A Woman Sphinx

Bryn and Feng got to work at the exact same time that day. Well, Bryn got there eight seconds earlier because his building was technically on the way to Feng�s building.

Parliament Station took them up on a dizzyingly steep conveyor belt, like iron ore out of the ground for the first time since a second-generation star exploded and threw it at the solar system, and spat them out into the normal world. The CBD was defiantly exactly the same as it had been when Bryn had left it.

Why did he spend so much money on a holiday when all it did was make the normal world feel more endless?

He parted ways with Feng like they were spies who had just been on a rendezvous. They always did that. No acknowledgement. They also did the same thing when they met up to go home. Bryn would loiter outside his building, and Feng would come out about a minute later. Then, Bryn would follow him from about four metres away and try to look unsuspicious. He�d keep that distance, all the way down all the escalators, deep into the bowels of the ground, down, down, under cancelled streams and fossils and decommissioned iron pipes and the remains of the houses of settlers, the whole lot cloaked in the blue powdercoat of Parliament Station.

They�d probably watched too many episodes of Spooks. Once, when probably the third or fourth series was on TV, they�d just done it once without any planning, and then the ritual remained, forevermore. It was an institution.

Once they�d finished the morning half of the spy commute, and Bryn was inside his building, he walked up the first four flights of steps briskly, then took the lift. He�d decided a while ago that he needed exactly that amount of mid-to-heavy aerobic exercise every day. Something about ten thousand steps ad the exact right ratio of heavy physical activity. He was an accountant.

Thank Christ facebook was physically banned at work. He imagined that he would most likely have seen that Marcelle had written a large number of cheerful updates about all sorts of awesome couchsurfing people who didn�t have real jobs and lived on the same continent as herself. And the French guy. Yeah, probably that bloody French guy who helped him that one time he needed to retch in the desert. Damn him, and his vague, dutiful kindness. Damn him.

Bryn didn�t know if any of this scenario playing in his head was real, but the thing was, it was probably real. It was the most likely and reasonable scientific explanation, as they say in the ghost hunting shows on the telly, and which the quote I�m speaking of does not entirely make sense here.

So, he twiddled his thumbs for the first hour, thinking about it, and then spent the next hour worrying about the amount of folders that had appeared on his desk in the last month.

He looked over at Trevor�s empty desk. There was also a worrying amount of beige folders on there. Or manila, if you will. I think manila sounds too exciting for what those folders held. By the time Trevor got back, there would be so, so many more. None of which contained anything more exciting.

There was also a worrying lack of common office equipment on Trevor�s desk, as well as Bryn�s own.

And so, Bryn spent most of his first day back wrangling his and Trevor�s staple removers and file holder together thingies from all over Level 26, and even occasionally Level 25, a Level he had always been uneasy about. They were different down there, on Level 25. They were like animals. It was fair enough that you�d grab someone else�s staple remover off someone else�s desk while they were on holiday if you were on the same Level, because you�d go past their desks fairly often to get to the toilet and see it there, tempting you, but the Level below, well, that was making an extra effort to seek out staple removers just to steal. Insidious, they were.

Luckily, there were no cactus references at Bryn�s work, or he would have freaked. He could have started retching again, and writhing around on the floor. Who knows?

It was just a normal, calm day at work, with much procrastinating, some of which was residual from jet lag. Pushing folders around, and attempting to put pen to paper for a to-do list.

Bryn fielded many questions at lunchtime about how the chicks were over there, which was painful to answer whether he wanted to answer truthfully or make up something awesome, how the beer was (not as good � you had to say that, yet the question was irrelevant; his tastebuds had been shot the whole time), which the best thing was (helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon because he could remember that vaguely), and if he�d seen Trevor in Thailand.

Yes, he had a feeling that everyone would have raided his desk and got all his good office equipment.

The whole week was like that. Collecting his and Trevor�s stuff, keeping an eye on Trevor�s desk, thinking about the internet, avoiding the internet, inventing the internet in his head, answering the same questions in the break room.

Bryn wished that he could have just gotten everyone, even those suspicious types on Level 25, and put them all in the break room, and just said three things. Because people kept bumping into him for the first time since he got back.

