The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  “What’s the deal with the research?” asks Lawfer.

  “I’d been working on a microchip that imitates living tissue in brain damage,” says Patterson. “Emulating cellular metabolism around astrocytes. I told Banjo. I’d applied for funding, they needed referees.”

  “Explain the research.”

  “The microchip served as a neuroprotective agent, reducing toxic reaction on dead cells and emulating metabolic simulation that activated spontaneous blood flow in the inner core. This triggered recovery in working brain cells, albeit slowly. Inbuilt artificial intelligence in autosensors generating cellular growth during the recovery phase, adjusting electronic stimulation into that part of the brain to double cell cycle time.”

  “And Banjo stole credit?”

  “He took it to the medical board unbeknownst to me. Claimed it for his. Imagine my shock when I found out he had a Nobel nomination from thieved intellectual property. Such audacity. He understood my compromise—how could I expose him? I confronted him; he said: ‘You had your moment. It’s not enough to lead a race; it’s important to win it.’ It seemed ages since I loved him. I wanted to kill him.”

  “Did you?”

  “What do you think?”

  Lawfer outstares him. “Forget DCI. Put Director in front of my name. Director of no bullshit.”

  Banjo broods at manicured nails.

  “Tell me about the blood.” Lawfer.

  “Banjo, he struck me.”

  Lawfer touches him, suddenly it is clear. “Your nose bled. Banjo sobbed, he was sorry. He offered you rum. Then you went home, left him in his office.”

  “And in the morning,” Patterson’s voice is small, “Banjo was dead.”

  ***

  22:45. Outside East Wing at the King George Hospital. A white half-moon with gray shadows shares few secrets against a blackened sky.

  “There goes another clue,” says Robbo.

  Lawfer feels the way she did the night she arrived to find Glenda was not home. Lawfer threw down her jacket, put her head, then her hands, on a pillow. And flash—she saw: Glenda straining in a beard’s arms. The ginger had fingers like feathers, trailing along Glenda’s inner thigh. Glenda’s breasts coned with need, her nipples swollen raisins eager for butter. The unseen fist that punched Lawfer’s belly took her breath away, such was her shock. First there was empty, and then a swarm of angry bees in her thoughts: How? Why? Where else?

  Lawfer cursed her gift that day, the knowing she would have given her life to erase.

  But she has long unsheathed Glenda from the pouch in her heart where she resided too long. The kind of pouch you put someone you flew 12,425 kilometers for an Elvis look-alike to wed you in a Las Vegas chapel, whose floors are splattered with freshly picked hybrid tea roses, whose walls are columned with drag queens in sumptuous costume, whose ceilings are splashed with graffiti of baby angels, Indira Gandhi and an opal-eyed basilisk. Took Lawfer eons to whisk back to solid the scatter Glenda’s betrayal put inside. And tonight . . . The allure of the moon, its beauty and myth, shifts something inside. Take a leap, she thinks. Damn you, Glenda. Tonight Lawfer sees different. Glenda’s shine in her head has waned.

  One with Zea, what’s wrong with that, yeah? They’d drink Durham dry.

  As the car reverses, Lawfer spots it. Opposite East Wing, above the library, a little blinker on a camera angled toward the crime scene.

  “Well, well . . .”

  Robbo sees it too, the CCTV. “Reckon I’m topping your odds, boss.”

  “Shit yeah.”

  ***

  Lawfer touches the tape, sees it all, way before CCTV footage.

  Banjo, glum in his office. The ajar door opens. A petite Asian woman in khaki uniform—an apron sprigged with a pattern of scarlet petals wrapped around her waist—enters with a vacuum cleaner.

  “That’s—” begins Robbo.

  “The deaf cleaner,” says Lawfer.

  “But how—you didn’t interview . . .”

  “An unfortunate oversight.”

  “Yes. Explains the dust, the black hair.”

  Just then, snow lines. The tape goes blank.

  “Holy sh—” Robbo holds back the swear.

  But Lawfer’s touch has seen. She knows what happens next.

