The Town

by Shaun Prescott

  The evidence has been there all along, I said. I’d thought about it deeply: if you scrutinise anything for longer than a moment, nothing is really complete. Everything is missing at least one component – sometimes something negligible, at other times something crucial. All of these absences, the cavities, are the empty spaces where important structural elements would normally exist in order to support the ongoing truth of anything. It is the same for a town.

  From above, I said, the town may appear to be an island, but upon closer inspection it is just an accumulation of flotsam, bobbing this way and that, and it is a surprise to me that anyone has ever managed to set foot upon it, much less walk safely on it. And it is extraordinary that many actually believe it to be an island: a location, especially a location with a purpose.

  That’s a very artistic way of putting it, Ciara said. She laid on my bed and closed her eyes. I suppose she had not slept for many days, considering the circumstances. But I interrupted her efforts because I wanted to know whether she thought my view on the town held any truth. She sat up and said she did not know. All she knew was that the next day she was going to breach what was left of the shimmer. She couldn’t stay once the whole town had properly disappeared, because she was certain that if she did, she would disappear too.

  I told her that I thought this was both sensible and true.

  She said we ought to go to my town. Maybe there we could live with my parents until she could sort her new life out. She could pretend to be my lover if necessary. Perhaps she could get a job and settle in my town, and make some friends, and one day start to belong. Maybe she would grow to understand the culture of the town I came from, and she could perhaps even one day be indistinguishable from the local people. She could become so accustomed to my town’s culture that she’d make it her routine to visit a Michel’s Patisserie every morning, where the people would look up from their coffees and newspapers to greet her warmly. Then she might gossip lightly with the barista while sipping on a coffee of some kind. Then she might have children, born to the town, who would be so unambiguously of the town that it would prove to the townspeople, beyond a shadow a doubt, that she too was officially of the town. Maybe they would forget that she was not truthfully of the town.

  Her plan was impossible, but I didn’t say so, or begin to explain why.

  She said it would be sensible to visit a new town and to find people with whom she felt comfortable. She had always considered doing this, she had to admit. But such a thing was inconceivable, she said. Maybe she could trick people into believing she was of the town, but forever she would know that she was from somewhere else. And even if she forgot, and even if no one else knew, the truth would be that she was from somewhere else.

  Or even worse: since her town was currently disappearing, she would soon be from nowhere else. She was becoming someone from nowhere, and that was unthinkable. How would people tolerate it? Any town culture she could imagine would not permit that, she was sure. They would be suspicious of her. She would be the woman from nowhere. She envisioned it like this: she would arrive in a town, even my supposed home town, and stay at my supposed parents house, and we would pretend to be lovers, and she would visit a pub with me and meet my supposed old friends, and they would shower her with warm greetings and compliments because they were happy that I was in love with someone, but soon enough they would ask her where she was from, and she could not simply say “I don’t know” or “I’ve forgotten” — she would need to say she was from nowhere, for she would have no option but to tell the truth, and under those circumstances I would need to break up with her due to pressure from my town culture, and she would end up in the stormwater drains or in the abandoned buildings in my town, and she would need to kill and eat pests for sustenance, and she would be jeered at and spat on by men and women warm in the embrace of their town culture, and she would become addicted to drugs.

  So these are the best and worst case scenarios, Ciara told me. But she knew that more than likely what would happen is that she would miss her town culture, despite it not being much of a culture at all. And so she would eventually reveal too much reverence for her disappeared town culture to my town’s people, and they would detest her for seemingly having a different culture at all. They would try to compare town cultures, and they would be worried that hers threatened to be better.

  Ciara laid back down on my bed. She added that none of it made sense, because she suspected all the towns in the country were the same.

  I didn’t know for certain whether all of the towns in the country were the same, but I was able to imagine they were. The city is probably different, I said. There were surely great mysteries in the city. And it was almost certain that we would be able to uncover secrets about Ciara’s town in the city, as the city is where knowledge is kept. It is where the important libraries are, full of books written for their own sake. These books, I told Ciara, were only written to allow someone to be certain they existed. They only existed to verify that certain events and phenomena existed. They were not written for the joy of reading. Besides, I said, we can’t go to my town. I don’t have a town.

  The city it is, she said.

  3

  THE DISAPPOINTING CITY

  The town was only a memory during my final days living in the abandoned house. It had mostly disappeared, and what remained could not have been mistaken for a town.

  It was difficult to decide whether to leave the remains of the town. When in my mind reasons to leave seemed obvious and logical, reasons to stay would soon follow. This is where I belong, I would say to myself. I belong here, to something that has never been anything. Other towns, or the city, or even the drowsy plains beyond the breach, might only serve to demonstrate that I, and Ciara, and everyone else in the town, are not real. We were there, but none of us were real.

  In the big coastal city they might ask who we are, and we might not have an answer. Everyone there would be already comforted by their own reasons for being. They might have rituals and customs which they could explain by history, serving to assure them that they are real.

