by Jane Rawson
‘I don’t really have a day job,’ Caddy said.
‘This is clearly bullshit,’ said Simon.
They all just sort of sat there, until the waiter brought over a bottle of wine and showed it to Simon, who said, ‘Yeah, what?’
‘Is this what sir ordered?’ asked the waiter.
‘I don’t know. You’re the one who took the order. Is that what I ordered?’
‘I’ll taste it,’ said Ray. The waiter, looking relieved, poured a half an inch into his glass. Ray knocked it back, nodded, and the waiter filled the rest of the glasses.
‘Not me,’ Sarah said. ‘Can I have a vanilla Coke float?’
‘You might as well have an imaginary wine,’ Simon said.
‘No way. Wine is bogus. I want Coke.’
The waiter sighed a little, put the bottle on the table and went, perhaps, to get her Coke.
Simon had a mouthful of wine and screwed up his face. ‘So,’ he said, then took another slug. ‘You knew my dad.’
‘I made him up,’ Caddy said.
‘Yeah, right, you made up my dad, you must know him pretty well. What would he have wanted us to do? Keep going, keep seeing America, or get a life and act like normal kids?’
‘He’d have wanted you to keep going,’ Caddy said.
Ray put his head in his hands and Sarah might have too, because later she couldn’t remember seeing what Simon did.
‘Even though there’s nowhere to go?’ Simon said.
‘Even though there’s nowhere to go. Your dad is unreasonable. He’s nuts. At least, the version of him that I wrote is nuts.’
‘And me?’
‘You too. But you don’t have to be. It’s not too late for you to stop all this.’
‘What about me?’ Sarah asked.
‘You’re me,’ Caddy said. ‘Obviously. I mean, I’m not a very good writer.’
‘Get fucked!’ said Simon, and looked like he was about to throw his glass on the floor. ‘GET. FUCKED. You come in here and tell us we’re imaginary, and now you’re saying you’re not even a very good writer! What do you mean? Like, we’re all two-dimensional and shit, not fleshed out at all? Unrealistic? Is that what you’re saying? I don’t feel unrealistic. I feel pretty pissed off actually, which is kind of a realistic response to someone telling you you’re a shithouse imaginary character.’
Caddy looked at Ray like he might somehow get her out of this. He still had his head in his hands.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re heaps more complicated than what I imagined, if that helps.’
‘Not really. Hey, and next time you’re going around imagining stuff for imaginary people to do, maybe you could imagine them being really rich and happy and having a very comfortable bed to sleep in, OK?’
‘Yeah. I’ll do that.’
‘Great. Thanks.’
‘Do you really not know the ending?’ Sarah said.
‘Really. I got stuck. I didn’t know what would happen next. And I’d had a really shit day and I just chucked my notebook in the river. I was pissed off.’
She turned to Simon. ‘It doesn’t matter, then,’ she said.
‘What doesn’t matter?’
‘If we’re imaginary or whatever. We can still do whatever we like.’
‘Who ordered the burgers?’ asked the waiter, and Simon and Sarah both put their hands up.
‘Short ribs?’ Ray waved his hand around.
‘The roast chicken must be for you then.’ He put the plate down in front of Caddy, who said, quietly, ‘Thank you’.
Everyone pushed their food around a bit, except Sarah who began to demolish her burger.
‘Hang on,’ said Simon.
‘Can we just leave it?’ said Ray.
‘No.’ He turned to Caddy. ‘How can you even be here if we’re imaginary to you? Are you an imaginary version of you?’
Caddy was about to say no, but then she thought maybe he was right. Maybe this was the imaginary version of her. That would make a lot of sense. It would explain why the chicken tasted so damn good.
‘We’re not imaginary,’ said Ray. ‘At least, not that we know about. I mean, you didn’t know you were imaginary till a minute ago, so maybe we are too. But we’re not imagined by Caddy.’ Simon was still looking at him, so he went on. ‘Remember how I told you about how I traveled around using the creases in maps?’
