No, Ari, I know we should go to the top of the mountain – the path back will open, said Manfred. We must take the baby to Hollow Earth – the surface is putrid.
Zest, who was nursing a six-month-old baby starting to teethe, and whose nipples were raw and who felt alone for all the fussing of the other two, said, We will go to the top of the mountain, and if the way back doesn’t open somehow we will get to Australia and make a new life on the surface, on the edge of the inland sea.
192.
The Outback is an official zone. You don’t need papers to enter, but you need a state of mind. To be hit by a truck is a definitive experience. And being hit in the ‘middle of nowhere’ is to be lost, to be undone by the most brutal realities of existentialism. That snap decision you make. That either or, that either or. Ee or ee or. Split second. Reaction time to survive. Life flash. By and bye. Slow motion slo mo, ee or. Or either. Never distracted by Mahler’s 9th, first movement, or a feadán calling up the dog, only companion on a cold thin day. Or Yothu Yindi just loud enough to follow but not distract – ‘Djat’pa’. And the truck from nowhere, Roadmaster, slam dunk. Sliced white bread. Bull bar paring knife. High up on a stack of power. Whose picture of whose harp you saw, ‘Far Away in Australia’. Assaults in the mosh pit, a colonial Viagra. Such conversations just before impact. And the truck driver, all the way from Federal Territory, prime mover released from its responsibility, the mining machinery, the Robber Baron’s incipient company – he will butt it out, he will start somewhere. To dig deeper, deeper, past where the subterranean waters rush and flood the desert minds, way past the asbestos fibres stirred into the desiccated air. Past the colour bands of a stinking hot Marble Bar, where gold drew cold people to excessive heat, driving off the acclimatised, claiming whatever. Grasping EXPLOSION of impact. Cut of metal. The contents of the car long sober, entirely clean. No trace of drugs or alcohol. Strange blood types. Unique. Every man, woman and child. Each category ticked. The truck driver, once chased by those he almost ran down in Port Augusta, travelling over and over. The driver. The either or, the either or. What bird is heard just before – not distracting, but preparing to offer a way out of the cave, the burrow. And there she was, swimming the limestone cave’s water, still as a glow-worm on the roof, the roots of great trees reaching down as hairs, as straws, stalagmites and stalactites joining, shoals of the order she might turn to if the baby no longer breathes. Breathe, baby, in your pod, your capsule, hardened against impact, cocoon against the tonnage of the truck. These vehicles that sign the endgame of the surface, internal combustion fossil fuel looking down to the hollow, the burrow. Which birds dig in banks so vulnerable to cats, what do you hear? Do you hear the rainbow bird, the rainbow bee-eater coming in to nest in banks behind the shack, in the tussocked mounds that hold floodwaters in when cyclones claw their way inland to change topographies in ways that become the stories the peoples whose land it is sing and tell by. Own their own stories by? The rain figures. Listen to the birds. Either or, think of love, think of blood, think of martyrs, think of what you cannot love and those who think love is beyond you. Paraphrase. The ownership, the social media deities so worshipped, but there, even now, outside the range. Just the old CB of the truck to say, There’s been an accident. And yes, he admits, he does do that, and that is his redemption, his hope: I have hit a car and I am not sure who is dead or alive, there’s a baby on board. The car is wrecked. Come quick, by land and air. The earth trembled from deep beneath with the impact. I couldn’t see them: they weren’t there, then they were. I ... Dr Exstaticus knows the page number, knows this carload of entities must have love, must love each other, so entwined. I am no great reader, but I can read the verses of love on the metal, the road, the unbroken bits of glass – the back windscreen survived. I had a love, her name was Regine, why do I think of this as I pick through this wreck? One breathes, two breathe. The baby seems intact, but silent. What will the newspapers carry where there is no phone signal? Tweets will have to wait, the encapsulations. The images. How can my loves, my divorces, my love of web porn at roadhouses relieve this anguish? I read ahead: they will call me eel and monkey, without a thought to the thousands, the tens of thousands of roos and emus and wombats, even camels that have died on my bull bar. And bulls. And cows. They will filter the truth. I will become part of the history of roadkill. This history of a curved surface, this rolling over a ball, this roll-on part. Sometimes, when thundering across the Nullarbor, I think of the caves beneath, inside the karst, the histories and truths they contain. I think of rumours of aliens and machinery. You’d think a long-haul truckie with a beer gut wouldn’t care or wouldn’t know. But I have loved trucks since I was a child and sat beside my father up high crossing the country. I was once an owner-driver who had to sell and join a company. The owner collects paintings and lives in a Harbour-side mansion. He will leave small fortunes to the offspring of his mistresses. I know enough to know this era is made up of other eras, and this place of other places, and in these dying moments I am as absent as the narratives of my victims. I could have loved them. I do. We are kin. I was distracted. I was driving fast. I saw the eagles and heard the crows. I wanted to get back to my beginnings. I hear the core of the earth shift like a ball bearing in mercury struggling to retain cohesion, an explosion of wakefulness, ice in the burning places. I struggle to sleep, exhausted after days on the road. To sleep, to go deep into myself, find a way through where the others are going, have gone.
