You think we're dancing? ... That's all we've ever done.

 

older/gbook/>>(in case of__)__//before&after ___my youtube__...
My novel 2004.. My novel 2006.. My novel 2008..

(diaryland) November 02, 2008 - 8:26 a.m.

Did I forget to tell you that I walked to the city from my house with Diane? Maybe I did. Well, in summary, it was a long way, and Diane got very, very slow and complainy for the last two hours.

It took five hours in all.

On to other things: this is the start of my November Novel.

Afterword: Part One

A big portion of my teenage years was haunted by an answering machine message left by my brother. My parents saved it and listened to it over and over again. I remember the words, and the inflections of the words, but they were not very revealing about his state of mind. By the time there was a power surge one night which wiped off this carefully saved message, in a way it wasn�t needed anymore because we knew what was said and how it was said and also how long it took.

It was only as long as it took to put your head in your hands and shake it six times in a bewildered way. My parents missed doing that around the answering machine after the power surge, but I would catch them doing it everywhere now and then after that; in the laundry, or one time when we went to Movieworld and I looked down on them from a ride.

The message said, �Mum and Dad, I�m sorry. I�m going to make a new life for myself in the 1870s.�

The thing that bothered my parents the most wasn�t that he was going back in time. I mean, that was a pretty intense thing to think about in itself. He was a physicist, though, so personally, I wouldn�t put it past him. There had not been a half-finished time machine in the shed for a number of months, but maybe it had been built in a lab at Melbourne University. If there was anyone who could figure out how to build a time machine, or invent an idea that told a wee curled up mysterious dimension how to swallow him and spit him out in the 1870s, it was him.

The fact that my brother chose to leave all the people who loved him (unless going to the 1870s was a code for something else) did bother my parents in a kind of way that any parent would feel, and I believe that�s why they put their heads in their hands and shook them six times every now and then.

But the thing that felt like the turn of the knife in the stomach wasn�t that either. It was the fact that he was choosing to go to the 1870s over living in the present day. What the fuck was there that was so fascinating about the 1870s? What would an award-winning physicist at the forefront of his field be wanting to do back then? There weren�t big piles of physics, and going back to that time just to pretend to invent all the physics we know about today seemed kind of not my brother�s style. I think he had more integrity than that. He was eleven years older than me, so I feel like I didn�t know him that well, but I doubt he�d go back in time to be fraudulent.

My parents would always look at a blank bit of wall and say, �Why would you choose this time? The gold rush was over. There�s prejudice against Asians. What would Bao want to do there? What�s the problem with now?� To go away to a time where bushrangers ruled the land and every day was to be in survival mode did not seem like a sensible time for my brother to live in, especially since he still got every item of his clothing picked off the floor, washed, ironed and folded, then put back into the drawers in his room. That is, before he disappeared.

We had only two leads. Three, if you count the answering machine message that got wiped off.

The second lead became more obvious the more we thought about it.

For a few months before my brother disappeared, he had spent a lot of time on the phone in his room to a very noisy man. You could hear it through the door. The man had a very strong American accent. My brother and this man would talk about things I could not understand. At the time, I thought it was physics stuff. I guess sometimes, it was. At other times, the noisy man would be screaming down the phone about �the correct way to get people�s support,� and my brother would say, �OK, OK,� as if he was trying to calm the noisy man down.

The clearest, and last, memory of my brother was of him standing in the hallway, looking overwhelmed. I think I would look like that too if I knew I was about to head on over into the 1870s and the likelihood of getting my laundry done by somebody else was uncertain.

The third lead happened many years later. I�d grown up, went to uni and became an audio archaeologist. This career path had a lot to do with my brother, come to think of it. During high school, every now and then, I would go into his room, which my parents had kept just the same as it had ever been. I think they had the faint hope that he would get sick of the 1870s and come back again some day. I guess that�s possible.

His room was very neat and pretty bare, except for a couple of posters with the periodic table and Einstein with his tongue poking out. The periodic table one had a phone number written on it in pencil. I decided to call it one day, but it was engaged. But then, I noticed how the poster was kind of wiggly when you looked at it side-on. It was blu-tacked to the wall and had sagged down a little bit over time. The edges of the poster had tiny waves in it.

I thought to myself, this poster has heard a lot. Maybe it�s absorbed all the phone calls my brother made before he disappeared and made them into records of sound. Paper vibrates when you speak near it, so perhaps it would get microscopic ridges on it. I had seen a similar idea once on the X Files, where there was this bowl that was being made near where Jesus was saying things, and it recorded his voice in the clay.

