Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘You might have to be patient with Dad,’ Hanna says, pacing through a long dining room to the back of the mansion. ‘He’s not as . . . how should I say . . . robust . . . as he once was. You might have to repeat your questions a couple of times and remember to speak loudly and concisely. He can drift off sometimes like he’s on another planet. He’s had some ill health of late but he’s excited about these awards tonight. In fact, he has a surprise planned for all the guests and he wants to give you two a sneak preview.’

  She opens two red wood doors to a vast reading room. It feels like the reading room of a royal. Two floor-to-ceiling walls of bookshelves, left side and right. Hundreds of hardback books with old bindings and gold lettering. Burgundy carpet. Blood-coloured carpet. The room smells like books and old cigar smoke. A dark green velvet reading lounge and two dark green velvet armchairs. There is a large mahogany writing desk at the end of the room and this is where Tytus Broz sits, eyes down, reading a thick hardback book. Behind him is a vast rear wall of glass so clean and pure you could squint your eyes and be convinced there wasn’t a glass wall there at all. The only clue to the door that’s been built into the centre of the glass wall are two sets of polished silver hinges that allow the door to open out to the magical and rambling lawn that runs seemingly for a kilometre or so, past concrete water fountains and perfectly angular hedges and flowerbeds tended by bees and perfect sunlight, down to what looks like a small vineyard, but that view must be a trick of the light because such things can’t be found in the lantana outskirts of Bellbowrie, Brisbane. Resting on his desk is a rectangular box about twenty-five centimetres tall and twenty centimetres wide, draped in a red silk covering cloth.

  ‘Dad,’ Hanna says.

  He doesn’t look up from his reading. White suit. White hair. White spine in my back tingling to tell me to run. Run away now, Eli. Pull back. It’s a trap.

  ‘Excuse me, Dad,’ Hanna says, louder.

  He flips his head up from his book.

  ‘The people from the paper are here to talk to you,’ Hanna says.

  ‘Who?’ he spits.

  ‘This is Eli and his photographer, Caitlyn,’ Hanna says. ‘They’ve come to talk to you about the award you are going to receive tonight.’

  Some new sun of remembrance dawns in his mind.

  ‘Yes!’ he says, pulling the reading glasses from his eyes. He excitedly taps the box covered in the red silk. ‘Come. Sit. Sit.’

  We move forward slowly, sit in the two elegant black visitor chairs at his desk. He’s so much older. The Lord of Limbs doesn’t seem as frightening as he seemed to a thirteen-year-old. Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.

  I could jump right over that desk and strangle his near-dead neck, stab my thumbs into his near-dead zombie eyes. The fountain pen. The fountain pen resting upright in the stand beside his desk phone. I could stab that fountain pen into his chest. His cold white chest. Stab my name into his heart. His cold white heart.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Broz,’ I say.

  He smiles and his lips tremble. His lips are wet with saliva.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘What would you like to know?’

  I place my ExecTalk Dictaphone on the desk with my left hand, my unseen right hand and its missing digit gripping a pen to take notes on my lap beneath the desk top.

  ‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  Hanna steps back from us softly and takes a watchful owl position from the dark green reading lounge behind us.

  ‘You are being honoured at tonight’s Queensland Champions ceremony for your lifelong commitment to enhancing the lives of Queenslanders living with physical disabilities,’ I say. He nods, following my ego-massaging opening set-up closely. ‘What started you on this extraordinary journey in the first place?’

  He smiles, points over my shoulder to Hanna, sitting attentively upright on the reading lounge. She smiles, self-consciously smooths her hair behind her right ear.

  ‘More than half a century ago, that beautiful woman sitting over there was born with a transverse deficiency, what is known as “amelia”,’ he says. ‘She was born with two congenital amputations at the upper arm. A fibrous band within the membrane of the developing foetus that was our Hanna grew constricted.’

  He speaks matter-of-factly, like he’s reading from a pancakes recipe. Blood clots forming in the foetus. Stir in four cracked eggs. Rest in fridge for thirty minutes.

  ‘A tragically complicated birth followed and we lost Hanna’s beloved mother . . .’ He pauses a moment. ‘But . . .’

