One day in April I had a revelation. The SETI Institute had introduced SETI@home. This software allows everyone interested to put unused CPU cycles of their home computers to work helping in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And guess what, Rose. Thousands of people have downloaded the software so they can participate. There is a high level of interest in being the first person to discover coherent signals from intelligent alien life. If people understood that there is an alien artifact hidden in the wilderness of Irian Jaya, they would be willing to master my Kembalimo software. For days I worked on ideas, scenarios for convincing people. But the emptiness of the house closed in around me. Ideas faltered as I second-guessed them. Without your presence, they seemed hollow. They were ideas without substance, without passion.
I left the house to work elsewhere. I worked on a bench on the street near your shop. But the emptiness followed me, as if it were not anchored to the house at all. One at a time the ideas were discarded. I could see no viable plan to convince others of what I know. I thought perhaps if doctors examined me they might see some proof, so I went to a doctor for the first time in twenty-two years. He found nothing unusual and complimented me for taking care of myself. I explained that I was sixty-three and then asked him to cut my arm so he could see it heal. He told me to leave and that I needed a psychiatric specialist rather than a medical doctor. Had you been there, you would have known how to convince him. But you weren’t.
Two months later, in June, I flew to Irian Jaya with a backpack of survival gear. In Jayapura I bought food. The next morning I hired a minibus to Wor, where I had started my journey in 1977. I hardly recognized the village, but as soon as I had hiked a few kilometers into the bush, the forest was as raw and defiant as it had been twenty-two years before. The vegetation had changed in the last two decades, but my perfect memory served me well. It allowed me to retrace my steps using larger trees that were still in place as landmarks. After three days I found the site where I had discovered the hidden village. I was sure of it. But the village was no longer there. Apparently it had been moved. I considered persisting, searching for the village’s new location, but instead I turned back.
My reason for giving up was I had made a promise to you that I would never return there. I know we’re separated, but I could not forget the promise. And there was more. On the first day I spotted a King-of-Saxony bird of paradise. But you weren’t there to see its beauty. I slept in a net-covered hammock, but it seemed too spacious without you. I crossed a river on the second day but had no hand to hold. I came upon an aboriginal hunter who spoke a bit of English. He had collected pandanus nuts, and he shared them with me. He said he had a wife and she would not allow him to return home for three more days because that’s how long her mother was staying at his hut. I told him my wife was waiting for me at home. I could not will myself to tell him the truth. After we parted, I retraced my steps to Wor and returned to Cairns.
On a Saturday in October I met a girl. I was sitting in the park trying to work, as the emptiness of the house had been particularly cruel to me during the night. She had a beagle that seemed to fancy my right leg. She apologized profusely and we began conversing. Turns out she likes Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov—all the greats. So there was something to converse about. I asked if I could see her again. I needed a friend, Rose. We met on the Esplanade the next day. Walked and had a bite. It didn’t help. She was just a girl, in her thirties. Half my age. I was ashamed, and I’m not going to do it again.
And so it has gone, one day after another, month after month.
Yonks Day is in a few weeks. I fear the emptiness will destroy me if I stay home that day. And so I will make fritters and salad, and I will picnic on Lumley Hill. If you are feeling the same emptiness, perhaps you will join me. I cannot express the joy it would bring me.
Blue Arrow has died. She was the last known cassowary in Mount Whitfield Park. If you come, perhaps we can pay our respects.
With eternal love, Peter
As I stared at the letter, my fingers stroked the loose skin under my eye. I shifted my gaze to the age spots and blue veins on the back of my hand. Peter was right, the emptiness could be cruel, and at that moment my apartment seemed as hollow as an empty cathedral.
“Damn you, Peter,” I said aloud.
I got up and called Sylvia. She said she was already dressed and ready to drive to the shop. She had anticipated that I would decide at the last minute to take the day off.
∞
The Blue Arrow track was not intended for sixty-three-year-old hips. My lung capacity was adequate, but the steep inclines tested my pain tolerance. The trail was busy that day. It had become a popular route for trail runners, and they passed me with their athletic legs and smooth-skinned arms. Two twenty-something girls with glistening faces stopped and asked if I needed help. I smiled and said, “Thanks, but I’m fine.” Bitches.
I’d seen Peter’s car in the parking lot, so I knew he was ahead of me somewhere. I didn’t find him until I crested the summit of Lumley Hill, nearly three hours after I’d started. He was sitting on the blanket that had been diminished to make bandages nine years prior. He sprang to his feet.
“Rose, my God, you came! Here, take a load off.” He gripped my arm until I had settled onto the blanket. I didn’t protest.
We sat in silence and gazed out at the Coral Sea as I caught my breath. I watched the waves moving toward shore near Machans Beach. Each wave seemed to be pursuing the one before it but was never able to join it.
“I read your note,” I said, finally. “This morning.”
“This morning?”
I gave him a sheepish look and shook my head slightly. “I think you’re approaching things wrong.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re not going to convince anyone there’s an alien artifact in the Irian Jaya rainforest. You weren’t even able to convince me, and I’m your wife.”
