Cargo and Chaos

“Clivilius isn’t built on quiet revelations—it’s built on crashes, curses, barking dogs, and the scramble to move faster than reason allows.”

The low rumble of the delivery truck as it climbed the street was the first thing that pulled me from the numbing glow of the laptop screen.

I had buried myself in spreadsheets and inventories, in endless calculations of what we needed to build a life in Clivilius—how many kilograms of rice would sustain three people for a month, how many litres of water we'd require before we could trust the crystalline river, whether the camping equipment I'd ordered would arrive before our meagre supplies dwindled to nothing. The numbers marched across the screen in neat columns, indifferent to the devastation still smouldering in my chest. Anything to hold back the tide of thoughts about Jamie. Anything to occupy the part of my mind that kept replaying his confession, kept hearing those four syllables that had rewritten everything I thought I understood about us.

I was with Ben.

The words circled like carrion birds, patient and persistent, waiting for the moment my defences flagged so they could descend and feast.

But the sound was insistent—that diesel growl climbing the hill towards Wallcrest Road—a reminder that the ordinary world refused to pause for my private collapse. Tasmania's courier services cared nothing for shattered hearts. They remained supremely indifferent to the fact that my ten-year relationship had just fractured along fault lines I'd never suspected existed.

I sat for a moment, paralysed, aware of the tightness in my face where tears had dried into salt trails. The skin beneath my eyes felt swollen, tender to the touch, and I knew without checking a mirror that the evidence of my breakdown in this very study would be written across my features for anyone observant enough to read. My skin felt raw, stretched thin, like parchment scrawled over with grief, every line and crease a testament to the storm that had passed through me and left wreckage in its wake.

With the back of my hand, I scrubbed away the remnants, though I knew the redness in my eyes would betray me. Still, the act felt necessary—armour hastily donned before stepping back into the realm of the living, before engaging with someone who existed in that simpler world where infidelity was grounds for ending things cleanly, where you could simply walk away from betrayal without calculating the survival needs of an inter-dimensional settlement.

Duke's sharp bark shattered the fragile quiet, followed by another, then a chorus of high-pitched insistence as he flung his small frame against the dining room window. His claws scrabbled against the glass with that particular frantic energy he reserved for delivery vehicles—as though each arriving truck might contain something wonderful meant specifically for him, as though the universe routinely dispatched Shih Tzu-sized treats via overnight courier. His tail blurred into invisibility with the force of his wagging, his entire hindquarters swaying in sympathetic motion.

Henri, ever the quieter counterpart, hovered by the dining table, watchful but unperturbed, his dark eyes gleaming in silent judgement of his brother's antics. Where Duke threw himself at life with the abandon of a creature incapable of anticipating consequences, Henri observed and calculated, storing information for some future purpose only he understood.

"Pack it in, Duke," I muttered, the words soft, my tone carrying none of the authority it usually did. My voice cracked with fatigue, the sternness half-hearted at best, emerging from a throat still raw from the sobbing that had wracked me such a short while ago. Duke ignored me, of course, his excitement unbothered by the weight hanging on my shoulders. He existed in a perpetual present tense, untroubled by confessions of infidelity or the logistics of inter-dimensional colonisation. There was something enviable in that—something I'd lost so thoroughly I could barely remember what it felt like to inhabit a single, uncomplicated moment.

I stood, the act heavier than it should have been, each movement a conscious push against inertia. My body felt foreign, disconnected from my will—this flesh that Jamie had touched with hands that had also touched someone else, this form that suddenly seemed contaminated by proximity to betrayal. I crossed the hall with steps that felt like wading through honey, my limbs sluggish with the particular exhaustion that comes from emotional devastation rather than physical exertion. Every footfall required deliberate effort, as though gravity had increased its hold specifically to make this walk more difficult.

