Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  Sitting up he examined himself. Trapped under his toenails was more of the mysterious dirt and also under his manicured fingernails. He shuddered, repulsed. It looked like algae. Thinking back he tried to work out where he might have picked up the dust during the day. Nowhere. The itchy feeling of being unclean made his stomach lurch.

  He ran to the shower and scrubbed himself until his skin was wrinkly and bright red. Standing under the high-speed shower nozzle he let its luxurious pounding wash all misgivings from his mind. Nothing had meaning, just this, the immediacy of physical pleasure. He was okay. He wasn’t just going to survive; he was determined to flourish.

  His pager went off in the other room. Gavin stepped out of the shower and, still wet, walked into the bedroom. A trail of shiny footprints followed him, each one a clear outline of an alien claw with three toes.

  “She’s a beauty but she’s a bugger to drive. It’s all this semi-computerized bullshit, you have to be a fucking genius to operate some of the equipment nowadays.”

  Gavin’s main project manager, a Pacific Islander named Murray but nicknamed Shortstuff due to the fact that at five foot four he was the shortest Islander anyone had ever seen, gestured to the mammoth crane. The name Stella was painted in scarlet calligraphy on the side of the operating cabin.

  They were on Gavin’s third building site—a considerable tract of land that was to be a new housing development west of the Brisbane hills. They’d already cleared the site, despite some local protest over what had been described as an endangered wetland. “The Kellen wetlands? Give me a fucking break—a bloody swamp more like,” Gavin had scoffed before giving the order for several tons of sand to be dropped on the area before they leveled the ground.

  Relishing the memory, Gavin stood in a hard hat and shades looking up at the crane that arched into the blue like a beautiful giant steel praying mantis.

  “Let me have a go.”

  “Boss, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You know what the men are like about the boss—you’ve got to be superhuman, eh? Can’t have that illusion shattered.”

  “I’ll be all right. I’ve got my operator’s license and the model I used to operate is only a couple of generations before this one. The basics have got to be the same.”

  Ignoring Shortstuff’s warning he hoisted himself up into the cabin. “Mind if I ride the bitch for a couple of minutes?” he asked the operator, who was leaning across the controls, a cigarette stuck precariously to his lower lip.

  The operator threw his cigarette away, grinned shyly, then swapped seats with him. Gavin’s hands hovered over the miniature thicket of gear sticks and brakes almost as if he was saying grace. A giddy excitement overtook him. He glanced out the window—they were a long way up. He’d forgotten the exhilarating feeling of being the nerve center of this massive machine that could destroy as well as create. He reached for one of the handles.

  “Wrong one, boss. Try this to get her moving.” The operator shifted a lever and the crane began to slowly shift, the enormous tread rolling forward over the compacted earth.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Gavin hissed, determined not to lose face. He reached for one of the control sticks and the arm lifted, the oversized trowel swinging up from the ground. “I used to operate one like this about fifteen years ago. Jeez, it was a buzz,” he shouted over the roaring engine. The operator grinned, a gold tooth flashing at the edge of his mouth, but fearing more reprisals stayed silent.

  The crane moved out toward an open area of the site. There was a lone tree marring the skyline. Pushed over at an angle, it clung to the earth in mute protest. Gavin aimed the crane straight for it. “Let’s get rid of this fucker!”

  He pushed down the accelerator and the crane lurched forward, squashing bushes and gliding effortlessly over lumps of buried debris.

  Just before they reached the tree Gavin went to lift his hand but found that it was glued to the gear stick. Mystified, he struggled, his right hand clamped around the accelerator. The crane was picking up speed; the herculean arm swinging dangerously from side to side threatened to topple it.

  “I can’t move my hand!” Gavin screamed. He pulled with all his might but the hand remained stuck, as if the palm had somehow fused with the machine.

