(diaryland) November 30, 2009 - 6:27 a.m.

Yeah, I might have gotten up at 4AM to write this chapter.

Chapter the Twentieth

ok. that hurt a lot,

the e-mail said.

Immediately I got another one.

hey weird I can do underlines but not capitals. this offends my usual meticulous observation of english grammar believe you me

Then, it changed tone quite a bit:

when you�re born you�ve got everything around you & then things can�t help but go further and further away from you. this happens to everyone man

Then:

not just you. you need to get over yourself man

Then:

seriously

Then:

ouch

OK, I thought. I was pretty sure that Vaughn was talking to me. Or maybe he kind of knew he was speaking to me, and he�d had some kind of experience in the fountain that was making him go a bit preachy. He was being a bit negative right now, but I thought that I could cope with the e-mails he just sent better than the one I had the dream about before.

So, I thought about things for a bit, and then decided not to address the grumpy e-mails. Instead, I wrote:

Hi. Hope you�re OK. Was it you who found my hat?

I got an e-mail straight back:

fuck the hat. i�m trying to address something here

Woah, alright, I thought. Let�s see what this guy has to say.

OK. Explain further if you want.

I said.

Vaughn Bourbon must have been pretty strong compared to his last jaunt in the fountain because his e-mails were coming thick and fast. Last time, days had elapsed before I had gotten anything at all. Then again, maybe Vaughn knew this time that he could actually write e-mails.

So, the next e-mail from Vaughn said:

i was in your head just before. i can do shit like that now

And then, the longest e-mail from Vaughn that I would ever receive. It popped into my inbox about four seconds after the last one. I wasn�t quite sure how he was writing these. Maybe he could just think a thought and they�d get written down. Maybe time was different over there.

so i will tell you your story. you were on the train & you saw a guy who was weeping & he was about forty five years old and his tie was all loose and everyone else on the train looked pretty tense but you didn�t notice it. you had bought a raffle ticket that cost a hundred bucks with your parents� money they gave you to get a textbook with like a month before & you won the first prize that morning. you had actually won the first prize. one in fifty thousand chance. so you thought to yourself hey awesome maybe i did the right thing with my parents� money and they�ll be so happy & all that

so everyone on the train was crying or tense and you were off your face on a natural high so you didn�t notice shit � um you must not have watched the news or listened to the radio or anything but that�s ok cos you�d just won a house i guess. probably other people would have done the same. you were only just a couple of years out of school and you did a lot of just you know finding out about life or whatever, like the stuff people do when they�ve grown up in the country and they stay at those bloody colleges where everything is half-arsed including their uni work & at least the tv gets neglected for once and the only thing that isn�t is their going to maccas down the road in huge noisy groups every four seconds. yeah that�s you right? except you didn�t really go to maccas all that much not as much as other people did fuck I�m getting way off track here.

so you even met some guy max who was a little bit christian who you had been on a couple of dates with and he was doing psychology at the uni or some shit and that was nice and everything was working out alright for you but fyi you probably would have broken up anyway. i mean you didn�t even tell him that you�d won a house. that�s a bit crucial

so anyway you were on the train and everyone was feeling pretty sad and you just had the biggest fuckin smile on your face and looking back this must be pretty painful to you. you had your ipod on & you were singing & you were going home to visit your parents to tell them how you�d been bad and how you�d won the house and they could come stay over whenever they wanted cos you thought that would make the whole thing ok & you never did actually get round to buying that textbook whoops.

you started to have an idea that something was wrong cos the train wasn�t allowed to go to the station and it had to stop a few k out of town for some reason & that had never happened before

& also that the sky was looking pretty damn weird and actually cloudy & yellow

so you were wondering about this but to me it was pretty fucking obvious a freak firestorm had gone through the town. It had started in that macquire reserve in a thunderstorm and had gone east & hadn�t touched anything on the other side of the goulburn river & there was so much dried landscape that could have been burnt on the other side but wasn�t. like for instance mooropna was all fine.

so the firestorm had been through the town in the night and most people were awake but there was confusion about what to do & everything. Now the fire was burning out in the middle of nowhere where people had their farms but it wasn�t anywhere near you anymore. you had your first tinge of worry cos your mum didn�t come to meet you outside mooropna with the car to take you home. i mean it wasn�t normal to stop the train before the station but you thought someone in a big yellow hardhat with a loudspeaker might have told people to pick up their loved ones from the place where the train had come to rest

so everyone got out & to your disappointment a lot of people did actually have other people waiting for them when they got out & they huddled together or were allowed to drive off and then it was like you and that guy you�d seen who was crying heaps on the train plus a few other super worried types. We gotta admit here, you might have had a few pangs of worry but you were pretty much still on a high. You were trying to push that down inside yourself but damn it would have been great to tell someone, like even that crying guy maybe it would have cheered him up. You didn�t though cos that would have been inappropriate even you realised that

so you went up to a person in a yellow reflecty vest where the other crying people were & then one or two dared to ask them whether their families were alright and the person in the vest said that they weren�t the person to talk to but the police were and that they were over there. You wondered what the list the person had on their clipboard was all about. Maybe they did know who was on a big missing list or something.

you decided to listen to a song on your ipod to calm down and it was the last song you ever really listened to. it was some shitty band in my opinion from that time one republic or some shit. you really gotta get out more & listen to some real music though I know you don�t feel like it

so after listening to that song all the way through and it has the most ironically appropriate lyrics in the whole world actually which you may have noticed at the time & after observing the people who didn�t have anyone to come & get them go up to the police van & get coffees & get good or bad news you decided to go & enquire about your parents. yeah like me you were an only child & your surviving grandparents were in russia who you didn�t know all that well so you didn�t really have anyone else around i mean who was people you knew from being a kid & who you could just ring up and say, hey, i need help. The people at uni were so not people you could call close buddies, yeah?

