Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

by David Cohen

‘Holy fuck.’ I turned away, turned back, looked him in the eye. ‘And Ellen?’

  ‘Well, that was kind of personal. I guess you could call it jealousy.’

  ‘Don’t you realise she was the love of my life?’ I could feel the tears. Then I saw that Bruce was crying too. ‘The best thing that ever happened to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ken.’

  ‘You will be.’ The time had come at last. Calmly, I bent down and removed the gun from my sock. Bruce could see what I was doing but he made no attempt to stop me. He did nothing and said nothing, even as I pressed the barrel of the Heckler & Koch into the side of his head.

  ‘I understand, Ken,’ he said.

  I hadn’t expected that. ‘Well …’ I said, ‘do you have anything to add?’

  ‘Only that all I wanted – initially, at least – was to save the business. Insane, I know. The thing is, I was still having issues with my meds.’

  ‘Issues with your meds?’ I pushed the barrel harder against his head. ‘It was a problem with your meds that made you do all this? Here’s a suggestion, then: take your fucking meds! Don’t go off your meds! Maybe if you’d taken them, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘But that’s the thing, Ken,’ Bruce replied, quite calmly under the circumstances. ‘I had a problem with my meds, but the problem wasn’t that I didn’t take them; the problem was that I did.’

  Thirty-seven

  ‘What do you mean you did?’ I said.

  ‘You see, it’s when I take them that I go too far – especially when they’re combined with the fluoro lights. The flickering sets off something in my brain, Ken.’

  ‘In your brain?’

  ‘In my brain, Ken. In my brain.’

  It was too hard to process. Also, my arm was getting tired from holding up the Heckler & Koch. My fingers – three wrapped around the handle and one hovering over the trigger – were so tense, they felt as if they would remain locked in that arrangement forever. I wondered if I’d be able to pull the trigger.

  ‘But you’ve had this issue for years,’ I said. ‘Since back when we were at Box Hill North and even before then – your hospitality days and all that. Why didn’t you try a different kind of medication?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bruce said. He’d remained quite still, quite composed throughout this exchange, resigned to whatever was going to happen. ‘These ones helped me think clearly; they stopped me from getting overwhelmed by things. So they had their good effects, but they had some bad effects, too. I only resorted to them when things really got too much. I’d think, well, maybe this time I’ll just have the good effects. And for a while, that was the case. They kind of lulled me into a false sense of security, but sooner or later something bad seemed to happen.’

  We stood there, frozen in our respective poses, concealed from the world by trees as I struggled to make sense of what Bruce was saying.

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘you don’t have a problem with the fluoro lights; I do. I’m the one who hears … I’m the one with the problem.’

  ‘We both are, Ken. We’re two of a kind really, aren’t we?’

  He was doing it again, fucking with my head, trying to throw me off guard.

  ‘No we’re not,’ I said. ‘I can see what you’re doing. Yeah, this is just another mind game. Just like how you tried to make me think I was losing my memory about giving you permission to use the van, and about the picture I found in my pocket – your pocket. And about the padlocks you said I told you to put on the units. And all the other things – Kelvin’s accident … There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re a liar.’

  Bruce said nothing for a while, but I could tell I’d got to him. He was sweating like a pig. In fact, so was I. He was breathing audibly. In fact, so was I. In fact, I could barely distinguish his breathing from my own; it felt like we were using the same set of lungs.

  ‘Then you might as well do what you came here to do. Get it over with, Ken.’

  ‘I intend to, Bruce.’ My hand was really cramping up by this point. ‘Just hold on a minute.’

  Bruce waited patiently while I transferred the gun to my other hand, and shook my gun hand to get the blood flowing again. I switched hands again and picked up where we’d left off.

  ‘You know, I really wish I didn’t have to do this, Bruce – we go back a long way …’

  ‘Like I said, Ken: I understand.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Any final words?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Just a couple of things. One: it simply got out of hand. I mean, I was just going to do away with tenants – and only tenants who I didn’t think anyone would miss.’

  ‘Well, gee,’ I said, ‘I guess that makes everything all right, then.’

  ‘Look, it started with Stelzer and it was going to be a one-off. But then when Jane McMath came along … I don’t know – I just couldn’t resist the opportunity. And then there was Michael Tan … But in my defence, I really did spend time talking with those people and – well, they seemed so lonely and unhappy; I really thought I was doing them a favour.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, that’s not for you to decide.’

  ‘Well, I know that now.’

  ‘I might as well ask,’ I said. ‘That guy who disappeared when we were at Box Hill North – the guy who caught me in his unit. Anthony. You never really told me what happened to him. Did you …’

  Bruce turned his head, just slightly, because it was obstructed by the gun. ‘Well, if I’m going to be totally honest … But he was the only other one, I swear.’

  I shook my head. ‘Holy shit.’

  For the next few moments, nobody said anything. Then the trace of a smile appeared on Bruce’s face.

