Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

  ‘Hardly a dull moment,’ Ronnie said. ‘So much to do. I’m full to capacity.’

  ‘That must be nice,’ I said.

  ‘Bugger-all competition around here, though, eh?’

  Ronnie walked around to the business side of the desk and heaved her large body onto a high swivel chair. I couldn’t recall what I’d originally been asking about. I leaned forward in my seat and tried to focus. My head continued to throb; someone was kicking the shit out of my brain.

  ‘Mind if I have some more water? My head’s killing me.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ Ronnie said. ‘You’ve got to be careful out here, mate. Walking around like that – T-shirt, trackie dacks, no hat whatsoever – you’ll burn up; there’ll be nothing left of you but your glasses, eh? What are you doing out here, anyway?’

  I got up and refilled the cup, pressing its cold plastic ridges against the hot skin of my forehead.

  ‘I was on my way to the No Worries Caravan Park near Kings Canyon. I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘Looking for someone, are you?’ She laughed her arid laugh. ‘Well, that narrows it down. And does this someone have any connection with the gun in your sock?’

  I looked down and saw that the lump at the base of my pants leg was unmistakably gun-shaped.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘He took away the woman I love. And other things, too.’

  ‘Well, that’s your business,’ she replied. ‘Not my place to comment. But you’re a fuck of a long way from Kings Canyon.’

  I got up and refilled the cup a third time, in a vain attempt to irrigate the desert in my mouth. When I’d finished drinking, I sat there scrunching in the sides of the cup, then popping them out again.

  ‘That’s something else I don’t get,’ I said. ‘What’s a self-storage facility doing way out here?’

  ‘It’s a bit off the beaten track, true,’ Ronnie said. ‘If I’m not mistaken, this is the most remote self-storage facility in Australia, eh?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s nothing for miles around. What good is a self-storage facility in this part of the world? I mean, it’s hardly convenient. Why on earth would people need to store their things here?’

  Ronnie adjusted the shoulder strap of her dress. ‘Things? Who said anything about things?’

  ‘Things,’ I said, scrunching and unscrunching my cup, ‘are surely the very basis of self-storage. The two go hand in hand; without things, there’s no storage – just a bunch of empty spaces.’

  Ronnie laughed like a desert wind, and her eyes gleamed.

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, mate. I don’t store things – I store people.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘So you’re saying that … er … What are you saying?’

  She rested her elbows on the reception desk and leaned forward, displaying two-thirds of her unrestrained breasts.

  ‘A lot of people go missing, right? Thousands every year. But nearly all of them turn up eventually, eh? They might be gone two days; they might be gone five years. Might make their own way back; might be found by someone else who brings them back. Might be found in some distant town; might be found next door. Might be found alive; might be found dead. Point is: they’re no longer missing, eh? You with me so far?’

  ‘It’s not complicated,’ I said.

  ‘No, but here’s where it might get complicated. What about that tiny percentage – tiny tiny – who vanish, never to be seen again? Ever wonder to yourself where they go?’

  This line of conversation felt familiar.

  ‘They enter another dimension,’ I said. ‘Or something like that.’

  ‘Another dimension.’ She cackled. ‘One way of putting it, I suppose. Here, have a look at this.’

  Ronnie gestured for me to come around to the other side of the desk. She tapped the keyboard of a computer, and some sort of database appeared on the screen: rows and rows of thumbnail photographs.

  ‘That’s just a sample,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ve got around two hundred tenants.’

  I pointed at the screen. ‘Are you saying that all these people are … here?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m running out of room; I’m in the middle of building another wing right now.’

  ‘What – you keep them in storage units?’

  ‘They’re comfortable enough. Not a lot of space, but they don’t need much space; it’s not as if they have any stuff. Some people go missing for that very reason: they’ve had a gutful of things; they want a place where there are no things whatsoever.’

  I gestured towards the screen again. ‘So these are the people who’ve … disappeared off the face of the earth?’

  Ronnie thought about that for a moment.

  ‘Well, you could put it that way, I suppose. But I prefer to say that they no longer reside in the world.’

  Thirty-five

  I looked again at the photographs, random snapshots, presumably supplied by families, husbands, wives, children. Although the images were small, and at times a bit of out of focus, I could see the faces clearly enough. They were like any other faces, except that the people attached to them were no longer around.

  ‘I don’t get it, though,’ I said. ‘Why do they come here? And when? After a year? Two years? Ten years?’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ Ronnie said. ‘They may come here straightaway; they may come after many years have passed. What matters is, they come here when they decide they want to vanish.’

  ‘So everyone who’s disappeared is here?’

  ‘Everyone who’s disappeared and wants to stay that way. That’s what I’m all about, mate. You see, like you, we used to do regular self-storage – Phil and me. It was good at first – heaps of demand – but a few years back, it all started slowing down, eh? Vacancy rate shot up; we had all these empty units on our hands.’

  ‘I know what that’s like,’ I said.