I pulled the front door open. The cool air rushed in, tinged with the faint tang of petrol and wet asphalt, brushing against my skin like a wake-up call. After the close warmth of the study—that sealed chamber where I'd collapsed and mourned and ultimately made my vow—the outdoor air felt almost aggressive in its freshness. It carried the particular smell of a Tasmanian winter morning: eucalyptus and damp earth, woodsmoke from distant chimneys, the mineral clarity of air that had blown in from the Southern Ocean across kunanyi's flanks.

I stepped through and let the door swing shut behind me with a deliberate thud.

"Delivery for Luke Smith," the young driver called, swinging himself out of the cab with an ease that spoke of youth and lightness. His trainers hit the concrete with a careless crunch, his gait brisk, purposeful, his voice as bright and uncomplicated as a summer morning. The sound jarred against the thick heaviness still coiled inside my chest, that leaden weight of grief and betrayal that seemed to have taken up permanent residence beneath my sternum.

Joel. The name surfaced from yesterday's encounter—the young courier with the clipboard and the easy movements who'd delivered the massive tent that now sat in Clivilius. I'd thought nothing more of him after he'd left, had been too consumed by the portal and Paul's arrival and then Jamie's shattering confession to spare memory for a stranger who'd done nothing more remarkable than his job. But here he was again, back at my doorstep, the universe apparently having decided that consecutive deliveries required the same messenger.

"Yes," I managed, my reply shaped into a smile that felt foreign, forced, stretched over ruins. My lips obeyed some social automation I'd developed over decades of navigating interactions whilst my interior landscape burned, but the rest of me screamed the futility of the gesture. This was performance—the mask I'd worn since childhood, since learning that other people found my intensity overwhelming, since discovering that the visions and dreams that defined my inner life needed to be hidden behind pleasant expressions and conventional responses.

As he drew closer, the light caught his face, and everything I'd half-noticed yesterday crystallised with brutal, devastating clarity.

My heart didn't skip—it stopped entirely, frozen mid-beat, suspended in the terrible moment of recognition. Because Joel, this stranger with his clipboard and easy stride, carried Jamie's features. Not vaguely, not in some abstract way that might be dismissed as coincidence or projection. Specifically. The same jawline, angular and defined, that I'd traced with my fingertips in quieter moments. The same slope of cheek, that particular plane of bone beneath skin that I knew so intimately. Even the faint curl to his fringe echoed something in how Jamie's hair fell when he'd just showered, before he'd styled it into submission.

Yesterday, standing in this same doorway, I'd felt that nagging tug of familiarity—something in the shape of his face, in those striking blue eyes that held my gaze with unexpected steadiness. I'd thought He really is just like Jamie without understanding why the comparison surfaced, without grasping what my subconscious was trying to tell me. The recognition had slipped away like a name on the tip of my tongue, leaving only a vague unease that I'd dismissed as projection, as seeing patterns where none existed.

But Jamie's confession had stripped something away—some filter, some protective barrier that had kept me from seeing clearly. The devastation had cracked me open, and now I looked at Joel with raw, undefended eyes, and the resemblance was unmistakable. Undeniable. It blazed across his features like an accusation, like the universe had decided to mock me by sending a cruel echo of the man who had barely an hour ago fractured my world beyond repair.

How had I not seen it yesterday? How had I stood in this exact spot, exchanged those exact pleasantries, and failed to recognise what was now so painfully obvious? The grief had sharpened something in me—or perhaps destroyed something that had been obscuring my vision. Either way, I couldn't unsee it now. Every glance at Joel's face was a knife twisting in the wound Jamie had carved.

I found myself staring, cataloguing details with an intensity that probably bordered on inappropriate, searching for differences that might break the spell, might allow me to see this young man as entirely separate from the person who'd betrayed me. His eyes were darker than Jamie's, I noted—warmer, perhaps, with that particular intensity of youth that hadn't yet been tempered by disappointment. His frame was leaner, lacking the solidity that Jamie had developed through years of physical work in aged care. But the resemblance was uncanny enough to make my chest constrict, to make breathing suddenly require conscious effort.

