Hollow Earth

by John Kinsella

  49.

  There were no brochures showing the beauty of Hollow Earth.

  50.

  Every atomic weapon detonation was felt in Hollow Earth, and if a chronology existed in any real form it was the marking of these in a new temporality. The first explosions were marked as the beginning of what transposes as ‘time’.

  51.

  Film festival time – they watch a long film along with selections of shorts. François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim – Ari taps her own head and says, too loud, Is this supposed to be hollow? And Zest says, too loud, Ari, there is always something in a sphere.

  52.

  We don’t expect our excess labour given for the wellbeing of the community to mean excess leisure or material gain for ourselves, Ari told the dealer, who snarled and said, Well, darl, a packet will still cost you thirty euro.

  53.

  We need more money, Manfred. This drug makes us receptive. Not for long, said Manfred – soon it will make you chaotic and slow. Your connection with nature will short-circuit. We don’t know how to connect with nature up here, Manfred. None of the creatures or the earth or the water speak to us, and the sky yells at us, especially at night. It is hard to cope with. Zest suggests that we use the computer and show ourselves naked and making love – with you too, if you like – and charge for it. Zest has picked up computers and the web really fast, in case you haven’t noticed. She feels sad for those forced into pornography, but what else can we do? You’re biologically a little different, Ari, and that will draw attention to you … to us. Only different if you want to think like that, Manfred. We are learning that to be human is to be many biologies. That’s the only positive we’re discovering in the ‘human condition’ – the surface world so shaped and abused by you. In the end, all fair notions will subside under the weight of the drug, Ari. But it’s so light, Manfred, and its crystals catch the light like the sky of Hollow Earth. We yearn for the return you promise, but we fear it will never come.

  54.

  Manfred was shaking. His heart felt arrhythmic. He was fast, very fast, and he wasn’t using the drug. Something is wrong with my thyroid, he said. It happened years ago but it was pulled back into line – I know it’s coming back. I am entering thyrotoxicosis! he said, none too calmly. Ari and Zest were angry and excited and feeling on top of the situation. Ari said: Fuck, Manfred, we’re on top of the world! You’re just out of kilter because you have no understanding of the shifts, the magnetic weather of the outer core. You’re racing against direction and, ‘time’, as you call it.

  55.

  They were – it seemed too sudden but it wasn’t, not really – in a house in Fremantle, Western Australia, pooling their money to head out to South Lake to score. There are flights via Dubai from Dublin now. They were at the house of an Irish guy who had been in Western Australia for a decade. He was a smalltime dealer but was out of gear and was going in on a packet, but was ensuring he’d get the better of it – being the only one allowed to go into the house of the next up the ladder to pick it up. He would, of course, cut it again before coming back. But what else could they do? They were all hanging out. Zest, Ari, Boog and his wife, Nina, had decided Manfred would go with Boog to keep an eye out, because Manfred was sober but hyperactive with thyrotoxicosis. We’ll cook up a feed for youse, said Nina, who was excited and aggressive and love-saturated all at once. She hugged and kissed and stroked Ari and Zest, and then sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, sighing and saying, I’ve gotta get out of this, gotta get away, gotta get clean. Then she leapt up and said, Come on, everyone, let’s get peeling and washing and dicing and cookin’! And picking out a few spuds from a cupboard, she said, Boog won’t let me go to the pick-ups because the big dealers are a racist couple with white supremacy shit all round the house and the one time I went there they kept asking me where I was from. I’m from here, I said, and they said, Nah, Boog is from here. No, I said, he’s from Ireland. And you’re from Ooga Booga Land, they laughed. Seriously, they were the exact words. I mean, they got a racist insult, a pun on Boog’s name, and a salacious suggestion in there re us as a couple, all at once. I mean, man, thinkers! He’s got tatts that went septic and she’s picked the pimples on her face so bad she has holes. They donate money to the Australian Patriots and One Nation. So we’re aiding and abetting by scoring. Manfred said to me once ... when was that? anyways, he said, Your addiction is everyone’s suffering. That guy! Anyway, Manfred has always been weird and antisocial, continued Nina, adding, randomly, and almost sadly,Well, Boog is hung like a horse, and Manfred’s, well, different. As if that has anything to do with anything, really. It’s a complex pathology. I’m a mass of contradictions, said Nina, crying onto the potatoes which were naked and uncomfortable and blueish in the late afternoon light streaming in over the South Beach dunes, the sun a school of hardy heads erupting in the half-depths, and a set of ship mast pines worrying the foreshore.

  56.

  The dinner was growing cold and the mood was desolate and agitated as Boog and Manfred were taking forever and Boog was not calling or answering his phone. Chess. No concentration. Let’s try. And then Boog was there, powderless, crystal-less … But I have a sheet of trips – Green Dragons! Manfred was everywhere at once.

  57.

  Hallucination in Hollow Earth was as close to religion as it got. You treat us as one, Manfred, which is reductive – we are two, at least, often many more. You and your personal subjectivity and your orgasm-driven spirituality.

  58.