  ‘But at the same time we noticed, while there weren’t so many people wanting to store things, there were these other people who wanted to simply disappear – people who had no interest in being found. Light-bulb moment. We came up with a revolutionary idea – fundamental paradigm shift, as those university wankers say. We set out to fill that gaping hole in the market. There’s lots of self-storage places around – too many – but this is the only one that literally provides self-storage, eh?’

  Listening to Ronnie, I wondered if perhaps, somehow, I’d been on the wrong track. Maybe Bruce had nothing to do with any of this.

  ‘If I give you some names,’ I said, ‘can you search your database for me?’

  ‘Sorry, mate – that’d be a breach of privacy. These people want to stay missing.’

  ‘But you just showed me all those photos. One of them could be my sister, for all you know.’

  ‘Is one of them your sister?’

  ‘No, I don’t have a sister.’

  ‘Well then, crisis averted.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘all I want to know is if they’re here, I swear. I don’t want to know the unit number; I don’t even want to see their faces on the screen.’

  Ronnie looked at me carefully, wondering whether or not to trust me.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Just say yes or no when I give you the name.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You say the name. If it’s there I’ll nod my head a bit; if it’s not there, I won’t. Then you say the next name … Right? But that’s it – no questions, nothing.’

  ‘Yes. Totally. Thank you.’

  I gave her each name in turn, but not once did she nod her head.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said.

  ‘Hey, what was our agreement? No questions.’

  That’s right, Ken, they’re not here. They were never here.

  There it was again: the whispering. I looked up and saw that one of the lights had begun to flicker, off, then on again, then off again, at ten-second intervals. Then another light started flickering: at the very point where
the first light went off, the second light went on, and when the first light went on, the second light went off. Off. On. Off. On.

  Do away with him, Ken. Do away with him.

  ‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘Can you fix those lights?’

  Not just yet. There’s one name you haven’t mentioned yet. Ask her about that.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Which one?’

  You know which one.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Here’s a hint then: he has the same surname as you.

  I said nothing. The throbbing in my head intensified. I had to sit down again.

  And his first name starts with C. C for Christopher. Ringing any bells?

  I pushed my fist into my forehead. ‘Shut up!’

  Christopher Guy. Ask her if he’s on the database.

  ‘How could he be on the fucking database? He died years ago. I was twelve years old. He had a brain tumour. He passed away in hospital.’

  You were twelve; I’ll give you that. And his brain – well, you’re half right there: he started losing the plot, but not from any tumour. Just faulty wiring, wasn’t it?

  ‘This is complete and utter —’

  Remember how he locked you in the garage for no apparent reason? And Test Match – what was all that about? Not exactly healthy behaviour, was it? And then the thing with your mum and that Vietnamese dentist – what was his name? Dr Nguyen. And so on and so forth. Bit of a gap, wasn’t there, between things and how he saw things.’

  ‘That was the tumour – it fucked with his brain.’

  Keep telling yourself that, son. He was just a nutjob, pure and simple.

  ‘No. Incorrect.’

  And then at some point, he just buggered off, didn’t he? He just vanished. Never returned. And to this day nobody knows what happened to the poor bastard. It’s as if he just … now, what’s your expression? He just disappeared off the face of the earth.

  ‘You’re full of shit.’

  Yeah? Ask her, then.

  I took deep breaths. Calm down, I told myself, calm down. Don’t want Ronnie to think you’re …

  ‘Sorry about all that,’ I said. ‘I just want to name one more name. One more name, okay?’

  ‘One more name – that’s right,’ Ronnie said, as if simply confirming the rules of a pre-established game.

  ‘Is there a man … Is there a man named Christopher Guy?’

  Ronnie cleared her throat and clicked on one of the images, enlarging it so that it filled the screen: a head-and-shoulders shot, slightly out of focus, of a smiling thirty-something man, blue sky behind. It looked as if it had been cut out of a family holiday snap. Underneath the photo, the barest of bare facts.

  GUY, CHRISTOPHER DAVID

  Last Seen: Frankston, Victoria

  Missing Since: October 1988

  I stared at that image for a long time, examining every feature of his face.

  ‘That your man?’ Ronnie said.

  I nodded my head, although I still didn’t entirely believe it.

  No denying it now, is there, Ken?

  I shook my head, although I still felt like denying it.

  Good. Now that’s cleared up, time to get back to the main issue.

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  Sorry if I sound a tad harsh, but that’s old business – you’ve got new business to attend to, an urgent matter.

  ‘What’s that?’

  You know bloody well what. Your former sidekick and current nemesis. Or maybe you’re his nemesis – if you do things right.

  I looked up to see that the two flickering lights had somehow infected another light, and then another, until the light virus had spread to all the fluoro tubes in the reception area. They flickered in what seemed like a perfectly orchestrated sequence, so there was no moment where all was light or all was dark.

  Do away with him. Do away with him. Do away with him.

  Now it wasn’t just one voice, but many – or the same voice reverberating around the room. I ground the palm of my hand against my forehead. I pounded my ears with my fists. Then I massaged my forehead again, finally taking refuge on the floor behind the front desk.

  ‘Please!’ I said.