Bryn�s building was huge, frankly. So putting everyone in there would have broken a Guinness World Record, and would have cost many, many lives.

He would have said, �I wish I could jump back in time. Don�t ask me why, or what that means or what it has to do with the holiday. Stop asking me questions.�

The week was torture. The week was just this thing, this horrible thing, whee work was completely normal, and it was banal and it was a thing that was trying to kill his life.

He had put a small, modest collection of tiny magazine photos in his cubicle of all the destinations he was about to visit. One by one, he took them off throughout the week.

This guy was miserable. This guy was mopey beyond repair. This guy needed a change. Another change. He would get one. He would get one at the Costume Party.

That Friday night, Bryn was eating a slice of meatlovers� pizza in bare feet on the terrace. He was freestyling it, holding it, drooping in his hand, and pacing around next to the balcony while little bits fell off and plummeted onto the terrace of the people below.

Feng opened the sliding door onto the terrace with a horrible screech. You had to force it to do that because it as actually on ball bearings, which led to a very smooth slide with almost no noise at all if you did it properly. But, Feng liked to makesounds that were like feedback.

�Is that a threat?� Asked Bryn. Bryn knew that Feng wanted to be asked about the good times. It was not a statement, repeated fourfold for emphasis. It was an invitation. An invitation to tango. Verbally.

�Cool,� said Bryn. He ate the rest of his slice of pizza while Feng waited patiently, still nodding.

�So, what about these good times?� asked Bryn, putting Feng out of his misery. I was better to end such stand-offs swiftly, otherwise they got dangerous.

�Yeah, man. Here, for Halloween. And people are going to dress up and stuff. Everyone�s coming. EVERYONE. Remember, I told you, on Sunday? Yeah.�

�What are you going as? What are you going as? Huh, huh, huh?� asked Feng, now bristling with excitement. He repeated stuff a hell of a lot in such a state.

�Dunno t this point, man. Is there a theme? Like a scary theme? I think I need to at least work to a theme, or else I�ve got too much choice, you know.�

�Nope, no theme,� said Feng. �Themes are for sissies. We�re men, you know.�

�No, no, you don�t get it,� said Feng. �No theme, lots of chicks, awesome party. Get it now?�

�Yeah, I get it,� said Bryn. He scratched his stubbly, slightly pizza-spattered face.

�I mean, you don�t even have to come as one thing. You cold potentially come as three things. You could be Leonardo da Vinci with Tired Jail Eyes if you want,� Feng said matter-of-factly, as if it made sense.

�Tired jail eyes. Interesting,� said Bryn, rubbing his chin, pondering what the fuck that meant.

�You don�t have to. Whatever. I mean, just come as something awesome. I just had tired eye glasses and handcuff glasses lying around the house. That�s all.�

Bryn kind of wished that the Tired Jail Eyes had never been explained. They had been more unexplainable that way.

Bryn lapsed into thought for a second. It was dusk, the pink climbing over the mountains n the distance. Fuck, the world was big, and full. He was in a tiny cul-de-sac of the world.

The Majesty of Footscray were way too loud. For what they were. Which was a quite loose-sounding, you�ve-got-a-ways-to-go-before-you�re-the-next-Hinder stadium rock.

Ah. I�ll read this in ten years� time and have no idea who Hinder was. That time cannot come too soon, my friend.

Bryn stepped back inside the apartment because he was now allowed to, having expressed joy at the Majesty of Footscray having their second kind of official gig. Feng wasn�t blocking the doorway anymore. He remained on the terrace, mentally calculating how long it would take to take an individual Big M off the floor and put it in a garbage bag. This calculation would come in very handy, because it would dictate exactly how many seconds before the party he would thusly begin carrying out said task.

He would cut it too fine. He would underestimate the bending down time, a rookie mistake.

This was no matter, as he had not taken into account one other very important and eminently more estimatable fact: everybody would be exactly one hour late. Well, a lot of people would. But that�s in the future. Not way in the future; just a little bit. One day in the future, let�s say.

Bryn slept that night, as he had for the last week. Slept at night, I mean. He�d struggled there, more and more easily and more and more regretfully. He�d reclaimed his proper sheets so he could slide in and be breathable. He did not have any more dreams about Carnegiea gigantea, well as far as he could remember.

