118.
Zest and Ari could see ultraviolet and hear frequencies well beyond the range of surface human ears.
119.
The forest was dying, smashed to smithereens by the ‘workers’ operating on behalf of the ‘bosses’. Zest said, It’s all bullshit – and as for those investigative journalists who shit in their sleeping bags and report both sides, being balanced, well, they’re at the core of the death. They feed the public the middle ground in order to maintain the status quo business as usual stuff. This is why they’ll soon break through to Hollow Earth and suck it dry and make excuses for it while being righteous, and as the few protest, those journos will feed it back to shift opinion just enough to preserve a few patches till those patches are ‘needed’ too and it serves the ‘common good’, and the universal translator into the primacy of English collapses and no one understands Russian or Chinese or Brazilian or Hindi and the actual languages of Hollow Earth sound like ‘flatulence’ [she said this with such irony!] to the refined artsconscious ear. At least the forest ferals defecate and piss in their trees, from their protest platforms! The wastes.
120.
Zest fell sick in London and they worried over how she could be treated without drawing attention. Zest left the hotel room late at night to try to find the moon through the London haze and light pollution, a moon she’d grown fond of, almost to rely on. It was the moon she’d miss most when they eventually found their way back down to Hollow Earth. Stumbling by the Occupy tents outside St Paul’s, she collapsed on the steps. Young people rushed to her aid, and a clergyman who’d been silently watching them came down also. The protestors and the clergyman argued over the tilting body of Zest, before fully turning their attention to her. Pulling out a phone, the clergyman was going to call an ambulance before Zest reached up and held his hand and said, Please, no … Are you on drugs? he asked. Are you afraid of the police? Fuck the police, said one of the young people, we’ll look after her. I’m okay, said Zest. Would you like to come and sit in the church? asked the clergyman guiltily. Another argument over the collapsed body of Zest. And then she was going through an opening in wood and stone and she was seated on a pew in a poorly lit cavern of God. Is this where you hide, God? asked Zest, only semi-deliriously. I’ll admit, said the clergyman, who was accompanied (uncomfortably) by two of the protesters, He’s hard to find if you don’t know how to look. He’s, scoffed one of the young protesters. And then the clergyman, in his public-school accent, said, I hate capitalism as much as you do, or more! We are all pulling words apart, adding spaces the internet can’t handle.6
121.
It was unclear who gave Zest the injection of ichor. Manfred worried about dirty needles – they were all pretty careful, even at Nina and Boog’s place. But it certainly gave her a boost. But something was different. As they say, as they say.
122.
Multi-pronged infiltration.
123.
They were at the York agricultural show. Tomorrow they would climb Walwalinj and search out the entry point through the extinct volcano. They were wandering the showgrounds and split up, arranging to find each other however it happened. Randomly. It’s not a large event, we’ll cross each other’s paths numerous times, said Manfred. When was this on the timeline of their time together on the surface? They did not know and nor do we. We might be flashing back, or jumping ahead of ourselves. But I think we are there now, with them. Knowing little, but enough to satisfy ourselves that we know something. Ari circled back to examine the quilting, and Zest found herself sitting in the petting zoo as small children jumped at the rabbits and the bantams, scaring them senseless. She tried to talk to the children about being gentle but was yelled at by one of the mothers, who said, Mind your own business! Is there sumpin wrong with you, gettin’ in there with the kiddies? No, said Zest, I am feeling quite well at the moment, thank you. And then the mother called to her husband and said, There’s a real weirdo in here and she makes me feel uncomfortable. And the hubby came over and leaned over the wall of the pen as his daughter did star jumps over the creatures, pinning feathers and feet to the ground. You get outta there, lady, or I’ll call the cops. And then he added, You’re disgusting – shouldn’t be allowed. Manfred heard this as he was talking to a Clydesdale horse held in a small pen. He came over and said, Sorry, I’ll look after her, and opened the pen and took Zest by the hand and led her out. But then Zest caught sight of a barn owl perched on a man’s wrist, and she went straight over to it, and looked into its moon face and asked the man if the daylight was hurting the night bird’s eyes. No, not at all, said the man. This one has an injured wing – we are rehabilitating it and will eventually let it go, back into the wild. Where is the wild? asked Zest. Everywhere, said the man. Up on the mountain? asked Zest. Yes, said the man, but many think it’s too wild up there and they want to build a restaurant for the paraglider people. A business opportunity. That’s devastating, said Zest. It is, said the man, it’s already festooned with communications towers and aerials. The devil’s legs, said Manfred quietly. Where I come from, said Zest, owls are the main birds. They thrive in day and night. That sounds like a fascinating place, said the man. I am not a woman, said Zest. That’s okay, said the man. According to some, I’m not much of a man!
