Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Remember what it was called?’

  Lenny’s smile is slow but comprehensive. She missed it. Getting old, but it’s hard to keep up with the Millars of the world.

  ‘The estate where he grew up,’ says the reporter to a measured beat. ‘It was called Lonardi.’

  01

  You share your birthday with America. When it comes around a sixteenth time you are given a present by the doctors, the psychs. Permission to leave hospital, go home with David and Giselle.

  Home.

  Independence Day. The nurses clap, give you a cake.

  —

  You had been to their house before once or twice, family barbecues. A nice home, in-ground pool. They wheeled you in and Robert, the little bastard, looked disappointed to see you.

  For a long time you would get most of the attention. Your ongoing care. He was ten, and already calling Giselle mum. Made you vomit, but that was just hypocrisy in operation. Your brother was never part of your family, not really, so why begrudge him happiness when he found a new one?

  —

  The lounge room is solemn. Evening, past Robert’s bedtime, close to your own. You creep to the edge of the balcony and listen closely to everything they say. Empty chatter for two or three minutes and then they call your name.

  Crutches: you descend the stairs like a debutante and everyone stands to receive you. The invalid is then made comfortable while the pair of constables—a man, a woman—introduce themselves. Looking back, you see that they are green, young, but at the time they seem worldly and substantial.

  The accident report is in, lovingly compiled out of fragments and tyre marks, out of shards and tortured metal. They have come to tell you the finer details of The Event.

  —Do you remember anything about the accident?

  —No.

  —Your father was not at fault. His reactions probably saved your life.

  —Did my parents die instantly?

  Silence reigns. The constables exchange a look. The boy-police makes a decision and nods, tells you yes.

  Bullshit artist. You get off the precious sofa and crutch around the room, David explaining to the visitors that you need to keep your blood in circulation. You go to the broad windows that overlook the front and that is when you see.

  —

  He stands on the lawn staring upwards at God, looking peaceful as he smokes. He is handsome, maybe double your age but still not old. A freshness about him as though recently showered, as though he will always seem recently showered. All the days of his life he will be cidery like fresh-cut pine, something natural like that if you get up close.

  You want to. To have such arms encircle, nothing would ever get through.

  —

  The girl-cop rises, follows your gaze.

  —That’s a detective we work with. We’re giving him a lift.

  —He’s massive.

  She laughs, and something about it triggers knowledge, a knowing that she is in love with him. You say in a voice of plain instruction. Tell me his name. The adults exchange more looks but it’s a known fact that traumatised teens get leeway with regard to the strangeness of their ways.

  Him on the lawn—in that moment he is the world, replacing the previous version, the one in which mothers and fathers do not die instant.

  —

  —Carla, the officers have come a long way.

  Dave is right: the polite thing would be to resume your seat, your listening demeanour. But you don’t. You linger at the glass and say sorry, keep going.

  Rude kid. Might as well be chewing gum, listening with earphones on. The girl-cop speaks kindly but you already have distaste for her.

  —Have you been able to catch up with your studies?

  —Not really.

  —Well, you’ve got plenty of time. How old are you now?

  —Seventeen.

  Actually, she’s just turned sixteen supplies ever-helpful Giselle. The police nod with patient understanding. Getting scraped off the Monaro Highway can make a person vague about the finer details: name, age, reason for being.

  —

  Only, it isn’t being vague. It’s what you do your entire life.

  You are not seventeen—you only say that you are, feel that you are. You do the same thing at nine-slash-ten, at nineteen-slash-twenty, as though the time between now and next birthday is already foresworn, resigned in advance, handed over as sacrifice to allay a worse fate. The girl-cop asks what career path you’re thinking about.

  —I’m going to be a solicitor.

  The adults speak in response to this but you do not hear. In fact your life ambitions are changing in that very moment—alchemising, becoming something immutable but new.

  —

  The giant on the lawn puts out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe, sticks it behind his ear. Dark hair, dark skin. He is looking at the sky again, a philosopher, a warrior-poet: the aura of his honour is plain. They will not tell you his name but it does not matter because love is like malice, accident, lies coiled in your personal highway before you even get here.

  01

  They go to the cafe and save Lenny’s life. They could be friends on an outing. Lenny orders a flat white with a triple shot.

  ‘Tradie’s order,’ says Karen.

  ‘What do you think reporting is? It’s like plumbing, really.’ Only there’s way more shit. Lenny almost makes the addition but it’s not that kind of place: busy, bright with Saturday energy, tending to the genteel. Cultured cafenistas surround on all sides, but the cop does not look nervous. You could bug the room and all you’d get is storm-cell audio.

  Karen stares at the cups. Hers white, Lenny’s black. ‘Notice the chessboard back there?’

  Lenny nods. A Russian affair, Tsarist, turn of century. ‘He was partial to chess.’

  ‘Not at the end.’

  The journalist’s smile is bleak. ‘What a way to go.’

  Karen is fit, Adidas, not self-conscious. She reaches into her zip-safe pocket and places figurines on the table. Three of them, ornately carved, green rock veined with silver. An apparent mix of quartz and jade, two pawns and a bishop. ‘These belong to the board Koestler was killed with.’