Is this how it will be now? I wondered. Seeing Jamie in strangers' faces, hearing his voice in passing conversations, being ambushed by memory at every unexpected turn?

Or was there something more here—some connection I was too shattered to grasp, some meaning in this young man appearing twice at my door with Jamie's features written across his face?

"I just need you to sign here," Joel said, his tone utterly oblivious to the storm he had summoned in me. He held the paperwork out, his finger tapping the designated space. Just a job for him, nothing more—a momentary intersection with a stranger's life before moving on to the next delivery, the next signature, the next forgettable interaction in a day full of them. But for me, his presence tore open wounds still bleeding fresh.

I took the pen, my fingers unsteady, and pressed the sheet against the cold brick of the house's exterior. The wall scraped faintly against the paper, grounding me in the small indignities of texture and sound—the roughness of the mortar, the scratch of pen against paper, the cool solidity of a world that continued to exist despite the implosion occurring within me. My name sprawled across the page in a hand that betrayed me—slanted, uneven, restless. Every stroke dragged something raw out of me, a signature less of confirmation than confession: I am unravelled.

This was not the measured script I'd cultivated over years of careful self-presentation. This was the handwriting of a man coming apart at the seams, barely holding himself together through sheer stubbornness and the knowledge that people depended on him—that Paul and Jamie, whatever he'd done, were waiting in a starless desert for supplies only I could deliver.

With a heavy sigh, I handed the pen and paperwork back to Joel. My thoughts were elsewhere, still snagged on the raw edge of Jamie's confession and now complicated by this young man whose face kept pulling my attention back to places I couldn't bear to look, when Joel's request slipped in—quiet, almost sheepish.

"Would it be alright if I... used your bathroom?"

The words pierced my fog, disarming in their simplicity. For a moment, I blinked at him, caught between worlds—Clivilius and its impossible burdens, and this here-and-now with a young man whose only concern was a basic human need. His slight awkwardness was oddly grounding, a reminder that life could still boil down to something as ordinary as finding a toilet. People still needed bathrooms. Bladders still functioned according to biological imperatives regardless of dimensional gateways and betrayed trust and young men who wore your partner's face like an accusation. There was something almost comforting in that mundane persistence of bodily necessity.

He really is quite cute. The thought ambushed me before I could stop it, quick as a spark in dry tinder—that involuntary aesthetic appreciation that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the simple recognition of an attractive face. The same thought had surfaced yesterday, I remembered now, that moment of noticing that I'd immediately suppressed. I stamped it down again, scolding myself. I would not—could not—allow Jamie's betrayal to loosen the boundaries I held myself to. My integrity had to remain intact, even if everything else around me was unravelling. Whatever moral high ground existed in this situation, I intended to occupy it. I would not become the same thing I was grieving.

"That's fine," I said, curving my lips into a smile I kept carefully measured, wary of letting it linger too long, wary of betraying the opportunistic idea that had begun to form in the shadows of my mind. I pushed Duke aside gently with my foot, his little body wriggling with resistance, his claws clicking against the tiles as though protesting this intrusion into his domain. He had appointed himself guardian of the threshold, despite weighing roughly four kilograms and possessing no defensive capabilities whatsoever beyond his conviction of his own importance.

"It's just up the end of the hallway and to the left," I directed, voice level, composed, the picture of hospitality while my thoughts whirled at breakneck speed beneath the surface. The plan was taking shape now, crystallising from vague possibility into something approaching actionable strategy. Joel would be occupied for what—two minutes? Three? Long enough, perhaps, to accomplish something significant.

Joel gave a quick nod and disappeared into the hallway, his steps soft but sure. As his figure receded—that figure that moved with a confidence so like Jamie's it made my throat tighten—the half-formed notion in my head sharpened with startling clarity, morphing into a fully fledged plan. My pulse quickened, no longer just from grief or exhaustion, but from the unmistakable rush of strategy, of action about to be set into motion.

