Carry-On

"I have built an entire career out of decisions taken with imperfect information. Nobody had ever handed me one with no information at all, and I found I did not know how to hold it."

The alarm went off and I was already awake, which surprised nobody, least of all me.

I had been awake more or less all night—on and off, in the manner of a man who is technically horizontal and technically has his eyes closed and is technically engaged in something that could, at a stretch and by a generous observer, be described as sleeping. What I had actually done was suffer a series of brief losses of consciousness, each one ending with my eyes opening onto the same patch of ceiling and the same bar of streetlight lying across it, and each one separated from the next by a long grey stretch in which my brain went round and round its circuit entirely without my permission and entirely without my company.

The parcel. The tracking. The record. My brother's voice saying package as though somebody had handed him the word in a language he had never studied. And a young woman called Laura, who had been given a form of words to say and had said them, and had then quite plainly stopped believing in them herself somewhere around the second database, and who had ended by telling me that she honestly did not know what to tell me.

Twice, in the course of all that, I got up and opened the drawer and looked in the tin.

So when the alarm went off it came almost as a kindness. It let me stop pretending that any of what I had been doing amounted to rest, and get up, and be a man with a task instead of a man lying in the dark.

I got out of bed the way a considerably older man gets out of bed. My hip, which had been quietly complaining since I put it into the corner of a meeting table on Wednesday, complained again, and I stood there for a moment in the dark with one hand resting on the top of the bedside table, and I did not open the drawer, because I had opened it twice already and I was determined to have some dignity about the thing.

The flat was cold. Properly cold—that particular chill Hobart manufactures in the hour before it gets light, even in the middle of January, even when the whole day is going to be thirty degrees by lunchtime and none of that is going to be the slightest use to a man standing barefoot on floorboards in the dark. It came up through the soles of my feet, and it was, in an odd way, one of the better things that had happened to me all week. Because it was ordinary. Because it was explicable. Because it was exactly the temperature a Battery Point flat with sash windows and no insulation to speak of ought to have been at that hour, and I could account for every part of it, and there was nothing about it that I needed to be afraid of.

I put the light on over the stove and made a coffee I already knew I was not going to drink, and then I went back down the hall and got the tin off the bedside table and carried it out and set it on the kitchen bench and sat down on the stool in front of it.

And I looked at it for a long time.

And the problem, when I finally made myself look straight at it instead of around the edges of it, was that it was a tin.

That was all. That was the entire obstacle. Not the two men in the white van. Not whatever it was that had got into the systems of the Commonwealth of Australia on a Friday afternoon and taken a parcel out of the world without leaving a mark on the paintwork. A tin. My grandfather's tobacco tin: pressed steel, about the size of a paperback, with a sailing ship stamped into the lid and eighty-odd years of somebody's hands worn smooth into the middle of it. It had held drawing pins for as long as I had been alive. It was, as an object, comprehensively and enthusiastically metal.

And sitting inside it, on a bed of loose steel drawing pins, were three things of unknown composition and impossible weight.

And in a little under two hours I was going to put my bag down on a conveyor belt and feed it into an X-ray machine.

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, one flat bark of a thing in an empty kitchen, and it did not sound at all the way I had intended it to sound, and I did not do it again.

Because I had spent that entire night lying in the dark being frightened of enormous and unknowable forces, and it had not once occurred to me—not once, in all those grey hours—that the actual, practical, immediate thing standing between me and Adelaide was a bloke in a uniform at Hobart Airport doing his job perfectly competently and looking at a screen.

I got the lid off and tipped the whole lot out onto the bench.

Three drawing pins came out with them and went rolling away across the laminate, and I got down on the floor and chased them and put them back in the tin, because I did not want to stand on one later—which was, and I knew it even as I was crawling about after them, simply a way of not looking at the three things on the bench.

Then I sat back down on the stool and made myself look.

Grey. Thumb-sized. Sitting in a row on the laminate.

I picked one up and turned it over under the light above the stove.

And nothing moved on it.

Every object I have ever picked up in my life has a bright spot on it somewhere. A gleam. Turn the thing—a teaspoon, a phone, a stone off a beach, a two-dollar coin—and the gleam travels across the surface as you turn it, and it is by watching that gleam travel that the eye works out the shape of what it is holding. Where the thing curves. Where its edges are. It had been happening to me every time I picked anything up for thirty-three years and I had never once noticed myself doing it, and I noticed it that morning at that bench because it did not happen.

There was no gleam to travel. I turned that thing over and over in my fingers under a bare bulb and it gave me exactly the same face at every angle, flat and grey and entirely unhelpful, and offered my eye nothing whatever to take hold of. It had looked like that under the fluorescents in Meeting Room 4B. It had looked like that lying in a drawer at dusk.