  Lenny shakes her head, begging to differ. ‘The set in his study was Staunton. Oversized but generic.’ She leans in for a closer look. ‘This bloke looks Ming dynasty or something.’

  ‘Try Qing. The board and the pieces were set in calcite. What you’re looking at is three components of something called the Rievaulx Artifice.’

  ‘Um, you lost me at calcite.’

  ‘China, 1836, enter British nutbar from the RAS. That’s Royal Astronomical Society to you. When he’s not at home, he’s the third Earl of Rievaulx. Mates call him Percy.’

  ‘Let me get a pen.’

  ‘Not if you want me to keep talking. Percy’s on a quest to find a legendary meteor in the mountains outside Turpan. It’s supposed to be the size of a house, but when him and the packhorses show up it turns out to be the kind of thing you can carry. Stuff-up in translation.’

  ‘Is this fair dinkum?’

  ‘The Earl is cheesed off, right, so he gets back to Nanking and decides to snazz it up a bit—have the moonrock crafted into something more impressive.’

  ‘You mean, like a chess set?’

  ‘Yeah—but a posh one, something that celebrates its celestial origins. Perce decides the name pieces should be astronomers.’

  ‘The back-row heavies.’

  ‘Exactly, the knights and kings and rooks all commissioned to look like Copernicus, Galileo.’

  Lenny is doubtful all over again. ‘This guy looks like he never spent a day outside Shanghai.’

  ‘That’s Johannes Kepler you’re talking about. But yeah, Percy was mortified when he saw the finished article; the Chinese features didn’t do it for him. To cap it off, the Society’s fit to hang him for his little show of initiative, so Perce does the smart thing: flogs the set for half a tonne of opium and
goes into a new line of business.’

  ‘It always comes back to the heroin,’ says Lenny. ‘May I assume the set had a colourful career after that?’

  ‘Deserves its own book. If this Koestler one doesn’t pan out—’

  ‘Trust me, crime sells better than history.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure, Lenny. The Artifice is worth squillions. A black-market sale would fund the acquisitions program in this place for years.’

  ‘No wonder they bought you lunch.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t let slip we’ve got it. Particularly now that we’ve managed to lose a bloody piece. This guy’s partner.’ Karen motions at the mandarin bishop, the little Bercovitch. ‘Scully’s combing the tombs in Evidence.’

  ‘Scully?’

  ‘My guy in the Basement. Chess geek, having a nervous breakdown. I suppose it is the only extra-terrestrial chessboard in the history of the world.’

  Lenny reaches out to touch one of the pawns—lightly, as though the material is frangible, not kilned in a remote sun and hurled in her eventual direction at three hundred times the speed of sound. The journalist feels the strength of revelation but it’s nothing to do with meteors. ‘This is why

  Slane and Koestler were pals. Slane was his bloody importer.’

  Karen nods. Now they feel alone. ‘He smuggled Koestler’s stuff into the country. Who better?’

  ‘Except something went sour between them. A dispute over fees, maybe.’

  ‘Or not,’ says Karen. ‘Slane isn’t the killer.’

  ‘Then you’re back to square one.’

  ‘No—I’m not. I have the murder weapon.’

  ‘You always did,’ says Lenny. ‘More or less.’

  ‘Less. The board has meaning.’

  It’s regular show and tell: Karen reaches into her other pocket and takes out Codex One, folded to quarters. She unfurls the page with care and places it on the table.

  ‘Code,’ says Lenny, craning over the sea of notation.

  ‘Chess,’ says Karen. ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘You sound sure.’

  ‘We were meant to find it, so I’m guessing we’re meant to crack it.’ Karen taps a finger next to the paper’s edge. ‘This was hidden, tucked away inside the last thing Koestler ever wrote.’

  She wears it on her person, the vanilla book so pliable and precious. Karen produces and slides it into view, turns to the opening page. There are not many words but the exposure feels obscene.

  The Truth of the Position

  An extra-judicial review into the conviction of William Meath

  for the murder of Sophie Dance

  The pupils of Lenny’s eyes reduce like twin planets whose governing star has died. She leans back in her chair, adjusts a shawl that isn’t there. ‘What the hell is that.’

  ‘A smoking gun. It gives us who, it tells us why.’

  ‘Can I read it?’

  ‘Of course you can.’ Detective Millar closes the cover and repossesses, slides it back into her holster. ‘But only if you’re good.’

  OMEGA

  28

  Unusual winds force the pilot into a drastic roll, a grinding yaw they teach but never use. The ship careens through a hundred degrees of compass and is rewarded with a fresh alignment, another crossing of a coast they cannot see.

  Maybe this time.

  Listen hard / you hear the metal scream.

  —

  He is waved through at customs. In the hall of meetings, a driver who bears no sign.

  The inside of the limousine is lightless and freezing. The transit into the city is silent and effortless.

  —

  In another time he worked with a man who was shot through the head. Coma. After eight months he woke, became depressed. The internal life of his trance was preferable.