  ‘What was her name?’ I ask.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Tytus says, bristling at the interruption.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if I get the spelling of your late wife’s name?’

  ‘Her name was Hanna Broz, like her daughter,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry, please go on.’

  ‘Well . . . where was I?’ Tytus says.

  I look at my notepad.

  ‘You said, “A tragically complicated birth followed and we lost Hanna’s beloved mother” and then you paused and then you said, “But”.’

  ‘Yes . . . but . . .’ he says. ‘But the world and I were gifted an angel that I vowed, there and then, would lead a life filled with all the riches and wonders available to any other Australian baby born that day.’

  He nods at Hanna.

  ‘I kept my vow,’ he says.

  I’m going to be sick. The question pops from my lips but I don’t ask it. Someone else inside of me asks it. Some other being. Someone braver. Someone who doesn’t cry so easily.

  ‘Are you a good man, Tytus Broz?’ I ask.

  Caitlyn whips her head towards me.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Tytus asks, shocked. Confused.

  I stare into his eyes for a long moment. Snap back to my normal piss-weak self.

  ‘I mean, what’s your advice to other Queenslanders on how they, too, can do so much good for this great State?’

  He rests back in his chair, studying my face. His chair swivels and he turns to his side and he looks out through that grand pure and clean all-glass wall and he ponders his answer as the bees tend his pink and purple and red and yellow flowers.

  ‘Don’t ask for permission to change the world,’ he says. ‘Just go ahead and change it.’

  He cups his hands, rests his chin on his fingers contemplatively.

  ‘I guess, in all honesty, it was the realisation that nobody was going to change the world for me,’ he says, gazing out to a cloudless blue sky. ‘Nobody was going to do the work for me. I had to turn up for all those other kids out there like my Hanna.’

  He turns back to his desk.

  ‘Which brings me to my surprise,’ he says. ‘I have prepared a little treat for tonight’s guests.’

  His lips are wet. His voice is raspy and weak. He gives a serpent smile to Caitlyn.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’

  Caitlyn nods, yes.

  ‘Go on then,’ Tytus says, not moving from his chair.

  Caitlyn warily leans forward, removes the red silk cloth.

  It’s a rectangular glass box. Pure and clean glass like the glass wall in front of us. Perfect edges, like the whole box was shaped somehow from one sheet of glass. Inside the glass box, fixed to a hidden and small metal stand, is an artificial limb. A right human forearm and hand, propped on the stand as though it was floating.

  ‘This is my gift to Queensland,’ Tytus says.

  It might as well be my hand in there. Caitlyn’s hand. So real it looks. From the skin colour and texture to the natural sun blemishes and discolourations on the forearm to the milky moons rising in the fingernails. The milky moons that make me remember the day I learned to drive with Slim. The freckles on this artificial limb that make me remember my lucky freckle on my lucky finger. There is something dark in the making of this perfect limb. I know this in my soul and in the nub of bone o
n my missing finger.

  ‘Human to the touch, human in its movement,’ Tytus says. ‘For the past twenty-five years I have employed and engaged the world’s finest engineers and human movement scientists with a single vision, to transform the lives of limb-deficient kids like my Hanna.’

  He fawns over the box like it was a newborn baby.

  ‘Underline this word in your notebook,’ he says. ‘Electromyography.’

  I scribble the word in my notepad. I don’t underline it because I’m too busy underlining the words, ‘Smack empire funds science?’ Four-word story. Can tell it in three words. Drugs fund research. Drugs buy . . .

  ‘Breakthrough!’ Tytus says. ‘This is only a prototype. High definition anatomically shaped silicone-based exterior. Revolutionary. Transformative. Conspicuously inconspicuous. A genuinely discreet exterior harmoniously integrated into a mechanical interior using electromyography – EMG – signals from existing contracted muscles within the amputee’s residual limbs to control the movement of the artificial limb. Electrodes attached to the skin’s surface record the EMG signals and these beautiful and informative human signals are amplified and processed by motors we have built into several points along our limb. Real movement. Real life. That’s how we change the world.’

  The room is silent for a moment.

  ‘It’s remarkable,’ I say. ‘I imagine there are no limits to where you could take this.’

  He beams and laughs, looking over at Hanna behind us.

