by Iain Ryan
‘Harlowe?’
In response, I hear a murmur, a human sound. A sob or a deep, deep breath.
I jolt up and see the silhouette. Someone is in the room.
‘What?’
Harsh white explodes out of the shadows, followed by the roar of thunder and the ripping of my bed sheets, the quilt, the plasterboard by my head. Something else is opened, something suddenly wet and—
Gun shots.
Fired at me.
I try to escape.
I roll off the bed. The floor rises up.
The gun keeps firing.
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
I hold up my hand and it bursts open, dark blood spraying my face. I’m screaming, and the silhouette is on me, its thighs over my thighs, pinning me down as a heavy metal object is slammed into me, crumpling my arms and shoulders and glancing off the side of my head. I bring my hands up to block the blows but the blows keep coming. I flail around, trying to attack, but it doesn’t work. Another blow comes in and my vision blurs.
I fade out.
The barbarian.
A spiral.
The end.
I come to.
The silhouette is kicking me.
The room smells like fireworks.
I hear the slotting of metal into metal. Reloading. The silhouette stands at my feet, a dripping gun in its hand. The gun comes up and it’s aimed at me. I try to say no but nothing comes out.
The gun snaps. No light. No flash.
‘Fuck me,’ says the shadow.
I know the voice.
The shadow lifts the gun to its head and pulls on the trigger.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
Sn—
The room strobes and I see Jenny’s blank white face and her empty eyes as the side of her head flies apart.
PART TWO
10 MONTHS LATER
PROVINCE OF KRABI, THAILAND
ERMA
Morning light flickers through the canopy and the brown mud under my feet is loose, the result of a dawn shower. In the distance, I can see a road. I can hear the ocean. I keep running till I hit the beach. I wade out into the lukewarm sea.
I’m in Thailand.
On my back, floating in the water. Cream-coloured clouds overhead.
Late June, 2005.
Beautiful.
Easy.
And the sum total of pure chaos.
There’s a book in the Choose Your Own Adventure series where you have to cheat. It’s called Inside UFO 54-40. You’re abducted by aliens and find yourself aboard their ship. In the story, the choices you make bring about the usual array of fatalities and happy endings but woven throughout are mentions of a better place, a penultimate ending. There’s a paradise planet called Ultima. Thing is, Ultima is hidden. To find it, the reader has to flick through the pages of Inside UFO 54-40 and manually find the passage. When a reader opens the buried section (pp. 101–104), they’re welcomed into Ultima by two characters wearing golden wreaths, one of whom says, ‘No one can choose to visit Ultima. Nor can you get there by following directions.’ And as such, you are rewarded for refuting the reality of the book, for breaking it.
I’ve been thinking about Inside UFO 54-40 a lot these last couple of months in Thailand. It’s the only part of my previous life I’ve let in. I feel a kinship for it now because I didn’t navigate myself to this place. It’s like I skipped ahead and landed here. I cheated death and found myself welcomed into a strange new paradise.
Except it’s real.
I almost died.
That wasn’t a dream.
Jenny shot me two times. The first bullet is what my doctors called a through-and-through: it entered my right shoulder just above the collarbone and passed out the other side without ripping up anything too important. The second hit my left hand. That was more serious. It broke three bones and shredded tendons. But, on the whole, a miracle. The worst and easily most embarrassing part of these injuries was the post-op infection in my shoulder from bullet number one. Apparently it pushed all sorts of garbage into my body as it moved through-and-through. No one knows exactly what the infecting material was, but the leading contender is bacteria-drenched fabric à la my clothes. I was sleeping in the shirt I’d worn that night to a half-dozen Fortitude Valley nightclubs. The two-for-one jugs of beer, the sweat and spit, the busted romances and bad breath, it all went into my bullet hole and almost killed me. That landed me in ICU for a week, which is a while, then ten days later I was back out in the world. At first, Kanika put me up in her new place just to help with my dressings. A month after that, I moved back to my apartment, to the empty answering machine and holes in the walls.
From there I went into months and months of physical therapy, hours of painful exercise and depressing training rooms and being around – or near, at least – people who had it far worse than I did. I was in rehabilitation with people missing limbs. These were people fucked up by auto accidents and war and industrial machinery. I was a tourist in their world. As one of my coaches, a former soldier, told me, ‘You’ll be fine. The person who tried to kill you obviously couldn’t shoot.’ My injuries were just a light sprinkling of near-death to those people.
And the part about Jenny’s terrible shooting is certainly true. At the start, the police didn’t tell me a lot, but I can count the bullet holes in my apartment. Jenny fired a six-shot revolver at me. No one could tell me how a postgrad with no experience with guns got this weapon but she did, somehow, and once she got hold of this exceptionally hard-to-find thing, she fired it at me until it was empty, then beat me with the gun so bad that the thing jammed with my own blood. The police detective in charge of the investigation told me I got lucky because – and here’s the clincher – Jenny was persistent. The fact that she kept going until she eventually got the gun working again, that solved a lot of problems. I got lucky because Jenny is a lot better at shooting herself, it seems, than killing other people. Which is fine by me.