  He said, I want to be among skyscrapers again. The doctors puzzled, quizzed for elaboration. The shadow crew did everything. There was space, silence. You cannot imagine the precision.

  People felt sorry for him, for his family.

  —

  Regarding coma, the surgeons could not agree. One said Latin, another said Greek. Simon looked it up and discovered a meaning for the word, something to do with optics. An aberration that causes the image of an off-axis point to flare like a comet.

  He thought this definition wondrous, its source code unimportant.

  —

  He too wants only to be among skyscrapers. He enjoys their thoughtless grandeur, each planing its shape against the grey sky of nothing with a nightly metal adze.

  One day they will house all art, all culture. He likes that their lights do not extinguish.

  —

  He steps clear of the car’s sleek beauty and sees himself reflected in a wall of metal chrome. Simon makes for a coalition of blues, the suit one faction and the tie another, his tailored shirt a third.

  He looks very smart. If his mother were alive and present, she would tell him You look very smart.

  —

  He is perhaps that man in coma. Even now he might be lying in a persistent vegetative state in a hospital room in another dimension.

  Then again, he might be the aberration that makes the off-point of the axis flare like a comet.

  —

  He almost married. It was long ago, before he knew himself.

  She teased him about people, about not dealing with them. She had a T-shirt made for his birthday, Do Not Disturb.

  Probably she found the right one, had children. Good. She was too social.

  To be with him. She was too social to be with him.

  —

  Vivacious. That is the word that she was. Everybody liked her.

  She said, Come back to me. No—at first it was, Meet me, just meet me. The rest came later.

  He said, I did not make you happy. You are here because I left you and I’m the only one who did.

  —I’m here because I can’t stop thinking about you.

  —Yes. But the thing you think is this: he left me. And he’s the only one.

  —No.

  —It is about you. It is not about me.

  He felt the gulf at its greatest remove, two satellites stringing in the dark of space like lanterns minuscule, unrelated. The pressure of her soul as it clawed to leak through lovely eyes and bridge the distance. Infect him.

  —What have I done wrong.

  —Nothing.

  —Don’t you love me?

  He made an exception and looked into them. The rare blue of an obscure flag, a country that nearly killed him. When he was with her he was with the world; she was still what the world had made her. He could remember thinking that he loved her but she had not come to know herself. Or anything, really.

  —I am going to tell you what I can offer.

  —Whatever it is, I’ll take it.

  —That is true.

  He stood and walked away and did not look back.

  —

  His beautiful shoes prove noiseless on the nacreous marble. The foyer is a bold expression of nothingness, a high glass ceiling underwritten by steel. Away to the right is a desk of polished stone and the tiny figure of security. The guard watches him and says nothing, does nothing.

  —

  He uses a key to summon an elevator and ascend. The doors part to reveal a thin woman in dark-grey suit. She walks across the line of his vision, right to left like the flow of Arabic. Whenever he speaks Arabic he thinks about the culture that unmasked the number zero.

  The woman moves at constant speed speaking quiet Japanese. He thinks, I have just come from there. Simon contemplates the signals that she casts and receives, their transmission close to the perfection of instantaneity.

  One day people will move like signals. Not him, not her, but perhaps her direct descendant. The laws of physics are known to alter radically in the very cold and a culture will arise that unmasks that zero too.

  —

  The floor is partitioned by brief internal walls, panel
s that obscure his view in some directions and not in others. The panels are thin, made of glass, tinted like the floor. The blueprint amounts to a cryptic maze.

  The woman stands to face an internal surface that is different because sentient: living numerals in many columns, many colours. Quantities materialise only to fade. From time to time an entire rank surrenders structural integrity, digits that cascade in a suicidal rain.

  He hears his name and turns to see a man he knows about but has not met. A meeting of hands. Inside of him, the schism that takes place when he must be social.

  Eye contact with an excellent suit. The man’s features are crystal like his voice and possibly he puts himself through similar schisms to be what he is, do what he does.

  Simon would not be surprised. Simon takes the world as being wholly provisional. If you said to him, This man who shakes your hand is a hologram, and the sensation of flesh and blood is just a trick we have induced your mind to believ—

  —

  ‘How was your flight.’

  ‘Comfortable.’

  ‘Hard to imagine you otherwise.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘That’s nice of you to say.’

  ‘I don’t say it to be nice.’

  ‘I’ll rephrase: nice for me to hear. Beautiful, yes?’

  ‘You mean the view.’

  ‘The cliffs of the harbour are sandstone. All of it, built on sediment.’

  Simon thinks they will move away from the windows, infiltrate the maze. Instead they skirt the edge. A small round table is flanked by chairs that face the glass as though the city is a cinema. A canny ear detects cyclonic winds and he knows the building is twisting, a tensile frame that must warp to survive. There is no real aspect because the weather is too crazy.

  ‘Comfort is the issue.’ Simon makes no reply. He likes that the chairs do not face each other / he is sensitive to the folders on the table. ‘If I gave you a man—selected one—could you hurt him? I don’t mean physically.’

  ‘What then.’

  ‘Could you make him…uncomfortable.’