193.
Hollow Earthers believe in an afterlife because they have seen the beyond-science of the vacuums, the black holes of their world. All goes in and yet the mass of their world remains fairly constant, as far as their diviners can tell. Science is, for them, a spirituality, and a commentary on what is, not what can be changed to make more of it. An equilibrium is maintained through faith. All that is essential, as well as all the waste and rubbish of Hollow Earth, finds its way into the suckholes, into the back of the mirrors. And even from the surface world, all that is essential will find its way through the porous crust – the infinitesimally small apertures that only atoms can find their way through, to the hollowness that is at the core of all life, all esse: ‘Who is to say?’ being their favourite cliché, and the truth they live by.
CODA: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
‘haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae’10
Swirl of plastic particulate fills
a need; to sail through, we establish new
colonies on the leftovers of beachheads,
the waste and packaging. Place sans name
is now named infamously, so all names
gather synonyms to their whirlpools.
Swords crossed on a map or the sinking
ship to show a battle, a wreck; salt air
to strip away the grime of history
we leave behind, or clean as desert dust
we’d replace with lush lands, regular
legends and symbols, compass
skills; navigation of bathymetric
features: collision course, astrolabe
sounding datum unsurveyed; overland
route: walking on water believable
if visionary. Always ahead of its time.
Amendments
Sisyphus by choice
he bobcats ‘shitloads of dirt’:
up/down then down/up.
First Amendment: It Gives Me Something to Do
from Job, Chapter 30:
5 They were driven forth from among men, (they cried after them
as after a thief;)
6 To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in
the rocks.
7 Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were
gathered together.
Ari, late in her addiction, channelling Aphra Behn and lashing out:
GIVE me the Man that’s hollow
The machinery is hard at it, driven day and night. The opening is
growing but is also being covered over so none can tell it’s really there. It’s there and not there. The noise is getting to the ‘neighbours’ scattered down the valley – to block it out, one turns on a stereo loud, which carries further down to double-afflict the next in line. Then sneeze loudly, bringing a response from further down the valley – a double sneeze. Call and response. And so the noise of the surface builds, searching for ways out, above and below. The dam near bursting. The tension of dryness.
A rufous whistler – the thunderbird – responds. It is hot and the vegetation volatile. Clouds build and the barometer drops to ‘storm’. All of this in the mix. Caution: a trail of oil on the road curving into the reserve. The bush-bashers are down there, spotlights glaring, hunting out roos. All hell breaking loose. Noise builds and builds. Architecture of strife.
Inside the houses it is like being inside a molar being hollowed by a slow drill, bits of decay flaking off the cavity walls into the mouth. Below the earth, the digestive system recoils and pushes against its plates, against its form. A goitred thyroid pulsates.