  They may not ever need new vantage points to know that there is more in the world. They may only need to cross the street, or to catch a train from home and travel three stations. Their city might keep them occupied forever, and even if they were barely as real as us, they might never have cause or time to wonder why they’re barely there. They might never have cause to wonder about their bearing to the soil, having barely ever stood on soil proper, having barely ever seen it at all.

  During my final days in the town I became frustrated with the townspeople in the plazas. Nothing they had lost was real. None of it could be substantiated. No one could accurately define their town’s essence during the rare occasions they were lucid enough to try. The truth of their town culture was only that they were there. The town culture was the belief that they were meant to be there.

  *

  Rick lived in a small fibro home at the edge of the town. What remained of the road’s tarmac had worn grey and patched. It might have been the oldest part of the town, given the rust on the Tonka trucks that lay tangled in weeds, and the barbed-wired gasworks looming in its centre. Most people in the town had long recommended against visiting these particular few blocks.

  I knocked for several minutes before Rick answered. The house smelt of cooked pasta, tobacco smoke, and dust. He took a moment before he realised who I was. Then he dropped his arms resignedly and walked up the hall. I followed.

  On a television in the lounge room an elderly woman was remarking on some stainless steel trays. The lounge room was dark save for a dim yellow lamp in the corner, a lit cigarette in the ashtray, and the fluorescent green indicator of a rotating air conditioner. A mattress leaned against one wall, a makeshift couch with pillows propped as backrests. Four plastic bags rustled in the air conditioner fan. Receipts were piled atop a makeshift coffee table.

  Mum’s asleep, he whispered.

  He beckoned
me into his kitchen. There were no appliances or utensils or anything in there except a toaster. Rick was cooking some toast, and offered me some slices with Vegemite. I declined, since I was in a rush. I’ve already eaten my breakfast, I said. Rick told me he couldn’t eat breakfast first thing. He needed to feel starving in order to eat. Especially in the morning – and he pointed at the television screen. He knew it was unusual to wait so long to eat. His mum was hungry the moment she woke up.

  He went about his business making his meal. It took several minutes. Then he turned and faced me, and sunk his teeth into the toast. He was ready to hear whatever I had to say.

  I told him that I was going to drive to the city, and that I would stay there permanently, and that he should join me and begin a new life. There would be hundreds of supermarkets in the city, I said, and he may even get a job in one. Or in the city he might feel inclined to never set foot in a supermarket again. He would no longer need to repurpose his town, since he would no longer be living in it. The town had never shuffled to make a place for him, and so going to the city seemed to be the only natural thing to do for someone in Rick’s position.

  The Woolworths is still here, I said, signalling towards the town’s centre, but it now would take a great amount of effort and luck to get there. You can’t simply march to the supermarket anymore. You have to know the exact route.

  Rick told me that he already knew the route well – he’d already figured it out. There were parts that would never quite disappear entirely — and he pointed towards the street — on certain roads. Stick to the right roads, and you were unlikely to vanish.

  Besides, he said, the Woolworths definitely won’t disappear. They were still cycling through this quarter’s sales. Prices on a particular brand of muesli bars were scheduled to plummet next week. He told me that he knew this because the supermarket always left obscure hints about its future sales: breadcrumb trails for the dedicated bargain hunter. If the powers that be at Woolworths suspected something as sinister as complete disappearance, Rick surmised, they would not bother planning a major sale.

  I knew for a fact that in a fortnight the Woolworths was planning on rolling out a two for $3 sale on Sanitarium muesli bar packs, and so perhaps it was true that the entire premises were unlikely to disappear. But I told Rick that he had missed my point: that it was not important what was happening at the supermarket. He did not approve of my tone.

  He said he knew he was an idiot, that it was idiotic to be addicted to supermarkets and unable to see life beyond them. He said he could detect in the tone of my voice that I thought I was conversing with someone much stupider than myself. I must have thought I was acting noble, he told me, trying to save someone far less capable. He said that he was well aware he was as stupid as it was possible to get as a grown adult. He’d already proven himself incapable of living like an adult, and yet, he’d not sought escape and gratification like so many wiser stupid adults did. He was stupid in a way that I could never understand. He supposed I tore my hair out, witnessing his missed opportunities to escape stupidity. If only he could see this very simple solution, I must have thought to myself. There were so many better ways to lead a stupid life, not to mention all the ways he could stop living a stupid life altogether.

  Rick told me he thought he lived the stupidest life possible. He saw drunks on the pension who couldn’t hold their bladders, yet they seemingly lived lives less stupid than his. He saw infants, unable to talk or stand up straight, unable to articulate themselves except to cry, and yet his life was clearly much stupider than theirs. Infants and drunks… their lives weren’t determined every step of the way by stupidity. But his was. Everyone who had ever looked at him thought he was too stupid. It wasn’t that he’d done stupid things, it was just that he lived a stupid life, even though he’d attempted nothing different to what his friends or parents had. He gestured towards his mother’s room.