This was what I did. This was who I was beneath the grief and the paralysis—a planner, an orchestrator, someone who saw opportunity in chaos and moved to exploit it before the window closed. The same capacity that had allowed me to envision an entire settlement in an alien dimension, to coordinate the logistics of inter-dimensional supply chains, now focused itself on the next several minutes with laser intensity.

"I'll just be waiting outside," I called, my tone casual, though the words felt more like a filler than a necessity. The lie came easily—not truly a lie, just a statement that would shortly become untrue. I opened the front door once more, letting it close firmly behind me as I stepped out into the morning air, my mind alight with the adrenaline surge of impending execution.

Outside, the truck idled, its low, steady hum vibrating against the still morning air, a mechanical heartbeat underscoring the chaos of my thoughts. The white bulk of it dominated my driveway, its rear doors facing the street, its cab pointed towards the gate like some patient beast awaiting instructions. The smell of diesel lingered faintly, sharp against the fresher notes of dew on asphalt. Everything seemed to pulse with potential—the truck, the morning, the Portal I was learning that I could summon at will. The ordinary and the impossible existed side by side, and I was the thread connecting them.

My grip tightened around the Portal Key, the edges pressing into my palm as if demanding I act, no hesitation, no retreat. The device sat in my pocket like a second heartbeat, its presence a constant reminder of the responsibility I carried—the burden and the privilege of being the bridge between worlds. I had been chosen for this. Clivilius had whispered to me since childhood, had prepared me for precisely this moment when preparation and opportunity collided.

I strode to the back gate, each step clipped with purpose, my mind too consumed by the enormity of the task to savour the moment. The ritual was familiar now—the tilt of the wrist, the press of the button—and yet the spectacle it conjured was extraordinary: the gate transformed into a living canvas of vibrant, shifting hues. Colours that rippled across the wooden frame, turning mundane timber into something that belonged in fever dreams or religious visions.

Normally I would linger, caught in its mesmerising swirl, contemplating the impossibility that I had somehow been granted the key to such wonders. But today there was no time for wonder. The Portal was nothing more than a tool, a doorway, a means to an end. Beauty could wait. The tents sitting in that truck could not.

Clambering into the truck's cab, my urgency betrayed me. My head cracked against the doorframe with a dull thud.

"Fuck," I hissed, instinctively pressing my hand to the sore spot. Pain bloomed through my scalp, sharp and distracting, adding insult to the morning's accumulating injuries. The sting lingered, throbbing in counterpoint to my racing heart, but I shoved it aside. Pain could wait—this couldn't. I'd suffered worse. I'd suffer worse still before this venture was through. A knock on the head barely registered against the landscape of hurt I was currently navigating.

I sank into the driver's seat, its fabric rough beneath my palms, worn by countless hours of Joel's occupation into grooves and contours that didn't quite fit my frame. The cab smelled of its owner—deodorant and fast food and something faintly like paper, the particular scent of someone young and living fast. I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with the acrid tang of oil and worn upholstery, letting the unfamiliar sensory environment anchor me in the present moment.

The gear stick rattled in my grip as I eased it into drive. The truck lurched, protesting my lack of finesse, the clutch catching roughly as I guided it forwards with every nerve tuned to the unnatural shimmer yawning open before me. I was no trucker. My experience with vehicles this size was effectively nonexistent. But necessity demanded competence regardless of training, and I forced myself to feel the machine's rhythms, to anticipate its resistance, to coax rather than force.

The front windscreen showed me the Portal's swirling face approaching—that impossible membrane between here and there, between the world I'd been born into and the world that had claimed my dreams since childhood. In daylight it looked almost playful, those dancing colours like something from a child's kaleidoscope. But I knew its weight, knew what it meant to cross that threshold and leave ordinary existence behind.

