by Jane Rawson
‘Yeah, really see it.’
‘All of it.’
‘Really see all of it.’
‘You mean all of it?’
‘All of it. They should really see the country. All of it.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yeah, all of it,’ I think someone else would have piped up right about now. ‘I mean, if we say we’re going to see the country, well, who are we to pick and choose between this state and that state, this national park and that national park, this scenic highway and that scenic highway? Who do we think we are, saying any part of this great country is any better than any other part of this great country? What, what’s that look for? You think Nebraska has nothing to offer? Really, you think Nebraska has nothing to offer?’
By the time they’d finished, they’d all sworn some insane pact that we were actually going to see the whole country. Simon’s dad, who was the finicky type – I mean, the dude loved orienteering – had already marked up his maps of Texas and Oklahoma into 25 foot squares and had planned our route through both states. He’d had my mom ordering topographic maps of the rest of the country at ridiculously detailed scales so he could mark those up too. The next day two out of the three of them would have been nursing hangovers and laughing at their ridiculous plans, but by then Simon’s dad had already been up for four hours: he’d scoped out a minivan he was going to buy, he’d quit his job and pulled all his savings out of the bank. I still don’t know how he convinced my parents to join in, but those guys were always up for a lark. I guess that’s why we never really had a house and why I ended up named after a rat.
So anyway, yeah: from the time I was three we were traveling the country, sometimes with Simon and his dad, sometimes just our family out on our own. It had its highlights, of course; no school, for example. But then mom and dad fell out with Simon’s dad, and a bit after that they had their accident, and that’s how I ended up with Simon. A few years later his dad died too and since then it’s just been the two of us. Just me and him for three years now, since I was eleven and he was thirteen. If I’d been the older one we’d have moved to the country by now, got a pony and a freakin’ British bulldog, worked in a canning factory or bussing tables in some diner to pay the rent on our shotgun shack. But Simon’s the older one. Good old Simon. I guess he inherited more than his shocking looks from his dad because it never even crossed his mind that we should give up on this whole square-standing business. I know, it makes no sense.
So anyway – oh wait, I already said that. Oh, what the hell: so anyway, here we are in San Francisco, holed up under a bush in Dolores Park, arguing about whether to grab a coffee and a pastry from the Dolores Park Café or whether to start checking off the squares between 21st and Cesar Chavez, Dolores and Mission.
San Francisco you say little girl? Does that mean you’ve made it all the way from your home town of Stillwater, Oklahoma, clear across the country to the Great Bear State?
Why yes, dear listener, it means just that. Oklahoma: check. Texas: check. New Mexico: check. Arizona: check. California: hold your horses! We’ve done everything south of the City by the Bay. From here we head north (Yosemite! That bit I’m excited about. God, I hope we get there before it snows) and then we start back east again: Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas … Did you see that movie, Forrest Gump, where the retarded guy keeps going backwards and forwards across the country and no one has any idea why someone would do something like that? Yeah, well, nuff said.
Can you do math? I’m fourteen years old, right. We’ve been doing this since I was three. That makes, hmm, eleven years. In eleven years we’ve covered four and one half states. Admittedly, we had to redo some of them after Simon’s dad took issue with the way my parents were measuring their squares – there was a whole chunk of the Texas Panhandle he insisted on doing over. OK, so let’s say we’re covering around five states every ten years, allowing for that remeasuring. And there’s, what, fifty states in the USA? Yeah, that’s what I heard too. Fifty minus five … forty-five divided by five … that’s nine, times ten years. Yep, that’s ninety more years. Even if I convince Simon that Hawaii and Alaska don’t count (how would we even get to Hawaii, for starters? I mean, we’re teenagers. We have no jobs. We’re not going to swim there), they’ll probably have made Puerto Rico and Australia states by the time we get around to finishing. I guess that’ll be some 104th birthday party I’ll have to celebrate when we wrap this thing up.
‘Sarah?’
‘Yeah what?’
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yeah, I’m ready. Stop nagging!’
