by Jane Rawson
‘Sorry.’
‘OK, so we go back to 1997 and you get to enjoy some of the stuff that we don’t have anymore. Gentle rain. Reliable electricity. Whatever other cool things you imagined.’
‘Real vodka.’
‘Of course. I should have known. Actually, though, I did like that bit. I had four different kinds of beer! They were all delicious!’
‘See? Aren’t you happy I’m obsessed with booze.’
‘I suppose so. Don’t you want to see what it’s like, the world you imagined?’
‘Yeah, kind of. But what if I keep seeing things I messed up?’
‘Like?’
‘I don’t know. Things that are corny. What if Simon and Sarah have really forced dialogue? What if just some bits of the landscape are described and everything else is a vague cliché?’
‘I’ve been there. It’s fine. Simon’s a jerk but Sarah seems lovely.’
‘She would. She’s the narrator. And she’s pretty much me. She gets to know all kinds of stuff she shouldn’t know. That’d make her pretty smart for her age, I bet.’
‘Yeah, it does.’
‘Sorry about Simon. But he kind of is a jerk, it’s just the way he is.’
‘I guess he’s had a pretty tough life.’
‘I don’t think it’s his life. He’d be a jerk even if he was well off and comfortable. I bet he’d be a wedding planner, and he’d make you feel inadequate every time you told him what you wanted, even if you never said anything about baby’s breath or chocolate fountains.’
‘Is he gay?’
‘I don’t know, is he? You met him.’
‘You IMAGINED him.’
‘I didn’t imagine that bit of him.’
‘I think he’s gay.’
‘Wait a second. Are you suggesting that there are things about those guys that I didn’t imagine but that exist anyway?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Whoa. OK, maybe I am interested.’
‘Good. I think we should go.’
‘Are you escaping the mob or something, Ray?’
‘No. Though your friend Lanh might be soon if he doesn’t watch himself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just maybe tell him to be a bit careful about siphoning stuff off the top of his shipments, OK? I’ve heard a few things since I’ve been back.’
‘Maybe I should go see him. He’s just a kid, Ray. I don’t think he has any idea what he’s doing.’
‘I thought we just agreed we’re going to The Gap?’
‘But maybe I should go find Lanh first, yeah? Ray, I don’t want to come back and find him dead. That already happened once this week, and it was dull and irritating.’
‘Yeah, I know. You go talk to Lanh and I’ll meet you later.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think my watch is buggered.’
‘Are you sulking?’
‘No.’
‘A bit?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, I told you about pretty much the coolest thing ever, that I met two people you invented in your head and traveled through parallel universes and saw a bunch of dead people’s shadows, and you’re all, “I’ve got to go find Lanh”.’
He was doing that fake Caddy voice again.
‘I’m sorry Ray. I am excited. I do want to go. But I do need to find Lanh.’
‘OK.’
‘Just out of interest, while you were there did you see anything about stuffing a bean bag with guinea pigs?’
‘No.’
‘Good. OK. Where do we have to go to get to The Gap?’
‘I think we can do it down at Flagstaff.’
‘At the reffo camp?’
‘Please don’t use that word.’
‘Sorry. Alright. How about I meet you by the La Trobe and William corner of Flagstaff in three hours.’
‘Deal.’
‘Do I need to bring anything? Money?’
‘Yeah, do you have a jacket?’
‘Why on earth would I have a jacket?’
‘Yeah, you’re right. OK, I’ll bring you a hoodie. And maybe a toothbrush and … wait … you just lost everything, right?’
‘Mostly. I have a few toilety things I got from the hotel.’
‘OK, bring those. Just in case we stay a few days.’
‘Gotcha. Which reminds me, I need to get hold of a couple more pairs of undies and another T-shirt.’ Caddy flipped him off, gave him a kiss on the cheek and left.
HAVE A TACO AND CALM DOWN
When we got to the edge of the world, we were both pretty surprised.
‘Hard to see the edge of this twenty-five foot square, huh, Si? Reckon we should knock the squares back to ten foot? Start over?’ I said, but I was playing for time. Y’know, joking cause I was shit scared.
We’d finished San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda and we were heading for Walnut Creek when everything just stopped. I mean, in front of us it stopped. Behind us was the area we’d just surveyed, still sitting there like nothing had happened. But in front of us was this weird, shimmery, bright haziness. We sat down and stared at it for a while. There were no people around – now that I thought about it, they’d been thinning out for a while – so there was no one we could look at and go, ‘Do you see that? The shimmery, bright haziness? Can you see it?’ We were on our own.
‘Why would that happen?’ Simon asked. I guess he was asking me but he kind of just said it to the air. I didn’t bother answering. ‘We should get a paper,’ he said, ‘or find a radio. Something. Go somewhere where there’s some people. See if we can find out what’s going on.’
‘Do you think it’s something that’s happening?’ I said. ‘Like a toxic leak or something? A noxious cloud?’
‘Maybe. Maybe it’s a weird storm. I reckon we should get away from it though, don’t you?’
‘It looks still to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not moving. You know. What still usually means.’
‘Yeah, but what are you trying to say.’
