Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

I took my keys from my pocket and activated the roller door. We both watched shafts of daylight skate across the loading bay floor as the door ascended.

  ‘This place looks really good, Ken. Seriously, I’m impressed.’

  ‘No need to suck up,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you on and we’ll see how it goes.’

  He nodded. ‘Brilliant. Thank you, Ken. I actually think we could make a great team.’

  Bruce turned out to be correct: we did make a pretty good team, and for years everything was, in his phrase, sweet as. Yes, he had some strange ideas, which he could never resist sharing, but so what? Yes, he’d developed some obsessive-compulsive behaviours, but fortunately most of them gelled nicely with his work duties – light years away from Fergus and his Who Gives a Fuck Syndrome: a mental illness in its own right as far as I was concerned.

  It wasn’t until the business started to go downhill, much, much later, that I noticed a change in him. It began, as far as I could tell, with the trolleys, and seemed to become more pronounced with each passing week, and then with each passing day. After our conversation following the Ellen-related police visit, I knew that Bruce was up to his old tricks.

  Twenty-seven

  Bruce, I thought, driving back from Kelvin’s house, it’s time you and I had a serious talk.

  I put on a CD – the ever-reliable In the Wake of Poseidon – to calm my nerves, wondering when Bruce had last taken the van out on one of his late-night visits. I hadn’t checked the CCTV cameras lately, mainly because the system had broken down and I couldn’t see much point in fixing it.

  I don’t know what else went through my mind on the drive back, because the next thing I knew, I was parked near the Pharaoh’s Tomb construction site. Something had possessed me to make one more quick stop there – maybe for old times’ sake; maybe as a fuck-you gesture to Bruce – to see how things were going.

  Watching through the fence I noted, with a peculiar sense of satisfaction, that the foundations had been laid and building was well underway. Men and machines worked furiously, making up for lost time. How appropriate, I thought: a new Pharaoh’s Tomb is being born while Hideaway Self Storage is in its death throes. And I wanted them to finish the job quickly.

  It made me think back to the confrontation with Anthony all those years ago when he caught us – me, specifically – plundering his unit. Bruce had had his little chat with Anthony and smoothed things over, but he’d never told me the nature of that little chat. And then Anthony had disappeared off the face of the earth. Whatever happened to him?

  When I returned to work, I entered my office, sat down in my swivel chair and waited. Why go looking for him? He’d appear before long.

  Meanwhile I studied the picture of the long white building with its long green hedge, located in the middle of nowhere. But even though it was in the middle of nowhere, it had to be somewhere. After all, I thought, everything is somewhere. Then I remembered that it was merely Bruce’s impression of a building that didn’t actually exist. That was why it looked so perfect, and why it didn’t appear to be located in an identifiable place, but in some ideal, imaginary place. The building was enveloped in a quietness, a serenity unattainable in the real world.

  I got up and walked around to the other side of the desk, removing the picture from the noticeboard. On the other side of the page, where the sets of initials had been written, there were now two more. The list read:

  LS

  JM

  MT

  EK

  KG

  It was only then that I understood what the initials stood for: Leonard Stelzer, Jane McMath, Michael Tan, Ellen Kruger, Kelvin Gadd. They’d all disappeared: for all intents and purposes, off the face of the earth. Two were officially missing. Bruce was keeping his own personal record. Why?

  ‘Bruce!’

  How typical of that bald fucker to materialise before me every time except when I wanted him to.

  ‘All right, Bruce – I’ll materialise before you.’

  I folded the A4 sheet and slipped it into my pocket. I walked over to the metal cupboard, pulled out my key ring and struggled with the lock. When I finally got it open, I removed the boltcutters. I wasn’t sure why I did that – more out of habit than anything else. Also, you never know when a pair of boltcutters might come in handy.

  ‘Bruce!’ I did a lap of the central loading bay. My voice bounced off the concrete floor and floated out over the car park and the motorway. I headed for the lift. When I pressed the up button, the metal box shuddered and protested but eventually deigned to carry me to Level 1.