Crossing the Portal was always a strange kind of drowning—sound muffled, weight suspended, light bending in unnatural hues. The transition happened instantaneously and yet seemed to stretch across infinite moments, consciousness passing through some liminal space where the rules of reality briefly lost their hold. My stomach dropped as if I'd missed a step on a staircase, that familiar lurch of inner ear protesting the impossibility, then just as quickly, the Portal swallowed me whole.

Clivilius received me as it always did—with silence so profound it felt like a physical substance, pressing against my eardrums with the weight of absolute absence.

For ten glorious metres, the plan held. The tyres crunched over alien dust, the truck an intruder in this raw expanse, a piece of human engineering impossibly transported into a realm that operated by different physics. The engine's growl seemed almost offensive against that primal silence, a mechanical intrusion into sacred stillness.

But then—silence. The engine choked, sputtered, and cut dead, leaving me stranded.

"Shit," I muttered.

My pulse quickened, frustration prickling hot against the back of my neck. What had failed? Fuel? Mechanics? Or was this some unseen law of Clivilius itself—an unspoken limit I'd been foolish enough to test?

The truck sat inert, a hulking carcass in the dust, and with it, my hasty gamble teetered on the edge of disaster.

There was no time to theorise. Joel was in my bathroom back in Berriedale, probably finishing up even now, and if he returned to find his truck missing, the consequences would cascade beyond anything I could manage.

I threw open the door and dropped to the ground.

Jamie's voice cut across the dust-thick air the moment my boots hit the ground. His incredulity was impossible to miss, each word sharp with disbelief. "You're not even going to drive it into the Drop Zone?" His figure strode towards me, eyebrows knitted tight, his expression an uneasy blend of concern and barely veiled irritation.

The sight of him sent contradictory impulses warring through my chest. Part of me wanted to turn away, to refuse even this necessary interaction with the man who'd shattered my trust. Part of me noted, with exhausted recognition, that he was still beautiful—still that particular arrangement of features and form that had drawn me in years ago and held me ever since. And now, overlaid across that familiar face, I saw the ghost of Joel's younger features, that echo that had finally clicked into focus at the worst possible moment. Love and betrayal occupied the same spaces within me, neither capable of dislodging the other.

Before I could reply, Paul's hand shot out towards the keys in my grip.

"No!" The refusal ripped out of me with more force than I intended. Adrenaline surged in my veins, quickening my stride as I moved toward the back of the truck. Paul faltered mid-step, my urgency slicing through his instinctive helpfulness. His face registered surprise, then concern, reading in my voice something that went beyond simple time pressure.

"But—" he started, his protest dissolving the moment he caught the frantic edge in my tone.

"There's no time to move it," I snapped, words tumbling over one another in their rush to escape. "The delivery guy is in the toilet. We only have a couple of minutes to get all these boxes out!"

The absurdity of the statement hung in the air for a fraction of a second—the notion that we were engaged in what amounted to dimensional theft whilst a nineteen-year-old relieved himself in my bathroom, utterly unaware that his vehicle had briefly visited an alien world. This was my life now. This was what I'd become: a man who orchestrated impossible heists between universes, racing against the biological rhythms of unsuspecting courier drivers.

A sharp expletive from Jamie marked his switch from disbelief to action. "Shit!"

Whatever else he was, whatever he'd done, Jamie could still be relied upon in a crisis. His body language transformed instantly—shoulders squaring, feet planting, his whole frame orienting towards the task at hand with the competence of someone accustomed to physical work under pressure. His job in aged care demanded exactly this kind of rapid response, shifting from calm to urgent in the space between heartbeats.

"Tents?" Paul asked quickly, his tone brisk, his eyes already sweeping the truck as if measuring the work ahead.

"Yeah," I confirmed, my fingers grappling with the latch. The mechanism resisted for a moment, unfamiliar with my hands, then surrendered with a metallic shriek. The back doors swung wide with a crash that tore through the silence like a gunshot.