  I suppose we’d say Hesk was similar to Basho, really, said Manfred to Ari who was Zest and maybe even Nina. Boog was painting the wall with fingers of colour.

  59.

  Why do they always send the Tactical Response Group? yelled Boog.

  60.

  Over the back fence, the trio vaulted into a world of cacti. And the apple tree from the Newton Institute hovered over the heated swimming pool where Mrs Dressel swam naked. Manfred went to the edge and called her a mermaid, and looked past her down into the reef world of St Georges Beach, Geraldton. My mum used to swim there too, lamented Manfred. And here am I, at the altar of authority, so full of doubt! He saw a sea snake swimming close to the shore – it looked like a tilde. He thought of the Batavia wrecked on the Abrolhos, and the killing spree that ensued. That was my mother’s name, he said to himself. Lucretia. She resisted them all.

  61.

  The hole – as wide a piece of poly pipe – he discovered in his grandparents’ garden was the first sign that access to an interior world might be literally possible. He was deep in the corner block’s back garden, and had been watching other children playing games on the Quiet Road from his hiding place in the mulberry tree, when he climbed down and thought, I will ask if I can play with them, but his shyness got the better of him, and he retreated across Gravel World, past the vegetable garden and behind the Big Shadehouse. It was among ferns dappled with shadows but wilting where the sun made contact that he saw the opening. A hole that went down down into an old bomb shelter from the war. He went inside to his bedroom and got a pencil torch and went out and shone it down. It went down beyond the reach of the beam. Then he got a roll of fishing line from his grandfather’s tackle box in the garden shed, attached a sinker, and went back to the hole, lowered it down down and it went and went and used metres and metres of line. He was excited! Who needed other kids – here was an entry to another world, here was something to get lost in. He feared getting lost, and desired it. A crow landed in the lemon tree – a massive crow that looked like it had come down from over the hills where his old home on the farm had been, his home burnt to the ground when lightning lit the paddocks and the fire rolled so fast at the height of summer in a roaring northerly and ate everything. He has been staying with his grandparents, who said, Your father will never return and your mother has lost her marbles. She has mentally perished. Perished. That’s the word the papers used. He went to school there, near his grandparents’ hou
se, the hole, the bomb shelter, as well. His grandparents owned the farm where his uncle lived, and Manfred knew the crow came from there. He often talked with the crow. Crow, I have found a secret place and one day I will work out how to get down there. Down there is where the miners go to destroy the world. I will go there first and shut them out, block the way. There will be no life down there for them. It is nowlife, not afterlife. He recited to the crow in Latin that his mother had taught him, that he would remember on the edge of his life in a different way. His older self would translate:

  Through the tepid world of detachment

  we trudge towards a fork in the road;

  beneath those impressive walls of Dis runs

  the road to Elysium, but breaking left

  the road rushes down to the fortress

  of Tartarus, where Phlegethon boils lust

  against rock in a fury of fevered blood,

  its gates watched over by that grotesque

  insomniac, Tisiphone, internalising chain-

  gang supreme punishment beyond imagination –

  the sisterhood of the lash doesn’t play nice

  with rules in there and vengeance swings

  wicked gates agape so the Hydra’s sixty

  throats can suck you down. And within,

  O how the mighty have fallen: magnates

  of iron and uranium, lead and gold, polluted

  rivers and armament factories: all their owners,

  even those who paid their workers well, repeat

  names of weapons they’ve helped manufacture:

  Thunderbolt, Exocet, Patriot are just a few

  you recognise. Complexes spread far further

  than nine acres. Measure up from the low point

  of manufacture, streamlined with pain.

  62.

  A year after he discovered that too-narrow entry to Hollow Earth in his grandparents’ garden – his garden, too – his grandfather shared ‘details’ about the bomb shelter under the fern bed near the lemon tree. I dug it early in 1941, he said, and filled it in after the war. I filled it in with the sand I’d dug out of it, and we buried all sorts of rubbish in there as well – broken cupboards, a dressmaker’s dummy that had gone too long in the tooth, broken clay garden pots … that kind of thing. Oh, and maybe a few gasmasks still in their boxes. Manfred grew obsessed and wanted to dig it up. It’s like an ancient Egyptian tomb, he said. Grandpa joked, If you dug down there you’d just about come out in Egypt, maybe at the Great Pyramid. But you’d hit the Bunker World first, said Manfred. No, no … no digging around, Manfred, leave your nanna’s ferns where they are. Manfred knew he could never get away with digging it out yet; Grandpa said he’d inherit the place one day and then he could dig to his heart’s content. Manfred didn’t want his grandparents to die so he discovered the glories of delayed gratification, but this didn’t stop him going through potential future scenarios with Crow or drawing maps and cross-sections and profiles which grew more and more sophisticated as the years went by. It was his narrative. The gasmasks haunted him as much as the filled-in hollow space enticed him.

  63.

  Both Ari and Zest had suffered colds and now they were lingering. Bacterial infections set in readily – even a minor cut became infected and would take weeks to heal. They were frequently unwell, though persisted as if they weren’t, caught up in a swirl of polydrug use, self-medicating. Ari pushed Manfred about family, and about his family in particular. They seem to all be dead and yet alive, she said. And alive and dead at the same time. That’s true, said Manfred. In the northern hemisphere, there are nettles around the tombs, but here there are everlastings.