He nodded slowly. “Rose, it’s so wonderful to here those words—”
“Here’s what I think,” I interjected. I wasn’t quite ready to talk about our relationship. “You need to go back to working on your software. Kembalimo. You want people to master it? You want them to learn to communicate using 128 symbols they’ve never seen before? Then make it useful. Make it so they need it.”
He sighed. “I think we’re all going to need it when—”
“No one cares, because you can’t convince them of that. Make it useful now.”
His brows furrowed. “How?”
“It’s some kind of language, right? The symbols are part of a language. If you’re right and the Lamotelokhai was made by intelligent beings, then let’s assume they knew what they were doing. If the thing’s purpose is to make contact with other races, then they must have designed it to be adaptable for a wide variety of ways to communicate, and a variety of cognitive capabilities.”
He nodded. The gears in his head were beginning to grind into action. “Let’s assume they knew what they were doing.”
“Yes,” I said. “The object was designed to teach others to speak with it, regardless of their language or means of communication. Regardless of the way they think.”
Peter edged closer to me on the blanket. “How many languages do you think there are? On this planet, I mean.” He was rolling with it now. “There are 800 on the island of New Guinea alone. Thousands worldwide. Thousands.” He actually took my hand in his.
I almost pulled my hand away, but his touch was warm and comforting. “And you’re creating a software system based on a radically advanced computer designed to help different species communicate with each other.” I stared into his wide eyes. “Make it useful, Peter.”
We gazed at each other for a long time.
“I’m done living without you,” he said. “I’ve tried it, and it’s not working.”
More seconds passed. I was nearly stunned by how much joy and relief these words provided me. I realized I w
anted him. Not only later, for the rest of my life, but right then—at that moment. Hesitantly, as if I were forty years younger, I pulled his hands toward me. He leaned in and kissed me, long and deep.
“Oh, Christ. Sorry, didn’t see you two.”
Startled, we turned to see a young man, a trail runner. The runners rarely came all the way to the top of Lumley Hill. He wore a blue New York Yankees cap, and he was drenched in sweat.
Peter said, “No worries, mate.”
The guy stared for a moment, obviously confused at seeing a man Peter’s age holding and kissing me. He said, “I’ll leave you alone.” He started to leave and then turned back around. “Ma’am, is everything okay here?”
I smiled at him. “I’m fine. In fact, if you could grant us a bit of privacy, I’m going to cop a shag with my husband.”
Yonks Day – Year 36 – 2013
I understand there are women incapable of leaving their abusive husbands. Some of them eventually die from the violence. And some women will not leave the financial security of their marriages, even though they no longer feel passion. In my own way, I understand these women. I had attempted to leave Peter, unsuccessfully. Twice. Once for ten months. Peter wasn’t abusive, of course, although he was financially secure. By our thirty-sixth Yonks Day, he had created a successful software company, and we had relocated to a home near his corporate campus in Brisbane. Yes, I enjoyed the financial benefits: a nice home, more time to stay physically fit, and the services of the best doctors. But that’s not what kept me from leaving. I had stayed with Peter because on that day fourteen years before—twenty-second Yonks Day—I’d had a personal breakthrough. No longer did I give a damn what anyone else thought. I loved Peter, and I would not let the stares and comments of other people keep me from him.
When I say it that way, it almost sounds like I was being brave. But the simple truth is I needed Peter. I always had. As I had relentlessly aged, it was my own fragile self-esteem that made me try to leave him. I did not do it for his sake. And later, when my vanity had faded away with my looks and vivacity, it was clearly not for his sake that I clung to him.
In spite of all this, on our thirty-sixth Yonks Day, I almost left Peter for good.
It was my fault, really, and I should have known better. At some point we have to give up the exploits of our youth. Believing our opinions are superior, threatening disrespectful idiots with a beating, eating whatever and as much as we want, making love at the tops of public hills. And going places without a cell phone.
Although we now lived in Brisbane, we still returned to Cairns every year for our picnic. Peter and I had hiked up Lumley Hill every Yonks Day for thirty-five years. I was damn well going to do it on our thirty-sixth, in spite of the fact that Peter thought I should avoid such a strenuous endeavor. I was seventy-seven. He was still forty-one, but he did not have the stamina to win that argument.
∞
Start at first light. Four and a half hours to make the hike to the top of Lumley Hill. Prawn salad, fritters, bottle of Shiraz. A damp, drizzling day with no other hikers or trail runners. Dry dirt transformed to slippery mud. No cell phone, because on this one day I wanted Peter to myself.
It happened on the way back, not long after crossing Hamliffe Creek. My progress had been slow, but Peter was patient. He wouldn’t allow me to walk any faster. But that didn’t prevent the inevitable. My graceful litheness was only a faded memory, and I was getting tired.
At that time, the peak number of hip fractures occurred at 75-79 years of age, and 75% of them happened to women. A woman my age was more likely to fracture a hip than to develop breast cancer, and the risk of resulting death was the same. I knew this, but still I insisted on hiking to Lumley Hill. That’s how foolish love can make you.
