73.
Wearing a floppy pink hat and shiny gold knickers, Manfred walked crisply down the river suburb street overhung with jacaranda blossom. He did not swan and he tried to ignore the shouts of derision from ladies in BMWs. One ute with a cement mixer in the back slowed down, and someone wolf-whistled, but he didn’t look. He stopped on a street corner, and recited from memory, with the comedy of death resonating below the surface, Théophile Gautier’s ‘A une robe rose’:
Que tu me plais dans cette robe
Qui te déshabille si bien,
Faisant jaillir ta gorge en globe,
Montrant tout nu ton bras païen!
Frêle comme une aile d’abeille,
Frais comme un coeur de rose-thé,
Son tissu, caresse vermeille,
Voltige autour de ta beauté.
De l’épiderme sur la soie
Glissent des frissons argentés,
Et l’étoffe à la chair renvoie
Ses éclairs roses reflétés.
D’où te vient cette robe étrange
Qui semble faite de ta chair,
Trame vivante qui mélange
Avec ta peau son rose clair?
Est-ce à la rougeur de l’aurore,
A la coquille de Vénus,
Au bouton de sein près d’éclore,
Que sont pris ces tons inconnus?
Ou bien l’étoffe est-elle teinte
Dans les roses de ta pudeur?
Non; vingt fois modelée et peinte,
Ta forme connaît sa splendeur.
Jetant le voile qui te pèse,
Réalité que l’art rêva,
Comme la princesse Borghèse
Tu poserais pour Canova.
Et ces plis roses sont les lèvres
De mes désirs inapaisés,
Mettant au corps dont tu les sèvres
Une tunique de baisers.
He was twenty, in manifest pain, which was detected in his voice by the girl watching through the window as she studied for her TEE, her mother making her a hot chocolate and calling from the kitchen, It’s a warm day but this will give you a boost. The girl wrestled her jeans into comfort, pushed a strand of errant hair back off her face and thought, I’ve had enough of physics, I will focus on my French exam.
74.
Ari and Zest had arrived in Australia on EU passports with Irish heritage. The passports were excellent forgeries. As intimated, they had been bought in Cork City, using up most of Manfred’s remaining savings. The rest of the money bought tickets to Western Australia for the three of them. Flying changed Ari’s and Zest’s skin colour from a lime-green tinge to a hazy emerald. They looked off-colour but not alien. They were quizzed passing through Customs, though, as they possessed very little baggage – only what they’d scaped in second-hand shops over their time in West Cork, plus their original clothing, which looked remarkably like early Swinging Sixties London get-up. They attracted attention, but not too much. They were asked if they spoke English, and Zest replied, Almost all Irish people speak English, though we prefer Irish. Speaking all surface languages inherently and a priori with the exception of Irish, they both broke into Irish with the pride of having ‘picked it up quickly’, and did a little stepdance. We are of the Celtic twilight, they said. Have you been among farm animals? the Customs officer asked.
75.
Racial profiling.
76.
Though there were no religions in Hollow Earth per se, all living things were seen as gods and respected as such. As noted, plants were eaten, but not animals. On the surface, Ari and Zest constantly recoiled in horror. Manfred protected them from the brutality as much as he could, but they smelt a slaughter house when passing one day and went to investigate, never having truly made the connection between butcher’s shop windows, people’s plates, and the creatures they saw contained behind fences. I have been trying to tell you about the cows, said Manfred.
77.
The threat of nuclear conflagration obsessed them and they couldn’t understand how people went about their daily business, the actuality reduced to a few flashes on mobile phone screens. Communications in Hollow Earth were quite sophisticated – all done via a crystallography that inflected off the sky’s roof – so the rapid dispersal of news wasn’t news to them. But the bullying, cajoling and ultimate ineffectuality of social media were bemusing. They became news junkies, but only because they couldn’t assimilate their fate and the fate of Hollow Earth with the cascading stupidities of the surface. So all events in their own journeys were consciously broadcast into the events of the surface world. They had a revelation of horror building like an accumulation of lead or mercury in body tissue, and no doubt in them, too.