Bryn woke up the next morning deciding for sure that he had to have a very complex costume involving many, many bits as he had to avoid party preparation at all costs. Feng decided to have this party, therefore Feng had to clean up the mess of the house, which was solely Feng�s mess, all on his own. It was like karma or something.

So, what would Bryn come as? A clown? Yes, complex, but no. He didn�t think clowns tested well. He could be too creepy. Not good for parties. Not a policeman. It seemed a bit sleazy unless you were part of a group YMCA tribute, and that took it to the realms of quadruple sleazy which then made it OK again. Interesting how when you multiply sleazy things they get unsleazy again. Something to do with multiplying two negatives or something like that.

In the end, he went with going as Johnny Knoxville, which he looked absolutely nothing like. He just about picked it at random, having no desire to see Jackass 3D which had just come out, however this costume choice did have three excellent advantages:

1. He would look like a fairly normal person instead of a daisy or something. That in itself could be an advantage.
2. He assumed that girls liked Johnny Knoxville, thusly he would be riding the crest of projected popularity.
3. The only thing he�d really have to do that day would be to invest in the exact right pair of sunnies, and get a four-colour biro and draw some stuff on his arm. He�d look up on Google images where all the tattoos were and all that later.

But first, the sunnies. The beauty of the whole sunnies thing was that he would have to spend a fair amount of time wandering around a shopping centre looking for the exact right pair. If Bryn didn�t have the exact right pair, who would he be at the party? Just some chump with pen on his arm, wearing Sunglasses at Night - that�s who. With especially wiggly pen on his right arm, due to the fact that he did it himself. And, as an added bonus, he would forever more have a cool pair of sunnies which Feng would eventually get his hands on and ruin by continuing to headbang and pogo after they�d fallen off his face while listening to a just-then recorded cassette tape of the Majesty of Footscray doing a cover of Boston�s More Than a Feeling without any singing on it.

And So It Is Written. I went back and read Bryn�s Life Graph Thing again. That�s how I know about the sunglasses� Ultimate Fate. Got tired arms now, shuffling through that one continuous stream of metaphysical paper.

Clearly, if I can tell just by looking at the completely unannotated graph about the sunglasses getting pulverised during a cassette playing a wordless cover of Boston�s More Than a Feeling, it must be a pretty expressive line.

Bryn finally came home with the sunglasses, at ten to eight. It was severe avoidance.

It didn�t matter. The word had gone out. Within two and a half hours, Bryn Mossman would come face to face with his destiny.

I guess you could say that he was coming face to face with his destiny all the time.

Feng finally turned up, after some other people did. It was just a typical, even archetypical thing to do. Turning up to a party he�d organised at his own house to clean up for it after people had arrived. Well, in his opinion, it was their own faults. Feng told them to go onto the terrace so that he could pick up the Big Ms, and that they weren�t counted as being at the party yet because everybody knew that the party started after Feng was in costume.

And so, the policeman, the indian, the cowboy and the sailor went out onto the terrace as told to work on their YMCA moves for a while.

Watching them practice was kinda hypnotic. Bryn was standing in the hall, transfixed, obviously looking like he could have been at a loose end, f he could just tear his eyes away from the men in uniform doing YMCA over, and over, and over again behind the tinted glass.

�Hey, man,� said Feng as he�d finished ushering the first party guests outside, �can you help ��

�Bro, I so can�t,� said Bryn, snapping out of it briskly. �I gotta put my tattoos on. And adjust my glasses.�

�Nice,� said Feng, nodding. �K. I�ll do this thing they call cleaning. I�ll see you in a bit.�

�Yep,� said Bryn, and he disappeared, eel-like, into his room to doodle on his skin in the mirror until he heard definite party-full-swing noises. He got all the Es e was writing on his skin backwards.

I�ll have you know that I did absolutely no research about Johnny Knoxville�s tattoos. So, if he doesn�t, let�s all humour me and pretend he has tattoos with Es on them on his arms. It would make me feel a lot better if you could just go with me on this one. Not that it makes any lasting difference to the story outcome, as far as I know.