  The horizon jolted with the motion of the rolling tread, sky and ground threatening to collide with each new lurch. The operator, clutching at the side of the swaying cabin, stretched across and with an almighty shove managed to push Gavin’s hand off the accelerator. Reaching for the brake he pulled the crane to a slow rumbling halt against a slope. It groaned then leaned at a forty-five-degree angle.

  There was a violent stillness. Outside a flock of cockatoos flew up squawking with indignation. The two men, pinned by their seatbelts, contemplated the burnt-red diagonal of the earth. Gavin lifted his hand. In the center of his palm, branded into the skin, was the neat outline of a leaf—a simple fernlike frond ending with the delicate outline of a seed pod. Shaking visibly the property developer held out his arm.

  “Do you see that? Do you see it?” he asked the operator whose olive skin was still blanched with shock. He looked down at the hand blankly then back up at Gavin, his features settling into a rigid caution.

  “No, boss, I see nothing.”

  “What do you mean? Can’t you see that…that mark?”

  “Boss, I’m telling you, there’s nothing there.”

  Gavin looked back at his palm. The brand was entirely visible to him; he ran his fingers across it—unmistakable; a lifted ridge rough to the touch. He thrust his hand back under the operator’s nose. “Feel it.”

  “Feel what, boss?”

  The operator glanced anxiously across the site. In the distance he could see other workers running toward the crane. He wondered whether he should try to placate his employer in case he’d become suddenly mentally unstable.

  “Just feel it. I have to know.” Gavin’s voice was choked.

  Tentatively the crane operator reached out and, fearing there might be hidden homosexual tendencies in the burly man sitting next to him, very lightly touched his palm.

  “Feels totally normal to me. Maybe you just froze—you know, nerves. Happens to a lot of blokes when they haven’t driven for a long time. It’s only natural,” he said carefully.

  Gavin, normally such a controlled man, seemed to collapse into himself, his shoulders slumped, his face liquefying as if he was struggling not to cry.

  “Don’t worry about it, mate, we’re still upright, no harm done,” the operator added softly, the status dissolving between them.

  “Mr. Tetherhook to you!” Gavin jerked himself upright. “Mention a word of this to the others and you’re out of a job, understand?”

  The crane operator nodded curtly. A second later Shortstuff was at the door, helping Gavin down.

  Back in the safety of the Merc, the property developer pulled on his driving gloves and left them on all day, despite the warm temperature.

  Later that day, when at last the air began to cool and the evening sprinklers were throwing out their incessant rainbows, Gavin headed to the State Library. There, under the fluorescent lights, still wearing the gloves regardless of the severe itching at his wrists, Gavin scanned the shelves of the Natural Sciences section. It was the middle of the school exam period so the place was packed with groups of adolescents restlessly trying to focus while the air jumped palpably with pubescent hormones. Irritated by the bursts of giggling and deliberate rustling of paper Gavin fought the urge to scream.

  Finally he located a book on Australian flora. He scanned the room, looking for a place where he wouldn’t be spotted by anyone else. There was a single empty desk behind the Theology section. Once seated he stealthily slipped off his gloves. He kept his palm turned downward as he flicked through the pages with an uncomfortable sense of furtiveness, as if he were viewing pornography.

  He found a diagram of a leaf that vaguely resembled the strange foliage on his palm. Slowly, heart racin
g, he turned his hand over. Yes, it was still there: a perfect imprint. Hidden behind the raised book he held his palm against the illustration. It didn’t correspond with the image at all. Disheartened, he turned page after page until he came to a chapter on the prehistoric flora of Australia.

  Under the subheading Triassic Period of the Mesozoic was a drawing of a fern with conelike seeds attached to the end of its main leaf. It was called a Dicroidium. The imprint on his palm was very similar except the seed pods looked more jagged. Staring closely at his skin, Gavin realized each tiny section was a hexagon.

  He tore the page out and slipped it into his breast pocket, then put the gloves back on and exhaled. Somehow, by defining the image he felt he had regained a level of control.

