Dyschronia

by Jennifer Mills

  But if we don’t know about it, we can’t very well decide. We have to work with the information we have, to move forward on the flimsy ground of our few certainties, even as they grow fewer. Or become near-certainties. Or best guesses.

  If he wanted to frighten us, it hasn’t worked. The idea of that instability, of the earth cracking open and letting go its store, is not too shocking. Once you’ve survived a few catastrophes you stop taking them so personally. It’s not that we want any more disasters, but we know what to do with them. We remember them now as times that we came together, chose together, worked together. We survived, became survivors. What can one more accident do to us? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  Greg’s car stops near the half-gate, clapstone rec. He climbs out and walks around it, through the long weeds towards the wheel. He stands beside the slab at the base of the wheel and looks up, presumably watching his bird; it’s far too small for us to see from here. He walks back a few steps like a man flying a kite. Behind him, the Big Thing rears like some ugly wreck, its broken eye watching. Was it always broken? It must have been one of the tourists.

  ‘We should read those contracts,’ says Allan, but he makes no move to go back inside. None of us takes a step. We know that we have work to do, choices to make. But none of us seems able to move at all.

  40

  After the sea returns, and before it has gone, and as it is always. Knots undo themselves in water, unless they tighten. Time loosens its hold on the skin, or it binds.

  Inside the new mind, she is shown the old world. Clapstone, becoming.

  Those who return have never left now. The machines that litter the park lie in their places. Houses lurch that have never fallen. There is no confidence in any action.

  They truck in the animal, refrigerate her, bury her at sea with proper service. The monster shifts, takes shape again. A promise.

  The village becomes an insect, then a fossil. Ed returns, and leaves again, and returns, and leaves, each time remaining. Ivy softens and grows stronger as he hardens, shrinks. The house is bigger, more comfortable, easier to breathe in. Its arguments are silent, loud, then furtive.

  Bricks are stacked on pallets, steel frames dismantled, footings lifted. Foundations liquify and suck into a mixer. There is a model, then a drawing, then an idea.

  Gases are brought up out of the earth. Now they were never injected there. A voice unspeaks what was never offered. As events contract, possibilities expand.

  The town floods, and houses shuck their damage like so much dust. Ned disappears into a taxi, a newspaper over his head against rain that rises, enters clouds, drifts off to the west.

  A single black stripe crawls up the skin of the river and buries itself under the old plant. Chemistry moves towards simplicity: carbon shudders from the air, shimmies down smokestacks, stuffs itself into coal, is buried. The air rejuvenates and is cleansed. Ed pulls trees out of the ground and gives them to the council. He flirts with a woman he slowly forgets. Once forgotten, he leaves town, driving too fast, closing in on the past.

  A plaque is removed from the memorial; it’s only a stone now. The stone is lifted into a truck, placed in the old quarry, and forgotten. The silos shoot up overnight from rubble. Their veils fall away. A line of men fly into the air. They land on top of the ladder, climb down carefully into their lives, opposite hand and foot outstretched as per safe ladder practices. Their lives swim timelessly around a rhythm of work and family that feels eternal, but only from inside.

  She can breathe here. She propels herself through water.

  Children come back from hospitals, the bad news removed from their skulls. Their hair grows back. Sam is forgetting. If there is Sam, she is always forgetting something. She has already forgotten The Merchant of Venice and the history of the Second World War and the names of the ships in the First Fleet, and she soon forgets that war is everywhere, and the names of the kinds of headaches. Water returns to the river the way that actions return to thoughts. It’s there one year and most years after. The red gums that line the banks spring up and grow young and strong and silky. The world shrinks around her and she shrinks with it.

  A car swallows a fire. A dog comes back to life.

  The water is deeper.

  She forgets the car, the dog, how to ride a bicycle. She forgets leucophores, iridophores, chromatophores. She forgets migraines. She forgets her name and the names for everything except hunger and thirst and pain and then these are sounds and her body becomes part of her mother’s body and a thought in her mother’s head about other names for the sea. And Sam restores herself to the halves that belong to these other bodies, to their mysteries; she splits in two and watches the halves walk away from each other, back into their discrete and unknown lives. Her DNA diffuses into code, it multiplies. She can breathe here.

  Everything moves against her, the current of it turns away. History undoes fate. All this time she was moving in the wrong direction. Better to untie the knot at its inception. Find the mark, the place where this world split away from the others. She moves faster now, turning past the turning points. Her water-pump propulsion, mouth-faced, swells and ebbs, balloons and flutters. Always and again, she changes form.

  Upstream, the water vanishes into the land. Tiny sections of uncontaminated earth grow and gather and connect. The population dwindles. Drills and rattles feed the earth its fossils. Asphalt retreats. Industry fails, machines are dismantled. Slavery is fuel. Human lives are short. Sea life proliferates. Forests creep into towns, trees quietly enter their seeds. Buildings are taken apart and carted away as rubble, buried in safe ground. Animals are everywhere. People too, the white dust gone.

  Whole nations slowly turn thus, whole civilisations: from ruins into homes and back to ruins. Others rise. Cultures, languages, wars flare and die, together and in isolation. People wake in bodies, they come and go from rooms, they diminish and are unborn. Earthquakes, with a moment’s strength, rebuild entire cities.