Bryn emerged from his room to a jungle of an apartment. It was dark with voluminous costumes the way a really hard piano piece looks on the page, but with colour and confusing movement, and sonically, the place was infested with jungle music with the bass turned up way too loud. So, it was jungly. What can I say?

His eyes hurt. From the visuals, but also the sound. The sound hurt his eyes. Thank goodness he was officially wearing the coolest sunnies at the whole goddamn party. Booyah.

This apartment was not built for this many people. It was not built for this may people that he did not know, especially.

A Donkey Kong Junior loitering in the hall, clearly busting for the toilet said hi.

Whoever that was, they knew Bryn. It would be very hard to tell who anyone was tonight. Relations would be strained.

Finally, through the sea of humanity, or mythical and real beasts, extinct, extant alike, and indecent angels/devils/Jesuses, Gagas, Perries, Cruises, Kahlos, et ceteras, Bryn did spy a spot of flora, somewhere approximately near the front door, and decided to gravitate towards it. Maybe he could tell this piece of plant life to turn down the bass on the stereo a little bit.

The bright green lycra showed off Feng�s emaciated ribs to great advantage, if you were into that sort of thing. His package had mercifully been packed away in a pair of tightey whities before being plunged into the green full body leotard, so there was a little left to the imagination in that area. It was relieving, at least for Bryn.

Feng�s face was delicately fringed with an appropriate number of proportionally accurate white foam petals. It was one of Feng�s better efforts, and one he could actually play bass with later on when the time came, unlike at Bryn�s birthday party last year. That was a crazy, crazy night. Not unlike this one.

But, anyway, Bryn managed to wrestle his way over to Feng, showing off his four-colour-biro-ed arms proudly.

�No worries, man. Daises don�t have human faces, so I�m more costumely inaccurate than you,� said Feng, in a rare moment of niceness. But then he kind of wrecked it by saying, �Bet they wished they had mine, though.�

Then, he suddenly realised, without obtaining mirror-based confirmation, that he looked really, really cool in his sunnies. Probably ultra-cool, even.

At that point, his older brother, Rhys, managed to wedge his way into the party through the front door (getting hard now, due to alarming amounts of people at the party) and ruined everything. From Bryn�s point of view.

Rhys. Was. Dressed. As. Sergey. Stepanov. From. Moldova�s. 2010. Eurovision. Song. Contest. Entry.

This was out of left field so hard, it was in a whole nother field in a whole nother freaking inconceivably mind-boggling universe, people.

Rhys was in a white singlet, white jeans. Multi-coloured stripey vest. Especially blonde-dyed hair. Especially for the occasion. Rhys� ten-month-old son, Cedric, was cleverly and so, so adorably dressed as a saxophone, for God�s sakes.

But the worst thing of all, the thing that older brothers do so, so well, was that he had one trump card to blow Bryn into the dust, so that his Johnny Knoxville sunglasses had to be worn so freaking hard just to live though without suffering permanent eye damage, the incredible pious, sun-like glow of Rhys� true-to-costume white-framed Ray Bans.

You should try thinking through your teeth sometime, when you�re mad at an older sibling. It helps a bit.

OK, well, Bryn no longer had the coolest sunglasses at the party. There was no point anymore. His tattoo-ed Es were all backwards, plus there was some guy walking around shirtless, thickly coated in the home-drawn tattoos in pen of Ninja from Die Antwoord, South Africa�s freshest Zef rap group. Fuuuuck.

Bryn might as well go to bed after greeting his brother warmly. It was the only thing to do in this situation, he realised.

�Hey, man,� Bryn managed to say after swallowing his pride and shielding his eyes from Rhys� Incredible White Ray Bans.

�Hey, Bryn, cool costume,� said Rhys sincerely, patting his alive saxophone on the back.

�You just had to one up me again, didn�t you,� said Bryn, not in the form of a question. �And getting your son involved, too. That�s just�.. hmph.�

Rhys was used to this sulking. It had been happening ever since he was two years old.

�I didn�t know you were also going for a sunglasses-based costume, bro. Let�s agree that it�s just a brotherly telepathic thing that we should marvel at a little bit, rather than a thing to get all persnickety about. Hey?� Rhys did that older-brotherly index finger under the little brother�s chin thing that you see on TV sometimes.