I guess he’s been asking me for ages. I wasn’t listening. ‘Hey Simon, can we get a burrito for morning tea? I saw in that book you got that there’s some great place at 24th and Mission.’
Simon was always hitting up backpackers for their guidebooks, everywhere we went. He’d give them the whole spiel about how we’d headed off from home with our parents’ blessing to see the country, that our parents were commune dwellers, that we’d been home schooled. Those backpackers loved that shit. So we’d had some Moon guide to the South-West, but a few weeks back Simon had scammed a Lonely Planet California and Nevada guide from some girl waiting to catch the Green Tortoise bus up to San Fran from LA. It was her last stop, she said, San Fran. She’d be flying home from there. She wouldn’t need her guidebook anymore. We both wondered where she’d even been if San Fran was her last stop. Had she seen Chula Vista? Lancaster? Needles? Tulare? We were betting not, but we were also betting she’d fly on home to New Zealand and tell all her friends she’d ‘seen’ California.
This square standing thing was turning us into real snobs.
‘So can we? Huh?’
‘Sure. Do you have enough money left to have a burrito?’
‘Yup. Been saving up for it since I saw that in the book.’
Where do we get our money from? Good question. Mostly we just ask and let the good lord provide. We both make a point of keeping ourselves clean. We don’t wear T-shirts with metal bands on them; we’ve got no piercings or filthy dogs, no sign of any drug habit. Simon’s extreme mental illness and bizarre addiction certainly aren’t visible to the casual onlooker. So we do alright. People feel sorry for us. And so they should; well, for me, anyway. Simon hates asking for money, but the one time we tried working for it (illegal and under the counter of course, in some Mexican restaurant in Phoenix, washing dishes) he was driven crazy by the time it took out of our square standing schedule. So he pretty much has to just bite the bullet. It would be neat if some rich aunty died and left us a mint (not, like, a breath mint, stupid; I mean, a whole pile of cash), but if we even have a rich aunty we’ve never heard of her, and I guess that means she’s probably never heard of us either. Imagine it, though; if we got, like, a thousand dollars we could get that place in the country. Surely if we had a thousand dollars Simon would give up this whole stupid thing. Surely!
‘OK, if you want to get down to 24th before we starve to death,’ Simon was saying, ‘we’d better get on with it. Are you sure you don’t need anything before we set off?’
‘Nope, I’m fine.’
‘Not even a drink of water?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘How much money do you have left, by the way?’
I pulled out the purse I’d bought back in LA after we got a big haul from some Norwegian couple who not only bought us lunch but gave us all their leftover US dollars before heading for the airport. It was Hello Kitty. I liked it. Simon thought it was a waste of money and wanted to know why I couldn’t keep using the black vinyl wallet he’d found me in a dumpster. Some things he just doesn’t get.
‘I’ve still got twenty-eight dollars and some change.’
‘Great. We can probably go a few more days without a break to raise more then, right?’
‘I reckon so. Do you think we’ll be able to wash somewhere before then, though? Maybe at one of those bathhouses we keep seeing around here?’
Simon
gave me a look, but I had no idea what he meant.
‘What?’
‘Those bathhouses aren’t for washing, Sarah.’
‘So what are they for?’
‘Um. Look, never mind.’
Simon liked to act like he knew all kinds of things that I didn’t know about, just because he was seventeen. But he didn’t. Where would he even have found stuff out that I didn’t know? He didn’t have any, like, seventeen-year-old friends. He had no friends, and neither did I, and we never had. For us, Friends was just some TV show we saw advertised on billboards. But it didn’t stop him acting all superior.
A LOT MORE FUN THAN TUPPERWARE LIDS
Any fool could have told Ray not to try using the map again. Ray tried not to talk to fools too much. So on the Tuesday after he got back from his trip to The Gap, Ray packed up his maps again and headed out to Craigieburn. He’d finally found a patch of map right in the city that fell in one of the well-worn creases. Trips to and from the city were a much more saleable proposition than trips from one side of the city to the other, he was sure of it. If he could offer both, he’d be on a real winner.