‘I don’t know. That maybe it’s always like that.’
‘You don’t think we’d have heard if there was a whole chunk of northern California that didn’t actually exist? You don’t think it’d be on some of our maps or something? Like, “Walnut Creek: don’t bother, doesn’t exist”. Why would they even bother giving a name to somewhere like that, that didn’t exist?’
‘Gee, I don’t know, Simon. Why would they?’ It wasn’t a very good answer, but it was all I had.
‘Nah, it’s got to be something new. I reckon we head back into Oakland and see if we can see the news.’
‘Can we go to San Francisco instead? Oakland kind of sucks.’
Simon frowned at me. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘What? It does.’
‘Yeah, OK, but maybe we didn’t really give it a chance. I mean, what you’re seeing as “sucking” is the product of oppression and poverty.’
‘Whatever. Suckage is suckage, whatever caused it.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘OK, we’ll get BART back to San Francisco.’
‘Can we get another carnitas taco?’
‘No. We’re just going to see if we can find out what’s happening, and as soon as it clears up we’re coming straight back out here.’
‘Yes. I can see that getting out at 24th Street Station and having a taco at the place that is practically on top of the station could really mess with that plan.’
‘When did you get so sarcastic, Sarah? I thought we should get off at that station downtown: Powell. We might be able to find out what’s going on there. Fat chance of that in the Mission.’
‘And you think I’m rude cause I said Oakland sucks.’
‘You are.’
So we walked to the station and caught a train to downtown San Francisco, because we always do whatever Simon wants.
‘Hey,’ I asked him, as we wer
e heading through West Oakland station and into the tunnel under the Bay, ‘Do you think that guy Ray was a cop?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he was maybe a renegade cop?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he was a cop who had spent too much time investigating paranormal activities and he’d gotten kind of paranoid and then he flipped out and so they fired him from the police force and now he’s like walking around hassling kids because he thinks he’s still a cop?’
‘No. Sarah, why would the San Francisco Police Department have hired a forty-year-old Aboriginal guy to investigate paranormal activities?’
‘Are you saying Aborigines can’t investigate the paranormal? That sounds pretty racist to me.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Besides, he wouldn’t have been forty when they hired him. He’d have been a young gun, fresh out of police academy …’
Simon interrupted me: ‘I don’t think police academy is necessarily real.’
‘Yeah, remember that movie we saw? That time in Phoenix, when we had cable in the motel?’
‘Police Academy Three?’
‘Yeah. See?’
‘Sarah, that … oh, never mind.’
‘OK, where was I? Oh yeah, he’d have been like twenty five years old, and he’d have worked as a beat cop for a few years, then been promoted to detective, and then they’d have opened up a department of paranormal activities and when he was, like, thirty two, they’d have chosen him to work in it cause he could like, see, spiritual stuff.’
‘What?’
‘He could see it. Spiritual stuff. The paranormal. But then after a couple of years, when his sister got abducted and he …’
‘Wait a second. This is X-Files.’
‘It’s what now?’
‘It’s the X-Files. You’re telling me the X-Files.’
When I got sick one time Simon’s dad had let us stay at a motel for a week, and Simon had watched totally hundreds of reruns of sci-fi shows on cable.
‘No!’ I protested. ‘This is the story of Ray.’
‘Don’t you have a book to read?’
‘I finished it.’
‘Ray got you two more. I saw.’
‘You’re just mad cause you didn’t get any books.’
‘He was going to buy me books, but I said I didn’t want them.’
‘I guess that makes you an asshat then. Do you want the one I just finished?’
‘Will it make you shut up?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Then yes.’
‘But first, do you think Ray was really from the future?’
‘Don’t be stupid Sarah, of course he wasn’t. He was just some crazy guy.’
‘Takes one to know one.’
And then he gave me an Indian burn.
OK, but the weird thing was that Ray knew we set fire to a Christmas tree, and Ray had already read The Golden Compass even though it was new, and Ray knew who would win the Australian football – though I guess we’d never know if that was really true. And what was even weirder was that in the afternoon edition of The Examiner there was nothing about a toxic cloud over Walnut Creek, so when it was four o’clock we went into a café where they had the radio on, but the news didn’t say anything either about noxious leaks or about the East Bay falling off the edge of the earth. Simon was feeling brave, so he asked the guy at the next table, ‘Hey, did you hear anything about some kind of industrial accident out at Walnut Creek?’ and the guy said, ‘Walnut Creek? Nope. Never been there.’ So we asked a few other people, like girls working in shops and stuff, and they all said the same thing pretty much. And no one had ever been there.
‘OK,’ Simon said. ‘We need to figure this out. How are we going to figure this out?’
‘Let’s figure it out over a taco,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe two.’
‘Can you grow up, just for a minute?’
‘I’m SICK of being grown up. I’ve got an awesome idea.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Yeah, well tough. Let’s stop. There’s nothing there to see. You’ve done all you can do. So have I. I’ve done more than I can do. Let’s just stop.’
‘We haven’t finished.’
‘I don’t care! We’re finished, OK? There’s nothing left to do, it’s not there.’