�Good,� said Bryn in the way that preps say good morning to their teachers en masse when class starts for the day.

�Hey, peeps,� said Feng. �I�m gonna just do some readjustment downstairs, if you know what I mean, and then I reckon the Majesty of Footscray is going to fire themselves up for a bit of a play. Party on, bros,� he added. It�s not often you get to say �party on, bros� to people and they are actually bros.

Feng patted the brothers on the back and wafted away through the heavy breeze of human bodies, kind of how a real daisy would, actually.
Just then, Bryn spotted someone who looked exactly like Marcelle in the TV pit.

His heart fucked up in that love kind of way, where it feels like you have to rip it out of your chest immediately, Temple of Doom style.

�Uh, excuse me, I need to, uh,� said Bryn, waving at his brother vaguely and melting into the crowd.

Oh, well. Rhys would have to mingle on his own tonight. That was OK, because all Feng�s friends knew Rhys anyway, and they all thought Rhys was cool.

Rhys would go home early that night. Within the next fifteen minutes, in fact. Cedric was to do a large poo that managed to escape out of his nappy and into the plush saxophone exoskeleton. Rhys would leave before Bryn fainted.

The girl was dressed as Bill Huxtable from the Cosby Show. Bryn knew that instinctively, or perhaps from watching too many episodes of the Cosby Show. She was wearing a lurid acrylic oversized jumper with combs embroidered in coloured yarn all over it. Her bottom half was sheathed in light olivey-brown slacks with a pronounced ironed pleat cascading down the centre of each leg.

He felt sick while walking up to her, and that she was a hallucination. Turned out, close up she only kind of looked like Marcelle. It was just that his brain wanted her to look more like Marcelle, and it was trying so, so hard.

He cleared his throat. �Hey,� he said. �The pleats in your trousers are very effective. Bill Cosby?�

�Yeah!� she said, not sounding at all like Marcelle. Definitely not Canadian.

�Yeah, it�s super vowelly. It�s Greek. Most of the consonants are contained within my surname.�

�Cool,� said Bryn, looking around to see if his brother was still around. He was no longer able to be seen.

Then there was silence for a while, if you could call boomy jungle music and drunk yelling silence.

�Accountant,� said Bryn. He wished he�d said something way more infinitely cool and fictional, like Foster Aunt. Accountant always sounded crap, no matter how you inflected it. In this case, if you�re interested, Bryn had experimented with a slight upwards inflection within the realms of the double Cs. Masterly, but, it still sounded like a boring, boring job.

�No way,� said Bryn, starting to feel OK. He could breathe properly again. His heart had calmed down. He had receded Marcelle to the nether regions of his brain.

�Yeah. I�m here tonight because this guy in my building Feng invited me. He�s an accountant too.�

�No way!� squealed Ioanna. �This place is awesome! And Feng is hilarious! Do you know that he only ever drinks Red Bulls at work? He must get so, so dehydrated. His bin�s full of them.�

Interesting factoid, thought Bryn to himself. Feng was leading a double life, cheating on Big Ms in the office, using bins.

�I did not know that,� said Bryn. �You must tell me more. Do you want to gravitate with me towards the bath-shaped beer receptacle with me for a moment?�

At that point, that infinitely short space of time in which he and his new friend began to make their way towards the bathroom to grab some kind of alcoholic beverage, Bryn could safely say this the night wasn�t a total and complete write-off.

But then Feng chose this time to start playing and then it was all shot to hell.

�Hey guys!� he shouted from somewhere after the jungle music had finally been cut, �May I introduce to you�.. The Majesty of Footscray!�

There was much whooping and wolf whistling from the applauding, confined crowd. Clearly they were not anticipating just how fucking loud his was going to be.

