A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

by Jane Rawson

  So that’s how it was. And now it’s gone. I don’t even know why I’m still here. It won’t come back. Believe me: I wasn’t any kind of kid when Harry and I got together, there had been plenty of others. Statistically, there won’t be something else for me like I had with Harry. I don’t even want it. There was me and him and it wasn’t magical or like anything you’d see on TV, it was just love. Kind and real and every single day. Every fucking single day, and I never had to doubt it, ever.

  CHERRY PIE

  Caddy stopped talking.

  They went to the boarding house, checked in and ran into Simon in the corridor.

  ‘You’re here!’ Sarah squealed, and immediately regretted it.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Simon was not in a squealing mood.

  ‘Hi Simon,’ Ray said. ‘I’m back from … oh, crap … um, yep, I’m back from the future.’ He scratched his head.

  ‘We got a room with a bed for you,’ Sarah said.

  ‘That’s great. I have my own bed, thanks,’ Simon said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll come stay with you then.’

  ‘I’m in the men-only dorm.’

  ‘Simon! Fuck! What?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what”?’

  ‘Eugh! Don’t be like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Ray, can you go away for a bit?’

  Ray and Caddy went to the family room they’d booked and Caddy had a shower, which she really, really enjoyed.

  With no one watching them anymore, Sarah felt like it was safe to become first person again.

  ‘Was it still all shimmery?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t want to give up on this, right?’

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  ‘Should we figure out some way to do it, even with the shimmeriness?’

  ‘There isn’t a way.’

  ‘There might be.’

  ‘Look, even if there is, you want to stop. You already said so.’

  ‘OK, that’s true. I’ve had enough. But you haven’t. And you and me are like, well, one person I guess. I can’t stop and you keep going. That would be spastic.’

  ‘Don’t say spastic like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like an insult.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. So you’re saying you’d keep going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not necessarily. Not if there’s nothing to keep going with, you know?’

  ‘Not even if there is, right?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know, Simon. I just. Well, I want to go to school. And I want to know where I’m going to sleep at night.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. You think I don’t?’

  ‘Well, you don’t, do you? You just want to “see America”, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really. God, I wish dad hadn’t died. If he was just here. If I could say, “Look dad, it’s all shimmeriness and there’s nothing more we can do, OK?”. And he’d say, “Yep, not a problem son, the job is done. You’ve done all you could do. I’m proud of you.” Is that totally gay? That’s totally gay, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not totally. A little predictable, maybe.’

  ‘Yeah, well. You know what? Shit like that is predictable because it’s part of the human condition and we’re all cursed with it.’ Simon kicked his foot against the wall, dug his toe into the corner where floor met wall. He looked like he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  ‘OK, here’s an idea. You’re dad is dead. I know you know that. But OK, imagine he’s really dead.’

  ‘He is really dead. What are you talking about? Do you think he’s not really dead?’ Simon looked weirdly hopeful.

  ‘No, he is dead. What I mean is, when you think about him, you think about him like he’s still around, like he knows what you’re doing. Try thinking like he’s gone.’

  Simon dug his foot in harder. ‘Ok, I’m thinking that.’

  ‘You’re still thinking about him looking at you, aren’t you? Watching you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘OK, try this. He’s rotted. He’s bits of meat and bone and no kind of consciousness at all. He can’t see you because he’s completely dead. No one on this whole earth cares about you except me. Only me. There’s you and me and no one else gives a shit about us except each other. You. Me. Nobody else. NOBODY else.’

  ‘Hmph.’

  ‘Seriously. Have a think about it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s dark now anyway. Think about it till tomorrow. If you still want to keep going, I’ll come with you.’ I was lying.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You want to come stay in the room with us?’

  ‘Spose.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Who’s the broad?’

  ‘Broad? BROAD?’

  ‘Well, I dont’t know! Dame?’

  ‘How about “woman”?’

  ‘So who’s the woman?’

  ‘Some friend of Ray’s. She’s a dick.’ I reached out and gave Simon’s hand a squeeze. ‘You want to come have a shower or something?’

  ‘OK, you don’t have to talk to me like I’m disabled or something.’

  ‘Is that an OK way to say disabled?’

  ‘Shut up alright.’

  I pretended to lock my lips and throw away the key.

  ‘Jackass.’

  I just stared at him.

  ‘Where’s the room?’

  I kept staring.

  ‘OK, you can talk. Where’s the room?’

  I pretended to look for the key.

  ‘Never mind, I’ll find it myself.’

  ‘It’s just down here. Do you think we can get those guys to buy us burgers for dinner?’

  ‘I thought you wanted tacos.’

  ‘I wanted tacos when it was lunch time, but now it’s almost dinner time.’

  ‘You know what I want? I want a root beer float.’

  ‘I want a vanilla Coke float.’

  ‘I want pie. Cherry pie.’

  ‘I want gingerbread cake, like we had at that place Ray took us last time, with the butterscotch sauce on top.’

  ‘That place was kind of poxy, huh.’

