Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

  ‘The van’s making a funny noise,’ Eric said.

  Aside from everything else, the petrol gauge needle was touching empty, so it was a blessed relief to stop at the next road-house. Whenever I saw a roadhouse out there, I felt immense gratitude and awe. It was like a minor miracle: you drove for ages, miles and miles of nothing – red dirt, dry creek beds, endless scrub – thinking that you’d never see another roadhouse again, and then one appeared just in the nick of time before you went mad. It was as if the outback were playing a game with you, fucking with your mind for its own amusement.

  Eric went to the toilet while I filled the petrol tank, hosed the mosaic of dead insects off the windscreen, and examined the engine for the source of the funny noise. I couldn’t see anything wrong. When Eric returned, he took a look, but he couldn’t see anything wrong either.

  ‘Should we get someone to have a proper look?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have time to wait around. Long as the van goes …’

  We entered the roadhouse to absorb as much air-conditioned air as possible before setting off again. Eric offered to buy lunch, so I ordered a chicken schnitzel sandwich and a bottle of Coke before heading to the toilets.

  As I splashed water over my burning face, I glanced at my reflection. They say that mirrors don’t lie, but I think it depends on the mirror, and an unfamiliar mirror in an unfamiliar bathroom is more honest than the mirror you look into every day. According to this mirror in a toilet in a roadhouse somewhere on the Stuart Highway, my head was little more than a round ball of flesh, uniformly coloured, if a bit redder than usual, with the mouth, nose and eyes stuck on as an afterthought. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that now I understood what Bruce had meant when he said there were only so many faces to go around. For the first time I saw how much I looked like Bruce, and how much he looked like me.

  Thirty-two

  When I saw that face in the mirror, I thought I must be hallucinating, that the heat was doing strange things to my brain. I looked away, afraid to look again and see Bruce’s sunburnt face staring back at me. It made me sick. I knew then that I wouldn’t hesitate when the moment came.

  I left the toilets and rejoined Eric, but I remained virtually silent. He tried to revive the prog-rock dispute but I could only respond in monosyllables. He offered to drive the rest of the way but I said no; I needed to keep my mind occupied.

  Back on the road, the funny noise seemed to have subsided a bit; Eric, too, was less talkative. I hoped he’d remain that way.

  The silence lasted for another 10 kilometres or so. Eric was staring out the window at the nowhere, the terrible stillness, relieved now and then by the movement of a kangaroo or a camel team.

  Get it over and done with, I thought.

  When next I looked over at Eric, I saw that he was flicking through a newspaper.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ I said.

  ‘Back at the roadhouse. It’s three days old, though.’

  ‘Why did you buy it, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t hurt to keep up with what’s happening in the world – even if it happened three days ago. It’s funny how when you travel, you’re out in the world, but at the same time you don’t really know what’s going on.’

  ‘If you want to know what’s really going on,’ I said, ‘the newspaper’s the last place you want to look.’

  ‘I don’t know – it gives you your basic facts: what, where, when, who … That’s all I want.’

  I repeated, ‘But it won’t tell you what’s really going on.’

  ‘Well, maybe so.’ Eric looked at me through his sunblock mask. ‘I mean, nobody knows what’s really going on, do they?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘I have to say,’ Eric said, ‘I enjoy our conversations. They’re always very interesting. It’s good to have a travelling companion for once. It can get a bit lonely, travelling about on your own.’

  I fixed my eyes on the road. ‘We all like a little chat.’

  ‘I mean, I like the independence of getting about on my own – I go where I want, do I what I want. It’s entirely up to me if I want to stay in Alice Springs for one day or one month. If I decide on the spur of the moment to go to Kings Canyon, then there’s no one to stop me.’ He paused. ‘But it can get lonely.’

  ‘I know.’

  We drove in silence for another few minutes.

  ‘Nice to have someone to share experiences with. Share my thoughts and observations.’ Eric laughed self-consciously – a nervous giggle.