78.
‘Bomb’. Onomatopoeia. Imitative origins. Really, how hard is horror to translate?
79.
A bomb falls on the forest and kills animals and people and trees. Houses and machinery are destroyed. Everything is destroyed and in the destruction are many noises. Aftertaste of emptiness but death. Paradox. And a rendering of a state of unbeing into language. How, they wonder. Ari says: Gitaigo. And Zest says, as a consequence: Giseigo and giongo. Is that a question? asks Manfred, who, as always, tries to follow.
80.
People are not interested if the event doesn’t involve some human agency, which, being presented as event must at least involve observation, mediation and presentation. Therefore, all events contain or reflect human agency? Even one of your so-called shooting stars or the moon having a face? Yes, even those. So Boog said in one of his rare cogent moments, calling on his university years and showing his ‘double major’ knowledge catchment. He added, smirking, I am a biological determinist, especially when I’m tripping. Manfred laughed. What a load of bullshit, Boog. You’re better when you’re yelling at the footy on the telly! Boog stared and seemed to grind a few cogs. What do you mean, your so-called shooting stars? Nothing, said Zest, nothing – I just meant yours specifically because you’re the centre of the Freo drug universe. I am, aren’t I? said Boog, I’m cock of the walk! Boog was happy, even if his body was almost giving up the ghost.
81.
It’s humorous watching someone being confronted with something they’ve never seen or experienced before, when all around them are over-familiar with that experience. That was Boog’s level of humour. It’s normal for them, strange and alienating for the stranger. But you, Zest and Ari, both seem to adapt almost immediately and don’t show much wonder. It’s disheartening, said Manfred in a bleak and selfish moment. He had many such moments, even if he couldn’t recognise them for what they were. Sorry, I accept that ‘humorous’ is a red rag to a bull, which is a bullfighting metaphor, and I am sorry for that too. I’m too stoned, said Manfred, who was rapidly losing his way and his self-imposed code of conduct, and in doing so complying more and more with the code of conduct of the society around him. He didn’t even recognise the ‘him’, and never really had, so he could see he was going to the dogs. Boog was in stitches – a far more compliant citizen than the police and the courts might like to think.
82.
Zest went off on her own, a rare thing, after she discovered Ari was keeping a secret diary. This wasn’t as shocking as being confronted with the industrial-military complexes of the surface, but shocking nonetheless. No showing their shock: Hollow Earthers tended to vacate their social circle and go off alone to build the spirits. Zest’s way was to study a small patch of ground intensely for a lengthy stretch without eating, drinking, sleeping or abluting. Her-his-their body would be contained, and would experience the shifts of the earth. But even this was never seen as a private act in Hollow Earth. She-he-they was deeply disturbed. It flashed across her mind – the liberation of the language of cliché – she knew what it meant, flashed across the mind, really knew, down deep: maybe Ari was having sex with others without her. She found this terrifying, even horrific. Ari could betray, could sell her out. Zest had always known it
was possible.
83.
There was no concept of Hell in Hollow Earth, though there was a plant whose name equated with Hell – a hallucinogen whose leaves produced intensely confronting and sensory disruptive effects. It was consumed only a few times in a lifetime, but by most people: as a coming-of-age experience, as a change-of-life stimulant to altering paths, and, for those who were aware, as a prelude to impending death.
84.
