Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  But, wait. Wait, Slim. The breasts on this artificial adult female body are pale white and saggy and . . . and . . . and . . .

  ‘Oh my God,’ Caitlyn gasps. She unslings her faulty camera from her left shoulder and, in a kind of trance, snaps several photographs of the room.

  ‘It’s real,’ she says. ‘They’re fucking real, Eli.’

  Snap. The camera’s flash pops, too bright for such a dark room. It stuns my eyes but it lights up the room too. Snap, she goes again. And this time my eyes adjust enough to take the whole room in. Not platypus. Not eel. The glass boxes are filled with human limbs. Ten, fifteen glass boxes across the shelves lining the walls. A human hand floating in a gold-copper-coloured formaldehyde solution. A human foot floating in glass. A forearm with no hand attached to it. A calf sawn neatly at the ankle so it looks like a leg of butcher-cut ham. Snap. The faulty and too-bright camera flash illuminates the medical table and Caitlyn vomits where she stands because the body on the table is a composite of uneven limbs, all frozen in time. Plastinates. Impregnated with a plastic solvent. Bathed in a liquid polymer. Cured and hardened in this room that smells like a hospital.

  ‘What the fuck is going on here, Eli?’ Caitlyn shudders.

  I take her flashlight from her hand and run it over the body on the medical table. Epoxy resin covers the limbs so they shine in light, resemble the body parts of a waxwork. Each limb is disconnected from the other. Feet placed against shins and thighs but not fully attached. Arms placed beside shoulder joints but not connected. It’s like we’ve walked into some macabre problem-solving game tasking children to fashion a full human body from a toy box of plastinates. The flashlight runs along the body. Legs. Belly. Breasts. And the head of a woman who was smiling beside fake flowers in a shopping mall family portrait on page 3 of today’s Courier-Mail. It’s the plastinate head of Regina Penn.

  By the medical table is a metal tray on rollers holding a large white plastic tub filled with a toxic-smelling liquid, another kind of clear preservation fluid. I take two cautious steps to this bucket and peer inside to find the head of Regina’s husband, Glenn, staring up at me.

  I hand Caitlyn the flashlight and I run out the door of this fever room, raising the axe that I plunge hard into the locked white door on the other side of the hall.

  ‘Eli, slow down!’ Caitlyn screams.

  But I can’t slow down. I can’t, Slim. My arms are heavy and tired and I’m exhausted, slowed by fatigue but energised at the same time by shock and dread and curiosity.

  I swing the axe again and it shatters the door at its lock. Kick, stomp, bash, stomp. Open.

  I stand panting in the room’s entryway. Caitlyn brushes my right shoulder as she enters the room and runs the small flashlight across this space in a one-eighty-degree arc. The room smells of harsh and cooked plastics. The room smells of work and disinfectant and formaldehyde. No medical table in the centre of the room. But more workbenches and more shelves lining the walls. Caitlyn’s light falls upon the workbenches and there is a collection of tools spread across the benches: cutting tools, scraping tools, moulding tools, hammers and saws, dark hardware for dark work. More tools spill from an old black leather bag, resting on its side, like a bookie’s tote bag. Beside the black bag is a collection of smaller specimen jars. These jars are the size of Vegemite jars or peanut butter jars. I approach these small jars.

  ‘Can I use the flashlight?’ I ask.

  I bring the light close, I lift a random jar from the group of ten or so all filled with preservation fluid. There is a label made from torn masking tape fixed to the yellow lid of the jar. I run the light across the label, written in a rough cursive: Male, 24, L ear. I hold the jar into the light to inspect a twenty-four-year-old man’s left ear floating in fluid.

  I hold a second jar up.

  Male, 41, R thumb.

  I run the flashlight over the masking tape labels on the jars.

  Male, 37, R hallux.

  I raise the glass up to my eyes to see a floating severed big toe.

  Male, 34, R ring finger.

  I scan six more jars and settle the flashlight on one last jar.

  Male, 13, R index.