Simon nodded.
‘OK, well that’s how I got here. How we got here. Sometimes the maps don’t work properly and instead of ending up where I think I’m going to be I get chucked into this place called The Gap.’
‘Like …?’
‘Yes. Like GAP. But it’s nothing like that. It’s a place where all kinds of weird shit ends up. There’s a section that’s all lost socks. And a place where your shadow goes when you die. And there’s this section called Suspended Imaginums. It’s where things go if you imagine them, then stop imagining them.’
‘What?’ said Sarah.
‘Like,’ said Caddy, ‘if you have an idea for a jumper you want to knit …’
A what?’ said Sarah.
‘A jumper. Oh. I mean, a sweater.’
‘OK. And?’
‘So you have an idea for a sweater you want to knit, and you plan it all out but then you break a finger playing poker and while you’re waiting for it to heal you kind of lose interest in knitting. So you never get around to making your jump … sweater. So your sweater goes to live in Suspended Imaginums.’
‘Yeah, so what does all this have to do with us?’ said Simon.
‘I imagined you guys and all this stuff that happened to you, but then I threw my notebook away and stopped thinking about you. You got suspended. So your whole story went to live in Suspended Imaginums.’
‘And that’s where I met up with you,’ said Ray. ‘Last time I was in The Gap.’
‘No,’ said Sarah, ‘you met us in San Francisco.’
‘That was part of what Caddy imagined. An imaginary San Francisco. I stepped into the place you live, which is a whole world she imagined. Only it ends. Right around Walnut Creek.’
‘I thought you said you were no good at making shit up?’ Simon said to Caddy. ‘This is hot stuff, this Gap business.’
‘She didn’t make it up,’ said Ray.
‘I have an idea,’ said Simon. ‘How about we all just shut the fuck up and eat our dinners, yeah?’
‘I’ve already finished,’ said Sarah.
‘Right, you just sit there and shut up, then.’
‘Shut up yourself!’
Simon stared at his plate and shoveled food into his mouth.
‘Hey,’ said Caddy, staring at her plate as well.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry.’
No one spoke.
When Ray and Caddy woke up the next morning, Simon and Sarah were gone.
HOW HAD HE GOT THIS BEER?
Imaginary?
That guy had definitely asked him if he was imaginary, hadn’t he? Harry took a long drink from his beer, thought about it for a second or two more, then got out of the hammock.
He walked up the steps and into the house, but there wasn’t a house there, just a kind of howling blackness.
Where did the house go?
He stepped out into the yard, picked up his beer and got back into the hammock.
OK, that was strange.
The cat strolled over and jumped up onto his belly. He let her rub her forehead against his jawline, but when she started licking the corner of his mouth he lifted her down to the ground.
‘That’s gross, Skerrick. Go get me a beer.’
How was he going to get another beer if there was no house there?
He must have got it out of the fridge, that’s where beer lives. But he didn’t really remember getting it. He’d been lying here, drinking beer, thinking about this morning – how he’d been up at the shops and he’d heard there was a fire at the oil tanks and he’d freaked out, but when he’d got back to the h
ouse they’d put it all out and everything was cool. And he was just going to have a beer then get on his bike to go up to the markets to find Caddy and tell her he was safe. So he’d been drinking this beer and then that guy had appeared.
Where did that guy come from? Did he come out of the house? And where did this beer come from?
Harry got out of the hammock.
‘Fuck it. I want another beer. Let’s see what’s going on in that house.’
***
Somewhere in the guts of The Gap, things turned. Imagined peoples, dreams of future wives and husbands, miscarried children and grandchildren pushed the edges of their imaginary bubbles, popped, snapped into the one and only real world, stepped into the streets of the real world and were hit by cars, fell from cliffs or just dropped, exhausted, from the struggle to be real. Some crumpled in the unsympathetic air. Their shadows, sticky, left a paste of black on the roads where they fell, or smeared on the doorways where they had tried to push through.