I didn’t realize my hip was broken until I tried to get up. I simply couldn’t, and no amount of will power could overcome the pain I felt when I tried. Peter could not carry me by himself. It would take him at least two hours to hike to the rental car, and it would be dark in three.
Peter left me there in the mud. What else could he have done? I lay on the ground, occasionally trying to shift to a more comfortable position and speaking encouraging words aloud to myself to break the silence of the forest.
At one point after lying there alone for more than an hour, I thought I heard a slight disturbance. I gazed into the trees, suddenly feeling vulnerable. Something moved. It was perhaps twenty meters away, almost entirely concealed by vegetation. It moved again, silently and methodically. It was a creature of some kind, walking up the hill. I thought I caught a glimpse of azure blue. Was that the head and neck of a cassowary? It couldn’t be; Blue Arrow had been the last known cassowary in the park, and she had died over a decade before. I stared at the tangled brush, occasionally catching sight of a patch of black or a stick-like leg, until the creature was gone.
It occurred to me that I might have been hallucinating, although my thoughts seemed reasonably clear considering my circumstances. But if it were real, what an astounding thing it would be—that magnificent creature living in secrecy year after year, no one even knowing it existed. Perhaps it was Blue Arrow’s mate, living on in secluded privacy long after she had grown old and passed away.
It was nearly dark when I heard someone approach.
“Mrs. Wooley?”
I shouted back. Soon a man—a trail runner in shorts and singlet—came sprinting up the trail. He knelt by my side.
“Rose, I met your husband as I was running up the Red Arrow track. He told me what happened. I had left my cell phone in my car, but I told him I’d come up here to the Blue Arrow track and find you. I’m going to wait here with you until help arrives. I imagine medics are on their way now. Another hour, tops. Can I do something to make you more comfortable?”
I said, “As long as I’m still, I can bear the pain. But I need to shift my weight off the rocks under me. They’re killing me.”
He gathered some soggy leaves and created a sort of cushion beneath me. I tried not to cry out as he gently shifted my body. Finally I could take no more and told him thank you. He sat on the trail next to me and crossed his legs.
“Your husband said you and he met me on this trail before, more than ten years ago. I didn’t recall, but now that I see you, I believe I do remember.”
“Peter has a photographic memory,” I said. I gazed at him in the fading light. He was perhaps in his upper thirties. His face didn’t ring a bell, but his New York Yankees cap did. “You’re the fellow who caught us in a rather awkward moment!”
He nodded his head, and I’m pretty sure he blushed. “I believe I am.”
“Have you been wearing the same cap for fourteen years?”
He smiled at this. “I have washed it a few times. It’s my lucky hat.”
I shifted slightly, grimacing at the pain. He rose to his knees, but I waved him off.
“Well, you seemed curious about Peter and I then. I imagine you’re entirely baffled by us now.”
He shook his head. “None of my business.”
I stared at him, waiting.
He settled back on his butt again and crossed his legs. “Okay, yes, I’m curious.”
Over the years Peter and I had guarded our privacy fiercely. But at that moment I was ready to talk. Perhaps I did not believe I would make it off that hill and thought this might be my last chance to open up to someone.
“Peter and I are the same age. At least we used to be.”
He stared at me for a moment. “Is that right?”
“He doesn’t grow older.”
“Is that right?”
“It started thirty-six years ago.”
He paused for a moment, as if he were almost afraid to ask. “What happened thirty-six years ago?”
I sighed, shooting pain down to my hip. “It’s a long story.”
He put his hands together and touched a watch on his wrist. A green glow appeared and then went
off. “I estimate we have forty minutes. Thirty, if they come with quad bikes.”
I hesitated, perhaps knowing that once I started, I wouldn’t stop. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Jonathan,” he said. He politely brushed the dirt off his hand by wiping it on his shorts, and then he extended the hand to me. My elbows were braced to keep me steady, so he grasped one finger and shook it gently.
“Your family will be worried about you, Jonathan.”
“My wife will understand when I tell her what has happened.”
“Then it seems we have some time.”
We had never shared Peter’s story with anyone before. Peter had always insisted that he complete his Kembalimo project first, and I had suspected this was because, deep inside, he was afraid of what people would think of him. He’d seen a few doctors and had suitably puzzled them, but he was unwilling to try to convince them of the real reason for his perfect health. I think Peter was actually waiting for the object in New Guinea to be discovered again. I think he believed that when that happened, the world would accept whatever he had to say.
But on that day, with my broken body sprawled in the mud on the Blue Arrow track, I needed to tell someone else our story. And Jonathan seemed ready to listen. I told him about Peter’s encounter with a strange object in the rainforest of Indonesian Papua, and that he had come home a new person. I explained why this was more than just an expression. I told him Peter believed the object had been created by an alien civilization. I told him of Peter’s decades-long attempt to create a software application that would prepare people to communicate with the object when it was found again, and how this endeavor had resulted in his knack for developing useful and lucrative language-related software products. I was still talking when we heard at least one quad bike approaching in the distance.
Blue Arrow Page 3