  ‘Life without limbs, Hanna?’ he says.

  ‘Life without limits,’ she says back.

  He bangs his fist triumphantly on the table.

  ‘Life without limits, exactly!’ he says.

  He turns around again to that vast cloudless blue sky hanging over his endless green lawn.

  ‘I have seen the future,’ he says.

  ‘You have?’ I say.

  ‘I have.’

  Beyond the glass wall of the reading room there is a lone bird in the sky over Tytus Broz’s manicured gardens. Against the backdrop of the eternal blue sky, this small bird zips and whirls and whips through air and the bird’s frantic and electric flight show captures Tytus’s gaze.

  ‘It’s a world without limits,’ he says. ‘It’s a world where kids born the way Hanna was born can control their prosthetic limbs directly through the brain. Real-life limbs controlled by neural feedback that can reach out and shake your hand or pat a dog in the park or throw a frisbee or bowl a cricket ball or wrap their arms around their mum and dad.’ He breathes deep. ‘That’s a beautiful world.’

  The bird outside his glass wall windows dips like a Spitfire fighter plane and then darts unexpectedly upward like a rollercoaster and makes a full loop before changing its flight path dramatically and speeding, unexpectedly, towards us. The bird is flying straight to us, to us three here around this office desk, to me and the girl of my dreams, and the man of my nightmares. I know it can’t see the glass wall. I know it only sees itself. I know it sees a friend. I see the colour of the bird as it nears the glass. Flashes of vivid and electrifying blue on its forehead and tail. Like the blue in the storm lightning I see from the front window of Lancelot Street. Like the blue in my eyes. That kind of blue. Not just azure blue. Magic blue. Alchemy blue.

  And the blue bird slams headfirst and hard into the glass wall.

  ‘Oh my,’ says Tytus, shifting back in his seat.

  The bird hovers, stunned by the impact against the glass, flaps its wings and flutters its tail furiously, then flies back from whence it came in a darting left turn that zigs into a right turn that zags into a left and whips into a right again and the bird is bouncing on air like a split atom and it knows not where it’s going until it finds its purpose and that purpose is itself, the other bird it sees in the glass wall, and it flies hard and fast to meet itself once more, zooming into itself, the Spitfire plane, the kamikaze bomber descending from the blue sky. The flashes of an unprecedented blue again on its forehead and tail. And it slams once more into itself. Into the impenetrable glass wall. It hovers, stunned, and flies away again, determined to find itself once more and it does. It zooms around in an arching left turn that seems to never end until it does because the bird rights itself and zips into an air stream that sharpens its blinding velocity.

  Caitlyn Spies cares for it, of course, because her heart can accommodate the sky and everything flying therein.

  ‘Stop it, little birdy,’ she whispers. ‘Stop it.’

  But the bird can’t stop. Faster than ever now. Slam. And from that horrid impact, this time it does not hover stunned. It simply drops to the ground. Falls with a soft thud on the gravel outside Tytus Broz’s glass reading room door.

  I stand from my chair and Tytus Broz is surprised when he watches me pass his desk and open the glass door out to the vast lawn. The smell of the lawn. The smell of the flowers. Yellow gravel dust and pebbles cracking and scratching beneath the soles of my Dunlops when I kneel down gently beside the fallen bird.

  I carefully pick it up with the four fingers of my right hand and I can feel its fragile twig bones beneath that perfect blue as I cup it in the palms of both my hands. It’s warm and soft and the size of a mouse when its wings are tucked up like this. Caitlyn has followed me out here.

  ‘Is it dead?’ she asks, standing over me.

  ‘I think it is,’ I say.

  The blue on its forehead. More flashes of blue over its little ears and more on its wings, like it flew through some magic blue dust cloud. I study the bird in my hands. This lifeless flyer. It has bewitched me momentarily with its beauty.

  ‘What sort of bird is that?’ Caitlyn asks.

  A blue bird. Are you listening, Eli?

  ‘Oh, what do you call them again?’ Caitlyn ponders. ‘My grandma gets them in her backyard . . . They’re her favourite bird. It’s so beautiful.’

  Caitlyn kneels down, leans over the dead bird, rubs a pinkie finger over its exposed belly.