  “What do you reckon?” asks Robbo.

  “I reckon the cleaner whacks Banjo with the vacuum handle, breaks glass with a chair, pushes the concussed Banjo out the window.”

  Robbo whistles. “Some reckon. That kind of strength, be a psycho or a woman just sick of rinsing glasses?”

  “Mother of a student Banjo was banging.”

  “That kind of motive gives you strength.” Robbo looks at Lawfer. “You’re just guessing, right?”

  “Guessing, yeah. Or a case of seeing.” Lawfer smiles. “We got a cleaner to interrogate. Not much English you said?”

  THE ENDURING

  She remembers landscapes, the history of silence loud in horses wearing blankets in a lush green farm near the Yarra Valley rodeo no longer in use. Vision remembers scent, the car’s “sweet lily of the valley” in a fragrance leisurely releasing from a hung freshener on the indicator stalk of a custom-made dash.

  K steered with one hand and fiddled with the radio, his eyes off the road.

  “What’s in your head?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  The color of words was gray in the stereo on full blast as the car whipped into Wandin and its white and yellow flowers near a graffiti-walled toilet named Lost Trains.

  Nothing in the mood was changed inside a community park where the car pulled up, or near the parking machine labeled FRAGILE. NOT IN USE and goons had wrapped it in cling wrap so it couldn’t swallow coins.

  The camphor-scented bar that was also a restaurant across the road hosted a waiter with the body of Apollo and a face both devils and angels would love.

  Vision avoided both, the body and the face, knowing K’s caliber of jealousy. She focused instead on the waiter’s voice when he took their order of a flat white.

  “Murderers have killed for less.”

  She looked up startled to have spoken her thoughts out loud on the waiter’s constricted vocals, but K refused to notice.

  “Are we fighting?”

  He still didn’t answer but his silence never left the table or the saucer or her heart—it lurked everywhere it could hurt.

  Vision dipped her thoughts in K’s coffee and sought for answers buried in dates and resentments in the muddied froth.

  As the waiter busied himself shining glasses, a ruby-haired mermaid winked inside a framed photo of an island and a coal-dusted tower reaching for an otherworld along the wall.

  ***

  She remembers the locating.

  One way is a bell miner’s tink, sweet and musical, just before sunrise and finishing on a hiccupping note just after sunset. One way is the poet’s limerence, verse upon verse in gravity and circles, black-billed gulls in smoking puddles on the burned sand waiting for the whitewash in rhyme. One way is wintering in the northern hemisphere while the patios in the south grow hot and hotter, the flies zang as opposed to zing, beating at heat until they collapse, and Vision, sunstruck in Sailor Falls, said, “I do,” to an excerpt.

  One way is albums and camping and everything in between that sirens warn against in songs full of rain. One way is the rumble of wind from his bum in the dead of the night, half a gallon of air condensed into fair dinkum toots. As he turns in his sleep she wonders about forever.

  One way is the road to Lost Trains and locating that you’re dead.

  ***

  She remembers the enduring.

  His was the kind of jealousy that vomited a sizzle of green, silent as an ogre but just as mighty. It was no surprise when just days ago he reminded her: “Twenty-five ye
ars.”

  “What?” She lifted her eyes from the manuscript and its proofreading mark-ups, but his face was a wall.

  “All gains make for nothing.”

  She raised her palm in exasperation, presenting him with the animation of an oak that wore the portrait of an old woman with cross tattoos on her face, each line of ink shaping a history of stumbles.

  If K saw it, the portrait etched in air, he said nothing. Or perhaps he was immune to her gift of the preternatural, or was it simply to the characters in her manuscript?

  In the worlds of her stories there were systems and plots to deal with green-eyed monsters, but in the world of K . . . She wondered what he saw as gains in their shared years and why they would make for nothing.

  His suspiciousness of her beauty or her literary triumphs or both had the eye of an osprey spotting fish in a lake, the giant bird swooping with talons stretched, shaking water off its wings in slow motion and soaring skyward with the fish secure in its grasp, all the way to a feeding perch where a hungry beak tore into pink flesh.