Feng�s voice appeared again, mumbling through a squealing microphone. �Uh, yeah, can you just step back a bit� yeah, off the guitar lead, and you, you�ll get whacked by accident if you, yeah, to the right-� then, to the general population of the apartment, �And now, the moment you have all been waiting for�. Our first song� drumroll please, Jonathan��

The drummer, who was dressed as a zombie Abraham Lincoln, yelled, �No! Just play it, man!�

Everyone screamed a general yay noise however they�d definitely never heard it before. The Majesty of Footscray had made it up that morning, and once they�d launched into it, it sounded like it too. It was a bit loose. The sheer wall of sound made up for it slightly, though.

The one guy dressed as a jackhammer operator in the corner suddenly realised that he was a very lucky man. If he was entrepreneurically inclined, he could have rented out his huge ear muffs for eight dollars per five minutes, which is a bit much if you ask me, and people would have still been thankful.

A lot of people suddenly wanted to be on the terrace. There was a fairly general rush to the right-hand-side of the apartment.

And that was when Bryn noticed the most nightmarish thing. The one thing, worse than cockroaches, which he hated. Worse than suddenly being dakked in front of everybody.

He had been heading to the bathroom, with Ioanna, but he turned around to see the flow o people on the terrace, and that is how he had seen it. Somehow, it had been blocked out of his vision since he�d left his bedroom and found out that his shakily applied tattoo Es were all backwards.

It was fiendish. Bryn only glimpsed it for a second before it was obscured by people who wanted to retain some semblance of hearing by being outside. But, it was there. And it was real. And it was facing him, with its arms open, and it felt like it was breathing.

�Oh my god, oh my god,� Bryn squealed, feeling like he was about to flood his pants with urine. �Oh, my fucking god. There�s a cactus out there. There�s a cactus out there. Oh, shit.�

�Uh, not really,� said Bryn, shielding his eyes on the left so that his view of the terrace was definitely obscured. �I need to forget about getting beer for a second. I just really, really, really need to go to the toilet right now.�

�Could you do me a favour? Ca you just wait outside for a sec? Can you kind of like, guard the outside of the toilet for me? I know there�s a lock, but.� He left the sentence like that. Unfinished. He didn�t know what else to say.

Mercifully, there was nobody waiting for the loo. Bryn ducked inside and shut the door with a slam.

He suddenly felt as if he was being watched. He darted is head around, looking up, around, everywhere. There was a shadow just outside the door. He hoped to fuck that it was Ioanna.

No, no cacti in the toilet itself. Unless some kind of tiny cactus spawn had wafted into the toilet upon a breeze from the terrace, but the one out there had not seemed to be flowering. Bryn shivered at the thought of it.

He couldn�t stay there all night. He wasn�t really being followed by a giant cactus. This was a fucking costume party, for Christ�s sake. People dress as plants. For example, Feng was a daisy tonight.

Bryn slowed his breathing down to just about a halt. He started to feel a wave of forced drowsiness come over him.

�Yeah,� came the reply. �What�s happening? Are you feeling very sick now?�

�Can you just do me one favour? I mean, besides guarding the door. I just need to to o out onto the terrace and see if you can see if there�s still someone dressed as a big cactus out there and then come back and let me know.�

�OK,� came Ioanna�s voice back through the crack in the door, exactly half weirded out and half deeply concerned. �I�ll be a sec.�

Of Course You Know By Now, This Was The Cactus. Right On The Other Side Of The Door. So Close.

He raised his head to observe the full horror of what stood before him, only approximately forty centimetres away, its two uneven arms gaping open, its fiendish spines just about touching his flesh as if it wanted to pull him into a deathly embrace within which it would become his grotesque plant-based gibbet.

Maybe if Bryn had remembered to pull his pants up after pissing, the following could have been avoided. I don�t think that anything Bryn did at this point in time would have led to a different result, though. It was his destiny.

He tried to duck under one of the cactus� terrifying outstretched arms, however in doing so he knocked his half-mast underpantsed knee on the edge of the door, and subsequently his face on the door handle.

It was bad to see. Ioanna observed it from about five metres away, her view partially blocked by that which she had been sent to seek out, horrified.

He managed to stand up after this, leaning backwards. The blood rushed out of his head in a race to the feet, his vision went blurry, and that was it. That was the point at which he fainted. His head caught a lot of things o the way back down; mostly walls and toilet roll holders and toilet seats. Well, one of each, really, just multiple, bouncy times.

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