  64.

  Zest focused on climate change. She was astonished that surface people destroyed their world and by extension the world of Hollow Earth. She had to get back to warn her world. It would listen – it always listened. That was the difference. That and militarism and industrial capitalism and fascism and environmental destruction. They invent notions of utopias up here, she said, to ward off facing responsibilities. Ours is no utopia – it just is. The surface world is a psychosis.

  65.

  At one of his many and various schools, he had two half-friends who were male and two half-friends who were called female and were made to play sports with the girls and had to use the girls’ toilets, but dressed like boys and were given shit for it. They didn’t really like Manfred but appreciated that he didn’t verbally or physically abuse them. Actually, he fantasised over them, and masturbated to their pictures in the yearbook from the preceding year, though he wasn’t in any of their classes then. But they managed to work together, to sit together, to be together – teachers had tried separating them, but they had no good reason and eventually reason was seen and they were let be. Manfred was intrigued as to why reason had been seen, as he could discern no reason at all operating in any capacity at school among teachers, students or parents. So May and Nina (a different Nina, he insisted, not the Nina married to Boog) were half-friends who acknowledged his existence but found him uninteresting. Darryl and Brett were half-friends who had invited him to their houses on one occasion each, and had gone to his place on two occasions each. They swapped postage stamps, information on astronomy, and dirty jokes on an irregular basis. Darryl and Brett were full friends who suffered for having undescended testicles throughout lower high school.

  66.

  Nanna took him to church because his mother and father had. But she was doubtful, and Grandpa called it a ‘load of hogwash’. May and Nina had different surnames and no one knew they were legally sisters, because they told no one and their parents never showed themselves at the school, but they were. The teachers seemed to be unware as well.

  67.

  The truth be told, Hollow Earth could only be portrayed in isometric projection. Manfred’s attempts at creating a 3D model fell flat. It resisted holographic projections entirely.

  68.

  It’s a folie à trois, the mental health services people concluded, but legal, so what could they do? They’ve committed no crime outside drug usage, and they’ve never been caught in possession. And even the blood tests for the two non-binary subjects are inconclusive. Their white blood cell count is out of this world.

  69.

  When wallflower boys gather together and get drunk in a one-off show of solidarity, all hell will let loose, and no matter the catastrophe, in the light of day it will seem impossible that it ever happened – the evidence of their failed, recessive characters stands them in good stead in the court of blame. They are just too insignificant, too irrelevant to be held responsible. Though a guilty verdict would rid local society of them once and for all – the irritants – it would also bestow on them a rebelliousness that would exceed all the hard work of the cooler boys, all the adequate marks and star-status football playing while drinking and fucking, the insider-outsider status the acceptable rebels had worked so hard for through high school. And this is how, after such an extreme set of events, the wallflower boys got off scot-free. But Manfred – who had managed to convince May and Nina to go with him to the school dance, against all the odds and against his own strong desire not to attend – didn’t even rate as a wallflower and his mere presence meant utter condemnation from all sides, all parties. A boy with two females, as the ‘one night in a lifetime’ girls and the ‘we’re gonna get some tonight’ boys and the wallflower boys and the wallflower girls all said, was just weird! Even the goth kids looked on suspiciously, and they travelled in degendering packs.

  70.

  I would like to go back to the farm, he said, maybe even run it. His grandparents, so old now, looked askance and then walked off in different directions – Nanna to her small shadehouse and Grandpa to study the camellias. And Auntie said, Uncle doesn’t want you there, Manfred, sorry. He thinks you have ‘issues’ – that you take after his sister, your mum. Sorry. Manfred appreciated their frankness.

  71.

  Wells on the farm had l
argely been filled in, but one was still active if a little saline – just within potable limits. He sat on its unstable rim and stared down at his filmic reflection: an oily tinge formed from the needle-fall of she-oaks which spoke a language he couldn’t understand but felt deep inside was someone else’s and that he was intruding. But he felt this in the city as well, as if the ferns planted over the bomb shelter were telling him the land had been disturbed and compensation was needed. The well burnt his sight when the sun came high overhead, shining right through the back of his head, his long, matted hair forming a Medusa reply of snakes. Over the months of being back on the farm, living in his caravan, he’d seen a gwarder and two dugites, which he’d identified from the Reptiles of Western Australia book. Where the old house had burnt there stood a chimney and some asbestos sheeting and little else. It was grown over with dead creepers, as if the creepers had never been alive. They’d taken the remains of the body from in there, risking asbestosis. The whole houseyard area had then been left, though the many paddocks had been leased to a neighbouring family, who had cropped them to dust and ghosts.

  72.

  They watch Truffaut’s Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent – Ann Brown, Claud Roc, Muriel Brown. Ari asked, Are they breaking down the barriers and crossing the boundaries or reinforcing them from another set of angles? The pun on angles had Manfred in hysterics.