  Only in hindsight did she understand that twenty-five years was a milestone, the landmark of a dying, a dawning of the day he would shape out her beating heart with a kitchen knife to quell his need to possess.

  ***

  She feels the writing.

  She wrote herself into the story and transported her spirit into a quokka. She did consider a selkie but rather liked the furry macropod and its ebony button nose and jolly temperament, despite the selkie’s shiny seal coat and superior gentleness, let alone the advanced swimming. The quokka doggy paddled out of the manuscript, just as K finished the carving.

  The critical incident response team, all sirens, arrived in a panel van blinking orange and blue. As K cradled Vision’s disconnected heart somewhere on a blood-bathed floor, the quokka opened the door, shook its head at the bewildered response team and said, “He was not a mouth.”

  Men who rage out loud, the talkers, they are harmless. It is the silent ones . . .

  But Vision was not a mouth either.

  ***

  She relives the dying.

  She allowed herself to feel each slice of the blade, and was still thinking long after the response team arrived. She wondered what the team might do next, if they understood the precipitous nature of unwisdom that had already sprayed Sailor Falls in the lead-up to the new year. What with gangs raping shops and residents, lotto megadraws going unclaimed and sexual abuse scandals hitting yet more politicians, would one more slaughter make a difference? Such was the world of detachment, the response team arrived and saw and departed, without doing a thing.

  She determined that, unable to keep what the team had witnessed—not the blood-soaked floor or a husband holding his wife’s beating heart, but the sight in Sailor Falls of a quokka that spoke human—one siren in the incident response team might write an anonymous op-ed without getting a stint in the psych ward.

  ***

  The history of silence was loud in horses wearing blankets in the lush green farm near the Yarra Valley rodeo out in the warm rain.

  Unpunished and uncuffed, K had wrapped her in a shower curtain, hauled her out the door and lowered her and a spade into the boot of his car where her blood crystallized into gemstones.

  Her quokka sat next to him, riding shotgun into a wail of cicadas soaring in circles etched in daylight, bothering the landscape now quiet after the response team chased down a different emergency. Vision was not surprised when the cicadas fell aground as dogs, and they ran away barking at K’s approach to the boot. She considered that they, too, were her animal spirit.

  He buried her right there in Wandin and its white and yellow flowers near a graffiti-walled toilet named Lost Trains.

  The end?

  Not quite.

  Turns out one siren in a whole team did write an op-ed.

  ***

  The quokka watches K’s life in monochrome inside a prison that is an eternity, the husk of him shriveled to a gnome trapped in ancient skin.

  If you listen closely, you will hear a faint scratching of nails long as a Komodo dragon’s on somber walls licked by a wash of tide, whispers from ashore in time after time inside a fossil tower on an island so unexpected, you’d be astonished anyone goes there.

  And if you work more characters into the story, you’ll find an important writ both fascinating and disturbing in the profundity of prison house faces never too disarming to distract the photographer. The shutter clicks, clicks to stir the silence unwashed in coal dust scattered over a short story with an old woman full of cross tattoos on her face, where a ruby-haired mermaid winks in the shores of what bodes inside a frame.

  FIVE-SECOND BUTTON

  “A what?!”

  “A five-second button,” said my mother.

  She pressed a pale blue object into my palm. “Your father gave you a dream. Here I go, it’s a button, my gift to you. Call up favors, use them wisely.”

  “But—”

  “The button is special. When my mother gave me mine on my nineteenth birthday, I thought I owned the world. Then I learned to be careful. The goodness it brought . . . your father . . . at a time when—” Her eyes clouded for a moment.

  “I don’t know, Mamma . . .”

  “Flow with what happens, when it happens.”

  “Oh, Mamma.”

  “Abella, dear child. You will gain wisdom.” She pressed the button with her thumb, dug it into my skin, and it vanished.

