Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I overslept.’

  ‘Hardly an excuse,’ Ron said. ‘Is it, Caitlin?’

  The goth girl cleared her throat and said no, but she sounded fairly noncommittal.

  ‘No, I suppose it’s not,’ I replied. ‘I’ll make up the hours.’

  ‘Doesn’t work that way, unfortunately,’ Ron said. ‘Fixed rosters.’

  ‘Okay. So don’t pay me for the hours I missed.’

  ‘Wasn’t planning to, buddy.’ He looked at the goth girl. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to keep moving.’ He looked back at me. ‘You better get a move on, too.’

  Ten minutes later I was desultorily vacuuming Unit 12C, halfway up Cheops (hence the C), cursing Ron Wood. The bastard could at least have reprimanded me in private instead of making me look like a dick in front of Caitlin. Had she been ugly, or even average-looking, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but she was at least an eight and a half.

  When I stepped out into the corridor, I looked up and noticed the fluorescent tube had started to flicker. This may sound strange, but I couldn’t bear – still can’t bear – the sight or sound of a flickering tube. There was something about the click … click … click as the light went on and off – like a sentient creature fluttering its way towards death, the light within gradually flickering into darkness. I was watching and listening as it struggled to hold on, but I knew that at a certain moment the death flicker would cease, and at precisely that moment, the inner light would go off and stay off.

  This may sound even stranger, but I could swear that the light, while in its death throes, was talking to me. Not directly – more like it was addressing a deeply concealed part of my brain, delivering its last words in a cryptic, fluoro-tube language. It happened whenever I was exposed to a flickering tube for too long – some weird neurological reaction I couldn’t explain. I’d never seen a doctor about it, either, because I was sure the doctor would tell me what I already knew, namely: avoid fluorescent lights.

  I went back into the unit and slammed the door to keep the light out. I leaned against the wall and massaged my forehead, rubbing the darkness into it like an ointment. I could see, through the slit underneath the door, that the corridor light was still flickering away – I could hear it, faintly – but at least we were no longer in direct contact.

  I may have fallen asleep for a few moments, or perhaps a bit longer, but I was suddenly woken up, or at least startled, by a voice right next to me.

  ‘And how can he not know about Ron Wood from The Stones?’

  I looked to my left. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness at this point, and I could see a man leaning against the wall right next to me, hand on his forehead, as if imitating me.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘Where’d you come from?’

  ‘Sorry, Ken. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Somehow he knew my name; Ron must have told him. ‘Ron sent me up to look for you.’ He laughed. ‘Make sure you hadn’t fallen asleep again.’

  ‘Is it just me,’ I said, ‘or is he a bit of a fuckwit?’ I said. ‘I mean, like you say, his name’s Ron Wood but he’s never heard of the Ron Wood. That alone guarantees him a place in the Fuckwit Hall of Fame.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Bruce said. ‘I think he might have some sort of undiagnosed personality disorder; we should really feel sorry for him. Shall we get out of here?’

  I looked under the door. The light had been extinguished, permanently. We stepped out of the unit, into the corridor. My companion glanced up at the dead fluoro tube.

  ‘Suppose I should replace that at some point.’ He looked at me. ‘Did I introduce myself?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘The name’s Bruce.’

  Now that we were back in the corridor, I could see Bruce properly. He had more hair then, although it had already begun to recede – at more or less the same rate as my own, as if our respective heads were competing with each other and were currently neck and neck, so to speak. As for his face, the only memorable thing about it was that it was entirely unmemorable. I didn’t know how old he was, but taking into account his physical appearance and his knowledge of The Rolling Stones, I got the feeling that we were around the same age.

  ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ I said. ‘Have you worked here long?’

  Bruce didn’t give a direct answer. ‘I’ve been away for a while. Just came back.’ He looked around. ‘Everything’s still exactly the same.’

