All Set

"'You're all set,' she said. I had put two permanent doorways to another world into buildings I did not own, and I could not take either of them out again, and a young woman with a scanner looked at a screen and told me I was all set."

They were already boarding by the time I came out of that corridor, and I heard it before I got round the corner—the voice going out over the concourse ahead of me, unhurried and profoundly bored, saying that this was a boarding call for the service to Adelaide and that they were now inviting passengers seated in rows fifteen through thirty to make their way to the gate. And I came out of that dead end, past the trolley and the vending machines and the rust-coloured shadow on the floor that I had not been able to lift, and walked back into the light.

And the light was very nearly the end of me.

It came down out of that ceiling from everywhere at once, out of a hundred panels, with no shadow anywhere underneath it—arriving at things rather than falling on them, so that everything it touched went flat and grey and slightly ill. And I had been standing, twenty minutes earlier, on two thousand acres of red dust under an ordinary sun that laid a proper shadow of a man out across the ground beside him, and I came back into that terminal and the difference went through me like cold water. The people looked wrong. All of them. They looked like specimens, laid out under glass and lit for the purpose. Nobody in that entire building looked well and not one of them could see it on anybody else, and I walked the length of that concourse in the middle of them with my hair still wet from an airport basin and a bag over one shoulder and my heart going like a bird in a box.

Nobody looked at me. Nobody has ever looked at me, and I do not believe I have ever in my life been more thoroughly grateful for anything.

Somewhere around the duty-free I got my phone out again, which I had been doing at intervals of about four minutes since Hobart and which had never once produced anything, and it did not produce anything now either. Two small grey ticks. My own words sitting up above them, over-explained and under-explained at the same time, the way they had been sitting there since the departure lounge in Hobart. And underneath them, nothing whatsoever.

He had had the whole morning. He had had my flight from Hobart, and the descent, and the landing, and the layover, and every minute I had spent walking that terminal staring at walls, and every minute I had spent on my knees in the dust of another world with my head splitting—he had had every single one of those minutes, and he had done nothing with any of them.

And I stopped in the middle of that concourse with people going round me on both sides like water round a rock, and I did the thing I had promised myself in Hobart that I was not going to do.

I started a second message.

Josh, did you get my—

And I stopped with my thumb over the screen, because I could hear it. I could hear exactly, precisely how it was going to read on a telephone lying on a bench in a kitchen in Broken Hill, coming in behind the first one: a grown man of thirty-three, sending a follow-up, chasing—from a brother who has been known to go silent for a fortnight at a stretch and cannot now leave the man alone for four hours. Did you get my message. As though the problem were in the delivery. As though it were a technical matter, and the network had let us down, and a second attempt might just get through.

And underneath that, and considerably worse, was the thing I had learned standing at a basin with red water going down a plughole.

Because I knew something about my brother now that I had not known when I walked into that corridor, and I had got it off a screen on another world, and it was the cleanest and the coldest piece of information anybody had put in front of me since a man with a cut on his jaw put an envelope into my hands in a laneway and walked away.

Josh had never opened his. Whatever had become of that parcel, and wherever it had gone, and whoever was holding it now—my brother had never stood in his own lounge room and pointed a device at a wall, and had never put his thumb down on it, and had never come out onto a plain of red dust in whatever he happened to have on his feet, and had never gone within a kilometre and a half of that cliff.

His lounge room was not on that screen. There had been three images on it and there had only ever been three, going round and round until my head split, and one of them was a meeting room and one of them was a corridor and one of them was a room with amber light in it that I had never been inside in my life.

And I stood in the middle of Melbourne Airport with a half-typed message in my hand and understood that this was, in the most precise and technical sense of the words available to me, good news—that it was in fact the only good news anybody had handed me in four days—and that it told me absolutely nothing whatever about whether my brother was alive.

It told me he had not gone through a door. That was the whole of what it told me. And a man can come to grief in a very great many ways that do not involve a door.

So I deleted it. One letter at a time, all the way back to an empty box, exactly as I had deleted one on my own sofa in the dark in Battery Point with the television talking to itself in the corner and a party going in somebody's garden two houses down. And then I put the phone in my pocket and went and stood in the queue at the gate like everybody else.

The woman at the desk was somewhere in her twenties, with a neckerchief on and a scanner in her hand, and she said the same four things to every single person who came up to her—the same four things, in the same order, with the same measured and entirely genuine quantity of warmth, over and over and over. She had done it two hundred times that morning. She would do it two hundred times more before they let her go home. And there was nothing whatever wrong with any of it. It was one of the most ordinary and most decent things I have ever stood and watched a person do, and I stood in that queue with red dust still packed into the beds of my fingernails and watched her doing it and could very easily have wept.

