Plato's Cave

by Russell Proctor

EMILY: You think so? This is the second time today I've told someone about what's been happening and I still can't believe it either.

  HEATHER: (indicating the bare room) You've checked? Everything's gone?

  EMILY: Everything except Mike.

  (HEATHER detects a note of sarcasm in EMILY's voice. She closes her eyes in a condescending way and pulls Mike a fraction of a centimetre closer.)

  HEATHER: All my stuff?

  EMILY: Yes. Everything. I told you.

  HEATHER: But this is impossible!

  (BRUNO crosses to MIKE and sniffs at his leaves. The cat wrinkles his nose and turns away. He walks to the kitchen door and sits, silently contemplating the loss of his food bowl.)

  EMILY: Of course it's impossible! But it's happening!

  HEATHER: Okay, okay. Calm down, jeez, it's not my fault.

  EMILY: No. It's mine. Somehow, it's mine. Ever since I woke up this morning, ever since the sausage in the basin. And now it seems the world is coming to an end. And it's linked to me.

  HEATHER: Do you think it's safe to be in here? I mean, as you say, the whatever-it-is might come back for more.

  EMILY: I don't know. I hope it does. Maybe then I'll find out what's going on.

  (HEATHER shifts uneasily, glancing around.)

  But somehow I don't think it will. Maybe not yet. Or maybe not in the same way. Although I'm still finding sausages.

  (EMILY reaches into her pocket and extracts a slimy sausage. She drops it on the floor and they both watch it squirm briefly. Long pause, long enough to make the audience shift in their seats, wondering if someone forgot a line.)

  HEATHER: Maybe Mike didn't vanish because he's organic. You know, maybe only objects were taken, not living things.

  EMILY: I thought of that, but what about his pot and saucer? And you'll notice our food has gone too. Not a scrap of anything left. This thing didn't seem very selective.

  HEATHER: (on the verge of tears) So what happens now?

  EMILY: Now, I think I should do nothing.

  HEATHER: Nothing?

  EMILY: Well this whole thing seems to be linked to me. When did you get that flat tyre?

  (HEATHER pauses. A shocked look comes over her face. She twitches her eyebrows.)

  HEATHER: Just outside the house. I saw you walking towards the phone box, and felt my back tyre deflate suddenly. Then those two cars hit each other. I was going to see if they were all right, then noticed they were looking at the sky. I did too and saw -

  EMILY: Exactly. When you saw me you ran over a nail. And what did your horoscope say this morning?

  (EMILY holds out the horoscope , now greasy with sausage fat.)

  "You will have a flat tyre."

  HEATHER: But this is stupid!

  EMILY: Of course it is. But let's do nothing. I don't want anyone getting hurt. Who knows what's happened as a result of the rip in the sky? Panic no doubt. What we saw in our own street was probably mild compared to elsewhere. Wish we could get some news.

  (She stares wistfully where the TV used to be.)

  HEATHER: But how will doing nothing help?

  EMILY: Look at the horoscope. It's come true for you and me. It probably will for everyone I come into contact with. The next one could be something really drastic. If these things happen only when I'm around, I don't want anyone getting hurt.

  (HEATHER grabs the clipping from EMILY and scans it quickly.)

  HEATHER: Reading Faust? Russian gymnasts?

  EMILY: Don't forget the uninhibited sex.

  HEATHER: I don't see how anyone could get hurt with most of these.

  EMILY: Put yourself in my place. They're creepy. I don't want them happening!

  HEATHER: But none of them says "you will die" or anything. The worst is probably AQUARIUS: "You will have a slight headache." Do we know any Aquariuses?

  EMILY Aquarians. I don't know!

  HEATHER: Emily, we have to do something!

  (Pause. The silence is broken only by BRUNO sniffing at the sausage on the floor and then grabbing it in his teeth. EMILY makes a move to stop him, but halts, watching fascinated as BRUNO bites off the end of the sausage and starts chewing. He shuts his eyes as he swallows, then proceeds to eat the rest of it. The two women wait as if expecting something to happen. Nothing. The rest of the sausage vanishes between the cat’s jaws.)