  Outside he walked straight over to the Queensland Museum. It was a Thursday and he knew it would be open until eight. At reception he asked to be put through to a staff member who knew about paleontology. The receptionist, a round woman in her fifties squeezed into a plastic stool, her abundant flesh rippling out of the sleeves of her blouse, blushed as she recognized the property developer from the social pages she scanned religiously every morning.

  “Mr. Tetherhook,” she stammered. “Stanley Jervis is our resident paleontologist. I’ll call him immediately.”

  They both stared at the rough pencil sketch Gavin had made of the footprints. Stanley Jervis—a clean-cut individual who looked like a corporate version of a Scientologist—snorted suddenly in ridicule. “Saturday sent you, right?” he barked derisively.

  “Saturday who?”

  “Saturday Honeywell. Oh, come on, mate, this whole thing stinks of those madcap conspiracy theories of hers. You can’t believe the number of times I’ve had to sit through one of her dumb diatribes. She even implicated the museum in one of her crazy theories—something about repressing information about coastal erosion. We had to let her go after that. Now she’s one of those radical greenies.”

  “I don’t know any Saturday, and I certainly wouldn’t know an environmentalist. Do you know who I am?”

  “Should I?”

  “Yes, you fucking should. I sunk twenty thousand into the renovation of this building.”

  “Tetherhook…Gavin Tetherhook, the property developer?”

  Gavin nodded, staring him out. The paleontologist swallowed, his protruding Adam’s apple bobbing like a buoy.

  “I shouldn’t imagine property developers are usually given to these kinds of delusions….”

  “I’m not asking you to pass judgment. All I want is a description of what kind of animal, primordial or otherwise, could have made those prints.”

  Jervis looked at the sketch again, then at the illustration of the leaf.

  “This,” he pointed to the leaf, “looks like a Dicroidium, very common in this area during the Triassic period of the Mesozoic. As for the footprint, the fauna around at that time included three-toed theropods. They were bipedal nasty carnivorous dinosaurs with particularly sharp curved claws at the end of each toe.”

  The scratches on Gavin’s back tingled suddenly.

  “Any chance you could give me a contact number for this Saturday of yours?”

  “Sure, but I’m not sure she’s going to be pleased to hear from you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re the bloke that developed the Kellen wetlands, right?”

  Gavin nodded, remembering the wave of public condemnation he had incurred—an outrage he hadn’t calculated into the overall costs of the development.

  “Saturday Honeywell ran the campaign to save them,” Stanley Jervis said a trifle smugly.

  Great, Gavin thought ruefully, funny how things come back to haunt us. He wondered if it was a side-effect of living a long life or one of ruthless ambition.

  Standing behind a glass partition, the radiologist watched the large feet covered by white nylon socks slowly disappear into the humming apparatus. Inside, the light filtered in at Gavin’s feet, but the tube he lay in was illuminated as well. The machine droned as the CAT scan edged its way slowly down his body and radio wave after radio wave painlessly and invisibly deciphered each section of his brain.

  Gavin attempted to distract himself with thoughts of the immediate future: the next meeting with Cathy; his legal position; making love with Amanda and the disturbing possibility of further emotional involvement. But he couldn’t keep his mind from the notion of cancer. Could he have a tumor? Surely not. The doctor didn’t think any of the symptoms indicated a brain tumor—there had been no headaches, no blurring of vision, just the infernal hallucinations. He had to be okay, he would be okay….

  The machine stopped suddenly and the radiologist’s voice came through a speaker, tinny and distant. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it, Mr. Tetherhook?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. You’ll be out in a nanosecond.”

  The bed he lay on slid forward smoothly. Gavin, hating the vulnerability of being prostrate, swung himself back onto his feet.

  “Now if you sit here for five minutes I’ll print out the results, but from what I could see on the screen everything looks absolutely normal.”