  Time stops, but only for a moment.

  One earthquake, in a curve of mountain. A stream that opens in a crack in the ground where there will soon be words. In the slanted land surrounding her, the dogs are barking.

  Above the stream a temple is restored. A woman who has lived too long perches on a stool above the crevice. The woman rolls back her eyes and breathes out poisons. She pours the gas of knowledge from her body, sends it down into the earth. The cracked earth welcomes her singing, swallows and holds. Her clawed feet cling. Men walk away knowing what they knew already. Nobody learns. Time has no axis. She is one in a series, she has seen all this before.

  She hisses, and the water hisses. When their eyes meet, there is a crack in them. It isn’t recognition.

  It isn’t here.

  She accelerates, feeling the ache of her extension. She is going too far. She will never get back. The cities fall into stones. The stones restore themselves to props in another country, shifting and turning through the animals and ice. A country known for a long time by other names. It doesn’t matter how far, or what she presses through. There is no restoration, no crucial moment; there is only this motion. This deep, her will flags. She has lost the sense of time, no longer knows if this is all a long way back, or a long way forward. Only this distance, and everything the same.

  All of it is snow and ice. All of it is desert. All of it is snow and ice. All of it is dying.

  There is nothing at the centre. No junction. No decision. Nothing but the now, transforming.

  Meteors fly. Dinosaurs blink. Everything crawls into the sea.

  Go home, says a stromatolite, tell them: my house has fallen.

  Breathe in and out in the right order. All there is to it. Take life’s allocation. Before the water dries up, inhale. She takes a breath, the first in existence. The earth is dead, not waiting, waiting. Before life, this stillness. No atmosphere. Even as yet the line
the wheel the loop the dream the zero of time

  is not yet breathing.

  Sam hears the universe contract. It has its music.

  It is not that anything nothing is happening.

  This is everything: a house built from falling.

  Here, now, there is no returning.

  41

  We can’t help it; we’re all holding our breath. Sam is an insect up there, a fly struggling across a web. It takes a long time for her to move along the spoke and to the centre. When she reaches the small platform at the top of the ladder, the axis, we feel dizzy. All her balance up there depends on the balance of our bodies down here. We can’t make a sound.

  Soon she’s twisted herself onto the ladder and is coming down, slowly and shakily. The Big Thing waits for her below, its one eye fractured. From here, it is an altar.

  We breathe at last. It’s about time.

  We find the young man standing in the grass, the glint of the orange monitor on his hip. We watch him the way we’d watch a scene from a film we’ve seen many times before, filled with the anticipation of narrative fulfilment. She’ll fall, and he will catch her. It’s a classic.

  Only other things start happening instead.

  Roger says, ‘Look,’ and he points into the distance, and we take our eyes off Sam for a second because there are lights behind the hills. Weird lights flickering on the horizon, like dry lightning. But there’s no sign of a storm. Not a cloud in the sky. We watched a show about the auroras once and now we think we must be imagining it, having some hallucination. If so, it’s a collective one. Dread begins in the soles of our feet and creeps up inside our bodies like a Guinea worm, a long string of dread filled with tiny embryos of more dread that will grow and multiply and consume. We shuffle our feet. The flickering lights are like a broken screen. Like a layer is moving between here and there.

  And then the ground shakes, and we all grab on to each other, or the nearest available object, and swear, and then a few of us find we are sitting on the ground, although we don’t remember falling. We get up again, at least to our knees. It seems to have stopped. We stand and dust ourselves off and laugh a little. And then we look around.

  At first we don’t see the difference. The line of pink hills hasn’t changed; they are still pale in daylight. The lights have gone, as inexplicably as they appeared. But just above the land, a little slip of white dust rises. It starts where the silos used to be, and crawls up as if it’s trying to draw their outline: a brushstroke memory, a ghost.

  We keep our eyes on the little wisp of white, and it grows. It swells in the air, turning, making the shape of the Luck, but soon it sinks to the ground. It crawls from the hills, spreading out around their base. We watch, not moving. There’s no need to panic. He promised us we would be safe.

  It’s beautiful. A pretty mist, a suspension, as granular as chalk. When it touches the lip of the place where the river was and begins to pour itself into the dry bed, we see that it is heavier than air. And it is spreading, moving down the river. Slithering towards the town. Towards us, or around.

  He promised us he knew.

  But then he told us to go inside.

  The instability. Before, when we fell, that must have been a tremor.

  All at once, there’s a scramble to get inside. Elbows, rib cages, the works.

  We shut the doors and windows, pull the blinds. We set the filters so they circulate the enclosed air. It’s quiet inside, apart from their hum. We all go into the courtyard, but nobody starts talking. We sit apart and look up at the sky instead of at each other. Through the dome the blue still looks perfect, untouchable, a cerulean ideal.

  We have our filters. We will be safe. We were promised.

  Gradually, the blue grows pale. The white encroaches across the dome, thickening to cloud. It darkens the room. We sit in the grey half-light and listen to each other breathing. Like animals in an eclipse, alert and waiting. Our mouths are full of our heartbeats. We let ourselves think of our children, if we have them. Fiona has her boy crushed to her chest, but he is looking up just like the rest of us.