  ‘Yeah, a bit. They had burgers though.’

  ‘Yeah, for TWENTY DOLLARS!’

  ‘Well, yeah. But we’re not paying.’

  ‘I spose. OK, let’s go see what those losers are doing.’

  As we got to the door of the room Simon turned to me. ‘Did you see the bulldog in the park today?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe we should get a dog.’ He opened the door.

  PART

  THREE

  On July 16, 1945, the edges of the world blurred. Atoms spilled their guts and burst the limits of their size, swelled with their new limitlessness, ate everything around them in a fraction of a second then everything around that and around that until they realized that, wait a moment, there were still limits after all. Collapsing in upon themselves, the atoms gripped and fell, tearing the seams of the world as they tumbled back into gravity. Things shifted. Ideas seeped through the rents.

  In Boston, a printing press caught for an eternal second, feeling the thoughtquake. Time paused, thinking it was dead, then felt its heart remember how to beat. The press shook itself awake then continued on in the remade world. In Sydney and in Bombay and in Berlin the presses felt it too, held their breaths for a moment expecting an end to all things. Then, when all things didn’t end, they breathed out, looked ashamed of their apocalypse-gripped mechanisms, and ground on.

  Maps fell from the presses, were folded and tied, marked SECRET when they were and sometimes when they weren’t, put in boxes, sent by rail and boat to the fronts.

  Meanwhile the fronts had felt that sliding, felt the word ‘front’ lose its precision, smear over everything, and their lines sagged a little knowing it was time to give up the glory. When there’s no hom
e left to write to, they thought, there would be nothing to write home about, and then who would tell the story of trench-dug mateship and mud-bound mateship and maggoty-canned-beef mateship and latrine-drowned mateship? The fronts pulled their belts tight, holding their edges in another thirty long days, but everyone knew their time had gone.

  August rolled around, and then September. Things receded. The maps, still in their boxes, were left tangled in time’s riparian trees along with the final solution and destruction that couldn’t be mutually assured and keeping the home fires burning and an empire on which the sun never set – left high and dry as everything else subsided and moved on, cutting a new course through an old floodplain. Maps were left dripping, irrelevant and forgotten, then swollen, then dry, until a man with a pointy stick pulled them down and found a way to sell them for money.

  The maps, it is no surprise to learn, had recorded the shift of the world along with their usual stories of borders, capitals, major cities, mountains, rivers, creeks. They went out into the world ingenuous, presenting all the facts (admittedly in neither legend nor key, but still), and it was hardly their fault that no one bothered to see.

  Of the maps of that moment, most – within forty years or so – found their way to a Tulsa landfill to soak up the juices of leaking diapers and microwave Hot Pockets. Some were pulped and reconstituted into paper for inkjet printers in a Canberra scientific office. Two lined the moulds of mud brick makers in Bubaneshwar. In 1972 one became a shade for the light that hung above a couch in a Prague apartment; on his second visit to the apartment a young man was delighted when the lampmaker showed him the couch could be converted into a bed. Later, he spent the time between 3.14 and 3.46 am, the light still burning, tracing the route of the Vltava south to Ĉeske Budejovice, imagining himself in a home-made canoe.

  One packet of maps stayed with the man with the pointy stick. He didn’t just collect pointy sticks; he also had a passion for cardboard boxes and for folding paper. Things weren’t yet at the point where he couldn’t let a single piece of folding paper pass through his hands – later he would find every brochure, newspaper and piece of giftwrap impossible to relinquish, but for now money still meant as much to him as the knife-sharp edges and softened planes on a folded brown paper bag, used and reused over tens and twenties of lunchtimes. So he sold most, but he kept one packet of maps, just for himself.

  When the man first traveled to The Gap it was a holocaust of shadows. The man near smothered when, on a stroll out into the shimmery emptiness of his new kingdom, he was submerged in the cut-short imaginings of 72 million futures: children, houses, a picnic on the meadows near Warsaw, a train set that was only twelve more instalments of pocket money away, cheese, a blanket from the officer’s mess, the curve in the small of his back where she would rest her hand while they slept, a moment to sit quietly in the warm sun, an onsen in the snow and her smile through the steam, shoes, three months till the birth, replacing the broken clothesline, to stab that fucker through the eye and watch him bleed slowly to death then chop up his corpse for the dogs. The man stayed among the imaginums for so long he lost count and weight.

  Every now and then the man would return to his old life, to his house of sticks and boxes, but as he wandered deeper into the future dreams of the world’s dead his real life seemed less and less interesting, and his visits home became less and less frequent. One blustery autumn day he emerged from The Gap to find his house had been taken over by Party functionaries. They took him in for questioning, searched him and confiscated his map, then they locked him up in the cells beneath Bartolomejska until they could think of something to charge him with. Unfortunately for the man – and for the future wife of a dead Russian soldier, with whom the man had been spending a lot of his time recently – things changed. The chief of police was replaced by another chief of police, who never got around to reading the file on the man and in the end – which was about three years later – the man died of pneumonia and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Zižkov cemetery.