A ripple had run through The Gap, a realization that time was getting short: that if not now, then never. So they came at first two a day, then five, then by the hundreds and the thousands, but among the billions and billions of the real world, and the years and years since 1945, almost no one noticed as they stumbled their way into the light and so often dropped. Most stumbled into the years around 2030, when the world was at its thickest and most compellingly real. Others slipped through cracks that took them to the remembered leftovers of 1949, 2012, 1978, 1997 and the years in between. And some were left hanging, part in and part out, their hopes snagged on reality like a shirt sleeve on barbed wire.
Simon and Sarah were not among the thwarted. That morning they got off the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART, stepped onto the platform at Walnut Creek and looked out over the shimmering haze that made up the horizon.
‘Well then?’ Sarah said.
‘Let’s go,’ replied Simon.
***
Mariam, who rented phones, was struggling to explain the rules.
‘What’d I tell you, man?’
‘I don’t know, what?’
‘It’s 32 cents a minute! That’s what I told you.’
‘Just LET ME USE IT, OK?’
‘You pay me the money up front and you can use it. Otherwise, you can jam it in your ass cheeks, OK?’
‘Whoa!’
‘Forget it, alright? Give me the phone back.’
All dressed in his suit, shiny powder-pink tie two and a half inches wide, hair all brushed forward over his forehead and his ears, streaks of blond and sunglasses pushed back to keep it out of his eyes, she thought, ‘This is a likely lad. This here boy is loaded. What’s he even need my phone for?’
My phone won’t work, he’d told her. I’ve got to call my boys, he said, hit the town, yeah! Friday night! We are going to PAAAAR TEEEEE!
Was he drunk? It wasn’t Friday night. It was about two thirty on a Tuesday afternoon. Most everyone was asleep in the sliver of shade thrown by the torn up awnings hanging from the closed up shops, caps pulled over their eyes, slumped on one another or their motorbikes, cigarettes tucked behind ears, a page of the newspaper open over faces. No one, for sure, was parteeing.
His face was dripping. She could see drips sliding down from the thickness of his hair, down his jawbone to the point of his chin, falling splat on the cement, another chasing after and threatening to catch it, then another and another.
Eyes wide, he didn’t seem to care.
‘Yo! Beeyatch! Give me the motherfucking phone!’
Yaba? Maybe it was Yaba. But look at that suit! He looked like an ice kind of guy. Could people still get ice? Mariam didn’t know.
‘OK, Sonny Jim,’ she said. ‘You get out of here right now. Go ask the street boys for their phones. You will NOT be using mine. OUT!’
She batted at his stiff, thick hair with a rolled up copy of yesterday’s CitiXtra, fly guts smeared across its front page from where she’d flattened a swarm that had tried to settle on her lunch two hours back. He grabbed at her phone and she belted him hard across the face.
***
At the bulldog bar, a wispy girl sat curled in a corner chair, weeping as she tumbled a broken baby bird over and over in her hands.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ The barman wiped her table and tried to catch her attention, but she didn’t look up for even a second. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Nothing.
He walked back behind the bar and leaned on his elbows, watching her tumble the featherless corpse over and over, tears streaming her makeup down her face.
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘I’m sorry?’
She was staring up at him, smudged black eyes and damp sweaty hair, ears poking out almost at right angles.
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me it would be like this?’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ He pushed himself up off his elbows, stood up straight and tried to look busy, wiping down the bar.
‘I don’t want a drink! I don’t want it! It’s dead, can’t you see it’s dead? It’s DEAD!’
‘Yeah, maybe you could wrap it up in a serviette.’ He pulled one from under the bar. ‘And I’ll get rid of it. Yeah? You go wash your hands. I’ll make you a nice G&T.’ Oh wait, no. The tears. Not gin. ‘Or a spumante? Do you want a spumante?’
‘Is it always like this here?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The death. Is it like that here? All the time? Does this happen all the time?’