‘That’s impossible. Something weird has just happened. Of course Walnut Creek exists. What are you talking about, nothing there? That’s impossible.’
‘You already said that.’
‘Let’s go back out there and see what’s happening.’
‘No. Let’s go to school and have friends. Let’s live in a house and cook dinner on a stove. Let’s watch TV whenever we feel like it. OK? OK. Let’s do it.’
‘If we go get a taco will you calm down? Let’s go have a taco and then we can get BART back out to Walnut Creek.’
‘Walnut Creek DOESN’T EXIST.’
‘THAT’S IMFUCKINGPOSSIBLE.’
‘Is it? You keep saying that but it’s not there.’
‘Yeah well, maybe it is. We won’t know till we go look.’
‘Alright, look. I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s there or if it’s not there. I’m over it! I’ve had enough, Simon. Your dad wouldn’t have wanted us to keep going like this. We’re kids! We should do kid stuff. This is just nuts.’
‘You know dad would have wanted us to keep going exactly like this.’
‘Yeah, well, your dad can go screw then.’
Simon turned his back on me and walked off in the direction of the station.
‘Simon!’ No luck. I tried again. ‘SIMON!’
He turned around. ‘What? What do you want? Are you coming?’
‘No. But when you get out there and it’s all still gone, come back, OK? I’ll be at that dodgy place we stayed at before.’
He turned round again and walked off. I really wanted to get on BART and go get a taco, but I didn’t want him to think I was following him. I checked my bag – he had the maps, but I had the guidebook. I turned to the page with the map of San Francisco and started walking to the Mission.
A PRETTY DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD
Ray could see Caddy walking down William Street, clutching a plastic shopping bag, dressed in her old shorts and a new-ish T-shirt. He had a backpack. He asked if she wanted to put her stuff in his bag, and he could see that she felt a bit uncomfortable about not having a proper bag. ‘Sure,’ she said.
‘Did you find Lanh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Romantic reunion?’
‘Not really. He was kind of busy, didn’t really have time to talk. I told him what you said about being more careful. I don’t know if he listened.’ He had written down the combination to the safe for her, though, in case she wanted to run the café sometimes. He said he was getting pretty busy with his other work these days. ‘Anyway, there’s a couple of cans of Jack Daniel’s and Dry in there for us.’
‘Was that when you told him he should be more careful?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe he’d listen more if you didn’t take the booze from him. Hard to take you seriously otherwise.’
‘Are you sure you’re not on the run from the mob? You’ve become awfully earnest lately.’
‘Nah. I dont know. Cool, thanks for the JD, that’s great. We can have em in the hotel tonight.’
‘Are we staying overnight?’
‘Might as well, eh? We’re going all that way. And you’ve got some clean undies, right?’
‘Don’t look in there. Yes, I have clean undies.’
‘Alright then. Let’s do it!’
Caddy hated this part of the city. Newell might have been an encampment, but it was, you know, kind of spacious. Flagstaff settlement was packed solid, mostly with refugees from Malaysia, mostly pushed off their land by massive palm oil plantations set up around 2015. At least Caddy was home, even if she had no building called ‘home’. These poor bastards had lost their ho
mes cause so many dickheads wanted to keep driving their big stupid cars and thought biofuels were the answer, and now they had nowhere to go but a crappy, dusty park in a stinky city where there was no place to grow food and no clean water to wash down the shitty food they did manage to scrape together.
‘Are we going to be here long?’ she asked.
Ray had his nose buried in a map. ‘Not long. Over here.’ Behind a snarl of razor wire there was a patch of concrete and broken brick that marked the entrance to Flagstaff station.
‘Do we have to get through that?’ Caddy could see cockroaches poking their filthy carapaces up out of the station entrance, sniffing after the cooking pots and baby poo of the settlement.
‘Fraid so.’
‘Can’t we maybe go out to Hanging Rock or wherever?’
‘Are you still scared of cockroaches?’
‘It’s not the cockroaches so much as the razor wire.’
‘I brought these.’ Ray pulled some wire cutters out of his backpack.
‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’
‘Not this specifically, but it’s good to be prepared, yeah?’
He pushed the wire aside and they stepped through. Ray had put Dromana on the back of the map – if they didn’t slip into The Gap, at least they could have a little seaside holiday, maybe even stay overnight down there, sleep on the beach. The sea breeze would be good.
But they did slip into The Gap. Ray heard the voice, and they came out on the carpet again. He wondered if he’d ever manage to use the maps for actual travel again. Would he be able to get his business started? Caddy was wandering off, trying to look over into Imaginum Gestation.
‘Caddy, over here.’ There was no sign of ponytail guy, which was lucky.
‘Ray, there’s a big vat of electric eels in there.’
‘Electric eels? How do you know they’re electric eels?’
‘There’s a sign on the vat. “Electric eels”.’
‘Caddy, just come over here.’ Ponytail guy couldn’t be far away.
‘Ray, why does it just look like an office in here?’
‘If you come over here I’ll show you the cool stuff.’
They ducked into Suspended Imaginums. Caddy stood and looked open-mouthed at the yawning blackness. Ray wondered if he’d done the same thing when he was first here.
