everyone I meet, eventually.

  He looks at me, the road, me, the road, the dash, the road, me, the rearview mirror, me. My face doesn’t tell him much.

  “Is this how you dispute their findings? Flat out deny everything?”

  I turn away and look in the sideview mirror. The truck carrying my boxes is driven by a compulsive tailgater, the headlights bright in my eyes.

  It’s all in the record he just read, if he paid attention. If any of them paid any attention.

  Colin’s use of it lodges the word in my head. It’s a pretty word with a meaning that is not so pretty.

  “A guy at work said my lunch was ‘exotic.’”

  Dad pulled a face at me, one of his many faces to indicate he had heard but probably wasn’t paying attention. He lifted the lid from the wok, dragging up a roil of steam and releasing the smell of pork, char sieu sauce, and cloud mushrooms. The hiss and spit conquered the kitchen, and I waited till he clanged the lid back down.

  “It was only two-minute noodles. Not even any meat or veggies. Just the noodles. In the microwave.”

  Dad pulled another face, disdaining my choice of lunch.

  “There are other people in the office who eat the exact same noodles, and they aren’t told it’s ‘exotic.’”

  He pointed at the rice cooker, and I obeyed.

  “Maybe it’s because I was using chopsticks,” I said, pushing the steamed bok choi and wom bok aside.

  Dad was nodding but not listening. Pork and cloud mushrooms out of the wok into a dish. Oil and garlic into the wok. Soy sauce on the silken tofu. The snapping and cracking garlic and oil on the silken tofu.

  This was not exotic either.

  Not even those who lived in the western suburbs had much to do with this place. It was intended to be an industrial estate until DREOC claimed it, and overnight it was made over with portable rooms and portable toilets and portable showers, all shuffled in and planted amid scaffolding and abandoned foundations and pipes and silos.

  We pull up at the final checkpoint, and as our convoy is confirmed against the registered database, Colin turns to me. “Your new home. What do you think?”

  Ropes have been strung between the portables, some laden with laundry. I doubt anything dries quickly in the cold. The area isn’t paved; the portables are set on cinder blocks, and all else is pot-holed gravel. Skips sit at the end of a row, lids raised with the bulge of sodden plastic bags, two listing at an angle with the stumps left by missing wheels sunk in the mud. A high fence marks the perimeter. Barbed wire, clean and new and yet unrusted. Puddles glisten sick, little rainbows of oil on leaked grey water, that careless reek wafting in through the car vents.

  A couple of women smoking by the toilets watch us, a mixture of apathy and raw seething hatred in the creases around their eyes, the twist of their mouths and the pinch of their noses as smoke leaves and rises around them.

  This is so far removed from the eucalypt-lined streets of my home and the tragically-hip and curious alleys of the city. There will be no possums on the roof here, no chai lattes and no urban exploration. No joyous discoveries of great restaurants, surprise street art, secret hot chocolate.

  Colin can’t keep his hands still on the wheel. Weirdly eager and afraid, as though he’ll take any rejection of the place as a personal failure. There was a time I would have been sensitive to his sensitivity. There was a time I’d have even tried to dress the situation in a positive light for my own wellbeing.

  I stare at him until he has to look away, and then I stare at him some more. Passive aggressive is all I have in me, and it isn’t all that aggressive.

  I’m given one half of a portable. A cracked chipboard partition provides a thin veneer of privacy between me and my neighbour but does nothing to drown out the sound of the TV, 60 Minutes covering something on shopping trolley rage. No curtains, anyone walking by can see my everything. It’s not insulated. The air feels heavy, settled, a faint thread of mildew souring the edges. No one has moved through it for some time.

  Colin offers to help me put my bed together, but I don’t want him to be nice, I won’t let him be nice, I’m going to hate him and everything he is.

  “I’m just trying to help,” he says, too much the kicked puppy.

  “You’re the bad guy,” I say. “You don’t get to help.”

  He ducks his head and leaves me in another place I will not call home.

  I pull up Mum’s number on my mobile. I pull up close friends, distant friends, coworkers. I cycle through them all over and over and don’t call any of them.

  There is nothing to say.

  Kim lives in the portable across from me, sharing with an elderly Brazilian-Rhodesian man who yells abuse at everyone equally.

  She’s not a mongrel like me. She grew up in four different countries, her parents doing some sort of diplomatic work, which is enough reason to lock her up in here (“the kennel,” she says, without a smile but not without amusement).