  I muttered, ‘Going to the dogs,’ as I walked down a corridor, loosely holding the boltcutters by one handle, swinging them to and fro. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. I hadn’t made the rounds of the facility for a long time. Nobody was bringing things in or moving things out. Had Bruce been telling the truth when he said there were no tenants left? I made a mental note to check the database later, assuming the database still worked.

  ‘Show yourself, Bruce!’

  I thought about Anthony again. Did he ever surface? More importantly, where had he disappeared to? I thought about all the people who disappeared off the face of the earth – the 0.5 per cent that Bruce had claimed vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. Maybe they all wound up in the same place, like Bruce said.

  I tried another corridor, then another. I paused to lean back on a roller shutter, pressing my spine against its corrugations. I saw, in my mind, an image of Bruce on the night of Anthony’s disappearance. He was holding a pair of boltcutters, swinging them to and fro like a cane. I could see the long red handles, the black rubber hand grips. They looked similar to the pair I currently held in my hand. Was that memory real or did I just invent it? There was certainly no reason why we would have used boltcutters back then; the whole idea was to pick the lock, not break it.

  The corridor, I realised, was dark – almost. I look up to see a row of extinguished fluoro tubes, except for the one directly above me, and that one was right in the middle of dying.

  ‘Bruce, you fucker!’ I shielded my eyes. ‘Come and fix this light! Where are you?’

  I realised, maybe for the first time, that the sound the light made as it flickered off and on wasn’t so much a clicking sound as a hard, sickening flutter – like the wings of a giant moth. I could hear it whispering to me, but as usual the meaning prowled just beyond the perimeter fence of my comprehension. It spoke in a language, or a syntax, I had yet to decipher. But now I was convinced that it had something to do with Bruce. It picked away at my brain with sharp metal implements. I tried to remain there, to force myself to listen until it made sense, but thirty seconds later I was running back up the corridor, my fingers in my ears.

  At the far end of the corridor, I came upon a man wheeling a trolley, with a pyramid of mismatched boxes stacked one on top of the other. But it wasn’t Bruce. It was a tenant. So Bruce had lied to me: there was at least one left, even though he appeared to be leaving.

  He looked at me warily.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I be of any assistance?’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m cool.’

  He scurried off towards the lift.

  ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ I said.

  I walked on.

  ‘Bruce! I order you to show yourself!’

  But he didn’t show himself, not then, and not the next day either.

  It looked as if Bruce had disappeared.

  But not, I suspected, off the face of the earth.

  Twenty-eight

  I was driving through Mount Isa, listening to King Crimson and eating a banana. I’d played In the Wake of Poseidon five times in a row and was halfway into the sixth. Some people might argue that King Crimson isn’t the best driving music – too baroque, too many shifts in tempo, too much mellotron – but that’s precisely what kept me alert. Besides, I hadn’t brought any other CDs with me, so it was either King Crimson or nothing, and I already
had enough nothing when I looked out the window: on either side of the Barkly Highway, lots of ground and lots of sky – gum trees and spinifex doing their best to relieve the nothingness in between. I’d never been further north than Rockhampton before, so this was all new to me – new and depressing. You can only take so much nothing.

  But I felt like I knew intuitively where I was going. I had this strange feeling that the universe was on my side, safely guiding the HiAce to its destination. So far I hadn’t got lost once.

  I still had around 400 kilometres to go before I reached the Northern Territory border, but after a good few hours’ sleep in the back of the van I was feeling quite refreshed. The HiAce was holding up well, although the aircon had packed up in Cloncurry and I couldn’t get it working again. Maybe a four-wheel drive would have been better, but I’d left in a hurry, having packed my old sleeping bag, a 20-litre water container, some canned food, my toolbox, a gun and my King Crimson CD.

  But I should probably backtrack a bit.