  I stared, astonished. “There is no blood—”

  “Questions, my child. Just your palm there now, harmless as a button. Press it and your future, whole or in part, slows down to five seconds.”

  “But . . .”

  “Once you push the button, there’s no unpushing. Remember that.”

  Three feet away, the rest of the family waltzed, drank fizz and ate shanks of roasted calf.

  ***

  My younger sister Amy, newly a teenager, always a tease. “Why so glum on your birthday?” she said. “It’s a rave, not a funeral.”

  “I am thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Boys, boys, boys!” Jeanie, her twin, piped in.

  “Keep that up and see what happens,” I said.

  “Must be true, so true. Abella likes boys! boys! boys!”

  “Oh, shut it.”

  The twins dodged my reach as they laughed.

  “Stop that racket, Jeanie, Amy!” boomed Mamma. “Whatever is happening, forget it.”

  “Dr. Phil here,” said my brother Micky, pointing at Jeanie, “knows all about boys.”

  “Lennie!” Mamma, distracted already.

  “Boys! Boys! Boys!” sang Amy and Jeanie.

  And the hullabaloo went on. A food court in the living room. Music like a rock band come to visit. Our family, big enough for a football team in staggered age groups . . . yet I felt alone.

  I thought of my button. Your future, whole or in part, slows down to five seconds. The future seemed a whole lot brighter than loneliness at your own party. I touched my palm and pressed.

  My head swirled. Time rolled as I lifted across seas and lands.

  One second.

  ***

  Summer was here. La Bonne Nourriture, an eatery sign said. Another road sign indicated I was in a town in the South of France.

  My gaze beheld a gentleman’s weather-beaten face. A thousand creases danced on it, and his smile went on forever, warming those wrinkles. The object of his smile caught my eye. A dainty woman in her early fifties. A silvery carpet of short hair framed her head with as much intimacy as her fingers clasped his.

  Two seconds.

  ***

  She led him up steps to a raised floor of the outdoor restaurant toward a vacant table. As they passed, I caught the question in her soft, dimp
led voice: “Where’s Beau, darling?”

  What he said didn’t matter, just his voice: husky, reassuring.

  Three seconds.

  ***

  I sat by myself at a table for two, drinking a glass of house red on promotion. Peals of laughter rang out somewhere in the distance. Wine flowed like a sea, ruby, gold, and white. It twinkled in polished goblets, sizzled and spat in champagne flutes. Tables away, servers ferried platters of culinary art. Food like wild rice, consommé, duck liver pate, camembert . . . in intricate flower arrangements. Chef’s chop, slice, whisk and mix transformed into bouillabaisse, fresh onion soup, Marseilles sabayon, raspberry fool . . . garnished to perfection.

  Four seconds.

  ***

  Laughter . . . it seemed a million years from my world within the boundaries of one small table. I yearned for a soul mate, someone who got me.

  Rustle, a jacket whipping past, then a clatter of cutlery. I wrenched my thoughts to the present, and a face came into focus. The gentleman with the weather-beaten face had now emerged with the flawlessness of youth, with river eyes that ran deep.

  “Pardon,” he said. “It was my fault completely, Madame.”

  He retrieved the fork from my feet where the edge of his coat had brushed it from my plate. He beckoned for new cutlery.

  A tinge crept to the corner of my eye. I bit my lip.

  “Ou la la,” the young man said. “It was not my intention, Madame. I did not mean to upset you.”

  His commotion was clumsy. He started for the tablecloth, then a napkin from my lap, abandoned the idea and drew a crumpled handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

  “Ce n’est rien,” I said, a tremor in my words. “Nothing at all. Rien à voir avec vous.” How vague it sounded. “Choses sur mon esprit,” I continued in poor French, and figured I’d better translate: “Things on my mind.”

  “Not nothing. It make you cry, Madame.”

  “Je ne ai pas l’intention pour cela.” From his baffled look, I decided to repeat: “It was not my wish to cry.”

  Our gazes held. His eyes softened. For a moment, I thought he would say something.

  Tell, my heart begged.