Then it was my turn, and she took my telephone and held it under the scanner, and the thing chirped at her, and a little green light came on.

"You're all set," she said. "Enjoy your flight."

All set.

I have thought about those two words a great deal in the time since, and I have never been able to explain to anybody what they did to me, standing at that desk with a backpack hanging off one shoulder.

Because that morning I had installed a permanent doorway into another world in a meeting room in a government building where thirty people come to work every day of their lives, and where a woman called Sal keeps a pot of succulents on her desk and waters them on Fridays. And rather more recently than that, I had installed a second one in the wall of a service corridor perhaps forty metres from where that young woman was standing, inside a secured Commonwealth facility, in a building with more cameras in it than the entire suburb I grew up in. And I could not take either of them out again. I did not know how. I did not know whether it could be done at all, and there was nothing about it in Seth's letter, and there was nobody alive that I could ask.

And she looked at a screen, and the screen said my name was on a list, and she told me I was all set.

"Thanks," I said, and it came out of me almost entirely normally, and she was already looking past me at the man behind.

The airbridge was cold, and it smelled of jet fuel and rubber, and it flexed very slightly underfoot in the way that they do—and I went up it in the queue, shuffling, one step and then a pause and then another step, with a woman in front of me wrestling a duty-free bag and a suitcase and a coat that would not stay over her arm.

And what I was doing on that airbridge I have never since been able to look at squarely.

I was looking at the walls.

Not deliberately. Not with any plan or intention of any kind. I was standing in a queue of perfectly ordinary people going to Adelaide on a Saturday afternoon and my eyes were running along the panelling of that airbridge and quietly assessing it, the way they had run along every vertical surface in that terminal for an hour. Blank. Continuous. Rather better than two metres by two between the top of the handrail and the roof. Nobody behind me for four or five steps. No camera that I can see, which is not the same statement as no camera.

I caught myself doing it and made myself stop, and stood there looking down at my own shoes with my ears going hot.

Because that was what four days had done to me. I had opened one in a meeting room and one in a corridor, and I had spent the better part of an hour walking the length of an airport doing nothing else whatsoever but this—and now it was simply running, all the time, underneath everything, in precisely the same part of me that used to notice whether a meeting room had enough power points in it and whether the projector cable would reach.

The world had stopped being a place I walked through. It had become a set of surfaces, and some of them were doors, and I could not find the switch to turn it off.

The aeroplane was a smaller one than the Hobart aircraft, two seats on one side of the aisle and three on the other, and my seat was an aisle on the three-seat side a few rows from the back, and it was the most comprehensively unremarkable seat on that aeroplane and I have rarely been so pleased about anything.

Because I could put my bag under the seat in front of me. That was all it was. That was the whole of the relief and it was very nearly enough to make me sit down in the aisle. I had spent the entire flight out of Hobart with three doorways to another world in an overhead locker two rows behind my own head, under a long grey plastic panel with the seat numbers printed along it, where I could not see them and could not reach them and could not stop turning round to look at the outside of the locker like a lunatic, until a woman two rows back caught me at it and drew whatever conclusion she drew.

And now I put the bag down between my feet and pushed it forward under the seat with my heel until the top of it was against my shin, and I sat back, and did up my belt, and put my foot on it. And something in my chest came down about an inch and stayed down.

The cabin filled up around me in the usual way. There was an elderly gentleman already in the window seat of my row when I got there, small and neat and entirely self-contained, with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes on the wing—and he gave me a courteous little nod as I sat down and did not say one word to me then or at any point in the two hours that followed. And then a woman came along the aisle and stopped at my row and checked the number, and I got up and let her past into the middle seat, and she said thanks and did not say anything else. She had a paperback with her and she had it open before we pushed back off the stand. Somebody several rows up was having a slow and increasingly public argument with an overhead locker and was losing it. A woman across the aisle was explaining to a small child, patiently, and evidently for the third or fourth time, that he could not have the iPad until the aeroplane was actually in the air, and that this was not a rule she had invented in order to spoil his day.

And I sat in the middle of all of that with my foot resting against a canvas bag with three doors in it, and looked at the seat back in front of me.

Then they began the safety demonstration, and I could not watch it.

And that is not a small thing, and it frightened me a good deal more than I would have expected. Because I have watched every safety demonstration I have ever been given, on every aeroplane I have ever been on, without one single exception, for the whole of my adult life. It is one of about four things I do that people find quietly funny about me, along with reading the terms and conditions and knowing where the stopcock is in a flat I have rented for a fortnight—and I have never in all that time been able to see the joke in any of it. A procedure exists because something went wrong somewhere at some point, and because afterwards somebody sat down and worked out what ought to have happened instead, and wrote it down, and made it simple enough that a stranger could follow it under pressure, so that the next person along would not have to find any of it out the hard way. That is the entire content of my trade. I have some respect for it.