  The officer who had been assigned the task of investigating the man’s SECRET maps investigated for around nine weeks before finally stumbling into The Gap. He was not as surprised as you might think; an aficionado of Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek, he’d been more surprised about how ordinary his life had been up until then. He was pleased to report back to his superiors that he had found a place where all their wildest imaginings had gone to live. A memo was quickly drafted. It stated that florid imaginings were counter-revolutionary and that the young officer would be posted to Moscow for retraining.

  A FAIRLY SWEET RIESLING

  Over a bottle of wine, Caddy mentioned that Simon and Sarah were imaginary.

  They’d gone to that restaurant Chow again, because Simon had insisted and everyone seemed to be in a mood to do as Simon wanted to do. They’d ordered the twenty dollar burgers and Sarah had asked for a vanilla Coke float, but Simon said no, she didn’t want that, she wanted white zinfandel, they all did. And Ray had said they couldn’t have white zinfandel because, firstly, they were both under twenty-one and secondly, it was totally gross and they should at least get ordinary zinfandel. And Simon reminded him that only a couple of days ago he, Ray, had actively encouraged and even enabled a minor (Simon) to drink alcohol (beer) in a pub (Transfer) and that Simon could pretty much get Ray locked up and maybe even he’d get deported to Australia, but it would be now Australia not future Australia and how would Ray ever get home again, and Sarah wondered if there was a word for ‘home’ that was about time instead of place, but she didn’t get to concentrate long because Caddy was saying, ‘Just let him have the wine, Ray. It doesn’t matter, it’s all imaginary, and anyway, I made up the world and in my world I want Simon to have a glass of wine and chill the fuck out.’ And then Ray was telling her to shut up but Simon wasn’t having any of that, he wanted to know what she was on about.

  The waiter let them know that they didn’t actually have any white zinfandel, but if they wanted he could either get them a fairly sweet Riesling or they could have ordinary zinfandel, if they’d like.

  ‘Riesling,’ Simon said, and the waiter went away, probably to call the police. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I invented you,’ Caddy said, now seeming a little like she wished she’d never mentioned it in the first place.

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Ray said, but Simon was, and Sarah was too, so instead they didn’t listen to Ray.

  ‘The shimmeriness?’ Caddy said, and Simon nodded. ‘That’s where I got bored of imagining stuff. It’s where I ran out of ideas.’

  ‘So you’re claiming you imagined all this? Like’ – he waved his hand around – ‘all this.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And us. We’re imaginary, and you imagined us. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You know San Francisco’s in history books and stuff,’ Simon said. ‘This restaurant, it’s on the internet. San Francisco is in atlases. Even old atlases, in the library.’ Sarah was pretty sure he’d never actually checked that, but anyway. ‘I really don’t think you made up San Francisco. Or did you make up the atlases too? Like those guys who reckon God created fossils and put them in the earth to trick us into thinking there was such a thing as dinosaurs and evolution. Is it like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Caddy. ‘I didn’t invent San Francisco. I read it in a book. I’m not really sure how it works.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Simon.

  ‘Wait a second,’ Sarah asked. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘She’s insane,’ said Ray. ‘I told you not to listen to her.’

  ‘I’m kind of interested,’ said Simon. ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘I think Ray’s right,’ Sarah said, and she tried to start a conversation with Ray about how boomerangs work, but Simon made her shush.

  ‘I don’t totally get this,’ Caddy said. ‘Ray’s the one who knows more about how the whole thing works, but I know this
. I made you two up. I had an idea that there would be these two families who would become obsessed with really seeing America, that they’d map the whole country out in twenty-five foot squares, and that there’d be some kind of falling out where one family would start using thirty foot squares. And I wrote a story about it, told from your point of view.’ She looked in Sarah’s direction, ‘About what it would be like to be the children of these families, left with the job of seeing all of America, and what would happen if one kid really wanted to keep going and the other had had enough.’

  ‘So what happens?’ Simon said.

  ‘I don’t know. I threw the story in the river before it was finished.’

  ‘Yeah, nice one. What a surprise. OK, you might not know the details, but surely you had some kind of plot for it, yeah?’

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘So you didn’t know how it was going to end?’

  ‘No. I was just going to write and see what happened.’

  ‘What? That is the laziest thing I’ve ever heard. You were going to let the story write itself?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Oh, freaking great. So I guess we’re about to drop dead then, huh Sarah? She didn’t bother imagining any more life for us.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen,’ Caddy said. ‘I never imagined this stuff, that we’d meet up. We’re outside what I imagined already. And you’re not dead yet.’

  ‘So, conveniently, you won’t be able to tell us what happens next and we won’t be able to check if you have any idea at all,’ Simon said.

  ‘You’re pretty half-assed, aren’t you?’ Sarah butted in. ‘How can you have just sort of imagined us? Why didn’t you even bother to figure out what would happen to us? That sucks. Don’t give up your day job, OK?’