  ‘Just a tick,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ll get someone to fix ’em. We’re in luck – I just took on an assistant yesterday. Getting too busy around here to do it all on my own.’

  I forced myself into the small space under the desk while Ronnie disappeared out the back. She returned in the company of the new assistant. I looked up at him; he looked down at me.

  ‘Hello, Ken,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Bruce,’ I replied.

  Thirty-six

  He stood there, bathed in flickering shadows, holding a pair of boltcutters. He looked the same as ever.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘turn off the lights!’

  ‘Not just yet,’ said Bruce.

  I stood up, keeping my eyes fixed on the floor tiles so that I only had to look at the shadows from the lights rather than the lights themselves. The voice or voices continued. Do away with him. I don’t know why; it wasn’t as if I needed any more convincing. But this was hardly the opportune moment to act.

  ‘I just told you to turn off the fucking lights!’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ Bruce twirled the boltcutters like a baton. ‘The thing is, Ken, I no longer work for you.’

  My hands still over my ears, I yelled, ‘Ronnie! Tell him to turn off the lights!’

  But Ronnie seemed to have slipped away. I shut my eyes and retreated to my hideaway beneath the counter.

  ‘Bruce, what the fuck are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘At Phil’s Self Storage.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘This place right here – where the point five per cent end up.’

  Bruce laughed and squatted down opposite me.

  ‘You really have lost it, haven’t you? You know as well as I do that there’s no Phil’s Self Storage. Nor is there any Phil. And Ronnie – who’s that?’

  I opened my eyes and looked around. Bruce was right. We were sitting on a rough circle of ground in the shade of some gum trees in the middle of nowhere – well, not quite, because I could hear cars on a highway in the distance.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘Just us and some dirt and dry grass and trees, and sod-all else.’

  I clutched at my head. ‘What going on?’

  Bruce stood up, brushed the sand and leaves from his tracksuit pants, and started pacing around the little enclosure. I could hear twigs cracking under his shoes. I stood up too, pacing in the same direction.

  ‘The thing is, Ken …’ Bruce said. He stopped, then resumed pacing. The earlier menace had given way to uncertainty. He seemed to be struggling with something. ‘The thing is, I’m afraid I went too far again.’

  I also stopped, then continued. I found it therapeutic to keep moving; in fact, I found it impossible to remain still.

  ‘What are you saying, Bruce?’ I knew what he was going to say but I needed to hear him say it.

  ‘I want to come clean about some things. Leonard Stelzer and the other tenants who disappeared off the face of the earth – well, they didn’t really disappear. That is, they disappeared, but not off the face of the earth.’

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it? I knew it. You made them disappear. What exactly did you do, Bruce?’

  He ignored the question. ‘I did it with the best of intentions, Ken. The business was going under and I got this idea: make it look as if the units had been abandoned, sell the stuff, make big chunks of cash up front, put the money back into the business.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured out that much. How could you imagine that would ever work?’

  Bruce paused to snap a small branch off a tree. He started tapping it lightly against the tree trunk, listening intently to the sound it made, as if measuring that tiny, insignificant noise against the silence all around. I did likewise. For a while, we wordlessly tapped our sticks in unis
on against the same tree.

  ‘In retrospect, I don’t know,’ he replied at last. ‘But at least I tried.’

  ‘So – what? You’re saying it was all my fault the company turned to shit?’

  ‘Let’s not play the blame game now.’

  I threw down my stick. ‘Are you joking? I fully intend to play the blame game. But it’s no game – I’m blaming you, full stop.’

  Bruce stared into the distance and said nothing.

  ‘I don’t need to know how you did away with them. What I want to know is what you did with them after you … They haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth, so where are they?’

  ‘Not off the face – more like under it.’

  ‘Stop talking in fucking riddles,’ I said.

  Bruce said, ‘Pharaoh’s Tomb.’

  ‘Pharaoh’s Tomb? What about it?’

  Bruce reached into the pocket of his tracksuit pants and produced a padlock, which he placed in the palm of my hand. I could tell by the weight alone that it was a Sargent and Greenleaf.

  ‘That’s the one I put on the gate,’ he said, ‘after I removed the existing one – which wasn’t secure at all – to get into the site. But I went back and swapped them over again before they started construction, which I’d say is well underway by now – maybe even finished.’

  It dawned on me, slowly, what he was talking about. I let the padlock fall to the ground.

  ‘You’ve probably already noticed it’s the same type as the ones on those units.’

  I walked to other side of our enclosure. ‘I don’t think I want to hear any more.’

  But when I turned around Bruce was right there with me; there was no escaping him.

  ‘But that’s exactly what you want, isn’t it? A confession. Isn’t that why you followed me all the way out here to the middle of nowhere?’

  I waved my hand, batting away his question. I said, ‘Let me ask you this: Kelvin? And Ellen? Are they also … Pharaoh’s Tomb?’

  ‘Yes. Both.’

  ‘Was that for the business too?’

  ‘Kelvin was nothing personal. I was just worried he knew too much. He’s a clever guy. Was, anyway.’