Plato's Cave

by Russell Proctor

  "All right."

  The truly marvellous thing was that by the time I had finished, Joanna had produced coffee and we were sitting together on the sofa and I felt a lot better, if no more enlightened. The main reason for this was that Joanna, besides being drop-dead lovely and apparently well-off financially, was also a very good listener, even if she didn't give the appearance of total belief. Apart from making the coffee (which was extremely good coffee), she sat there in silence and at least acted as if she was interested. I also felt better explaining things to someone.

  I finished my tale with the disposal of the second sausage, which had joined the first down the garbage disposal before I had left to catch the 305 bus to Joanna's side of town.

  Joanna was now sitting with her feet up on the chair, her knees tucked under her chin, hands wrapped around her ankles, holding her skirt close. I liked the look of the silver bangle on her right wrist, a kind of snaky thing with runic sort of symbols on it. I made a mental note:

  MEMO: Remember to ask Joanna where she got her bangle.

  I took another sip of coffee as a full stop to the end of my story and waited. I had no doubt that Joanna had assumed charge of the situation. Normally, that would have irritated me, but not now. Another interesting thing about her character, I guess. There had to be something wrong with her, I thought. She was too bloody perfect.

  "Who got the paper this morning?" she asked. From the tone of her voice I could imagine her pulling out a Meerschaum pipe and deerstalker hat. Perhaps she believed me, perhaps not. Whatever, at least she wasn't showing me the door.

  "Heather," I said. "But she didn't do it."

  "How can you be sure? She's your only suspect. She could have planted the sausage."

  "The first one she could have," I said. "But not the second. That appeared after she left."

  "Whoever it was must have accomplices at the paper. You saw the whole paper, you said, not just the clipping?"

  The interrogation went on for some time, but I didn't mind. Joanna was helping, even though we could not solve the mystery. At least two minds were working on it now.

  After a while I began hoping Joanna would mention something about food as well as the coffee. My stomach had decided lunch was a good idea, and who was I to argue? The thought flashed through my mind that perhaps I should ask Joanna to lunch as a sort of compensation for the trouble I had put her to. Fortunately, something happened before my conscience could force me to make this uncharacteristically social step.

  Joanna broke off from her questioning and stared down at her coffee cup. She put three fingers into it and pulled out a pork sausage.

  The end of the sausage dripped with coffee. We both stared at it for a moment, then Joanna squealed (ha! I knew there was something: she squeals like a little girl) and dropped the sausage.

  It lay on the living room floor, writhing in that same way the first one had done in my vanity basin. Then it stopped.

  "See?" I said. "Happens to me all the time."

  I was feeling really good now. I had a witness.

  Joanna was marvellous. Apart from that one little squeal, for which I have long ago forgiven her, she did not lose control of the situation.

  "This," she said, "is not going down the garbage disposal. It's similar to the others you've seen?"

  "As far as I'm aware, it could be the same one. But then, if you've seen one pork sausage..."

  I stopped before stating the obvious.

  ***

  Time passed. Joanna and I stood together, united, at the desk of Bob Kirke, the Editor of that ridiculous scandal sheet The Trumpet. He was loud, with unsightly sweat marks under his armpits and a chain-smoking habit that would bring joy to a cardiologist.

  "I'm busy," he said without looking up, as we stood at the door to his office.

  "Hello, Bob," said Joanna, but there was no warmth in her voice.

  He noticed us then, sighed inwardly, and gave a small shrug.

  "Joanna Clifford," he said. "What can I do for you?" At least, those are the words he used. His tone implied that anything that even approached asking for a favour would be met with a stern refusal.

  I figured if you were that bad-tempered at this hour of the morning, you needed to find another job.

  "This is Emily Branwell," said Joanna. "She found this in her paper this morning." And she placed the clipping from the paper on Bob's desk.

  We waited while he read it.

  "Good one," he chuckled. "Who did this?"

  "We don't know," I replied.