  Rick insisted that he was not trying to elicit sympathy from me. Why would he bother, when he knew the first thing I felt laying eyes upon him was sympathy? I must have known he lived a stupid life before he’d ever uttered a word.

  There had always been many options available to Rick in order for him to stop living such a stupid life. If some sequence of stupid events guaranteed that he could not live a satisfying life by the measure of the town, then why not live an emphatically stupid life? Why not be irrational? Why not live an evil life? He had no family. He could wander into the horizon and happen on a house and burn it to the ground, or he could catch a lift to another town and seduce every woman in his path. What would be the point of doing otherwise? He wasn’t getting what he was promised. He might as well.

  It would be satisfying to do both of those things, and if he were to do them, there wouldn’t be much at stake. But he could only think. When he considered deviating from his set path, his muscles would not let him. He could not convince his limbs to do what his mind would like, but the same held true in the opposite direction: his mind obstructed his limbs. There was a vast gulf between them. Both were frightened at their opposite ends of the chasm. They bickered relentlessly in search of a solution.

  He said he supposed this just made him normal. But he was a normal person in a stupid life. There was nothing stupider than when he awoke in the morning. He would be tranquil for a minute or two, and then he would remember: this is the stupidest existence possible. It almost felt like a responsibility, Rick said, to let life continue to ladle stupidity on his head. I was lucky — he pointed at me — because I’d only ever witnessed people with stupid lives, but I didn’t live a stupid life. What type of life did I live?

  I told him that I didn’t know. That there was no specific mood to my life. That I did not awaken into stupidity, but nor did I awaken into something satisfactory or serene. That I just woke up and the first thought that occurred to me defined my day. I said this to Rick on a whim, though it wasn’t true at all.

  Rick told me that if the town was disappearing, then so was he. After all, he had felt both happy and wretched there, and that is the most anyone can ask for, especially an idiot. He didn’t get to decide the ratio, and nor did I. But he knew one thing: he didn’t want to set the process in motion again. There may be happiness elsewhere, but there would be wretchedness, too. The ratio would not change.

  I was growing tired of listening to Rick philosophise about his life. I told him that the town was disappearing, and that it might be impossible to leave by conventional roads by the time he had finished his speech.

  Why would I leave now, Rick said. Perhaps things were changing for the better, because soon enough the town would only be the plazas. It’d only be the supermarkets. He wondered: why shouldn’t he stick around to watch his memories advance into their purest forms? There was relief to be found in that large absence at the centre of town — and he waved towards the absence — because everything he had ever wanted was impossible for everyone, now.

  I did not want to be drawn further into one of Rick’s speeches, so I accepted his desire to stay, and left his house via the back door. As I did, Rick instructed me to climb through two blocks of backyards, swing through the canopy over Rozelle Street, and then walk along a certain low brick fence that I could take the rest of the way to the plaza.

  *

  Tom’s bus route had ceased to exist. The main bus terminal was lost in the mirror.

  On the footpath outside her disappeared pub, I told Jenny about Tom’s bus route, as a means to demonstrate that it wasn’t only her livelihood that had been ruined by holes. She didn’t agree.

  What do you expect? Jenny said. Who would catch a bus now, anyway? No one would catch a bus under these circumstances, even if they could. But everyone always needs a drink.

  The holes were a matter of serious inconvenience to her. She was waiting for an intervention, or maybe she was waiting to disappear too. Jenny had lived her life at the frontline of logic, barracking for it. There on the footpath at the edge of her disappeared pub, s
he may well have been wondering how anyone or anything could restore the town’s face value. I don’t think she even knew: her stubbornness blocked any conclusions at which she might have arrived.

  I asked her to come to the city with me, but she refused. It was barely Australian there, she said.

  I spent six hours searching for Tom. I searched at the McDonald’s — still bustling with commuters and oblivious townsfolk — and I searched at the recreation ground too. He might have been eaten up at the bus terminal, lost inside the mirror. He might have driven straight into it, perceiving no difference in the empty reflection.

  Eventually I found his bus on the edge of town, by the monolithic Bunnings, parked at the edge of a weeded gully with doors open and hazard lights on. You always put hazard lights on in a stationary bus, Tom had once said to me solemnly. Even offroad. It’s about safety.

  Tom was in the bus. He had been sitting there at the edge of the town for days now, with a dry petrol tank and a view of the shimmery horizon just over the crest of a nearby hill. He said he’d considered walking back to town, but had already sworn privately that he’d never return. Not for any practical matter, anyway. He felt he really should head to the next town — and he pointed towards the horizon — but to walk would take days, probably weeks, if there was even another town at all.

  I ducked back into town and returned with a jerry can of petrol. But by then Tom no longer wanted to drive to another town. The renewed possibility cast doubt on the project. Instead he wanted to recommence driving the circular road around the town. Life wouldn’t be any different in the next town, Tom insisted. He said that if I thought any differently then I had clearly lived a very different life to his. Everything was the same everywhere, even in the city. Tom speculated that it was probably even worse in the city, and waved towards the east. It was barely Australian there.