  EMILY: I guess it really is sausage.

  HEATHER: We should have kept that. Had it analysed or something.

  EMILY: Bruno just analysed it. No animal would eat anything that was going to harm it. They have an instinct about these things. I guarantee you, it's sausage. Besides, I think there'll be plenty more where that came from.

  HEATHER: And the sky – what was all that about?

  EMILY: Maybe that's where all the sausages are coming from.

  HEATHER: What?

  EMILY: Well, look at everything: astrology – admittedly not scientific, but it has to do with the sky, right? - the split sky... maybe they're connected. They have to be connected. Nothing like that could happen and not be connected. So maybe the sausages are coming from the sky.

  (HEATHER regards EMILY carefully, and across her face passes a curious expression that hints that a cup of tea and a good lie down might be in order. BRUNO licks his paws. If the stereo still existed, it could play some dramatic chords.)

  BLACKOUT

  ***

  I saw myself on the evening news.

  Of course, the television set had gone from our house, but that was no great loss as far as I was concerned. Heather, however, would miss it quite a bit, addicted as she was to the slightest crap that the media magnates thrust upon the unsuspecting populace. Do they imagine we’re stupid or something?

  Don’t answer that.

  As I said, I saw myself on the evening news. I watched it at Joanna's house. Heather had gone to her parents' place in, I have to confess, rather an upset state. She had taken Mike the Plant with her. I had Bruno. Fortunately, Joanna loved cats.

  Joanna had not seen the split sky, having been in the shower at the time. I forgave her. She had no opinion yet about what had happened, and seemed strangely calm. I guessed she was used to dealing with unusual events. The books in her home library dealt largely with unexplained phenomena, ghosts, astrology, the occult, that sort of thing. They freaked me out.

  But, as I said, I was on television. My fifteen minutes of fame actually lasted less than three seconds, so I guess the remaining fourteen minutes and fifty-seven point something seconds will be along later. It was all quite interesting. Apparently there had been some guy with a camcorder on the scene – actually in one of the houses on the street – when the sky had torn in two and he captured a few moments. (Ever notice there is always someone with a camera whenever some major event is going on? A landslide, a crashing aeroplane, whatever: someone is always there, camcorder in hand, calmly filming the death and destruction. Maybe he was trying to capture a bit of "real-life TV" and have his fifteen minutes of fame by selling the results. Maybe. Perhaps he was just doing something unspeakable in the privacy of his own home.)

  And I appeared in it, one of the people hanging around the street after the cars had collided. Incidentally, I am conspicuous as the only person looking at the cars and hoping the drivers were all right, rather than staring up at the sky. I hope whoever hands out the karma was watching.

  But of course the camera then swung up and the jagged split across the blue dominated the scene from that point.

  But the story had, as the journalists say, broken.

  There was a scientist at the end of the news item saying that everyone should stay calm and that even though he didn't have the slightest clue as to what was going on, there was no doubt a perfectly satisfactory scientific explanation for it all. The end of the world, he announced with a slightly superior smile, was not about to happen.

  I must confess this made me feel a bit better. I had my doubts up to that point. He was quite a good-looking scientist too, Dr Max Fishe
r from the Brisbane Planetarium. He exuded, if that is the right word, confidence. Actually, I don't think it is the right word. It makes it sound like the stuff was oozing out of him in a yucky way. Actually it sort of surrounded him in a warm glow that probably would have looked even better had he taken his shirt off. That sort of confidence. The sort that a girl could get interested in.

  "Crap," said Joanna.

  I tore my gaze away from Dr Fisher's body to acknowledge Joanna's remark with a carefully considered "Huh?"

  "'A perfectly satisfactory scientific explanation'," she scoffed. "This is patently supernatural."

  "And what about this not being the end of the world?" I asked. "Is that crap too?"

  "I think we're safe enough on that score. There'd be a few more signs about something like that."

  "Like what? The sky splitting in half isn't enough?"

  She sighed loudly. "I would have seen something in the stars." Her tone indicated that any further doubt on my part would not be appreciated.