You went up to the policeman who seemed to be the guy to ask and you kept one ipod earphone in just in case there was bad news because somehow having soft music in your ear would make it a bit more bearable whatever the news was and the policeman could tell that�s what you were doing & he thought you were a bit young to be out and about on your own at such a time but that was only cos you were really short. so anyway he looked on his list, and then he told you the worst case scenario, and then a policewoman came up and gave you a big hug and you said that you�d just won a house that was fully furnished that exact day and now you had nobody to tell that to. because the whole day since you looked on the net to see if you had the winning ticket and then you actually did had seemed so fucking unreal that this bit didn�t seem real either. but your toes curled up in your shoes and they felt sore so you knew for sure that this wasn�t a good dream gone bad and that you had actually won a house & that your parents� house had burnt down basically at the same time which was midnight & that they had not been located & in fact you were not allowed to go into the house because it was cordoned off with that magical police tape that only lets them in so that they could go and look for your parents� teeth. they didn�t put it that way but that�s what they were going to do.

But the lady policeperson took you to another person who was wearing a fluorescent yellow vest and she drove you to your old street because now you could say that the street in Balwyn where you are sitting right now & where i keep passing through is your new street & you sat in the car & she drove down the street very slowly which was probably more depressing but you didn�t say anything even though you wanted the lady to hurry up so it wouldn�t resemble a funeral procession so much. one whole month later you would do the funeral march for real with some ashes & some teeth & they would cremate the remains all over again because that�s what it said in your parents� wills to do.

the lady in the fluorescent yellow vest pulled up in front of the house & there were some houses in the street that were all ok and some that had disappeared & your house was the only one that was kind of in between. nothing existed anymore in the same way that it had existed yesterday before the sun went down but the walls were still mostly there & the tree in the front yard was there, yeah it had all the leaves burnt off it & it was black but you could tell that some day, it would be sprouting leaves back out of the left side. you could now see the backyard through the house where you weren�t supposed to before & the back fence was defiantly still up which just seemed inexplicable. The police tape was up but no police were around but you didn�t feel like going in there and having a look who knew what you might be stepping on. you still couldn�t quite believe it & you weren�t crying.

the lady in the vest didn�t want to stay there with you for too long because she said it probably wasn�t a good idea & that you could stay at her place until you were ready to go out & make your own life but you wouldn�t take her up on that offer. you moved into your new place the next day cos that was part of your prize, being able to move in straight away, & you got two cars in the house which you promptly sold & you quit uni because you couldn�t get out of bed & then eventually you couldn�t stay with your own thoughts anymore so you looked for a job & you became an accredited truck driver & they found you the job at biff�s fleet and that�s how you would live till you retired. the last thing you saw before the lady in the fluorescent vest drove you away was the part of the wall that had your family photo on it. the photo had melted & crumbled but the wall behind it was still ok & you could see the wallpaper pattern only in that spot still. you had pretty successfully managed to keep that memory out of the conscious part of your brain until a dream two nights ago & then you remembered it when you woke up

That was the whole e-mail. Well, that explained a couple of things. It explained why I had kind of relived Vaughn�s assassination attempt � he�d been rummaging around in my brain somehow and I�d felt it.

I read the whole e-mail quite quickly. I read it, and didn�t dwell on it. It was the most relieving thing I had ever read.

I truly wasn�t by myself anymore. That was the feeling.

I couldn�t reply to that e-mail. I didn�t know what to say.

But, about five minutes after this e-mail came through, and about two minutes after I had finished reading it, and was staring at the screen, I got another e-mail anyway.

go out in the front yard

Suddenly, I had a question I�d thought of asking. I hardly dared type the words.

Have you seen my parents? Are they where you are?

Vaughn took three long minutes to reply to that.

no

I took a deep breath and got up. I walked down the hall and waited there for a second. I could feel the magical ions coalescing in the air through the door, but they didn�t seem angry or turbulent. They didn�t seem like the Atmospheric Skull type. They seemed more benign.

I opened the door, and the fountain was working. It was doing its fountain thing that it had never done before, in the hot evening air. It was squirting out the top, and dribbling down all around the edges of the top tier, and dripping off the statues, and into the pool below. It wasn�t spurting water, though. It was quicksilver, which was thicker and glinted in the backlit cloudy sky. It was much quieter than real water, and much more amazing.

I went back inside and got my last e-mail for the night before a series of events happened that I didn�t want to happen.

It said:

the fountain is crying