  Having wandered around the facility for ages, searching in vain for Bruce, I sat in my office thinking about what to do next. I was in a bit of state, I suppose. I tried to get the CCTV screens working again, but the system had well and truly given up the ghost. I checked the rental records, which Bruce, in typical fashion, had kept perfectly up-to-date, and saw that he’d been telling the truth when he said there were no tenants left. Those who hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth had, one by one, emptied their units and moved on. So the tenant I’d bumped into while roaming the corridors was on his way out: Hideaway was the proverbial sinking ship, and he was the final rat. Could I blame him? Not really.

  After a couple of hours had elapsed, I did another circuit of the facility. Many of its abandoned corridors were dark beneath spent fluorescent tubes. I hadn’t realised how badly Bruce had neglected the upkeep of the place. By this point I was certain that he’d fled and would not return.

  I made my way back to the lift and stepped in. Now even the lift light had begun to flicker. Averting my eyes, I pressed the button to go down. The doors promptly closed; the lift grumbled and vibrated but it didn’t move. I was stuck there with the light. Inevitably, it started its dreadful whispering. I kept my eyes on the floor and blocked my ears, but the whispering grew so loud that it bored straight into my skull like a surgeon’s drill and proceeded to tinker with my brain. I kicked the lift doors, but it seemed I was imprisoned in there until I paid attention.

  I had to force myself to listen, to try to decipher the code of the flickers and their corresponding flutters. But they refused to resolve themselves into intelligible speech. When I could take it no more, I shifted my attention – more survival instinct than any conscious decision – from the flickers and flutters to the intervals between. And it was then I heard: Bruce did away with them.

  I concentrated as hard as I could on the gaps. I heard it again. Face facts, mate. Bruce did away with them.

  ‘What are you on about?’ I yelled. ‘What the fuck are you saying?’

  You heard me. You don’t want to hear me, but you can’t pretend forever, can you? You might be able to pretend with the other one – he’s gone now, anyway – but you can’t pretend when it comes to Bruce.

  ‘What “other one”? I said. ‘What are you on about?’

  Your old man, the one with the so-called brain tumour.

  ‘It wasn’t a so-called brain tumour. It was a brain tumour, full stop.’

  Yeah, just keep telling yourself that.

  ‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘Shut up!’

  Okay, enough said. But Bruce – well, that’s a different matter. He did away with them, didn’t he? No ignoring that, no matter how much you try.

  I said nothing. Don’t give it any airtime.

  And now you have to do away with him.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  The whispering ceased. The light went out for good. Reluctantly, the lift began to move. When it hit the ground floor, the doors opened and I stumbled out, maybe for the last time.

  I returned to my office and my swivel chair, swivelling back and forth for the next few hours, repeating the words to myself. Bruce did away with them. In fact, the light’s revelations about Bruce were really not so momentous: deep down I’d suspected this for some time. Bruce was responsible for the disappearances of – at the very least – Leonard Stelzer, Jane McMath and Michael Tan. What he’d done or how he’d done it, I still didn’t know, but I knew why: things. Stelzer, McMath and Tan had been the source of things, things we could and did sell for a lot of money.

  Clearly Bruce had done away with them in the course of his late-night visits. They were half gone even before they disappeared – his words, not mine – having all but dropped out of the world. He’d claimed that if they vanished altogether, nobody would notice. He was wrong. Even when an anonymous person goes missing, they still leave an empty space in the world, even if it’s just a very small space. Had the absence of Stelzer and Ellen not been noticed, perhaps Bruce would have continued on his merry path, finding more nice little earners. An insane scheme: he must have stopped taking his medication.

  And Kelvin? He’d fallen to his death – according to Bruce, or according to what Bruce claimed I’d told him. But I had no recollection of that.

  I could forgive Bruce for Stelzer, McMath and Tan – at least his intentions were good – and even for Kelvin. But what I couldn’t forgive, meds or no meds, was Ellen. Bruce hated Ellen because he felt she’d taken me away from him. Now he’d taken Ellen away from me.