  ‘Well, I’m only here as a stopgap, until I can save up some cash.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘I want to get into the property-investment game. I’m looking at the Gold Coast, which is on the way up again. Population’s growing and there’s going to be a big demand for single-bedroom apartments. I want to get in on that.’

  Bruce didn’t seem very impressed, or maybe he wasn’t really listening.

  ‘I’m in no great hurry to leave the Tomb,’ he said. ‘Despite Ron Wood, this is better than my previous job.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Hospitality.’

  ‘Been there, done that,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know Dooley’s Irish Bar in Dandenong Road?’

  ‘Name rings a bell.’

  ‘Live music nearly every night.’

  ‘Anyone good?’

  ‘U3.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They were Melbourne’s premier U2 tribute band at the time. In those days there were at least four U2 tribute bands in Victoria alone.’

  Bruce slipped into a sort of reverie, as if trying to recall whether he really had worked at Dooley’s Irish Bar after all.

  ‘That was years ago,’ he said eventually. ‘Anyway, it looks like we’re both kind of stuck here until the time comes to make our next move. But that doesn’t mean we can’t augment our income a bit in the meantime.’

  ‘What do you mean, “augment our income”?’

  ‘Ken, my friend,’ Bruce said. ‘I think you know what I’m talking about.’

  I nodded, although frankly I didn’t know. Not right then, anyway.

  I returned to the front of the building site, where the gates were held closed by a thick chain and a thick padlock. I pulled at the chain a few times, making the gates rattle. I closed my hand around the padlock, rubbing my thumb over its hardened-steel surface – a pleasant sensation, and a familiar one. Although it was dark, I could almost identify the brand by touch. I bent down to take a closer look. I’d guessed correctly: it was a Sargent and Greenleaf.

  Nine

  The following afternoon, I drove the antique figurines from Unit 102 over to Kelvin’s house. They were pretty delicate so I drove carefully, slower than usual. Bruce and I had had to make several trips with a trolley from the unit, down in the lift and across the central loading bay to transfer them all into the van.

  As soon as Kelvin opened the door, I said, ‘Are you familiar with antique porcelain figurines?’

  ‘To some extent,’ he said, scratching his fat belly, which his KISS T-shirt could no longer conceal. Then he stuck his hand right down the front of his shorts, rearranging his genitals with the nonchalance you might expect of a man who spends his life alone in front of a computer.

  I said, ‘Let me show you something.’

  ‘Yahtzee first.’

  ‘Do we have to? I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

  ‘Very quick game. Super quick.’ He opened the door and I followed him down the hall towards the games room, listening to the floorboards creak under his every step.

  As we took our positions on either side of the desk, I gazed at the shiny green Test Match box, sandwiched between Mouse Trap and Connect 4. There had come a point, in the course of the Test Match games between my father and me, when he started accusing me of cheating. Whenever I won a game, he refused to accept that I’d won fair and square, so he’d demand a rematch, and then another rematch, and so on until he won. That’s probably how the levers got worn out. Even then, I thought it odd that although I wa
s the kid and he was the adult, he couldn’t accept defeat. But I later chalked that one up to the tumour, which caused him to think and say and do a lot of peculiar shit. But again, why revisit it? The man was long gone. If asked to describe his face now, I’d have to pause to reconstruct it in my mind: a fairly haphazardly assembled identikit image. He might as well never have existed in the first place.

  ‘Can we play Test Match instead?’ I said.

  ‘Test Match?’ Kelvin snorted, as if Test Match had no right to be mentioned in the same breath as Yahtzee. ‘To hell with Test Match!’

  I resigned myself to another game of Yahtzee, although my mind was wandering. I kept thinking about the padlock on the door of Unit 102, the padlock on the door of Unit 117 and the padlock on the gate at the construction site. Each one was a Sargent and Greenleaf, and yet Sargent and Greenleaf isn’t the sort of padlock you find at your local Bunnings; you have to go to an army-surplus store or buy one online. I should know: I’d been collecting them for years, and I now had fifty of the bastards sitting in the bottom drawer of my office desk. And I’d asked Kelvin to keep an eye out for more, since padlocks, like everything else under the sun, were bought and sold on eBay every day.