A rabbit – a massive buck – hops past the window. His window. He’s separated off from the other hises. His aloneness, his memorialising of his earliest self. Listening to the machinery, thinking of the hers, his neighbours from way way back. He wrote fictions of their quests, but he never told them. And after a long separation, a reconnection would bring embarrassment and never the strength to say, You are with me every day, I write you both. Into me. My entire life has been lived in the shadow of our childhoods – the three of us, and our secret ways. They wouldn’t appreciate it, and why should they? The rabbit is large and angry and going in a straight line, but it is heavy-eyed. Myxomatosis? It is moving towards the node. What else can it do? Hop onwards till it starves, till infection takes it down? Face rotting? Remember it first showing its face in Uruguay. Lab rabbits. It had hoped for inoculation but it’s too late, the vector has found its mark. It is inside the tunnels of veins, in the body’s cavities, around the eyes.
He says – that is, the neighbour with the digging desire, Maker of Holes – I have to keep busy. I believe. It is a right to move shitloads of dirt. I find focus, digging and dozing, pushing aside, gouging. It’s better than drinking liquor. When drinking I dug the earth anyway, but without faith, without belief. Now I know its purpose. His name is Simon Macherey and he has a vision of dirt. A shitload of dirt.
Second Amendment: ‘Supermarionation’/Captain Scarlet
Retro-metabolism brought him back from his 2nd OD. Destiny Angel told them to hit him with adrenaline. Captain Blue had shot him up. That’s the noise that totally busts up the valley’s concentration. The high-powered rifle let loose. Percussion. Sound barriers. Impacts. Manfred had been a fan since early childhood, and also knew the plot of every episode of UFO, and could still mimic the sounds of the UFOs themselves.
In Hollow Earth a game is played with heavy feathers – feathers fallen and gathered from the low winds. The game entailed writing the future of fellow players in the earthy air. Manfred never got the hang of it and couldn’t elucidate much more than this if asked. He had no idea why the shooting reminded him of this peaceful game. A peaceful game that might reveal a tragic future. He said to no one in particular, I covered the balloon in papier-mâché, let it set, and then popped the balloon. A planet remained. I was eight. I painted it red and green. Painted over the crisscrossed strips of newspaper.
Third Amendment
The Underworlders ignored the order to stay out of the dwellings of Hollow Earthers, inviting themselves in on dancing jackboots, flashing their company logos (not to be mistaken as being a plural of logo), making themselves welcome.
And now, still on the surface, neighbours at his door after the disaster, who was Manfred to turn them away? He imagined himself into this future. He could see it coming. Alone now, since the accident, he was surface-bound, bereft of Ari and Zest. Briefly, he had returned to Hollow Earth and seen the ravaging that would come of him via him that would follow. The wreckers and the diggers, the shooters and the bigots, all needed shelter after the Incident. The catastrophe. The result of the Newest Cold War outcome – the need to look Under. He opened the door then, and would open it in time to come, and he opened the door right now, welcoming them in. Sleeping with the enemy. You are one of us, they said, even though everyone in the district thinks you’re a weirdo. Is it true you’re in therapy? A person like you shouldn’t have a house like this all to himself. I agree, said Manfred, But I am never really alone.
Water was in short supply. The Great Rain Water Tank was running low. The bobcat man suggested digging a dam for when the rain came. A dam on the hillside. A gouge that would collect. Forward planning. The others voted yes. He was outvoted, but didn’t make a song and a dance about it. I quite like dams, he said, for all the damage they do. Nobody heard that remark, which was all to the best.
Fourth Amendment
The seizure of non-property left the Hollow Earthers bereft. Here are the lies on a plate that none of you own, said one of the execs wearing a hard hat and hi-vis vest over his suit jacket. ‘When David surprized Saul sleeping in the cave, and cut off the skirt of his robe – we read his heart smote him for what he had done …’11
In this brute body, thought Manfred, I can only become the Robber Baron – it started as a child, it began with smashing quail eggs and making dams and playing secret games with the girls next door and next door. I have the skill set, I have the DNA, I have the gender requirements still sitting on the top shelf, to be brought down and unpacked. I will breed and produce technicians. I will populate the future with operatives.
The Den of Cruelty.