The Muay Thai training camp in Thailand was an idea I acted on quickly. The doctors and trainers cleared me to resume fighting in November – five months after the shooting – and having had a recent brush with death, I was keen to get back into it. At first, I used a gym near my house, going six days a week during the last gasp of 2004 and ignoring almost everything else.
My misdirections.
My stalled career.
My isolation.
My sister and my family and my research assistant Jenny who can’t shoot and all the reasons why she might have—
Nope. Not yet.
Can’t.
I took time off from my position at the university. They put me on some type of extended leave. Half salary. Negotiated end date. No pressure. I probably could have returned after three months. I was physically fit enough. But definitely not sane enough. I still sweated through the night, tossing and turning. I went days without long thoughts or conversation. Apart from the gym, I was a shut in. Didn’t read a single email since the day I left work. My book contract, my research, the grant applications and acquittals and whatever else I’d promised people – reams and reams of promises – that was all up in the air. I was definitely between things.
There was no vacation responder.
No explanations to friends and family.
They didn’t call anyway. Kanika was my emergency contact. The only living thing I had regular contact with was the cat.
I was a mess. Before the trip to Thailand, I cried every day, sometimes over exact memories, a lot of the time over nothing. I lived on steamed vegetables and cask wine. I read the fucking Da Vinci Code. As the Brisbane summer came on like nuclear fallout, I dragged a spare mattress into the living room and spent whole days and nights in there watching rented DVDs in front of the fan with Harlowe. When I could sleep, I dreamed of Sero the Barbarian, some abstraction from the Archibald Moder books I studied. The original novels are tales of journeys through
foreign lands, heavy on bold quests, valiant action and dungeon running. My version was darker, more sombre, almost directionless. I think I dreamed weird stuff like that because I was barely living in the waking world.
I was alone.
The only time I felt good was in the gym.
I worked hard in there.
Low rep free weights with short breaks.
Body work. Resistance work. Cardio.
Endless drills for my right cross and low kick.
In the ring, I started to focus on attacking instead of defence. A long time ago, an old trainer of mine told me, ‘This is Muay Thai. You’re gonna get hit.’ And pre-Jenny that’s how I fought: in anticipation of getting hit. I blocked. I moved. I thought about my opponents strategically. I avoided getting hurt because I hated going to work with injuries. But that’s all gone. Now I’m aggressive. I have long arms and yet I come in close.
I want to be near my opponent.
To feel her breath.
Blowing on me.
As I punch faceless stand-ins for Jenny.
Yesterday, in Thailand, my Krabi instructor Teng took our training session out into a grass field beside the camp. In the bright afternoon sunlight, Teng moved quickly, swinging into my side and neck with his rattan sticks, attacking me.
‘You die. No head,’ he said.
‘OK. Again.’
I brought up my wooden swords. We fought. I ran my combination.
It didn’t work.
‘Again.’
Teng backed up. ‘You know, the other guy told me you were getting good. But this …’
‘Fuck off. Again.’
We went at it. I backed him up, got inside, tried for the femoral artery. But Teng is fast as shit and he found a way around. At the session’s end, we rested in the grass. Me huffing and puffing. Teng hardly warmed up.
‘You going home soon?’ he said.
I nodded. I had extended my stay twice already. Extending it a third time felt wrong, like I might never go back.
Teng said, ‘You want to date me? Last night tonight. Last chance.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Teng has a look I can come at. Big around the arms. Brown eyes. But I wasn’t tempted. Hadn’t been in quite a while. Not since Jenny. ‘Do you know why I came over here?’
He shrugged.
‘Someone tried to kill me, back home.’
‘You fight back?’
‘I tried.’
‘You win?’
‘I guess.’
‘Did you fuck him up?’
‘It was a woman. And yeah, she’s dead.’
Teng smiled at that. ‘Maybe no date then. You’re too dangerous for me.’
I drew a finger across my neck.
The lukewarm dusk sea.
On my back, floating.
The salmon-pink sky arcing overhead.
Late June, 2005, Thailand.
I close my eyes and let the water move me to and fro. I imagine myself from above, as if filmed through a camera from a satellite. I’m only here, in this place, this water, this beach, these exact geographic coordinates, because this is the path of my life thus far.
No lessons.
No answers.
It just happened.
I skipped ahead.
But today something stirs in me, something in the deep ocean below. In my mind, I sink down. I swim into the cold water. The light fades. I go into the dark excess. My eyes adjust. There’s a black canyon on the sea floor and inside it I see something.
Two sickly white eyes in the shadows.
Brown-green tentacles silently floating.
I reach out.
Back home. Day One.
Brisbane in winter. Still bright as hell outside.
11.35 a.m.
It feels like a mistake.
The place sounds the same. Traffic on the street. Lawnmowers. Renovation. There’s a pile of mail on the coffee table. My luggage still in the hallway from last night.
I go to the answering machine and press the button.
You have three missed calls.