It was the clouds. That’s why they were in Tübingen. Flying made Ari and Zest vomit. They couldn’t eat or sleep, and watching movies made them agitated. Movies. Television. Concepts and materialisms they’d never adjust to. And the entry through Walwalinj had denied them – closed over so long ago, the volcano would not yield. They had gone there and been swarmed by paragliders and hang-gliders. These intrepids had so damaged the rare flora that the codes of entry had been obscured and lost. My mother could read the alpine wheatbelt orchids, said Manfred, and only up here do they grow, and the leisurists have killed them off. The people’s whose land this is would know how to translate the rocks, the country, but landowners of impeccable whiteness have prevented their return. One day the way will open, but not now, and not in time for us. The destruction around them made them weep. Manfred, operating by torchlight: All can see us, we are a beacon, he said. This would configure their days to come and will feature large in the narrative. We will be back. But for now, Tübingen and the clouds. The horrific history of Germany and the ability of the state to facilitate expressions of the evil in the human soul, and the fact that so many who were not Nazis went along silently, letting it happen, including visitors to the country in the late 1930s, and Australian writers who were affiliated with the Hitler Youth with it all forgotten in their new Australian quirkiness, so celebrated by critics, compelled them to seek out openings to truth, to the integrity of Hollow Earth.
85.
Fasnet was a Hell Zest and Ari could recognise. We verge on it sometimes in Hollow Earth ... Zest knew something indissoluble and irreconcilable was taking place within. We come close to this, she said, but it is not systemised. But it’s those in positions of power – not that surface dwellers would even be able to detect differences in power, as all seemed treated the same and treating each other the same; not even Manfred after a year could sense who was and wasn’t ‘in power’ in any particular capacity. But there were nuances, even if they were in constant flux so power couldn’t consolidate, but people did anticipate elevation and loss and there were adrenaline and endorphin rushes associated with such movements. So when the Dreege came upon them, they knew it was because the power was gaining momentum and many of them acted the fool and did what they would never do, treating others as inferiors and gloating over their own personal accomplishments. It was a hideous time that many thought necessary, though Zest never did. Manfred experienced one such ‘celebration’ and was urinated and defecated on by both Ari and Zest (who only urinated, in truth – defecation was where she pulled up short), and it couldn’t be said he enjoyed it. He told them of a scene in Portnoy’s Complaint and why it undid the author. Both had read the book at Boog’s place. Boog had a good book collection. He liked literature.
86.
The clouds were grammar and a hook and a mirror. They stayed constant while the rest of the sky changed. They hovered around the Swabian Jura and over deep fields of wheat moving towards harvest — the beheading. Over the town square the clouds attracted the cameras of tourists and locals alike. A rain shower passed and blotted the Schloss out a little, but the clouds – those clouds – stayed the same. It’s a different world up there, said Zest. It’s just a phenomenon, said Manfred. Like Hollow Earth? said Ari.
87.
The Old Professors gathered outside the Hölderlinturm, pressed against the wall looking over the river, as the student galleys battered the river gods into submission. On the Neckar’s island families strolled under the plane trees and thought of peace. It happens, even in places of such violent history and thinking. The Old Professors weren’t going to let Manfred and his hangers-on into the sacred tower to speak their foolery. Manfred had volunteered to talk about Hölderlin’s influence on his life as an ‘adventurer’. I carried his works to the top of K2, he told them. He had never climbed K2, though he had been close-ish in a plane that flew out of Kathmandu on one of those final journeys with his mother. Maybe he was sixteen at the time – it was during a Christmas school holiday. But he carried those Hölderlin texts in translation! screamed the professors, worried about their standing among the Klansmen of the frat houses and their little wreaths of Nazism, lingering lingering. ‘Concordia firmat fortes!’ they shrieked into the lantern-lit night, and stood as one against the oncoming tide.
88.