  "Says here I'm going to choke on an egg sandwich. And I'll meet some stranger or something."

  Joanna nodded. "Could someone have printed a fake issue of the paper?"

  Bob shook his head. "No way. Are there more like this?"

  "Just that single copy as far as we know," I said, determined to enter the conversation somehow.

  He looked at me suspiciously, as if trying to decide if I was some sort of joke myself. After a moment he slid the clipping back across the desk.

  "I wouldn't have a clue," he said. "Nothing to do with me. Looks like someone's just trying to be funny." As if to emphasise his point, he gave another small chuckle.

  "I don't appreciate anyone trying to mock my column," persisted Joanna.

  "Mock your column?" His phone rang. Bob spun around on his chair and lifted the receiver. "No one has to mock your column," he continued. "It's a crock of shit anyway."

  "Enjoy your sandwich," I said as we left his office, since Joanna seemed unable to find the right words for a moment.

  But she wasn't finished at the paper. She had other friends there, among the journalists and secretaries. None of them had seen any bogus copies of the day's edition, however, nor did they know of any clandestine tampering with the print run.

  We left the building and went back to her car.

  I was almost prepared to drop the whole thing. An unlikely notion entered my head that all this was an elaborate global conspiracy designed to give me an excuse not to finish my Thackeray essay, but I knew that was mere paranoia. Unfortunately.

  Joanna asked me what I wanted to do. I was keen to pursue investigations, since my mind still seethed with questions. What was going on? Why were sausages randomly appearing? Why sausages? Why pork ones? What did the fake horoscope have to do with it? Why me?

  Joanna said that the answers to these questions existed, but we would have to wait for them. Being a Leo, she added, I was by nature prone to regarding myself as more important than others. I replied that since I seemed to be the only person affected by these things, that was a fairly understandable point of view, no matter what star sign you were. All the sausages appeared in my presence, I added. Had I become some sort of meat magnet?

  "A meat magnet?" she asked. "That's an interesting way of looking at it."

  She laughed.

  I was glad she did. We might have started arguing otherwise. I had this feeling that Joanna was going to become a good friend. She was taking this whole thing rather well. I was a little more hysterical but hey, that's just me. Joanna dropped me off at my home and told me to let her know if any other mysterious things happened. I said okay, but I hoped nothing would. We swapped phone numbers.

  I was a little cautious as I opened the door. I half expected to see pork sausages filling the hall.

  But there was nothing.

  I mean that literally. There was nothing. The house was empty. No furniture. No carpet. No light fittings. Bare boards throughout the entire place. Absolutely nothing.

  Even the paint was gone from the walls.

  All in all, not a good day.

  ***

  My bum hurt.

  After sitting on bare wooden boards (see above description of empty house) for several hours, pondering the infinite mysteries of the universe and having a bit of a cry about half way through, the only conclusion I had arrived at was that my bum hurt.

  It was the only thing I was sure about. That, and the fact th
at I had absolutely nothing left in the world apart from my clothes and the $4004.65 that I had sensibly taken with me when I went to see Joanna.

  Bruno had been outside, thank goodness, and hadn't vanished with everything else. I patted him absent-mindedly as he alternately licked his paws and stared around at the stripped house. I thought I could detect a rebuke in his expression. Never mind the furniture, he seemed to say, my toy mouse is missing. What are you going to do about that? I wished I had his purely feline priorities.

  My life sucked. Jack, the sausages, and now this. Heather was going to be pissed. The landlord was really going to be pissed. How could I possibly explain this to anyone?

  ME: Sorry, I went out and when I came back the interior of the house was gone.

  ANYONE: Oh that's all right, Emily, these things happen. Here, have a chocolate biscuit.

  That was the problem. Apparently, these things did happen. But why were they happening to me?