  So presumably the planets still spun as they always had, and no ominous conjunctions or oppositions or foreboding comets had announced dire news.

  I glanced back at Dr Fisher and thought briefly how at that very moment the uncountable billions of electrons that formed his image on the television were plunging through my body. Somewhere deep inside a seldom exercised, but unmistakably libidinous, part of me broke out in a heated sweat at the thought.

  "Well," I said. "I hope you're right."

  I had been having doubts myself, as I said. I still felt enormously central to all this, and I was wondering, too, if I should say something to someone. Maybe to Dr Max Fisher, over coffee. Or dinner. With my luck, he was married.

  "He never knows what's under his nose," Joanna continued. "I keep telling him, but he never listens."

  Jealousy appeared in the form of a huge green-eyed monster that leaped out of the closet, grabbed me and threw me into its mouth, swallowing me down in one huge gulp. I desperately fought against it, trying to force my way out of its digestive system before I was dissolved completely.

  "You know Dr Max Fisher?" I asked.

  "He's my cousin."

  The monster spat me out again. I landed, sticky and covered in hydrochloric acid, on the living room floor.

  "Your cousin. I see. Quite a coincidence."

  Joanna shrugged. "They always drag him out whenever anything needs to be explained up there." She pointed to the ceiling. "Actually, he and I have never agreed on anything in our entire lives. He's a scientist, you see."

  The word scientist sounded like she was spitting out a bad bit of cheese.

  "But does he know much about astronomy?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "Astronomy, yes. Astrology, not a clue. He thinks he does, though. Tries to tell me about the precession of the equinoxes. Or there are thirteen signs of the zodiac instead of twelve. As if it had anything to do with astrology. Though he does put on some good shows at the Planetarium, I must admit."

  The news report had said that the split sky had been visible over a good section of the Earth, running roughly north to south between longitudes 152ºE and 165ºE. It had been seen as far south as Macquarie Island and had certainly protruded to some extent into the Northern hemisphere. And that was all anyone knew about it. Except that, according to Dr Max Fisher at the Planetarium, it wasn't the end of the world.

  But was it the end of me?

  "I think I'd like to talk with your cousin," I said. "Can I do that?"

  Joanna had the atlas on her knee and was trying to work out how far the sky had been split on the world map. "Where's Macquarie Island?” she said. “Don't worry, I found it. Yes, I suppose so. I'll give him a ring."

  (That's why I liked Joanna. She Got Things Done, even if she did ignore the precession of the equinoxes – not that I knew what that was myself until I looked it up. I just wish the astrologers were consistent about things: when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, they somehow managed to include them in their calculations. But update the fact that the Earth now points in a different direction than it did 3000 years ago? No, that would be too much to ask.)

  ***

  I hate sleeping with women. Well, to put it more correctly, I hate waking up with them beside me. I have done so on the odd occasion throughout my life: sleepovers with girlfriends from school when we spent half the night giggling and talking about boys; once at my grandmother's when I had to share with a distant cousin because there weren't enough beds. That sort of thing. But I don't hate it because I'm rampantly heterosexual and the thought of close physical proximity with a woman makes me cringe. I'm hardly in a position to criticise anyone's sex life. No, the problem is me.

  I go loose in the night. Somehow, all the different parts of my body relax during sleep and fail to rally sufficiently once consciousness returns. My skin sags and my eyes accumulate wrinkles like the trenches of Dante's Nether Hell. My hair, in contrast, becomes almost violently active and each separate strand goes on its own nocturnal journey in a different direction from all the others. I wake up looking like a witch. Now, a man is not so fussy about whom he wakes up next to; women tend to cast judgments on their bed partners. Hence my aversion to being seen by another woman in the unforgiving light of dawn.

  Joanna had been very kind in letting me sleep in her bed instead of the sofa that was apparently fun to sit in but dreadful to sleep on. Nevertheless, I wished she had a spare bed. But she used one of the spare bedrooms as a study and the other as a library. Of course, she woke up next to me looking absolutely stunning, which wasn't fair.