  I nodded.

  ‘I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a solitary type. Live alone. No girlfriend or anything like that. I was like that at school and nothing’s really changed.’

  ‘I hated school,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t like it much either.’

  ‘Fucking shithole.’

  Eric took my outburst as an invitation to open up further. ‘I got bullied a bit at school. Quite a lot, to be honest.’

  ‘Quite a lot?’ I said. ‘If a day went by and I didn’t get beaten up, I’d be wondering what the fuck had gone wrong.’

  Eric nodded.

  ‘There was this one guy,’ I went on. ‘His name was Trent. Trent Gant.’ I laughed. ‘His commitment to humiliating me was … I would’ve admired it if I wasn’t the one being humiliated. Just to give you a single example: I was walking across the school oval one morning – always a big mistake – and who should appear out of nowhere but Trent Gant and his mates, on BMX bikes. Yeah, so they grabbed me and held me down on the ground while Trent shoved a Kool Mint up my left nostril.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Eric said.

  ‘Yeah, that fucker really hurt, although I have to say not as much as a Fruit Tingle. I’ve had the entire range of Allen’s confectionary up my nose at one point or another, thanks to that cunt. The worst thing about the Kool Mint was, I couldn’t get it out – it was lodged up there for the rest of the day. Mum was still at work when I got home. Dad was … well, he’d disappeared by that point. Maybe if he’d hung around he could have taught me how to stand up for myself, not take any bullshit from the Trent Gants of this world.’

  ‘Did you say he disappeared?’

  I was only half listening. ‘What?’

  ‘You said your dad disappeared.’

  ‘Oh.’ I laughed. ‘Slip of tongue. No, he had something wrong with his brain.’ Now I’d lost my train of thought. ‘I mean, he had a tumour in his brain, didn’t he? He went to hospital and never came back.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Eric said.

  ‘Bloody hell is right,’ I said. ‘Bloody hell sums up the situation quite well. But look, the point is … the point is, I had this fucking Kool Mint up my nose and I had to suck the bastard out myself, with a fucking vacuum cleaner. I can literally remember using that thin attachment you use for cleaning behind the fridge.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a handy attachment,’ Eric said.

  I waved my hand. ‘Anyway, let’s not talk about it anymore. So fucking long ago, who cares?’

  I gripped the wheel hard, concentrating on the road, thinking about Trent Gant, but thoughts of my father kept intruding. I said he’d disappeared. Why did I say that? He’d simply died in hospital from an inoperable tumour, and from that moment he was absent from my life. No more Test Match. End of story.

  Ten minutes passed. We were 20 kilometres from the Lasseter Highway turn-off, which meant we were close to the halfway point of our journey. I was making a concerted effort to visualise how things would play out with Bruce, when Eric interrupted my train of thought.

  ‘Did you say you ran a self-storage facility?’

  ‘Yeah. I did.’

  ‘Right.’

  He went back to reading, but before doing that he looked at me in a way he hadn’t looked at me before. For a moment the familiar bland expression gave way to something else. I couldn’t quite identify it, but I didn’t like it.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, no reason, really,’ Eric replied. But I sensed that there was a reason, and not a good reason. And now the grinding noise had returned. This time it wasn’t just a noise; I could feel the van protesting. It was time to make a rest stop.

  I pulled over in the dry soil a couple of metres from the roadside. We both sat in silence, watching the breeze blow red dust about on the other side of the windscreen. Every so often another vehicle sped by. Otherwise we were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by spinifex bushes and dirt. The landscape stretched on forever in all directions, but I felt a weird sensation that the sides were, millimetre by millimetre, closing in.

  ‘Can I have a look at that paper?’ I said.

  Eric hesitated, then passed it over.