  “My mind is a spaghetti jambalaya goulash stir fry.” There is some pride in this statement, but I’ve yet to hear her say something unexpected.

  She passes me a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I’ve now confirmed that I cannot leave the camp without “special permission,” and even if I could, there are no trains or buses this far out; and thus I cannot get to work and so no longer have a job, not to mention I can’t get to any of my stowed books in order to read, so I smoke. Or rather, I suck on the filter, hold the smoke in my mouth, nettled acridity muting fast on my tongue, and dare myself to inhale without choking.

  This is how dogs in the kennel pass the time.

  “I’m just a banana.”

  “Like most of the people here. Bananas, coconuts, eggplants—”

  “Kiwi fruit.”

  She laughs.

  “I don’t get the point of that. Not here.” I point at the Psychic Waypoint Tower mounted over an unused silo at the southern end of the camp. “Waste of time. All right for reading all the nicely sorted zones, I mean, there probably are patterns there to recognise, but here?” I watch one of the camp guards jog to the toilet. “They’ve never explained how the towers work.”

  She exhales gustily, silent, and smoke spills from her nose.

  “It isn’t for data, you know. It’s so we know we’re always being watched. We’re the aberrant cultural cells in the larger body of Australia. Everything else is neat and orderly, and we’re the cancer; and they’ve got their eye on us to make sure we don’t get out of hand.”

  “You sound like Agent Smith.”

  I return the cigarette. “It isn’t neat and orderly. It’s never been neat and orderly. This is Australia.” The smoke has coated my teeth, and they’re tacky against my tongue.

  I hate this place; the cold and the mud, the stagnant air infected with stewing sewerage and old steam from the mess hall, the emptiness of trees, the absence of all I’ve taken for granted—loose leaf tea, magpies stalking me on the nature strip, fog over the railway tracks, hot soft-boiled eggs, overheard laughter, running water, light switches that work, colour, colour, colour—I hate this temporary third world country. I might be in shock.

  “Why aren’t there any Australian Cultural Zones, anyway?”

  I never did fit in the Asian Cultural Zone. To everyone else, I was Asian enough to be labelled “Asian,” but to all Asians, I was white. The looks I’d get as I left the railway station at Box Hill varied from surprise to hostility. I didn’t belong, and if they must be segregated, then they didn’t want me there.

  There was never a question of whether I would be placed in a British Cultural Zone.

  No one belongs in here either, and there
is an equality in that misfitism like a balm on a burn.

  Kim squints at me. “You haven’t even been here a day.”

  “Don’t tell me I have to earn my bitterness.”

  She laughs again, and some of the tension slides from my neck.

  Colin is in the mess hall. Why is Colin in the mess hall? Too late, I’ve made eye contact. He parks himself at our table, the plastic chair stammering across the lino, a forced casualness in his white knuckles and clasped hands, that ticket inspector paranoia waiting to be challenged.

  “Soooooo.” He can’t help but fill the silence he’s created. “Tess—I can call you Tess, right? You’re not Malaysian, and you’re not Chinese. What are you then?”

  “Fuck off,” Kim suggests.

  “I’m Australian.”

  To his credit, he does not say yeah, but what are you really? “Your family then.”

  “It’s all in my file.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  The sound Kim makes could be at Colin or at her carbonara.

  The look he directs at me, this government-sanctioned bully, this clueless boy, this ordinary guy, unhinges my jaw. He’s all expectation, eager and open-minded and trying so hard.

  Okay then.

  “Mum is white Australian. Her Mum came over from England, and her Dad is seventh generation white settler.”

  “Then your Dad is Malaysian.”

  “Yes. No.” I poke my carbonara with equal distaste. “He’s Chinese-Malaysian, which means the family is Chinese but they live in Malaysia. Not Malaysian, though. Different cultural group. Sorta.”

  “Doesn’t that mean he’s just Chinese?”

  Dad, tucking into rendang and sneering at the group at the table opposite. “From northern China,” he said. “You can tell from the sallow skin and the pudgy faces.” Mum met my eyes, and we shared a shrug. “Really?” “Yeah.” A disapproving sniff. “You can tell.”

  “Yes. No. He’s never been to China, and the family has been in Malaysia for generations. There’s geographical cross-pollination of the culture.”

  Colin’s mouth puckers in thought.