You really want a story about what I did next? Walked down to the corner of Argyle and Collins Street where the rivulet tunnel opens and climbed down inside to hide from people, is what I did. But I contend that part was quite unremarkable. Luckily it was only an hour or two from dawn on a weeknight and the city was quiet. So I was able to duck and weave.
I walked at first down an avenue of cypresses that seemed to commemorate some great and terrible war I’d not yet heard about, but did not approach the monument in fear of seeing the date. I came to a place where I could watch the wide, empty eyes of the horseless, carriages. Instead of headless horseman the night streets of Hobart now bore headless carriages.
Also in my favour was the my feverish imagination has always been balanced by a streak of cooler reason. Observing everything from the trees, I steeled myself into a state of calm. I reasoned that these vehicles were run by some type of engine in the front, one more advanced than steam, but nonetheless non-magical. When the noisy things stopped for the red lights (moving away again at the green signal) I was able to see people inside them operating the controls, just as with a normal carriage, but with engines. Inside something was combusting other than coal. I discerned the safe way to cross the road and went about doing it.
What was far louder in me at the time than the cars or my heartbeat was the queasy autogenesis of fear. The dread that I had indeed been away longer than twenty or even thirty years... My earlier surge of faith where I’d told Arthur aloud I was coming for him was greatly rattled by this doubt that edged and thorn-needled its way into the back of my brain. Witch-pin like it gave off subtle venom, that doubt-demon. I knew all I had left going for me was the power of my determination, the pin-cushion poppet of my body endured these regular bone-deep injections, whilst on the outside I effortlessly negotiated the changed world around me. Below the surface I was still drowning, on the surface I am… well, good at things, I suppose. You will think me arrogant for saying so, but it’s true. It’s also not a choice for me whether to believe this of myself, because for me the other alternative to self-value is always death.
As I write this I fall again into the semi-stupor in which I wandered those nighttime streets… A functional stupor, of course, because one’s worth to this world must always be re-demonstrated, for humans forget past services very rapidly when made comfortable and complacent. Last time I stopped being functional something terrible had happened to me that I didn't fully understand as yet. So I was avoiding other humans like the concrete-spreading plague animal it seemed they had become.
Or should that be that we have become? After what I had done I felt more human than ever somehow, up against the stark background of this miracle that tasted clean-bitter like the pith of the blood orange... I was ever so much more human than this world, ever so much more fragile than the current Spirit of the Age, I guessed from the start. Time it appears, the lineality (to coin a word) of experience is also quite deceptively delicate. It folds in like treacle and the distinction between its layers is quickly lost. This is what is important about my story. I hope you didn’t expect I was going to leave all the analysis up to you, did you? I didn’t come here to let you study me, together we will study what has occurred and together draw the conclusions.
A brief observation of the system for regulation of traffic and spying on another late night pedestrian allowed me to cross the highway without incident. Running where possible and walking when I fatigued I generated sufficient body heat to partially warm and partially dry my clothing. So there could be no doubt I was quick with life.
Next I discerned where best to jump the very serious looking fence that seems to bar our descent down into the darkness. There is no sign to say it’s explicitly not allowed for citizens to crawl down into the Hobart Rivulet Tunnel but there’s a fence. As if the dark bowels of our city, seething with memory, are not quite forbidden by the rule of modernity, just strongly discouraged. A mild prohibition was never enough to prevent me finding my way into the guts of Hobart. It was where I belonged after all, was I not something that ought to have been digested by her long ago? Was I so uniquely unpalatable that of all Hobart’s dead only I had been coughed up, phlegm-covered and wriggling like a raw nerve?
The walls of the rivulet tunnel hissed and wriggled with voices. You could smell the history down there as strongly as you’d have smelt rot around the water in my time. History is buried into the foundations of Hobart, the skeletons of cottages of convict-hewn stone rise like stone ghosts to the sight of the late-night wayfarer. Deeper into the arteries of the city the air smelt like the effluence of well advanced capitalism. Just from the way they vented into the Undertown my nose wrinkled and I knew I wasn’t going to like what the living had been up to above.
The rest you know. How you say I froze, like a ‘deer in headlights’, when you flooded me in torchlight. You were standing there with your modern camera, a girl who was to my perception dressed in boy’s clothes, right beside the place with the baby’s heads. You pointed at the numerous plaster castes of boneyard-white doll faces that looked out eyelessly from the walls of the tunnel. You didn’t seem worried by them or by me.
“My theory is that this is here to commemorate the high infant morality in Hobart during the nineteenth century. Did you know they used to call part of South Hobart ‘shadow of death valley’ back in the day?” You addressed me.
“Yes,” I whispered, still caught staring into the bright light you wielded in your hand and forgetting to lie.
You turned the direction of the light on the baby head art next, so I was able to think more clearly.
“Well aren’t you the current reigning Smartypants of Smartypants Town?”
I wondered if I should agree it was likely, but I sensed you were perhaps facetious. "Well answer me this one then if you're so smart." You said this shining light on a gold painted plaque of a demon. "Whose this ugly, fella?"
"He looks like Typhon the many-headed monster of Greek myth, or perhaps his spawn Gorgon." I said it very quietly, as someone well aware that I wouldn't always be rewarded for knowing things. You nodded as if you were genuinely pleased to know. But all the learning in the world wasn’t going to help me out of the fix I was in, and I knew it. There was a question that would come to mean everything and it was going to hurt less to answer it now than when I would later find myself standing outside Lebrena and seeing the physical evidence.
“When you say… the nineteenth century… what… which year would that… make it today? Please?” Even cold and injured as I was it pained me not to use my manners in a proper introduction, to say my name and ask yours, as two humans ought. But the imperative around my question had become stronger even than my good upbringing.
I watched the motion in your eyes from incomprehension to growing fear, and who could blame you really? When some lunatic in a tunnel looking like something the ocean regurgitated asks you what year it is, it’s reasonable to feel unsettled. But you didn’t run, thanks be to Our Lady…. You stayed and told me how many years it has been. I don’t want to write about that… About what I felt. About realizing… No. I’ve got nothing more for now. Give me a different stimulus question.