Several years later, that�s just what I did. I took all the special equipment I had developed home with me, and went up to his room. I took out the laser needle, calibrated it, and listened to the magnified sound of the poster.

It wasn�t anything helpful. It was either the sound of him humming along to a song on the radio, which I remember he tended to do, or the sound of him saying, �OK, OK,� over and over again, presumably speaking to the noisy man on the phone. I tried other parts of the room. A particular corner of the empty desk where I would see my brother propping up his chin on his elbow sometimes when I walked past yielded the most clear results, but still there wasn�t much to go on.

I then tried the phone my brother always used, which was the portable one in the kitchen, but it was impossible. I�ve had a difficult time getting sound out of hard plastics.

I went to my brother�s old lab at Melbourne University, which was somewhat close to the lab I now had, and ran my laser over all sorts of things. Most of them were other people�s stuff, it turned out, which was fair enough considering he had been gone for years. I think I might have caught my brother�s voice saying hi across a corridor from one particular test tube, but mostly it told a very compelling story of a spicy workplace romance which had nothing to do with it.

The real big break came about when I saw a reasonably small article in the free mx newspaper. I always read that on the way home in the train as well as marvelling at how the rough surface of the pages were prime for recording the audio happenings around it. I perpetually reminded myself never to say anything rude or secret around newspapers, just in case it got into a fellow audio archaeologist�s hands.

The article said that what was most probably a modern Duracell battery was found in an archaeological dig in the renovation of a backpackers in Adelaide�s CBD. It had originally been fairly hard to tell what it was, it was so corroded. In fact, the battery seemed so badly deteriorated that CSIRO scientists had determined beyond a doubt that this battery was well over a hundred years old.

As soon as I read that bit, my tummy turned over. I thought, hey, this has something to do with my brother. I went home, rang the uni and told them where I was off to. My parents said, �Don�t get lost and don�t go to the 1870s.� I promised them I wouldn�t. They were still pretty cut up about losing their only son, so understandably, they were unreasonably protective of their only daughter.

I still lived with them, rent free.

And so off I went, to Adelaide. I was given the rusty battery, and I turned it over in my hand. Yes, this had to be a clue. It looked like it needed help. Maybe it was a cry from the past, saying, I�m here. Look for my next clue. I�m stuck and I need your help.

I knew it wouldn�t work, but I steadied my shaky hands and carefully calibrated my laser needle. I ran it over the battery.

Nothing. Too corroded. Well, on the very rusty bits at one end I could hear quite distinctly the sound of a fart and a guy saying, �Oh, Dale, come on, man, not in this confined space.� The clarity of the recorded sound indicated it was from about a week ago.

I was ready for the hunt. I went down to the dig site at the backpackers. They had just been doing a bit of restumping. What had triggered the investigation was the unearthing of a whole trove of interesting stuff from the deep past, like coins from around the world, broken pottery, wrecked hand bound books, and jewellery with real precious stones in them. Upon further investigation at the Titles Office, the place used to be a pawn shop, owned by one Ramos Theodore Rigby.

Everything the archaeologists found had been placed on rows and rows of tables in the common room upstairs. I went up and down the rows, contemplating what was lying there, wondering which item was going to prove to be the next step in my scavenger hunt. I was hoping for something unmistakeably my brother�s, like a textbook, a plastic toothbrush, something from now; but not. From now.

A piece of time machine would have been nice.

No such luck. Days were spent picking an item, cleaning it off, and grabbing stunted parts of conversations from people either begging to sell their keepsakes, or begging to get them back.

Finally, scanning the flat part of a wooden doll�s arse, I got a positive result:

�What�s this?�

�To be honest, I�m not sure. It appears to be metal, and heavy, and may contain a precious item used to power machines, from what I have been able to gather. Perhaps, as it says down here on the side, the matter within is named �Duracell�. Wow, sounds useful.�

�Is this stolen, mate? It sounds like you don�t know what the hell it is, and that raises some suspicion in me.�

�You know I found it. I find all the items I bring you. I got it from the same place I got the other bits and pieces, just at that decrepit dumping ground in Halls Gap.�

�Alright. I�ll put it with the other ridiculous things I can�t sell, and you go out and get yourself some nice duds as you always do. One p, there you go.�

So there was my next clue in the scavenger hunt.

Off I went, across the salt lakes, and appeared in the little town of Halls Gap. In the visitor�s centre, I perused all sorts of books, looking for mention of this dumping ground the wooden doll�s arse had been mentioning.