  I hold this jar up. The light of Caitlyn’s torch makes the preservation fluid shine like a golden sea. And inside this golden sea is a pale right forefinger that reminds me of home because there is a freckle on the middle knuckle of it that reminds me of the freckle Slim’s girl, Irene, had high up on her inner left thigh, that freckle of hers that became something sacred in Slim’s mind way down in the hole. Sounds crazy, Slim, I said, but I have a freckle here on the middle knuckle of my right forefinger and I have this feeling inside me that this freckle brings me luck. My lucky freckle, Slim. My silly sacred freckle.

  ‘What is it?’ Caitlyn asks.

  ‘It’s my . . .’ I can’t finish the sentence. I can’t say it aloud because I’m not sure this is real. ‘It’s . . . mine.’

  ‘This is insane, Eli,’ Caitlyn says. ‘We have to get outta here.’

  I shine the flashlight to the shelves above me. I’m steeled now because I’m whole and because this is a dream. I’m dreaming this. This nightmare is fantasy.

  So, of course, there are human heads lining the shelves. Faces of small-time criminals. Plastinates. The grotesque plastinated heads of small-time and big-time criminals. Trophies, maybe. Research tools, more likely. Black hair and brown hair and blond. A man with a moustache. A Pacific Islander man. Men with puffy lips and damaged faces where they’ve been beaten, tortured. I’m dizzied by these faces. Sickened and frenzied.

  ‘Eli, let’s go,’ Caitlyn says.

  But one head keeps me still. One face keeps me frozen. The flashlight finds it at the end of a shelf above me. And I know immediately I am standing inside a moment of trauma. The trauma is in me and the trauma that will happen has already happened. But the face makes me move. This face I love.

  I reach for the black bag on the bench, tip it upside down and the tools inside it clatter against the concrete floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Caitlyn asks.

  I reach my right arm high up on the shelf above me.

  ‘We’re gonna need this one,’ I say.

  ‘What for?’ she asks, turning her eyes away from me, outwardly repulsed.

  ‘For the end of Tytus Broz.’

  *

  Axe in my hand. Black leather tote bag over my shoulder. I’m shuffling behind Caitlyn as we scurry back down the hall. Hope in our hearts. Hearts in our throats.

  ‘Wait,’ I say. I stop on the spot. ‘What about the door at the end?’

  ‘Let the cops open that one,’ Caitlyn says. ‘We’ve seen enough.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Bevan,’ I say.

  I turn and run back towards the last locked door at the end of the corridor, heaving the axe over my shoulder. This is what a good man does, Slim. Good men are brash and brave and fly by the seat of their pants that are held up by suspenders made of choice. This is my choice, Slim. Do what is right, not what is easy. Crack. The axe drives into the final door. Do what is human. August would do this. Crack. Lyle would have done this. Crack. Dad would do this. Crack.

  The good-bad men in my life helping me swing this rusty axe. The doorknob falls off and the splintered door pops open.

  I push it wider, stand in the doorway as it swings to a right angle. Caitlyn’s feeble light is waving behind me, beaming over my right shoulder to settle on a pair of blue eyes. An eight-year-old boy named Bevan Penn. Short dusty brown hair. Dirt over his face. Caitlyn steadies her light on the boy and the scene becomes clearer. The boy stands in an empty room with a concrete floor and concrete walls like the other rooms. But there are no workbenches or shelves in this room. There is only a cushioned stool. And upon this stool is a red telephone and the boy holds the red telephone’s handset to his ear. Confusion over his face. Fear, too. But also something else. Knowing.

  He holds the handset out to me. He wants me to
take it. I shake my head.

  ‘Bevan, we’re gonna get you outta here,’ I say.

  The boy nods. He drops his head and weeps. He’s lost his mind down here. He holds the handset up to me again. I walk closer to him, grip the handset tentatively. I bring the handset to my right ear.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Eli,’ says the voice down the phone line.

  That same voice from last time. The voice of a man. A real man type man. Deep and raspy, weary maybe.

  ‘Hi.’

  Caitlyn watches me, stunned. I turn away from her. Turn my eyes to the boy, Bevan Penn, watching me, expressionless.

  ‘It’s me, Eli,’ the man says. ‘It’s Gus.’