It hadn’t taken Ray all that long to get over the trauma of The Gap. He’d gotten out, right? If it happened again, he’d just get out again, right? And besides, it didn’t seem like time in The Gap was particularly out of synch with time in real life. If he could ever remember to check his watch he’d know for sure, but he was pretty certain he’d been gone about the same time there as he’d been gone here; maybe three hours or so. And nothing untoward seemed to have happened to him as a result – he hadn’t gotten shocking diarrhoea or lost his memory, his phone still worked (thought it must have been years since he’d last gone three hours without a voicemail or a text) and he had all his hair and all his hair was still red. Yep, curtains and carpet.
So, the plan went like this. He’d head out to Craigieburn, patch the maps up so he had the area around Flagstaff Gardens on the back, then tunnel it up. He was hoping not to land in the middle of some biofuel refugee’s humpy, but there were no guarantees. Had to be safer than tunneling through to the middle of some SUV-swamped freeway though, for sure.
A little part of Ray’s brain reminded him that it was only three days ago that’d he’d wished he could be a little more circumspect, just a little more cautious. The big part of Ray’s brain started singing the theme from Mission Impossible to drown it out. He had brought a bag of stuff with him this time though, just in case. Y’know, a spare T-shirt or two, some toothpaste, something to read. He could be gone a while.
In a patch of scrub in the back blocks of Craigieburn, Ray hid his bike and started pacing around. He was really hoping this was the right spot – he didn’t want to try this trick along any of the main roads. He was pretty sure he’d covered the whole area though. Maybe he’d have to try from Hanging Rock again. He stepped sideways.
‘Mind the gap.’
Oh, crap. He was looking at the back of ponytail guy, sitting right in the middle of the square of empty carpet. He bounced on to his feet and ducked behind one of the dividers marking the edge of Suspended Imaginums, hoping none of the zany funsters there were paying attention.
They weren’t, but mainly because there was no one there. He could have sworn he’d heard someone doing the rounds with an envelope when he’d first hit the carpet. He’d expected desks, cubicles decorated with pictures of children and dogs, inspirational posters tacked to the wall by management so they could be ignored or defaced by staff. But instead of passive-aggressive post-it notes about whose turn it was to clean the coffee filter he found nothing. A literal nothing; what seemed to be a yawning, gaping absence of anything at all. Except by his foot. By his foot there was what looked like a karaoke machine. While he was staring at it, it suddenly burst into life, with the sound of coins being jangled in an envelope. ‘It’s for Jasmin’s baby! She’s due in a week! Do you want to contribute? Anything will do, anything but nothing ha ha ha ha!’ The machine fell silent again.
Ray stepped forward, pretty much expecting to fall into an eternal pit of darkness. But instead he stepped into what seemed to be an AFL match, Collingwood and Essendon. Collingwood? Those guys had merged with Carlton nearly twenty years ago. It was definitely the MCG, and the stands were packed to the very brim. It looked like President Hird – plain James back then – had the ball. He’d broken through the pack and was heading for the goals, when a burst of machine gun fire rattled out and the ground was strafed with bullets. One of the backline caught it in the thigh. Someone – he was pretty sure it was Alan Didak, who he’d thought had died of some kind of drug overdose – went down, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Ray stepped back, and the MCG was replaced with the howling blackness.
That was weird. Mountains of odd socks and discarded shadows hanging from chairs were weird, but that was seriously weird. He stepped forward again to take another look, but this time he was in some kind of room, like a club room with leather wing chairs, and there were dogs sitting around a table, and they were knitting. Wrong door. He stepped back, took one step to the left, and he was in the MCG again. The game was still going, despite the ground being littered with bodies. Someone was playing the Last Post. Anzac Day? Was this the Anzac Day game they used to have? He stepped back again.
This was fun. No, really. This was a lot more fun than Tupperware Lids. It probably even beat out Unmade Lists in the fun stakes. Ray took another step to the left and then a step forward. Whoa! World peace! He was definitely looking at world peace. It looked pretty good. He stepped back again.