  ‘Ignoring all the bad things about what I did at the construction site, you could, I suppose, look upon it as my revenge against Ron Wood.’

  ‘In what way,’ I said, ‘is it revenge against Ron fucking Wood?’

  ‘Or maybe revenge against Pharaoh’s Tomb as a whole, is a better way of putting it.’

  ‘That really doesn’t make your point any clearer.’

  Bruce smiled, rather condescendingly. ‘Seriously, Ken, you’ve got to use your imagination – not everything has to be cut and dried. Revenge can be carried out years after the initial insult – dish best served cold and all that – and it can take subtle forms. Maybe revenge is the wrong word. Think of it as closure, if you like. I told you I find it hard to let things go.’

  We were silent again. Just get it over with, I thought. Do away with him.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, Ken, there was no pain involved. Not for any of them. I’ll even tell you exactly how I did it, if you like.’

  ‘No! Except – do you swear Ellen didn’t suffer?’

  ‘I swear. Ellen was in emotional pain, but that was there before either of us came along.’

  ‘Okay then. Now, no more fucking around – the time has come, Bruce.’

  But I simply couldn’t do it.

  Thirty-eight

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said. ‘This is so frustrating.’

  ‘I know.’

  If I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t think I really intended to go through with it. I just wanted to bring things to a head.

  ‘It’s just that, like I said, we go back such a long way – it’d be like shooting a part of myself.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I tucked the gun back into my sock.

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘Now?’ I said. ‘We have two options: we go back and do what we have to do —’

  ‘What – you mean face the music?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘You realise the consequences of that, Ken?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And what’s the other option?’

  ‘The other option is: it’s our turn to disappear off the face of the earth.’

  ‘Disappear, Ken?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, it’s not that hard to disa
ppear; people are doing it all the time.’

  ‘And where would we go?’

  I kicked at the ground with my toe. Some startled red ants scurried out of the hole.

  ‘Anywhere but where we’ve been. Hideaway’s a thing of the past, either way. Time to move on.’

  ‘So,’ Bruce said, ‘those are our options: face the music or disappear off the face of the earth. Which one would you recommend, Ken?’

  ‘I’m going to leave it up to you,’ I said, ‘and just hope to God you’ll choose correctly.’

  ‘No, Ken – this is your decision.’

  I looked at Bruce’s face: a red balloon, onto which someone had painted two eyes, a nose and a mouth.

  ‘My decision? Okay, but you have to swear to go along with whatever I decide. And there’s no backing out.’

  ‘No backing out.’

  ‘Do you swear?’

  ‘I swear, Ken.’

  I walked around the enclosure for a long time, first clockwise, then anticlockwise, then clockwise again, weighing up the choices. Bruce walked alongside me the whole time, but I barely noticed him.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ve made up my mind. Follow me.’

  Bruce followed reluctantly. I think he knew.

  We emerged from our little hideaway, back into the world. It was late afternoon but the sun continued to burn us as we trudged through the dry sand, me in front, Bruce a couple of feet behind. We walked in silence, on and on.

  By the time we reached the highway, my resolve had already begun to weaken. I’d gone back to weighing up the options: face the music or disappear off the face of the earth? Disappearing off the face of the earth meant that I could go pretty much anywhere; facing the music meant that I could never go anywhere again. But disappearing off the face of the earth was no picnic, either, for all sorts of reasons. Both scenarios involved me suffering for the sins of Bruce. Yes, Bruce had well and truly fucked things up.

  For a moment I considered a third option, or sub-option: return to Phil’s Self Storage and insist on seeing my father, no matter how much he didn’t want to be seen. In fact I was already walking back along the highway when I remembered that he wasn’t at Phil’s Self Storage, because apparently Phil’s Self Storage didn’t exist.

  If he’s not there, I thought, then Christ only knows where he is. It was possible that he’d died long ago, brain tumour or no brain tumour. On the other hand, he could well be alive, in another country, maybe on the other side of the planet. But then again, I thought, he might just as easily be around the next corner.

  The problem was, there weren’t many corners here – just lots of empty space sliced in half by a highway. I’d have to look elsewhere, some place where there were people, which was pretty much anywhere but here. The odds weren’t particularly good.

  I could see that this would require further consideration, very careful consideration. So I sat myself down on the ground, not far from the side of the highway. And for the time being that’s where I would remain: a solitary figure in the landscape, thinking things over.

  David Cohen grew up in Perth, Western Australia and now lives in Brisbane. His first novel Fear of Tennis won a Varuna/HarperCollins Manuscript Development Award, and was published by Black Pepper in 2007. His short fiction has appeared in The Big Issue, Meanjin, Seizure, Tracks and elsewhere. In 2015 his short-story collection The Hunter was shortlisted in the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Barry Scott, Tess Rice and Penelope Goodes at Transit Lounge, Lynn Martin and Alexandra Molnar Kovacs.