  ‘How’d you find me down here?’

  ‘I dialled the number for Eli Bell,’ he says. ‘I dialled 77—’

  ‘I know the number,’ I say, cutting him off. ‘773 8173.’

  ‘That’s right, Eli.’

  ‘I know this isn’t real,’ I say.

  ‘Sssshhhhh,’ the man says. ‘She already thinks you’re crazy enough.’

  ‘I know you’re just the voice in my head,’ I say. ‘You’re a figment of my imagination. I use you to escape from moments of great trauma.’

  ‘Escape?’ the man echoes. ‘What, like Slim over the Boggo Road walls? Escape from yourself, Eli, do ya, like the Houdini of your own mind?’

  ‘773 8173,’ I say. ‘That’s just the number we’d tap into the calculator when we were kids. That’s just “Eli Bell” upside down and back to front.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ the man says. ‘Upside down and back to front, like the universe, hey Eli? You still got the axe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ the man says. ‘He’s coming, Eli.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He’s already here, Eli.’

  And then a fluorescent bar light fixed to the ceiling above us shimmers twice and flicks on. I drop the handset, let it hang from the cord. The whole underground hall is lit up now, ceiling lights buzzing to life from one main power source.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ whispers Caitlyn. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s Iwan Krol,’ I whisper.

  *

  It’s the flip-flops we hear first, the rubber thongs of a menacing Queenslander descending the concrete steps to this man-made hell bunker. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. Rubber on concrete. Walking down the hall now. The sound of busted doors swinging open. First door on the left. First on the right. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. The second door on the left swinging open, kicked at twice. A long silence. The sound of the second door on the right swinging open. A long creaking swing, the hinges busted. Another long silence. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. Rubber on concrete. Close now. Too close. My weak bones stiffen. My amateur heart frozen. My amateur mongrel lost to me now.

  Iwan Krol reaches the door to this room. The red telephone room. He stands in the entryway. Blue thongs. Light blue short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into dark blue shorts. He’s an elderly man now. But he’s still tall and muscular and sun-damaged. There is strength in those arms. A man who works a farm when he’s not sawing the limbs off small-time Queensland criminals who made the fatal mistake of meeting Tytus Broz. The silver hair that was once only creeping from his scalp into a ponytail has fully evacuated, along with his ponytail. His dark eyes. His twisted crazy eye smile that says he likes having three innocents cornered like this in a room beneath the earth.

  ‘Only one way out,’ he smiles.

  We’re standing in the farthest corner of the concrete room, Caitlyn and I forming a protective wedge around Bevan Penn, who huddles behind us. I’m not holding the axe any more because Bevan’s holding it, hiding it behind my back, as per my dubious plan to get us the fuck out of this nightmare.

  ‘We’re journalists from The Courier-Mail,’ Caitlyn says.

  We’re moving back, moving back, deeper into the corner until there’s no more corner left to move back into.

  ‘Our editor is fully aware of our whereabouts.’

  Iwan Krol nods. Weighs up the possibility of this. Stares into Caitlyn’s eyes.

  ‘What you meant to say was, “You were journalists from The Courier-Mail,”’ he says. ‘And if, by chance, your editor is indeed at that swanky do in town with my employer and he is indeed thinking about you down here beneath my employer’s lawn, then . . .’ – he shrugs, pulling a shining and long Bowie knife out from behind his pants – ‘I guess I better make this quick.’

  He marches forward like a heavyweight boxer leaving a blue corner at the sound of a bell. Predatory.

  I let him come closer. Closer. Closer. Three metres away. Two metres away.

  Half a metre from us.

  ‘Now,’ I say.

  And Caitlyn points her faulty camera at Iwan Krol’s face and clicks a blinding flash. The predator turns his head, momentarily stunned, still recalibrating his eyesight as the axe that is now in my hands takes an achingly long arcing journey towards his body. I’m aiming for his torso but the camera flash is so bright it stuns me too, and my aim is skewed. The rusty axe blade misses his chest and his belly and his waist completely but it finds flesh at the end of its journey, lodges into the mid-dorsal area of his left foot. The axe blade cuts clean through the foot and his stupid fucking blue flip-flop and digs into concrete. He looks down at his foot, transfixed by the scene. We’re transfixed by it too. Curiously, he doesn’t howl in agony. He studies his foot the way a brontosaurus might have studied fire. He raises his left leg and the ankle end of his foot raises in the air with it but all five toes stay planted to the concrete. Five grubby toes resting on a cut cake of rubber flip-flop.