So this was Suspended Imaginums, right? He had a bit of a think about it, played with a few ideas, and came to the conclusion imaginum was some kind of noun form of imagining. Did people say ‘noun form’? He thought he’d heard something like that once. OK, he thought, and he stepped forward again into someone’s garden, a multi-coloured hammock slung between two poles of a pergola, some guy lying back in it, one hand behind his head, the other hanging on to a longneck of beer. So let’s say I’m right, he thought, as the guy lifted his head to see what was going on. What are imaginums? Well, maybe they’re the things people imagine.
‘G’day,’ the guy said.
‘Oh, g’day,’ said Ray. Which would mean this guy was imaginary. That he was something someone imagined.
‘You here about the fence?’
The guy sounded Kiwi. Looked a bit Kiwi too; Maori maybe.
‘The fence?’
‘Yeah, didn’t see you come in mate, sorry. Must’ve drifted off!’
‘Yeah. Yeah … nah … That the cricket you’re listening to?’
‘Yeah bro.’
‘How’re we doing?’
‘Who’s this we, bro? En Zed’re two for two-eighty. Youse blokes are looking all washed up.’
‘Shit.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ The Kiwi made to get up out of the hammock. Ray waved him back down.
‘Nah, I’m just …’
‘You’re what?’
‘Yeah, I’m not sure.’
‘You OK, bro?’ This time he really got up, pulled himself up to sitting. ‘You want a glass of water or something?’
The bloke looked kind. Ray liked his beard, all scruffy, and the knitted stubbie holder he had for his beer. He must’ve had a cool wife.
‘OK, this’ll sound kind of weird, but where is this?’ Ray asked.
‘This? You’re at number six. You’re not the fence bloke? You got the wrong house, mate? Which one are you after?’
‘Yeah. Oh yeah, must have the wrong house. I’m after number twelve.’
‘No number twelve on this street, mate. Two, six, eight, eight a, eight b, eight c, ten. That’s it. Your boss must have messed you up. You need to use my phone or anything?’
‘Nah, I’m alright.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ Ray sat down on the edge of the back step.
‘Want to hang round and listen to the cricket for a b
it? No point rushing; not your fault your boss can’t count, eh?’ The Kiwi laughed. ‘Might as well kick back for a bit, eh, have a beer?’
He didn’t have a cool wife, Ray remembered. He was imaginary, right? This guy was imaginary. Man, this was weird.
He kind of wanted to ask this bloke for a beer, just hang out for an hour or so and listen to the cricket. But what happened if you drank imaginary beer? Did you get stuck in imaginary land? It wasn’t so bad here, in imaginary land.
‘You’re not imaginary or anything, are you mate?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Yeah, nothing. Hey look, I’d better get going. You know how it is.’
‘Sure bro, no worries. If you’re sure. You’re sure eh?’
Ray nodded.
‘OK mate, well, have a good one, eh?’
‘Yeah, you too,’ Ray said, pulling himself up off the step. ‘Go Aussie, right?’
‘Bugger off, mate!’
Ray laughed and stepped back out into the void. The Kiwi, getting back into his hammock, trailed off in the middle of whatever it was he was saying, then disappeared.
Suspended Imaginums? Ray tried to find a back step to sit on out here in the howling void, but there was nothing but void. He tried standing up and thinking instead.
Maybe people imagine stuff, he thought. Well yeah, he thought, duh. He knew people imagined stuff. He’d imagined some stuff about that sheila at shadow storage, for example. OK, so people imagine stuff: imaginums. But then they get bored with it or something good comes on telly or they fall asleep or something. They never do anything about it. They don’t end up pashing the girl from Shadow Storage. They don’t get around to making that trip to Disneyland or running for an hour every day or writing that song or that story or that letter to the editor or that email to the AFL in which they request that on Anzac Day, for authenticity, players be strafed by a Turk using a chronologically accurate machine gun. They imagine doing it for a bit, and then they get on with something else.