About now – diagetically and in our own relative times – the trio became aware they were being stalked. Whatever they did echoed and came back as slightly rewritten. It was uncanny and unnerving. Ari had been reading Freud – and enjoying him. Ari desperately wanted to understand, to comprehend ‘the phallus’, finding the concept and it humorous, sad, infuriating, threatening, ridiculous and fascinating. It was around then she felt something forcing her to identify as ‘she’ – beyond the passport tricks and the need to choose a public toilet. Manfred had felt such relief when he was absorbed into the community of Ari and Zest, where gender was an alien concept. So Ari became she when she wasn’t, and Zest was forced to follow suit. They were no more she than he, and both had T-shirts made up (which caught on quick): DENY PERSONAL PRONOUNS. But this was by the by, as they were all being stalked, and though they never saw more than shadows, shadows so exemplified and personified and were driven by the solar enslavement of the surface, they felt they knew their persecutor-worshippers by name: Django and Jezebel and Lucida. But they never mentioned this to each other, and were not sure how they came across those names for their doppelgangers.
89.
–But courage! gentle reader!–I scorn it–’tis enough to have thee in my power–but to make use of the advantage which the fortune of the pen has now gained over thee, would be too much–No–! by that all-powerful fire which warms the visionary brain, and lights the spirits through unworldly tracts! ere I would force a helpless creature upon this hard service, and make thee pay, poor soul! for fifty pages, which I have no right to sell thee,–naked as I am, I would browse upon the mountains, and smile that the north wind brought me neither my tent nor my supper.
–So put on, my brave boy! and make the best of thy way to Boulogne.5
90.
Boulogne appeals, but there’s no hint in anything I can find of there being an entry point through to Hollow Earth, said Manfred, as ‘the girls’ (they are not girls) browsed travel brochures. Pity, they said as one, given every entry point we’ve pursued so far has been a dead end. And as for that caving adventure holiday, it was a mockery of home. All of them were feeling narky with each other and with the surface world. Places were becoming names and GPS coordinates, which repulsed Ari and Zest, whose objection to satellites was fundamental – a haunting that empowered their doppelgangers, becoming a fate far worse than gravity. They took their readings off the core – unpredictable as they might be. Place was emptied of its contents and culture became a costume incandescent on screens they more and more defiantly refused to embrace. It’s sad, said Manfred, that things are reduced to what we do and don’t like.
91.
I want to go where snow is, said Zest. I want to be free of the hate and the pain, I want to be a snowflake. But if we don’t do something about the horror on the surface it’s just a matter of time before it impinges on Hollow Earth, Ari. We are part of the trigger warnings. A premonition of Underworlders breaking into Hollow Earth. Of Vermin – the bullied becoming the bully, the Chief Bully. Of the intrusions. Of the Compliance – the flow of materials and culture out of Hollow Earth and up to the surface in the name of the sun and its righteousness. Of no safe space anywhere. That was to come, though it was be
coming now.
92.
The destruction of species is the destruction of the individual creature, said Ari. Why do you let it happen?
93.
Vermin loved the irony of his name as he exterminated the ‘vermin’ of Hollow Earth. The rules imposed by the oligarchy of Underworlders were and are or will be:
1. Material profit flows to the surface.
2. Colonisers can move freely between worlds, but Hollow Earthers can never visit the surface.
3. Hollow Earth is a resource.
4. Hollow Earth is a repository for the wastes of the surface.
5. Hollow Earthers are to be kept in reserves. On these reserves they may practise their beliefs where this is not to the detriment of the company, colonists, or the wellbeing of the surface. To prevent perversion of those from the surface, contact with those in the reserves can only be made with a permit.
6. Interbreeding is not encouraged, but the company recognises the sexual needs of employees and colonisers. Where there are offspring, they will be separated and kept in special compounds. Each offspring’s fate will be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.
7. Proper documentation of habitat is to be made by company scientists, with a Museum of Hollow Earth to be established in the capital city of every country on the surface (in perpetuity). We are a caring company that believes in the preservation of knowledge.
94.
An old flame. Really, said Manfred, there weren’t many – I guess I wasn’t very appealing, and I guess I didn’t know how to convey my feelings. I never wanted to seem intrusive. But this woman was, I guess, or is, an old flame. We only last three months and I lived with her in her nest by the river, from which she administered her cleaning business empire. She exploited her workers, and she kept me in drugs. It watered down the effectiveness of my criticisms.
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