124.
They were in a place of lemon trees. Look, there’s one there, dropping its fruit to the ground. And there’s another, also full of fruit but holding on to them. And another, and another. That one is leaning over a fence, one of the last wooden picket fences. A massive tree. There was silence regarding the buildings and the changes to the place. But there were birds, silent birds. Throughout, there were birds. Manfred recalled the magpies on the lawn, early morning, and there was dew and it was not embarrassing to say ‘on the dewy lawn’. Spider webs glistened between spikes of grass. That warbling, that imitation of other birds’ songs, of the world’s noise, the surface noise. The lemons are loud like the sun, and are bending towards us. They are compelling us down, down to their roots. To look where the lights of the lemon guide us. They are and we are in the place of lemons, soon to take our leave. A departure. It is an issue of duration and sourness. Pick up the offered, the dropped lemons ... and suck.
125.
The hydrogen bomb squeezed into a lemon fell through the drillhole deep through the mantle to shake the skin, to shuffle off its mortal coil. The earthquake showed up on the Geological Survey (centralised but privatised by HLH) at 6.3, but in Hollow Earth the sky fell and children’s picture books lost all credibility.
126.
Annihilation. No equivalent of that word exists in the human or animal languages of Hollow Earth.
127.
OMO DEI – privileged neo-Platonist theological scholars seeing Latin in the God in the face in the recognition and filtering the non-conservative worshippers out of the peasant flock. The Underworlders had all been scanned, with Scientology’s groundbreaking techniques drawn into the algorithm.
128.
Manfred was breaking away into plain view but alone. He dwelt as a straw man in the hollow of self. He regretted. And there were plenty out there who didn’t know him who would let him know it. Vilified, he wandered the streets of Fremantle till he came to the front of the town hall, where some kind of gathering was taking place. On the ground, two wasps were violently mating. People stepped around them, exclaiming, and filed in. Manfred eyed off the piles of vegan food being served, looked at books being sold, and walked into the hall to see a woman standing in the central aisle yelling at the people on the stage. She was extremely upset. People were trying to coax her out. She was having none of it. She was uttering a warning and a protest at once: about land and belonging and the right to speak. Manfred knew he could add nothing, could say nothing. It wasn’t his right to do so. The audience hung their heads low, and someone said, Be careful, don’t hurt her! Manfred walked out, inhaling the odour of vegan green curry, resisted, then went on through the front doors. The wasp
s were still mating. He was astounded someone hadn’t stamped on them, claiming threat, claiming proper conduct in public. He could smell a sheep ship being loaded in the harbour. He could smell the terror, the sheep-knowledge of fate.
129.