A Den where Tygers make the passage good,
And all attempting Lovers make their Food;
I’th’ hollow of a mighty Rock ’tis plac’d,
Which by the angry Sea is still imbrac’d:
Whose frightful surface constant Tempest wears,
Which strikes the bold Adventurers with Fears.12
And then he puts on Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine – and he remembers seeing Trent Reznor’s maybe ex, Tori Amos, at Cork Airport. And then he remembers Ari and Zest saying, Why do you link her to him in a bodily way? You don’t know. They had both taken to Tori Amos’s work and life in big ways since surfacing. She is her. She is she, without him. And Manfred sees Tori Amos, diminutive, walk under his arm as he reaches over to lean against a pillar. She has come off an Aer Lingus flight and is talking to a tallish thin man, but not as tall and thin as he is. Ari and Zest watch her and hold back. They are – were – on the move. And Manfred calls across the airport,
Happiness is under our feet, and Amos looks back weirdly, her eyes spiralling, and nods in affirmation. Manfred knows he should remember her hair colour, what she was wearing, and other such accoutrements to personality, but he doesn’t. The expression, though … and the eyes. He remembers them as well as he remembers the lost visages of Ari and Zest, the strangeness of his childhood.
1 Try the opening of Book 6, Virgil’s Aeneid
2. Bradshaw, William R.. The Goddess Of Atvatabar (illustrated), Kindle edition, p. 48.
3. Bradshaw, William R., The Goddess of Atvatabar (illustrated), p. 53.
4. Bradshaw, William R., The Goddess of Atvatabar (illustrated), pp. 53–4.
5. Do we really have to footnote this? Is the commodification and desire for ownership so far gone that our every path through the trace has to be marked? More fool you, says Manfred, lonely as he is. So out of sync with your temporality (as he was)!
6. Yes, that letter to Regine does come to mind. Those typesetters!
7. Yes, yes, ‘A Soul After Death’.
8. You Know Who.
9. Bradshaw, William R., The Goddess of Atvatabar (illustrated), p. 278.
10. Virgil, the Aeneid, Book 6, line 776.
11. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Chapter 1, XLII. See also: �
�Indeed there is one thing to be considered, that in Nova Zembla, North Lapland, and in all those cold and dreary tracks of the globe, which lie more directly under the arctick and antartick circles, where the whole province of a man’s concernments lies for near nine months together within the narrow compass of his cave – where the spirits are compressed almost to nothing – and where the passions of a man, with every thing which belongs to them, are as frigid as the zone itself – there the least quantity of judgment imaginable does the business – and of wit – there is a total and an absolute saving – for as not one spark is wanted – so not one spark is given. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! what a dismal thing would it have been to have governed a kingdom, to have fought a battle, or made a treaty, or run a match, or wrote a book, or got a child, or held a provincial chapter there, with so plentiful a lack of wit and judgment about us!’ (Chapter 2, XIII.) And also, for good measure: ‘– That provision should be made for continuing the race of so great, so exalted and godlike a Being as man – I am far from denying – but philosophy speaks freely of every thing; and therefore I still think and do maintain it to be a pity, that it should be done by means of a passion which bends down the faculties, and turns all the wisdom, contemplations, and operations of the soul backwards – a passion, my dear, continued my father, addressing himself to my mother, which couples and equals wise men with fools, and makes us come out of our caverns and hiding-places more like satyrs and four-footed beasts than men.’ (Chapter 4, XCII.)
12. Aphra Behn
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Barry at Transit Lounge for believing in this work, and Penelope Goodes for her characteristically informed, diligent and sensitive copy-editing. Thanks to Curtin University, where I am Professor of Literature and Environment. And special thanks to the various authors of ‘hollow earth’ texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, especially William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess Of Atvatabar and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with which this novel ‘converses’. At a tangent, there’s also Théophile Gautier’s poem ‘A une robe rose, and the poetry of John Keats (‘The Fall of Hyperion’), Aphra Behn, William Blake (‘The Tyger’), the Bible, and so on!’
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