  When the white swallows us, we forget about Sam. We forget about the past, about cause and effect, about survival and afterwards. There is only this empty moment.

  An artificial light flickers.

  Slowly, the daylight fades in. The blue creeps back into the vision. We open our mouths, we taste the air on our tongues. Nothing tastes like corpses. The cloud’s passed over us, and we’re still alive.

  We stand up.

  ‘That’s it, I guess,’ says Trent.

  Some of us lean against the wall, hoping it will straighten us. But the building itself seems to have shifted, acquired a slant.

  We go to the window in Carl and Jean’s unit, which has the best view of the park, and we pull aside the blinds and look out at the old part of town. The fog still covers the abandoned houses. It’s moving slowly, spreading across the park towards the sea.

  The fog is only as high as the roofs of our old houses, now; when it slides over them like a soft veil, the defunct TV aerials and two-dollar-shop weathervanes and the outlines of old Christmas displays are still visible above the white. When it sails through the park we can still see the false clock, the top half of the barn, almost the whole wheel and the points of the Big Thing’s confused remaining limbs. Without the ground the park is briefly transformed into something pretty, rising from a cloud almost, or a forgiving fall of snow. Roger fumbles for his camera.

  And then the whiteness shifts and pulses, moves off over the dunes and over dead water, and reveals the same old left-behind world. The park’s real face stares back at us, weathered and ugly. It’s the same place it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. We listen to our own breathing and the click of the images being made too late. It has passed over us in a whisper.

  We’re still alive. We’re safe. But something’s not quite right.

  We sniff the air. It smells filtered and interior. We count heads: twelve.

  ‘Ivy,’ says Roger, letting the camera hand dangle.

  ‘Sam,’ says Jean.

  There’s no answer. We’re thirsty. We walk back into the courtyard, looking for something to drink. And just as we are opening the fridge, the sun goes out again. The room goes dark. A black dark now, not a white one. The kind that coats the air with tar.

  We look up, legs electric with that animal dread.

  The second cloud doesn’t cover us, not like the first. It’s high up and fragmentary, composed entirely of crisp-edged pieces, so discrete that the light shines through in places. It looks like ash at first, like from a bushfire, but it isn’t falling. It’s moving sideways, self-propelled, as if it’s flying. We can’t make head or tail of it at first. And then we see it has many heads, and many tails. Roger makes a small noise in his throat.

  ‘Birds,’ says Quayde. His voice a wisp of air.

  ‘It can’t be,’ says Fiona.

  But he’s right. These particles of ash look just like crows. They’re wheeling together like crows. They’re shifting their wings in a pattern like

  it is crows, and we want to applaud but we’re afraid. Only Quayde’s not afraid. He’s laughing like he’s watching a cartoon. Maybe we should be too. It’s been such a long time since there were any birds that we have forgotten how to react, and we are shocked by their grace, the life in them soaring, and we feel the flex in our shoulders where we might one day move like they do, or might have long ago: the prescience of loss in our feet.

  Something about it isn’t right. Quayde wouldn’t remember crows that well, he’s too young. But we do. And we’re sure we’ve never seen them act all thick like this. It isn’t natural.

  The crows flicker and cluster. They form a black band in the sky, and it slowly cements to a rectangle, solid as a flag. Some disappear mid-air; others fall into thick strips, blocking out
all light. The disappearing leave their shapes behind as blank space, and it’s a shape we’ve seen before. Letters. A message, spelled out in the blue beyond.

  It says shhh.

  The crow-drones shatter and dissipate, and then we’re looking at nothing but air.

  It was only a trick. Nothing but air.

  Now we understand: this is not a false alarm at all. It isn’t a coincidence, or a mistake.

  This is a warning.

  42

  Sam returned to her body as if from far away. When she opened her eyes she saw Jill sleeping beside her, her face so close it was out of focus. Traces of some sickness clung to her mouth. She inhaled rancid air and, with it, memory.

  ‘The sea,’ said Sam, turning onto her back. Her head hurt. She waited for her eyes to focus. ‘Did that happen?’

  Jill was awake, after all. She leaned on one elbow, tucked her hair back with the other, nodded.

  ‘I found you in the road,’ said Jill. ‘You crashed your pushbike in front of the Foodtown.’

  Sam touched her forehead. There was a small bump; it felt rough and hurt to press, but her hand came away clean. ‘Where’s Ivy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Haven’t seen her. A lot of people left already.’

  Ed’s indignity returned then. His ordinary terror as he gathered his books and papers and accusations, and his calm as he drove away. She couldn’t have gone with him, even if she hadn’t known she had to stay. Sam tried to lift her head, felt her temples swell with a surge of blood.

  ‘What have I done?’ she said, and let her head fall back again.

  ‘It wasn’t you,’ Jill said. ‘It’s happening everywhere.’ She put a hand against Sam’s hipbone.

  Sam pulled away, rolled on her side. The blood was loose in her skull. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. She had her feet on the floor, tried to put her hands out, lift her weight. ‘You should go.’