  The article was headed Search for Missing Four Continues. Jane McMath and Michael Tan had now officially joined Ellen and Stelzer on the missing-persons list, and the police now knew that all of these people had, at one time or another, rented a unit from Hideaway Self Storage. There was no mention of Kelvin, but I knew he’d be mentioned soon enough.

  Police are looking for Ken Guy, manager of Hideaway, in connection with the disappearances. Guy himself has also disappeared, having apparently abandoned the failed storage facility, which is currently empty and in a state of disrepair.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the head, but from the inside.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said. ‘They’ve got it wrong. It’s Bruce they’re looking for, not me. You see, this is exactly what I was talking about before – the newspaper won’t tell you what’s really going on. Don’t you see? This is the whole point. I know what’s really going on. Bruce is behind all this; he set me up. I didn’t want to go into it before but I’ll tell you now: he’s evil. You have no idea what he’s done. He’s ruined my life. This is why we’re here now – he has to be … done away with.’

  ‘Done away with?’ Eric said. ‘What do you mean?’ His agreeably bland exterior melted away, and he now looked genuinely perturbed. I don’t know why; the whole thing made perfect sense to me.

  ‘I probably should have told you before we left Alice Springs, but I thought it was in your best interests not to know too much. Let’s get out and stretch our legs. I’ll explain everything.’

  We climbed down the shallow embankment on the side of the highway and walked towards the shade of a clump of trees. I explained the Bruce situation as best I could, and I think Eric understood. But as I headed back to the van, I became aware that something very strange had happened.

  Eric had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Thirty-three

  ‘Eric? Eric!’

  I stood near the trees and called his name several times, but there was no response, just the whisper of the breeze in the spinifex grass.

  ‘Now you’re gone too,’ I said.

  Time was ticking away and a long stretch of road still lay between me and the No Worries Caravan Park. I’d have to continue alone.

  ‘Forgive me, Eric,’ I said. I left his newspaper by the side of the road, using the water canteen as a paperweight.

  There was another problem: not had only the funny noise in the HiAce returned, it had grown even funnier – louder, grindier – than before, and now I could feel the van struggling under me, a recalcitrant beast. I floored the accelerator but the van refused to cooperate. I had to drive at a speed way below the legal limit. Every now and then a car approached from behind and I was forced to let it overtake me.

  I felt deflated, depressed even, now that Eric was no longer present. You don’t often meet people who like prog rock. So what if he’d thought that Hawkwind were better than King Crimson? You can’t force someone to see the truth; I realised that now. But the worst part was that Eric was supposed to have been instrumental to my plan; his disappearance didn’t bode well.

  ‘That wasn’t part of the deal, universe,’ I said. ‘Or are you merely making an adjustment?’

  Maybe that was it. Eric had helped facilitate my plan, but then, when he posed a possible danger, the universe, like any good project manager, had taken him out of the equation. It was neither good nor bad; it was merely a necessary accommodation.

  There was, however, another possibility – one I preferred not to consider.

  Bruce.

  I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but Eric’s disappearance had all the hallmarks of my enemy. I wondered: was I closer to Bruce – or he was closer to me – than I’d realised? The more I thought about it, the more I could feel Bruce’s presence, as if he was sitting in the seat next to me, breathing the same air. I’d been so caught up in the process of looking for him, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be looking for me.

  ‘Bruce, where are you?’

  There was no reply. And yet he seemed so close. Was I mistaken, or was he simply not yet prepared to declare himself?

  ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s see this through to the bitter end.’

  I managed to coax another 50 k’s out of the HiAce. I didn’t know what the problem was, but whatever it was, I knew that I couldn’t fix it out here. I willed the universe to send a roadhouse my way, asap. But not even the universe could swing that. The van came to a stop, not just in the middle of nowhere but in the very middle of the middle of nowhere.

  I had no choice but to abandon it for the time being. I opened the back of the van, retrieved the gun from the toolbox and shoved it into my sock, concealing my sock and the gun under the leg of my tracksuit pants. I grabbed a bottle of water from my supplies and waited on the side of the road; maybe I could thumb a ride if I could get someone to slow down in time. But I’d broken down during a very long pause between passing vehicles. I seemed to be stuck inside a massive gap.