  It seemed like too big a coincidence: three Sargent and Greenleafs in a row, in the space of a few weeks. On the other hand, as Bruce no doubt would have said, much bigger coincidences happened every day. I recalled him claiming that airport face-scanning machines, the kind they use for catching terrorists, have captured images of people who live in different parts of the world, aren’t related, have never met, and yet look exactly the same. If that was possible, then surely so were the padlocks.

  When the game was over, we walked back down the hall and out the back door. The air was still and quiet but for two magpie larks singing a duet in a nearby tree. We descended the rotting wooden stairs, and as always I thought to myself, Kelvin’s either going to have to lose fifteen kilos or fix the stairs – whichever he thinks will take less effort – otherwise, one of these days he’s going to have a bad accident.

  I opened up the van. Kelvin dipped into a couple of the boxes, scrutinising the little figures. ‘Very nice. Very nice indeed.’

  ‘Valuable?’

  He examined the base of a dancing woman in a white lace dress.

  ‘This looks like antique Dresden. I could get a few hundred for this alone.’

  Kelvin’s knowledge of these things never failed to impress me. But then I thought, If I had nothing else to do all day but sit in front of a computer, I’d know just as much.

  ‘The Krauts have always been good with porcelain,’ he said. ‘Heard of Meissen? They were the first porcelain manufacturer in Europe. Established early eighteenth century.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read it in the Britannica.’

  Kelvin was a big reader. And even though he conducted his business online, he was, like me, of a generation for whom the natural way to read things was by studying ink marks on sheets of paper. Aside from the daily newspaper, Kelvin’s favourite reading matter was reference books; he had shelves full of them. And when he passed on a piece of information, he always remembered exactly which reference book he’d read it in. His ability to recall interesting facts was rivalled only by his apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of encyclopaedias.

  ‘Do you think there’s any Meissen stuff among these?’ I asked.

  ‘Unlikely, but you never know. There’s definitely some highly sought-after merch in here – some of these pieces could be worth thousands. But are you sure they won’t come back for it?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The owner. No chance they’ll show up at your place out of the blue, wanting to know where the hell their porcelain disappeared to?’

  ‘Absolutely not. She’s as good as dead, as Bruce puts it; he’s a callous prick sometimes. And even if by some miracle she does show up, tough. I’ve told you how it works with rent defaulters. Our system registers non-payment of rent. If that happens for another six weeks, and I’ve done what I can to contact the tenant – and I can only do so much, mind you – but there’s still no sign of them, then they’ve officially abandoned their unit, and I’m legally entitled to go in there and do whatever the fuck I want with their stuff. That’s how it works.’

  Kelvin rubbed his fat gut again; either it was getting bigger or his T-shirt was receding before my eyes, like the ocean over a massive white sand dune.

  ‘Still seems a bit unfair, somehow.’

  ‘Unfair?’ I said. ‘I’m the one losing money. It’s not my fucking fault people bail and leave their valuables behind.’

  ‘All right. I just don’t want to be in a situation —’

  ‘You won’t be in any situation. All right?’

  That seemed to satisfy him, but he quickly found something else to gripe about.

  ‘Why don’t you clean out your van?’ he said.

  ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘I guess I don’t notice because I spend so much time in there. What does it smell like?’

  ‘There’s a lingering odour. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it’s distinctly unpleasant, like something died in there.’

  ‘It’s the smell of self-storage,’ I said. ‘You get used it. There’s no smell I haven’t smelled. People are disgusting – as Bruce says.’

  ‘Bruce sounds like quite the philosopher,’ Kelvin said. ‘You should bring him around one of these days.’

  ‘Let’s get this stuff inside.’