There was scant mention of anything until about 1893, when the first post office was opened in the town. I�d already learnt that much from Wikipedia. One book mentioned something about a small settlement approximately out where a lavender farm was now. It couldn�t go into much detail about the settlement, except that it was a closed community, it had come from Melbourne, and that the author of the book didn�t really know much else. Oh, and that it had been and gone in the 1870s.

Out I went to the lavender farm. There was a lot of smell, but no real signs of any preserved settlement from the time the book mentioned. I walked down a gravel path heavily lined with dwarf lavender varieties, keeping my gaze hooked to the ground, rapidly sweeping my eyes for an extremely faint hope of seeing something helpful.

Like I thought, there really wasn�t anything.

I stepped in the door of the farmhouse and was hit by a new wave of smell. This type of smell was heady, soapy lavender rather than the unbridled, freedom-loving lavender smell of the rows and rows outside. There were mauve smelly teddy bears, little pillows with embroidered pictures of lavender on them, bunches of dried lavender in little pots, jars of lavender lollies, and the promise of lavender flavoured in ice cream. I honestly don�t think I would have been able to discern any lavender taste in the ice cream with such high mauve-powered background levels of odour.

There was a pure white, long-haired cat, and a lady sitting on the same chair. The lady spoke. �Hi there. I made all these things myself, including the ice cream. Would you like some? I�ll give you a free taste. I�ve got some gluten-free lavender lollies if you�d prefer.�

I said, �No thanks. I�ve come to investigate something. There used to be a settlement here, or near here�.�

�Yes, I know,� said the lady. �We had to clear away quite a bit of bizarre stuff you wouldn�t expect before we built this place. It was about twenty years ago, mind you, so I can�t remember completely clearly what sort of things used to be around. Twisted metal, machinery, bits of what I think could have been dormitory buildings. Are you doing a little bit of family history research?�

�Well, actually, yes, sort of,� I said. This lady had said something in a well-meaning question that she didn�t really know half the significance of. I continued. �Have you stored any of the items you�ve cleared out, or do you know where they went at all?�

�Oh, no, we didn�t keep anything at all,� the lady said. �It was all taken away in a series of skips, you know, twenty years ago, and I wouldn�t have a clue where.�

�Oh, right,� I said, toeing the ground in the inevitable way a disappointed person does.

�I mean, in a sense, we did keep something. It wouldn�t be something your great grandfather would have owned if he lived here, though, but you might possibly be interested.�

�Yeah?� I said, lifting my head. As long as it wasn�t hard plastic.

�See these chairs here? They�re all made from the trees we had to clear out where you see the rows and rows of lavender we�ve got growing out there. Did you see the sculpture in the middle? It�s a pretty nice sculpture, isn�t it?�

�Yes,� I said, not having seen it. I had spent much more time scanning the gravel path on the way in for glinting pieces of time machine. �Anyway, I�m going to ask you something you might not agree to. You don�t have to agree to it, either, so don�t feel guilty about turning down my request.�

�I�m sure it won�t be too much to ask,� said the lady. �I love family history, and if I can help, I�ll try my hardest.�

�I was wondering whether I could scrape a little bit of varnish off the seat of a chair or two. I could arrange to get it redone if you�d like.�

�I have absolutely no idea why you�d want to do that,� said the lady, baffled. �But be my guest. I don�t know whether you�d even need to, to be honest. Have a look,� she added, getting off the chair she was on, and pointing at the seat. �I was so impatient to get these done, I didn�t really put that much varnish on the wood. It�s mostly rubbed off already. And I didn�t even bother with the bottoms of these seats. Do you want a wood sample? You can grab a wood sample from the bottom, if that�s what you�d like.�

�Sort of,� I said. �I just want to do an audio analysis on the chair. I�m an audio archaeologist. I can get historical sounds from scanning objects with my laser needle. It�s really fascinating � wouldn�t it be great to hear what was going on when the tree that made this chair was a hundred years younger?�

�Absolutely!� squealed the lady.

�I�ll just go grab my laser needle from the car,� I shouted, half out the door in enthusiasm.

Back I came, breathless. The lady had turned over all of the chairs in the room, the amount of which was two. Once again, out came the laser needle from the black bag I kept it in and once again, I calibrated it with shaky hands. I scanned the chair that had been at the table, and almost immediately, I got a clear, loud voice recording from a hundred and thirty years ago.

�Fuck you and your fucking hawaiian shirts, man,� said the voice. It was unmistakeably my brother.

The next day, I found out that the lady had sanded down and thoroughly revarnished the chairs as soon as I had left.

Then, the trail ran cold.




Cherry Soda [prev | list | join | next]