Zest, do you remember when Manfred got called a foreigner in Bantry and he took it badly? It was the most upset I’ve ever seen him. It’s the St Brendan the Navigator’s shipwreck scenario, Ari. Remember how central the flotsam and jetsam of a Hollow Earth wreck make themselves, swirling about us all, making navels where you and I don’t have them. But we know of the navels, Zest, we know of the axis mundi because we are the concretion of their mythologies, their dreams of ambivalence and ambiguity and it might go either way. And choice? No, that’s just them reassuring themselves. But there is a Heaven and a Hell as we’ve been taught, also. Yes, but we are never between. We are certain. But the Underworlders will say that our cultures are unstable, that they never settle, that our facts are inclined to slippage. They will, as they interfere with their own disciples, as they rouse up storms of vilification to distract from their own grand designs. The death of their biosphere, this biosphere, is a vehicle for their personal liberations. Which of us is saying this? I think it’s a good sign we can’t work it out – we must be getting back on track to returning home. To go further than Down Under, in making the clichés do their work. Smokescreen. Not here, the metaphor fails: too much burns, and so much of it because ‘controlled burns’ run riot. Also near Bantry, the furze fires running rampant with hypocrisy. Whiddy Island is hanging low. There is a fog. No, there is smoke. The centre of town is shifting. The seals will have to move on. The drinking water has been tainted by the bog. The treatment has gone awry. The slight forest around Bantry House is aching and the treasures of the house make history ache. The treasures. See that tapestry, hear Captain Richard White being born wailing on Whiddy Island. Hear the rooks about the wisteria. Watch the footsteps lost to the hundred steps. Should we follow? Manfred LOVES us, Ari. It’s all we have. His mix-up mix-up love. But we are here, now, searching for Manfred who is lost on the curved surface of his world. In Freo where the drugs arrive smuggled in containers, bobbing on great ships of the watery surface, the liquid of Heaven whose truth we have come to know. Can we ever tell them back home, Zest, I mean really tell them? Yes and no – we must warn them, we must prepare them. We must show them how devastating an accent or lack of accent can be for those who do and don’t have it. Manfred was buying organic fruit at the health-food shop under English smiles and West Cork belonging when he received the accusation, when he was labelled, when the magic went out of the solstice. That’s how we’ll warn them, Ari. That’s how we’ll warn them, Zest. There is a machine called the solstice, it goes both ways and is extreme in its manifestations, its implorings, its cycle of consequence. Ari assured Zest that she too was drug-free. Zest knew Ari lied. Ari never knew Zest could lie too.
130.
Without the exercise of wit, what is harvest? Can you gain no centre without reference to an icon of the internet? Do we need to deploy the brand names à la HTML to make it real for you – the flowers on the cake, the ergonomics of Tom Foodery? The harvest at night over the hill. We hear the header biting off the heads of the wheat. The GM canola which is death has been taken in already – a special point in the grain receival zone, the altered seed spilling out. But now it’s wheat and the header eats and spits into the chaser bin, the water truck hovering, for on such a hot night a spark might still take us all out. Take us all out. This limited bag of tricks, this Iraq wheat scandal, this food on war footing, this market at all costs, this foreign policy, this placate the farmers who have us over their barrels and still die in droves from abandonment, aloneness and depression. How to unravel – a sutra I bring from Hollow Earth where harvest damages none and is happiness. It’s true – only up here can such an outcome be seen as dubious, worth mocking. Harvesting between the native vegetation, coexisting in the weirding light which is comfort inside the ball, the shell.
131.
Manfred is a ghost, says an old schoolfriend when asked what had become of him. A ghost is real, but it’s so evasive it amounts to nothing. I cannot describe him, though I know he still exists. But where in Proust is memory honed by encountering text, or is this a fugitive intervention? Where on earth does Manfred dwell? I saw him in flesh and blood some time ago, then he was gone as if the earth had swallowed him up. Yes, I was a close friend, though I know he never mentioned me. But I am here, and have been all along, in the unknowing bits of the narrative. Unsettling? Hard to pick one voice from another? Inside your head it’s always like that, thinking one package of memory belongs entirely to you when that can never be the case. You lay claim, you put up ramparts, you defend your intellectual property. But you can’t. None of it is a possession. None of it will last as a marking on a headstone. It is all our singularity, and remains so in the eternal present where Manfred is and isn’t, where he ghosts my reply, signs off and on like any other phantom. Who am I? I am the entry point, I am the conduit, I am the interface between. I am the crossover. I am I am I am.
132.
Byzantium. They couldn’t stop the ship of fleece making its way through the straits. The school of. Manfred’s mum despised The Cosmic Conspiracy and Chariots of the Gods? Distractions, she said, to placate. To make money by exploiting our genuine need, or awareness.