  His eyes and my eyes move at once from his foot to meet on the same eye line. Rage fills his face. Red death. The predator. The reaper.

  ‘Run!’ I scream.

  Iwan Krol swings his Bowie knife swiftly at my neck but I’m swift too. I’m Parramatta Eels halfback Peter Sterling, ducking and weaving under a swinging arm from a Canterbury Bulldogs prop. The heavy black leather tool bag tucked under my left shoulder is now my old leather football. I duck and step left as Caitlyn and Bevan Penn run right and we meet at the door of this dark and evil place.

  ‘Go!’ I scream.

  Bevan runs in front, then Caitlyn, then me.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ I scream.

  Sprinting. Sprinting. Past the open doors to these sick rooms, these Frankenstein rooms with the real and fake body parts, these underground dens of design where madness and mongrel take hold because in the ground we’re that much closer to hell. Sprinting. Sprinting. To the stairs that go up to life. To the stairs that go up to a future with me in it. First step, second step, third step. I turn around as I climb the stairs and the last I see of Tytus Broz’s secret underground play space is a Polish-Queensland psychopath named Iwan Krol limping down the concrete hall painting a trail of blood with his axe-cut left foot. The blood is burgundy.

  *

  The tyres on the Ford Meteor screech around the corner from Countess Street into Roma Street. Caitlyn shifts gears with her left hand and turns the wheel in sharp, deliberate jolts, slams the accelerator into and out of bends. Something deep in her eyes. Trauma, maybe. The magnitude of the scoop, maybe. Which reminds me of work. Which reminds me of Brian Robertson.

  The face on the clock on the Brisbane City Hall clock tower is the same silver colour as the full moon. The face on the clock says it’s 7.35 p.m. and I’ve missed my deadline for tomorrow’s paper. I see visions of Brian Robertson in his office bending bars of steel in anger as he curses my name for not filing twenty measly centimetres of fawning colour about the glories of a Queensland Champion named Tytus Broz.

  I find Bevan Penn in the reflection in the rearview mirror. He sits in the back seat. He stares out his window, stares up at that full moon. He hasn’t said a word since our car tyres left a cloud of gravel dust to blow on that sprawling jacaranda in Bellbowrie. Maybe he never will say a word again. Some things can’t be put into words.
<
br />   ‘Nowhere to park,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Nowhere to fucking park.’

  The central CBD gutters of Adelaide Street are lined with cars.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Caitlyn says.

  She yanks on the steering wheel hard. The Ford cuts across Adelaide Street and bounces hard up a kerb into King George Square, the central meeting point of the city of Brisbane, a paved square of manicured lawns and military statues and a rectangular fountain kids piss in when they’ve drunk too much lemonade at the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

  Caitlyn slams on the brakes directly outside the Brisbane City Hall entry doors.

  A young male City Hall security guard rushes to the car. Caitlyn winds her window down in expectation.

  ‘You can’t park here,’ the security guard says, dumbstruck, clearly disturbed by this unexpected threat to the hall’s security.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Call the police. Tell them Bevan Penn is in my car. I won’t be moving until they get here.’

  Caitlyn winds up her window and the security guard fumbles for the two-way radio on his belt.

  I nod at Caitlyn.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I say.

  She gives a half-smile.

  ‘I’ll keep this guy distracted,’ she says. ‘Good luck, Eli Bell.’

  The security guard barks into his transceiver. I slip out of the car and scurry in the opposite direction from City Hall, past the water fountain and across King George Square, then I double back, taking a wide and clandestine angle to the hall’s grand entry door, behind the security guard who is busy shouting at Caitlyn through her closed car window. There’s a welcome desk inside the hall. A bright, beaming Indian woman on the desk.