‘Dead birds? Yeah, sure. But maybe not so much birds, you don’t see them dead that much. Except grilled, you know. Where are you from? Like, the country?’
‘Country? Which country?’
‘I mean, you know, out of town.’
‘I don’t know. I guess. Maybe I am. It was sunny, but not too hot. I was in the shade of a tree, on grass and there was a picnic basket just by my hand. Birds sang in the tree. I had a puppy. It chased a stick. I sat up and there was a cool drink waiting for me and he was smiling and he said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” And it was.’
‘That doesn’t sound like anywhere around here. Hey,’ he said, and he came out from behind the bar and crouched down by her chair. ‘Do you want a tissue? I can find you a tissue.’
‘For the baby bird?’
‘Not for the baby bird. For your eyes. Your nose. You know.’ He wiped the back of his hand across his nose to demonstrate. ‘Maybe we could bury the bird.’ But of course he had no idea where anyone would let him dig up dirt to bury a baby bird, anything that wasn’t dust or baked hard clay or owned by someone.
‘Yes please.’ She wiped her hand across her nose like she’d seen him do. ‘What is this place?’
‘Sister Bella.’
‘Sister Bella?’
He nodded.
She put the bird down on the table. ‘I’m going to wash my hands,’ she said. ‘Then we should have sex.’
***
On the river there was a boat and it was packed with fish-gilled men, six feet wide across the shoulders, six feet high at the head. They shimmered with electricity and their black-green skin oozed sparkling oil.
The boat was unloading, fish-men clambering over the high edges onto the river bank and as Xotchel watched, the first of them ran flapping towards her and fell sprawling by her feet.
She stepped back, but his hands, oiled and rough, grasped her round the calf and pulled her towards him. He sank his teeth into her ankle and her foot tore clean off. She thought about calling for help, but really, what was the point? She stared him hard in the eyes as he gnawed at her exposed bone and then she lay back on the burning cement.
***
At the market outside Docklands, Harry was looking for Caddy. She would want to know he was alright, that he hadn’t been hurt in the fire. He hugged the squirming pillowcase closer to his chest. ‘Shoosh Skerrick,’ he told the wriggling bag. ‘We’ll find her soon.’
JEANS WERE TOO SHORT, HAIR WAS TOO LONG
We took
the escalator down to the street and started walking east. After about five minutes we stepped into the haze, which, about a minute later, cleared before us into more Walnut Creek: suburban streets, big fat family cars parked in big fat family driveways, sprinklers on front lawns, a dog barking in a yard somewhere.
‘I knew she was full of shit,’ said Simon.
‘What?’ I said, staring at the denseness of his shadow and turning my back to the sun.
‘Full of shit. Caddy. She’s full of shit. She sure had some wacky ideas though, huh? Lucky she’s a writer.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, come on then.’
Simon pulled the map from his back pocket. ‘Man, this place sucks for walking. Imagine being a kid around here. How would you ever get anywhere? OK, let’s take the next right.’
It was hot here, much hotter than it had been back in the city.
‘Simon?’
‘Yeah.’ He was turning the map around.
‘You shouldn’t have to turn the map around.’
‘What?’
‘You shouldn’t have to. Only girls have to turn the map around.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Can you let me concentrate for a minute?’
I did remember, but I’d decided I didn’t want to say. It was just that everything was kind of hurting my eyes.
Simon had stopped.
‘What’s up?’ I asked him.
‘They’re in the wrong order.’
‘What are?’
‘The streets,’ he said. ‘They’re in the wrong order.’
‘Maybe you turned the map around too far.’
‘Look,’ he said, and handed me the map. ‘Remember, back there, when we went past Camrose Place?’
‘No.’
He looked at me.
‘There’s nothing in the rules,’ I said, ‘that says I have to pay attention. I just have to walk through the squares, right?’
‘Come on, Sarah. Can you just, you know, try a bit?’