  "Morning," she said. I tried to roll over and ignore that she was apparently as much a morning person as I was not. I was surprised she had not grimaced more at encountering The Hag lying next to her.

  But her happy mood dissolved when she stepped out of the bed. There was a pause, and, in a voice that sounded like she was trying to stay very, very calm, she said, "The bedroom's full of sausages."

  Now, that was not literally true. If the room had been full of sausages we would of course have been buried under them. They didn't even come up to the bottom of the bed. But there were hundreds of them that had appeared during the night. All over the floor. Arranged like soldiers across the polished floorboards. On top of the wardrobes. In my shoes.

  "I've had enough of this," I said.

  It took a long time to clean up the bedroom. I did it by myself, feeling somewhat responsible. Or somewhat irresponsible, depending on one's view of the situation. But, I thought, if the room was full of sausages it was, at least, full of something, and there had been no Great Removal of Joanna's belongings while I slept.

  At least not yet. Perhaps it was something to look forward to.

  Things became worse when Joanna tried to cast her horoscopes for next week. I heard a little scream from her study and ran in, thinking maybe something heavy had fallen on her (never let it be said I can't whip up a crisis from the most paltry of events), only to find her staring at her laptop and desperately clicking the mouse buttons.

  She used a computer to do the horoscopes. It saved time and the necessity of keeping a huge book full of boring figures and rising and setting times of stars and planets and stuff about nodes and phases. At least that's what I called it. Joanna called it an ephemeris. She had a computer program for doing that sort of thing, but it wasn't working today.

  "The computer's ok," she said with a wail. "But the program's screwed. Look at that."

  I looked. There was a picture of Mars and underneath it some numbers in two columns, one headed Right Ascension and the other Declination, only the first were in hours and minutes and the second was in degrees and minutes and couldn't they be a bit more consistent?

  "Looks – um - yes. I see what you mean," I said vaguely, hoping I sounded at least slightly intelligent.

  Dismal failure.

  "Those numbers give the current position of Mars," she said. "But Mars can't be there. It's on the other side of the
Sun at the moment."

  That seemed a good place to be myself. Or even further.

  ***

  I left Joanna desperately trying to salvage the program and headed off to the Planetarium. I had a theory forming that, as soon as I was out of the vicinity, her computer would return to normal. I hoped so. I felt bad.

  On the way I indulged in some retail therapy and bought some clothes with the $4,000.00 I still had. My wardrobe quadrupled its contents within a very short time, considering all I owned in the world was what I was wearing. Joanna had offered to lend me some of hers, but I had imposed enough. Besides, I was in desperate need of bras and knickers, and I wasn’t about to borrow those.

  I took a bus to the Toowong Cemetery, walking the remaining few hundred yards up Mt Coot-tha Road to the Planetarium, carrying my shopping bag of clothes. There had been a threat of rain all morning, and it had started to come down in buckets (or, more correctly, bucketfuls) just as I entered the gates to the Botanic Gardens. The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium was a white dome a short way inside the gates, and I ran through the downpour to the entrance.

  The foyer was dark, the sole occupant being the man behind the ticket counter. Backlit, poster-sized slides of all sorts of astronomical phenomena decorated the walls. I looked for Mars among them, remembering it from the image I had seen on Joanna's computer (my total knowledge of astronomy) but I did not see it anywhere. The slides seemed to be mostly taken up with lots of star fields with coloured clouds behind them. The legends under the posters called these clouds "nebulae". They looked out of place to me. Wasn't space supposed to be black? And what were they doing behind the stars? Maybe Max Fisher could explain it.

  My appointment with Dr Fisher was for 1.00 pm, his lunch hour. The man behind the counter pointed down the corridor when I asked where his office was. As the few remaining minutes passed, I checked that my new white top was not too wrinkled and my new light green skirt was flounced out enough. Normally I hate to appear too girly, but this was an emergency. The world was at stake. I also made a quick check to make sure there were no stray sausages lying around. I'd left a couple on the bus.

  I went along to the door marked Dr M. J. Fisher, MSc, PhD, Director. (Impressive. He should know something). I knocked.