  Had I not had that encounter with the light, I may well have gone straight to the police. They’d hunt him down like a dog. But no, that was my job and mine only. And I wanted a confession, directly from Bruce’s lips to my ear, about Ellen and the others. I needed to even the score. I needed closure.

  I got up from my swivel chair and opened the safe.

  The Heckler & Koch was still there, waiting patiently; its time had arrived. But even now, I didn’t know: could I really do away with Bruce? I guess I wouldn’t know until the moment came.

  The other thing I didn’t know was where Bruce might be. I didn’t know where he went when he wasn’t at the facility. He may as well have lived here, and for all I knew, he did. That’s the way things had been for as long as I could remember. He was always more present than I needed or wanted him to be. The question had never been how to find Bruce, but how to get rid of him.

  I placed the gun on the desk and resumed my position in the swivel chair. I sat for another hour, swivelling and thinking. If Bruce was to disappear, where would he go? No doubt he’d go as far away as possible, to escape the fate he must have known awaited him here. I thought long into the night, sitting there in my office, contemplating the picture of the white building, listening to the faint sound of traffic on the motorway.

  As I pondered the mystery of Bruce and where he went when he wasn’t at work, I recalled our conversation when he’d first appeared at Hideaway, all those years earlier, asking for a job. He told me he’d been living in a caravan park somewhere in the Northern Territory, and that he would return there if things ever got too much – something like that.

  I stopped swivelling. The Northern Territory. Well, that narrowed it down a bit. But I couldn’t recall the name or location of the caravan park. And I had no hard evidence to suggest that Bruce had gone there anyway. But I sensed I was on the right track. I just had to make my way to the Red Centre and at some point between now and when I got there, my memory would do its work and supply me with the missing information.

  So now here I was, heading for the Northern Territory border, a King Crimson CD in the CD player and a gun in the toolbox, looking for Bruce. Beyond that I didn’t have much of a plan.

  Twenty-nine

  The engine overheated somewhere between Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. I was forced to stop in the middle of nowhere, or maybe it was the beginning of nowhere, or the end; it’s hard to tell when there’s s
o much nowhere that it’s everywhere. I fell asleep waiting for the engine to cool down.

  The sun was setting when I woke up, but I filled the radiator and drove on. The HiAce took me the rest of the way without incident.

  Things were unfolding as they should.

  By the time I rolled into Alice Springs at five-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, I’d lost track of how long I’d been on the road, but I couldn’t face another night sleeping in the van; I needed a shower and a proper rest before continuing. Since the demise of the air conditioning, I’d done more sweating in that van than I’d done in my entire life to date, and my body felt as if it had been folded up and packed away for months in a cupboard.

  I wondered how Bruce had got out here from Brisbane. A car? A bus? I had no idea how Bruce got from A to B when he wasn’t driving my van.

  Money was tight, so I drove around the town centre until I found a backpacker hostel. I was wearing nothing but underpants, so after parking the car I put on the tracksuit I’d been wearing before the aircon broke down. Gazing at the hostel’s brightly coloured brick exterior, I got the impression that I’d gazed at that same wall before. And then as I stood in the foyer, I got the impression that I’d stood on that floor before. Even the dreadlocks of the woman at reception looked familiar. But I’d never been to Alice Springs. I guess if you’ve seen one backpacker hostel, you’ve seen them all.

  ‘All we’ve got at the moment is a bed in a six-bed mixed dorm,’ the reception woman said. Apparently the tourist season was just getting underway.

  The dorm was clean, though, and air-conditioned. It overlooked a swimming pool. I’d hoped that the room would be empty when I walked in, but there were three backpackers – a man and two women – sitting on the floor. The man’s hair was tied up in a knot. He was recounting the time he’d gone trekking in Ladakh. Before long one of the girls cut in to recount the time she went trekking in Ladakh, only to be interrupted by the other girl, who started in with another travel story, which also involved trekking in Ladakh.