Jamie flinched violently, his hands flying up to cover his ears. "Fuck's sake, Luke!" he barked, his face twisting with discomfort at the sudden assault of sound.

"Oops," I muttered, a sheepish grin breaking briefly across my face, though my shoulders never stilled. There was no room for lingering apologies, not with the clock ticking down. I gripped the metal pole fixed just inside the door, hauled myself up, and scrambled into the truck's belly.

The interior was darker than expected. Three massive boxes sat wedged against the far wall, each one taller than Duke standing on his hind legs, each one representing hundreds of dollars I'd charged to credit cards that would eventually demand reckoning. The tents I'd ordered online—absurdly oversized canvas structures meant for group camping trips and outdoor events, far more than three people could possibly need.

But I wasn't building for three people. I was building for a settlement. For a future that existed only in my visions and Clivilius's whispered promises.

From below, Paul's voice reached me, steady, businesslike, already in place to shoulder the weight. "How many are there again?"

"Three," I grunted, my muscles straining as I wrestled the first box forward. The corrugated floor groaned beneath its bulk, each inch a reminder of the money I'd sunk into these heavy, precious shelters—the price of hope measured in weight and sweat. My back protested, muscles unfamiliar with this kind of labour screaming their objection, but I pushed through. There would be time for physical complaints later. There would be no time at all if Joel returned to find his truck mysteriously relocated.

In a blur of motion, the three of us worked as if driven by one mind, urgency lending us a rhythm that bordered on frantic. Hands darted, muscles strained, shoes scuffed against the dust as box after box was wrestled from the truck's belly. We abandoned the neat logic of the Drop Zone—that organised staging area we'd established for incoming supplies—choosing instead the blunt expediency of stacking the cargo directly beside the Portal.

The pile grew steadily, each thud of cardboard on ground a small victory, each placement a fleeting reprieve from the gnawing awareness of borrowed time.

When the last box hit the ground with a hollow thunk, I expelled a sharp "Thanks," the word pushed out on ragged breaths. My chest heaved, lungs burning with exertion that felt disproportionate to the actual work performed. My body rebelled against the physical labour layered on top of the emotional wreckage of the day, protesting that I hadn't slept properly, hadn't eaten, hadn't done anything to care for myself since Jamie's confession had detonated my equilibrium.

I jumped down from the truck's bed, the impact jarring through my bones, my knees protesting as the reverberation climbed up my legs. For a moment I simply stood there, palms braced against my thighs, letting the air scrape in and out of me. The dust settled around us in the aftermath of our frenzy, those impossibly slow-falling motes descending like snow in slow motion.

I gestured quickly to Jamie and Paul, my hand slicing through the air in lieu of words. They needed no further prompting. The unspoken urgency—the awareness of a delivery driver still somewhere in my house—bound us together tighter than any speech could. They moved to secure the truck's rear, shutting away the hollow space we'd emptied with such haste. The doors closed with a more controlled sound this time, Jamie clearly mindful of his earlier flinch.

Turning back to the cab, I felt the magnetic pull of the driver's seat, the cockpit that had become both bane and necessity. Sliding in, I twisted the key, and the engine bellowed awake.

The vibration rattled up through the steering column and into my arms, so unexpected after its earlier failure that I actually laughed—a sharp, startled sound that contained no real humour.

The truck jolted into motion, graceless in its lurching obedience as I coaxed it forward. Ahead, the Portal swirled, its colours alive and insistent, ribbons of brilliance bending reality into impossible motion. It looked different from this side—inviting rather than daunting, a doorway home rather than a threshold into the unknown. The vehicle groaned as its nose touched the shimmering veil, and then, with a shuddering pull, we crossed.

The barren sprawl of Clivilius blinked out, replaced in an instant by the damp chill of morning air and the tight geometry of my driveway. The shift was dizzying, the contrast almost violent, as though the two worlds warred inside my senses. One moment dust and silence, the next the hum of suburbia—familiar yet somehow estranged.