  My computer was gone, of course. I could see the ends of the wires where the plug had been attached on the wall. Whatever had cleaned the house out had stopped at the inside. I would have phoned Joanna straight away, only for some strange reason my mobile’s battery had died. I had to go to a public phone to call her now and my body was not yet capable of that much physical action. Besides, I had this hesitation about calling Joanna again so soon. One mysterious unexplained phenomenon per day was enough for a new acquaintance. Like anybody, I could be a nuisance occasionally, but I didn't want to be a persistent one.

  The kitchen and bathroom were a mess: taps, sinks and bath had all gone, with water spraying from the severed pipes. I had rushed outside and turned off the water main. It was when I got back to the kitchen I noticed that not everything in the house had vanished.

  Mike was still there.

  In his pot. On his saucer.

  Surrounded by the empty house and the water.

  Strange...

  The water had not been pouring out for very long. There had been a couple of minutes while I stood in a state of shock looking at the nothing that filled the house, then the mad dash out into the garden to find the water main: maybe five minutes in all. The water heater was not yet empty. I still had enough wits about me, as I sat there getting a sore bum, to conclude that whatever had happened to the house had happened just as I arrived home. Perhaps in the few seconds I had stood outside fumbling for my key.

  I hadn't heard anything. I hadn't seen anything. But the water clue told me that the Great Removal had taken place as I entered the house. That was the scariest thing of all. Had I been a few seconds earlier, would I have vanished too? Or did the whole thing happen because I arrived? It was the finest example of the chicken/egg conundrum I'd ever encountered.

  I seemed to be the focus of whatever was going on. And I hadn't even asked.

  I stood up and paced the bare rooms. My bedroom was the tidiest it had ever been. My books were gone, my bed (my lovely, precious bed!), my clothes, my guitar, my CDs. I had collected cat statues all my life: I had about a hundred of them, ceramic, wooden, cloth, metal – they were all gone, as was the glass-fronted cabinet in which they were displayed. My life had been reduced to a bare wooden cube. It all looked so sad and forlorn. I couldn't stand it any longer. Making sure that Bruno had the run of the back garden, just in case whatever had stolen the house came back for more, I headed out the gate and down the street to the garage on the corner where there was a public phone.

  I never reached it.

  About twenty metres before the garage, I heard a scream of brakes and the unmistakable sound of two large metal objects colliding. I was so used to sudden occurrences by then I was almost tempted not to turn round. But I had to know just how close I had come to being killed. Besides, deep down was the thought that maybe someone else had been. So I looked.

  Two cars – a Mazda hatchback and one of those urban four-wheel drives popular among the asset-rich who never actually take their off-road vehicles off-road – had met in a nose-to-tail sort of way that looked expensive. A young man stepped out of the Mazda and looked at the back of his car. The man in the four-wheel drive stared up at the sky. I wondered for a moment if he was injured, you know, broken neck type of thing, but he was gazing fixedly upwards so intently that despite the vehicular carnage I felt obliged to follow his gaze.

  It didn't take more than a second to find out what he was staring at.

  The sky had been ripped apart. Right down the centre was a black tear, through which the stars were shining. The sun was off to the right, thermonuclearising just as brightly as always, apparently in total ignorance of the fact that night was breaking through right beside it. The tear was jagged, like someone had taken both sides of the sky and given a good pull.

  "Look what you did to my car!" the Mazda driver complained.

  "Look at that!" the other driver yelled.

  The Mazda driver did. He stopped complaining and started frowning. With both of them looking up I surreptitiously kicked into the gutter the two sausages that had appeared on the footpath. Wouldn't want anyone slipping on them.

  "You guys ok?" I asked as nonchalantly as one can while the sky is being destroyed. Hey, someone may as well stay calm in a crisis, and I didn't know anyone else I could trust at that moment. Besides, it was just a tear. It wasn't as if actual bits of sky were falling on top of us. Now that would have been scary.

  "Look at that!" the drivers said in unison, one in A flat, the other a third higher. It sounded harmonious, despite the strident overtones.