  Normal. He inadvertently glanced at his palm—the outline had faded slowly over a period of twelve hours and finally disappeared leaving nothing, not even a rash. Regardless of circumstances, Gavin had decided he would not go to a psychologist. A pragmatic man who had always regarded therapy as an indulgence for people who hadn’t grown up with priests, he was convinced that whatever was bombarding him with these visual and aural hallucinations was too real to be explained as a psychological reaction to his divorce. No, the CAT scan was the last physical check—and if anything else manifested he planned to take more radical action.

  The radiologist looked up from his screen.

  “Just as I thought, totally normal, both hemispheres showing absolutely no sign of lesions or tumors. I’ll have the scans sent over to your doctor in the next week, Mr. Tetherhook. By the way, I love that new building of yours, Bridgeport. It really is stunning.”

  Gavin stepped out of the hospital doors. Normal, I’m normal—the phrase ran through his head like a new marketing campaign. Gavin Tetherhook, property developer supreme, was recently vindicated in his fight for full control of the Bridgeport development after a long legal battle with his ex-wife Cathy Tetherhook. Gavin could see the headlines now, could see himself post-divorce: independent, handsome, healthy. Hell, he might even start the Pilates class Amanda had been nagging him about to combat the middle-age spread that had started to thicken around his hips. Yep, the vision of the yacht was coming back: himself on deck with his kids, but this time with wife number two—blond, groomed, but a good fifteen years younger than wife number one.

  His reverie was interrupted by his mobile vibrating with delicious intimacy against his thigh. He reached into his pocket and checked the number. Amanda again, as if she’d intuited his sudden change of heart. He almost answered, then changed his mind. Let her wait, he’d ring later that night.

  He reached the car, which he’d parked under a jacaranda tree. As he bent to pull open the door he felt an unexplained chill. The hairs prickled at the back of his neck. Resisting the immediate instinct to look behind him he ran his gaze across the ground. The car and the pavement surrounding it was enveloped in a bizarre shadow that seemed to have an emerald tinge to its darker parts. Gavin froze, his hand still on the door handle, trying to muster up the courage to look up. The shadow had the jagged outline of something vast, something organic…. It was wrong, terribly wrong.

  Clutching at his polyester jacket, desperately seeking comfort from the synthetic weave that caught at his fingernails, Gavin took a deep breath and looked up.

  The jacaranda tree was small—there was no way it could be casting a shadow of such magnitude. His heart suddenly racing Gavin leaped into the Merc and sped off. He bent over the wheel, eyes glued to the road as the car swallowed the tarmac faster and faster. For one horrific moment he thought the shad
ow had followed him like a massive hovering bird but just then the car drove into sunlight. It flooded the plush interior like sudden comfort. Three blocks later Gavin pulled to the side of the road and wept.

  “She’s a live wire is old Saturday Honeywell, that’s for sure. But she’s the best man for the job, there’s not a paleobotanist in the country that can match her expertise.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Gavin could tell that his colleague—a civil servant in the Ministry of Planning and Environment who specialized in land clearance and contra-deals with corrupt developers such as Gavin—was wondering what the hell a notorious antienvironmentalist like himself wanted with a radical botanist.

  “Found something, have you? ’Cause if it’s of national significance you’re gonna have to fess up. Times have changed, there’s a lot of green dollar now in native flora.”

  “Don’t worry, Jeff, I’m not hiding anything.” They laughed together and some of the tension crackling along the phone line dissipated. “It’s a private matter, nothing the ministry need worry about. By the way, how is that charity of yours getting along?”

  After Gavin put the phone down he made a note to donate a couple of thousand dollars to the Barrier Reef Foundation—unspoken barter for the ministry to leave him alone for a few more months.

  Saturday Honeywell’s phone number stared up at him, her name round in his mouth. Wishing for the impossible he evoked an image of a svelte scientist with her hair neatly scraped back, indicating a pragmatism he anticipated would anchor his fears forever rather than the typical ratbag environmentalists he was used to dealing with.