The first missed call is from …
Some telemarketer.
I hit the button.
Next message: Hello, Miss Bridges? A man. Hello? The man coughs twice, and the line goes dead.
I hit the button.
The third call is from …
My mother’s voice fills the room. ‘Hello, dear. We’re selling the house. I wanted to call and say that. I’m sick of cleaning the damned pool, if you must know. So, if you want any of your old things, maybe you should arrange to have them shipped up to wherever the hell it is you’re living at the moment. Your father … your father—’
I hit delete.
I head straight to the gym.
On Day Two, Kanika visits without invitation. We stand in the little courtyard at the front of my place and drink stove-top coffee. She looks me over and says, ‘You look thin.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It wasn’t a compliment.’ Kanika grabs my arm and lifts it up, as one might handle a pet. ‘Strong though.’
‘Sword work. I learned how to fight with one.’
‘Every little girl’s fantasy,’ says Kanika.
‘What’s been happening here? How’s Howard?’
‘He’s making noises about retiring, louder noises. But, aside from that, the Centre is still the same.’ Kanika takes a cigarette from her purse and lights it. ‘You meet anyone on your trip?’
‘You mean, a guy?’ I shake my head.
‘You OK?’
‘Better. I don’t know where to start exactly but I’m thinking about work again.’
‘Really?’
‘What else am I going to do? Work in a 7-Eleven? I feel like I need to just … I don’t know.’
‘Well, I’ve got something for you, then.’ Kanika tucks her smoke into the corner of her mouth and leads me out to the car. She opens the boot and stands back. ‘There you go.’
A cardboard packing crate.
‘Go on,’ she says.
I hoist it out.
Two months ago, Kanika signed for a package at the Centre. A brown box. The sender: Gloria Wasserman. Jenny’s sister.
When I’m alone, I open the box and carefully place the items on the kitchen table:
Three black Moleskine notebooks filled with Jenny’s handwriting.
A thick pile of printed journal articles.
Two A3 mind maps in biro.
A plastic wallet filled with receipts.
Two overdue library books.
Four USB sticks.
A UQ-inscribed laptop charger.
A pencil case.
And more books. A dozen dog-eared textbooks filled with marginalia. My research copies of Forest of Doom and Secret of the Ninja. A vintage copy of Inside UFO 54-40, the Ultima passage marked with a Post-it. She also has Zone Mover 29: Dark Corridor by A. S. Moder, the distinctive series logo on the cover: an ornate shield locked inside a cube-shaped spiral. It’s in bad condition. I scan through. Dark Corridor looks like all the books in the series. It’s a branching narrative with numbered sections and line illustrations, the same elaborate ink-work by Elizabeth Goodman. The story revolves around a young family terrorised by an evil red-headed daughter who wears exaggerated black-rim glasses and has telekinetic powers. I put the book back and arrange Jenny’s things in a tight grid on the table.
There’s something off about this.
I stand on a chair, for a different angle. From above, I can see it all at once.
Research materials.
A project underway.
But too neat. Too orderly.
Organised, even. Too organised for …
Jenny wasn’t flaking out.
Jenny was working.
I go cold. Jenny didn’t seem human that night in my room. But here, on my kitchen table, there is proof of her humanity, her complete lack of psychosis. I stay up on the chair and star
e into her stuff. It takes a while but finally another thought arrives.
I say it out loud, ‘Where’s the interview, Jenny?’
The irreplaceable interview with Moder, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
All that pain and suffering for naught without it.
My kitchen walls are painted an orange-cream colour. Above my kitchen bench there’s a long space I’ve filled with posters and clutter. I tear it all down and wipe the paint with a washcloth then dry it with a tea towel. I take a set of Jenny’s pencils and draw a line. About a third of the way along, I write her name, and underneath I mark a date.
‘July, 2004’.
That’s the night she tried to shoot me. But I hired her in the winter of her first-year post-thesis, so there’s a lot of space before July. I back up and look at this timeline with one marking on it. I look at the blank spaces, either side. Somewhere on this line, there are answers.
I go back to her stuff on my kitchen table.
I look through her USB sticks.
I open her work journals.
I log receipts.
I transcribe everything onto the line.
For the first time in months, I feel like my old self. It actually feels good to work. Research is research, I guess, In my bed that night, as I dream of the timeline, my mind starts to work through the details, the connections. The cross-fade between my new project and the epic fantasy of my barbarian dream proves seamless: I’m in the kitchen, scratching at the wall with a pencil, mapping data, then I’m following the timeline back – like a rope – into a sinister forest of drooling creatures and howling wind. In that dark wild place, I become a different person and I live inside that person. The barbarian. I see things I cannot see elsewhere. For example, I can see, with calm poise, that I am lost along every dimension. And yet, I keep moving forward.
SERO
3
Two days pass in the forest but the rain and the canopy render day as night and the journey is long and directionless. On the third day, the treeline breaks to a valley and down in the valley there is a small village dug into the earth, chimneys expelling smoke into the morning mist.
4