  ‘What are you gonna do with it?’ she asks softly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  Tytus Broz is now standing in the glass doorway.

  ‘Is it dead?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, it’s dead,’ I say.

  ‘Stupid bird seemed so determined to kill itself,’ he says.

  Caitlyn slaps her hands.

  ‘Wren!’ she says. ‘I remember now! That’s a wren.’

  And, with that, the dead blue wren comes back. Like it was just waiting for Caitlyn Spies to recognise it, because, like all living things – like me, me, me – it lives and dies on her breath and her attention. Back. Its peppercorn eyes open first and then I feel its feet gently scratch the skin on my palms. Its head moves, a brief rock. Groggy and stunned. The bird’s eyes turn to me and in a flash something is transferred that is beyond my understanding, beyond the universe of here, something tender, but then it’s gone and it’s replaced by the bird’s realisation that it rests in a human hand and some electromyographical signal inside its perfect construction tells its weakened wings to flap. Flap. Flap. And fly away. And we three, Eli Bell and the girl of his dreams and the man of his nightmares, watch the blue bird dart left then right as it finds its strength then loops once again because it likes to be alive. But it does not fly far. It merely flies to the far right side of this grand manicured lawn nursed by a groundsman paid in drug money. It flies over a green wood shed, some kind of tool shed maybe. The shed is open with a green John Deere tractor parked inside it. Then the bird flies further to a concrete structure I have not yet noticed. I missed it. It’s a kind of square concrete bunker hidden in a huddle of elms and covered in jasmine vines and other wild plants lining the lawn’s far right fence. A concrete box with a single white door built into its front and the jasmine vines spill over its roof and connect to the lawn so it looks like the structure has grown up from the earth. The blue bird lands on a vine hanging just above the box’s door. And there it stays, darting its small storm-blue head left and right
like it’s as puzzled as much as anyone by the past five minutes of its curious existence.

  Curiouser and curiouser. Curious concrete structure. I’m looking at it strangely and Tytus is looking at it strangely and then he knows I’m looking at it strangely.

  I forget my right hand is hanging down with its four fingers. Conspicuously conspicuous. Tytus’s old and unreliable eyes zero in on this hand.

  I stand quickly, slipping my hands into my pockets. ‘Well, I think I’ve got enough, Mr Broz,’ I say. ‘I better get back and file this thing for tomorrow’s paper.’

  He has a puzzled look on his face. Off on another planet. Or maybe just off to five years ago on this planet when he instructed his Polish standover psycho mate, Iwan, to cut off my real-life forefinger from my real-life hand.

  He eyeballs me suspiciously.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ponderously. ‘Yes. Very well.’

  Caitlyn raises her camera.

  ‘Do you mind if I take a quick snap, Mr Broz?’ Caitlyn asks.

  ‘Where do you want me?’ he replies.

  ‘Just back at the desk inside is fine,’ she says.

  He sits back at his desk.

  ‘Big smile,’ Caitlyn says through the lens.

  Caitlyn clicks a shot and the camera pops with a blinding flash that hurts all our eyes. Too bright. Stuns us all in the room.

  ‘Dear God,’ Tytus cries, rubbing his eyes. ‘Turn that flash off.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says. ‘This camera must be faulty. Someone should toss it in the repairs cabinet.’

  She aims her lens once more.

  ‘Just one more,’ Caitlyn says, like she’s talking to a three-year-old.

  Tytus forces a smile. Fake smile. Artificial smile. Silicone-based.

  *

  In the Ford Meteor, Caitlyn tosses the camera by my feet in the front passenger seat. ‘Well, that was weird,’ she says.

  She turns the ignition. Drives too fast out of Tytus Broz’s driveway.

  I’m silent. She does the talking.

  ‘Okay, gut impressions first,’ she says, talking to herself as much as to her junior reporter. ‘I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but there is something rotten in the State of Queensland,’ she says, pressing hard on the accelerator as the car splits through Bellbowrie scrub on the black bitumen road back to Bowen Hills. ‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question? You ever seen anyone so creepy? You see his old bag of bones body rattling in that suit? He kept licking his lips like he was licking the sticky bit on an envelope.’