So I looked at the woman standing in the aisle. She was pointing out the exits, fore and aft. She was holding up a mask and demonstrating how it would drop, and how I should pull it towards me, and fit it over my nose and my mouth, and breathe normally through it, and fit my own before assisting others. She was doing every part of it precisely as it ought to be done—calmly, and in order, and leaving nothing out—and I looked straight at her the whole way through and could not make one single word of it go in.

Because there was no card in that seat pocket for what I had done. There was no procedure anywhere. Nobody, in the entire history of the world, had ever sat down after a thing like this went wrong and worked out what ought to have happened instead and written it down and laminated it and put it in a pocket where the next man could find it.

I was the next man. And I was the first one. And I had already got it comprehensively wrong twice before lunch.

The cabin door went shut somewhere behind me with that heavy hydraulic finality they have—a sound I have heard several hundred times and never once actually listened to—and I felt it in my ears rather than heard it, and I sat there with my hands flat on my thighs and let them take me.

We pushed back, and then we taxied for a very long time, out past the tails of half a dozen other aeroplanes and along the edge of a great flat brown apron with the heat coming up off it in ripples—and somewhere in the middle of all that I got the phone out one last time, because they had not told us to put them away yet and because I could not stop myself.

Nothing.

And I sat with it in my hand and looked at those two small grey ticks, and I thought about a demountable office on the edge of a mine, and about a telephone lying face-down on the arm of a chair in a house I have never been inside, and about a yard, and a coffee going cold on a bench somewhere eight hundred kilometres away.

Then I put the thing into flight mode, and I watched the bars go out one at a time, and the little white aeroplane came up in the corner of the screen where they had been.

And that was the end of it. Whatever was going on at the other end of that silence was going to carry on happening without me for the next two hours, and there was not one thing in the world I could do about any of it, and I put the phone in my pocket and left it there.

They let it go at the end of the runway, and the whole aeroplane leaned into it, and the tarmac started going past the window faster and then very much faster, and the seat came up under me and the noise got in behind my sternum.

And it did nothing for me at all.

That surprised me, and it frightened me a great deal more than the taxiing had. Because on the last one—that same morning, in an exit row, with an emergency door eighteen inches from my elbow—that same enormous, brutal, entirely indifferent physics had gone through me like a mercy. I had sat with my head back against the rest and my hands flat on my thighs and let it happen to me, and I had cried about it, and I had not been able to explain why to myself at the time. Twenty tonnes of metal being thrown down a strip of concrete by a process I could have explained to a child. The wing making lift. The lift exceeding the weight. The thing working, and going on working, whether or not there was another world, and whether or not a parcel had ever been lodged, and whether or not my brother remembered a conversation I had bled for.

And now I sat in an aisle seat a few rows from the back with my foot against a bag, and the process worked exactly as it had worked before, and I felt precisely nothing about it.

Something had gone out of me on that plain. Or something had come back with me. I have never been able to decide which of the two it was, and I am no longer confident that the distinction means very much.

We came off the ground, and the nose came up, and Melbourne began to go away underneath us.

Neither of them was looking out of the window. The old man had his eyes shut. The woman had not lifted her head from her book once since we pushed back. And I sat there for a moment weighing up the social cost of what I was about to do, and then I leaned across the pair of them, rather further than was polite and considerably further than I have ever leaned across two strangers in my life, and looked past them out of the window at the city—and neither one of them acknowledged that I existed, which I have always been grateful for.

And there it all was, exactly as it had been on the way in. The grid. The straight lines running out and out and out in every direction, north and south and east and west, crossing one another at ninety degrees, mile after mile after mile, with the little rectangles of the houses fitted neatly into every square of it and the swimming pools going off in the afternoon sun like a code somebody was sending. The freeways in their long clean curves. The industrial estates in their rows. The whole enormous rational thing, drawn up on a table with a pencil by people who thought about it beforehand and got it approved, and then executed on the ground, with five million people living inside it and going about their Saturdays.

And somewhere down there, at the back end of a pier, four gates from a departure lounge with a coffee stand in it, behind a folding yellow sign that says CLOSED FOR CLEANING, there is a corridor with three vending machines in it and a stain on the floor.

And a wall that is not a wall.

I looked at that city until the wing took it away from me. Then I sat back in my seat, and put my foot against my bag, and did not sleep.