133.
Manfred declared the poet C.J. Brennan to be a fantasy writer of the ilk of Tolkien. And as he described the world the poet had created, barely analogous to our own, he was laughed off the stage and the door was forever closed on his academic career. But Lilith in succubus scrubs remained to haunt him, to jar his gender aphasia into distressed shadow shapes, a travesty of light that might have led him out of the aimlessness, out of the forest maze, all the more horrific because the forest had long since been chopped down by a building firm wanting to claim the world for apartment developments. He couldn’t remain in Sydney, where he’d gone to find the essence of his hero, because he could detect the leakage from Lucas Heights reactor and none would heed or even hear his warnings. And that makes I am – I am – the narrator, really. Beneath it all, reading the plaques of writers around the Quay, swooning over the mysticism of the ferries, aching for the Heads, reconfiguring the coathanger and the shells that parody Hollow Earth so knowingly (I, thinks Manfred, narrating himself, I saw a Beckett play in there once – well, under under, Ruth Cracknell Winnie Winnie half above half below), I — we — ticked the boxes of presence, of participation, and Brennan being a homophobe drunk on red wine in the Cross, hocking his books. I watched the snow fall inside the dome of his humungous head and heard the bells ring, prinkt with the desire for Valvins in the Antipodes. And now, in the now of then, I acknowledge that the chair at the university was destined to end up in the hands of a Greek scholar, a certain Enoch Powell who will go on to further bloody the empire’s blood-saturated waters and lay the foundations of Brexit. I am caught in the phantasm, caught in the treeless forest of twilight, the yob millionaires on the harbour feeding on bare flesh and laughing at Hollywood for stuffing up their mega goodthing, their dissolution of the divide between slavery and wealth, consumerism and exploitation, their love of dossiers and publicists. I fan the fallout over me. I think of the politician of the right and his cronies who want a waste dump near Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula. The Kimba residents tilt towards contamination, and tilt towards the patriotic fervour that makes the monsters of the woodless forest rise in decibels, that roaring wind of annihilation. So far from Sydney, or halfway there crossing the country from Fremantle Port, from Mount Bakewell and its paraglider fighter pilots, from the desecration of law and country and orchids. That’s one history that can’t be called history that connects with the openings through to Hollow Earth, I’ve heard it thought by Zest. Yes, I have access. And I believe she thought it with respect, quickly feeling kinship though claiming no rights. Can I say the same of Ari? What I d
o know (as narrator, as Manfred’s proxy) and we all might realise is that as with the reality of the Big Galah, as with the reality of hitchhiking across to the Sydney Opera House, to C.J. Brennan’s hangouts, Manfred knew, as we all know, that the nuclear waste dump so desired by fascists at Kimba would block the portal and thus block our seeing, but also to hijack this interface and operate it as the perfect conduit for the risings of the future, for the coming of the Underworlders with their brains trust and policymakers, their One Nations and Trump First (under)groundworkers.
134.
Funnily enough, as has been noted by some (in the future, even now), the Music of the Spheres is a Hollow Earth paradigm. All music, even the most radically innovative, derives from that basic structure. It is the shape of the inner ear, the bell curve of perception. The sentssilts – so long, surface bluebells – gently encouraged by the air drifts that come between pressure events, such as they are, ring in counterpoint, a squabble that’s harmonious. And that’s why, we might conjecture, there is nothing we can equate with total war. Conflict being of a different order, and non-damaging. That’s the version I have to hand, anyway. A translation where no translation is possible or desirable, really: gyttynnm haster berrt larr larr larr rest haster larr larr larr haster gyttynnm, as it’s so beautifully sung according to the laws of spheres where no outside of the globe exists, only insides. So, imagine the interior and the flower and you’ll find a way through. It’s a pity what the drugs are doing to Ari. Such a dreadful pity. And they treat her like dirt in the hospital wards, saying her biology is her own fault, and what a waste of taxpayers’ money. They say that with a snarl.
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