  Ten

  It was around this time that I discovered something else a little bit odd.

  I was catching up on some paperwork in the office, listening to ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery. Keith Emerson had just launched into a particularly good organ solo, and as I twisted around in my chair to turn up the volume, I noticed that Bruce’s tracksuit top was draped over the back of the chair. I hadn’t even noticed it when I sat down; it seemed that Bruce’s tracksuit top, like Bruce himself, possessed the uncanny ability to materialise out of nowhere. I was kind of annoyed that he was treating my chair, a high-backed swivel chair that nobody but I was allowed to sit on, as his own property. True, as a longstanding employee and acquaintance – I’d hesitate to call him a friend – Bruce enjoyed the same rights and privileges as I did, but lately he was beginning to act a bit like he owned the place.

  I checked the real-time CCTV footage, but I couldn’t see him anywhere in the facility, at least not anywhere picked up by the cameras, which, admittedly, didn’t pick up much and would continue not to until I was in a position to update them. I couldn’t see that happening any time soon; business hadn’t improved – in fact the opposite was true – and Kelvin’s eBay sales, while pretty healthy, weren’t making much of a dent. But I knew Bruce was around the place somewhere, maybe cleaning a unit or replacing one of the fluoro tubes that flickered away in the corridors. I’d told him on the very day he began working here: as soon as you see – or even sense – flickering, replace the offending tube. ‘Put it out of its misery’ was the phrase I used. And he was very diligent about that. The problem was that, as soon as he replaced one fluoro tube, another tube in another corridor, or even in the same corridor, would begin to die. Admittedly, they were cheap tubes.

  I grabbed the tracksuit top and walked out to the central loading bay. The trolleys were lined up as neat could be. That was never a good sign: it meant nobody had come to move anything in or out. My footsteps echoed as if I were walking inside a mausoleum. I looked out through the bay’s entrance, which framed a small portion of the outside world: the empty car park, the low wire fence, the narrow strip of grass, the solitary ghost gum with pale bark slightly wrinkled at the base of each branch, like it was wearing a tight white skivvy. I stared out at the same old section of the M1. The sound of its passing traffic was as familiar to me as the silence of the loading bay; one just happened to be outside, the other in
side.

  Standing on the concrete floor was making me feel chilly, so I walked out to the car park, absent-mindedly swinging the tracksuit top over my shoulder. A folded-up sheet of paper fell out of the pocket onto the ground. I picked it up, intending to put it straight back, but curiosity got the better of me.

  The picture showed the exterior of a crisp white building: low, flat and seemingly located in the middle of nowhere. A pale rectangular stripe between a reddish earth and a blue-ish sky, it looked as if it could rise up and float away. A perfectly manicured green hedge ran along the front of the building: a smaller, lower green rectangle in front of the larger, higher, white rectangle. If you squinted, the two forms blurred into purely geometrical shapes. I had no idea what or where this building was but it looked welcoming, in a way.

  On the other side of the page were what appeared to be initials, handwritten.

  LS

  JM

  Someone coughed. I turned around and there was Bruce. I jumped.

  ‘Ah, Bruce. There you are. How goes it?’

  ‘You know, Ken – same shit, different day.’

  Out there beneath the sun, I was shocked to see how much Bruce’s face had aged. When you see someone all the time, always under the artificial light of a self-storage facility, you don’t really notice how they change with the years. The shadowy ring around Bruce’s scalp could no longer be termed hair, but rather the faint echo of hair. Now his face appeared to have expanded, and his eyes, nose and mouth were gradually receding into the background. For all that, Bruce’s face remained as nondescript as it had been when I first encountered him at Pharaoh’s Tomb.

  ‘This fell out of your tracksuit.’ I handed him the sheet of paper and the top.

  Bruce looked at the two items but didn’t take them from me.

  ‘That top isn’t mine,’ he said.

  ‘Whose is it, then?’

  ‘Yours.’