  Several other people had by now appeared and were craning their necks at the tear, mouths open. I was the only person not walking around like a sideshow clown.

  The four-wheel driver had recovered sufficiently to apologise to the man driving the Mazda. "Sorry, mate," he said, "I was looking at that and I didn't see you."

  The Mazda driver didn't appear to hear him. His car was damaged quite badly. The rear fender was pushed in, as was the panel below the hatchback. Broken plastic from the tail-lights littered the road, orange and red jewels on the bitumen. The four-wheeler had a bull-bar, which had prevented a lot of damage: a few scratches maybe.

  People were starting to talk quite loudly now, pointing at the sky like what was up there wasn't bloody obvious, or shading their eyes with their hands – a far more intelligent gesture. More people were emerging along the street. I guess the same thing was happening all over the city, maybe all over the country.

  Noises, rising in volume as more people joined in, a symphony of street sounds around a theme of uncertainty:

  - a police siren wailing away a few blocks off;

  - dogs barking;

  - mobile phones starting to ring in a dozen pockets at once;

  - oohs and ahhs;

  and the endless repetition of "What is that?"

  I looked up the street and noticed Heather, wheeling her bike along, the back tyre flapping flatly. She, like everyone else, was staring up at the sky. She almost bumped into me. I put one hand on her handlebars and grinned.

  "How's your day been?" I asked.

  She noticed me, and I could tell she was a little scared. And who could blame her? I must have been quite a sight by then.

  "Emily..." she began, and then stopped.

  "You want to know what's going on," I filled in. "I don't know." I pointed to her bike. "Got a flat tyre, I see."

  She frowned, wrinkling that broad brow of hers as she continued to look at the gash in the wide blue yonder. I glanced up at it for the first time in five minutes. It was still there. I could not explain why, but I was feeling little surprise about the whole event. It seemed almost natural, given the other things that had happened to me that morning. I was reaching a sort of surprise surfeit. Any psychologists among you can debate whether or not there is such a thing.

  "Heather," I said, tapping her on the shoulder.

  She glanced at me. "What?"

  "You got a flat tyre."

  "Yes. Coming back fr
om the refuge. Must have been a nail."

  So whoever had written those predictions in the paper had been accurate with more than just me.

  "When did it happen?"

  She was looking at the sky again.

  "Heather," I said: louder, slower. "When did the flat tyre happen?"

  "Emily, the sky..."

  Someone bumped into me from behind. The street was packed now. There must have been a hundred people walking around. Cars had stopped and quite a traffic jam was in progress. The volume of noise began to peak. The crowd became edgy as a distinct wedge of fear started to drive its way through it.

  Then, to everyone's infinite relief, the tear started to repair itself. It contracted, the ends down near the horizon creeping gradually towards the zenith. The middle part, which had initially looked a couple of centimetres wide from the ground, became narrower. I looked steadily upwards then, and in five minutes the tear had shrunk to a hole, which slowly closed over and everything was nice and blue again. A cloud drifted across the last bit of blackness before the final healing took place. I thought I caught a glimpse of a single star twinkling brightly just as the hole closed over, but maybe it was just my imagination. My eyes were starting to hurt by then, staring up at the bright sky for so long.

  The crowd's noise, which had died down during the disappearance, started up again. The ugly, scared mood had not subsided. For once, I agreed with it.

  I turned to Heather. "Let's go back to the house," I said. "You're going to love it."

  The unreality of it all had not yet sunk in. My words fell strangely from my mouth, as if my whole life had become a movie or a stage play, and I was watching this piece of theatre as an audience member, not an actor.

  (SCENE: The living room of EMILY's perfectly bare house. Stage right, HEATHER, sitting on the floor, with MIKE THE PLANT beside her. Stage left, EMILY, pacing back and forth, while BRUNO THE CAT sits stage centre and licks himself. He somehow presents the image of being the most in control of the four of them.)

  HEATHER: This is unbelievable.