  Thirty minutes later, I gave up and proceeded along the highway on foot. After a couple of kilometres, I felt as if half the sand in the Northern Territory was inside my mouth, and I’d nearly run out of water already. The words of a song from the 1970s came into my head – something about the heat being hot and the ground being dry but the air being full of sound. The heat certainly was hot and the ground was undeniably dry, but the air wasn’t full of sound: it was full of silence, and yet that silence felt louder than the loudest sound I could think of. Who knows – maybe that’s what the song was getting at.

  I walked for miles, the silence drilling into my head. A car approached; I waved my hands but it didn’t stop. Meanwhile the heat got hotter and there was no roadhouse in sight – only gum trees, spinifex grass, red sand rippling into eternity …

  At some point I came to a turn-off – a narrow gravel road. There was no signpost. I thought, This might lead to nothing, but on the other it might lead to something. So I followed it. The road went on and on, finally terminating at a small car park. Just behind the car park was a hedge – very green, neatly manicured – and just behind the hedge was a low white building. The whole thing looked out of place here, as if it had fallen from the sky in the middle of the night.

  Weird place to put a roadhouse, I thought. But as I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t a roadhouse at all. There was an opening in the hedge with a metal gate, and attached to the gate was a rather understated sign – black letters on a white background.

  PHIL’S SELF STORAGE

  I knew I’d seen this place before, even though I’d never been here. I didn’t have to ponder this for long to realise that it was the image on the sheet of paper still stuck to the noticeboard in my office at Hideaway. Now, standing here looking at it, at the three bands of colour formed by the green hedge, the white building and the blue sky, I was amazed to see that it looked exactly the same, in every detail, as its two-dimensional representation. The only discrepancy lay in the scale; I’d imagined that the building would cover a lot more ground, but in real life it appeared quite small, certainly smaller than Hideaway. But that made sense: there probably wasn’t much demand for self-storage in the middle of nowhere.

  Thirty-four

  I passed t
hrough the gate, crossed a small paved area and came to a glass door, which automatically slid open. A two-note bell sounded as I entered. I now stood on the tiled floor of what appeared to be the front office, which like the no-nonsense exterior was clean, bare. It was also extremely bright; this, combined with the air conditioning cranked up high, made me feel as if I’d walked into a huge fridge.

  A grey-haired Aboriginal woman in a sleeveless cotton dress appeared behind the reception desk.

  ‘G’day, mate. What can I do for you?’

  ‘My car broke down,’ I croaked. ‘I’ve been walking for miles.’

  ‘Yeah, you look a bit the worse for wear.’

  I looked around. ‘Are you the manager?’

  ‘I’m the manager, the owner and the human resources department.’ She laughed, a prolonged cackle, as dry as the interior of my mouth.

  ‘Who’s Phil, then?’

  ‘My late husband. We ran the place together, then he passed away, and now it’s just me, Ronnie, eh?’

  I glanced at the ceiling. No wonder the room was so bright: there were at least a dozen fluoro lights up there.

  ‘I’m curious,’ I said. ‘Who designed the building?’

  ‘No idea, mate,’ Ronnie replied. ‘It was here when we came along. Maybe Phil knew, but he’s long gone.’

  I heard a throbbing sound somewhere in the distance, getting closer and closer, until I realised it was coming from inside my skull.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, go for it, mate.’

  I collapsed onto one of two white plastic chairs near the front desk.

  ‘You could probably use some water,’ she said, tapping a water cooler in the corner.

  ‘That would be amazing.’

  She poured some ice-cold water into a plastic cup and handed it to me. I was so dehydrated, the water evaporated almost before it reached my tongue.

  ‘I … work in self-storage too,’ I said. ‘I did, anyway.’