I sat there with it in my hand and understood, in a way I had been carefully avoiding understanding since Wednesday, that I did not know what it was made of.

And it mattered now. That was what had changed. On Wednesday it had been an interesting property of an impossible object—smooth but not plastic, warm but not metal, and I have handled a great many materials in a life spent largely among the manufactured—and I had rather enjoyed the puzzle of it, in the way a man enjoys a puzzle he is not obliged to solve. And now I was obliged to solve it. And I could not.

So I sat at my own kitchen bench in the dark with a coffee going cold beside me and I worked the problem properly, the way I would have worked it for a client—which was either the most rational thing I did that week or the most deranged, and I could not have told you which at the time and could not tell you now.

Density: unknown, but demonstrably anomalous. And that was not some peripheral characteristic I could note in an appendix and move on from, because density was the entire operating principle of the machine at Hobart Airport. That machine did not care what a thing was called, or what it was for, or who was carrying it, or why. It fired radiation straight through the object and looked at how much of that radiation came out the other side, and it coloured the picture accordingly, and what governed the amount was density. And I had in front of me three objects that weighed a great deal more than their volume permitted, and I had no idea at all—none, not the beginnings of one—what they were going to look like on that screen.

Atomic number: unknown. Organic, inorganic, metallic, some fourth thing: unknown. Behaviour under X-radiation: unknown. Comparable articles previously carried: none. Precedent of any kind, anywhere, that I could lay my hands on before the sun came up: none whatever.

I had spent my entire working life making decisions on bad information. Bad information had never frightened me for a moment; bad information was most of what I did. Give me a rotten brief and a difficult stakeholder and I would find the gaps and tell you honestly how big they were and hand you something you could act on regardless.

But I had never once, in thirty-three years, been asked to make a decision on no information—a decision where the risk could not be assessed, and could not be assessed not because I had been lazy about the work, but because the work could not be done. There was nothing to find. There was nobody to ask. There was no document anywhere in the world that would tell me what happened when three of these went through a scanner, because as far as I could establish nobody had ever put one through a scanner, and if they had, they had not seen fit to write it down anywhere I could get at it.

And I sat on that stool with my hands flat on the bench and found that I did not know how to hold a thing like that. It would not fit in my hands. There was nowhere to set it down. Every method I had—every single one of them, everything I had built up over eleven years for turning an unbearable problem into a manageable one—ran through the assumption that if a man goes and looks hard enough, there is something there to be found.

My heart was going. My hands, when I noticed them, were not steady.

So I put the analysis down and came at the thing from a different side entirely.

Forget what it is made of. What does it look like?

I held it out at arm's length under the light and made myself look at it the way a stranger would.

And it took me an embarrassing length of time to get to the answer, and it should not have taken me any time at all, because I had already had it once and thrown it away.

It looked like a USB stick.

That was exactly what I had thought it was, sitting in Meeting Room 4B on Wednesday afternoon with the contents of Seth's envelope spread out across the table in front of me. Several small USB-like objects. That had been my first assessment, and it had been an entirely reasonable one, and I had only abandoned it after I picked one up and held it an inch from my face and discovered that it had no connector on it, and no seam, and no logo, and no visible purpose of any kind.

But that had taken me the better part of a minute of close, deliberate, undivided attention.

And a man at an airport does not get a minute. A man at an airport gets about a second and a half, with a queue building behind him and a screen full of somebody else's shoes and laptops and shampoo—and what he would see was a small grey object about the size of a thumb, sitting in a bag alongside a phone charger and a toothbrush and a pair of rolled-up socks.

Nobody had ever looked twice at one of those. Nobody in the history of aviation had ever looked twice at one of those. I had gone through that airport with things like that rolling loose in the bottom of a bag along with a dead pen and a pair of earphones with one side broken and a boarding pass from 2016.

Which meant—and it arrived all at once, and it went through me cold—that the very worst thing I could possibly do, the single most incriminating arrangement available to me that morning, was the one I had been about to make by default.

Three unidentifiable objects. Individually wrapped in bubble wrap. Sealed inside a metal tin. Buried underneath a change of clothes at the bottom of a backpack.

That was not a man with some USB drives in his bag. That was a man with something to hide, and it announced itself at every single layer, and it announced itself directly to somebody whose entire job was looking at bags all day and noticing exactly that.

The concealment was the danger. It had been the danger the whole time, and I had been about to carry it into an airport wearing it like a coat.

So I sat at my kitchen bench in the dark and unwrapped them.

I had not expected that to be difficult, and it was difficult, and I could not have told you why. The bubble wrap was Seth's. He had wound it round them himself, at some point, in some room I have never seen and never will—with his hands shaking, presumably, the way they had been shaking in the laneway—and I sat there in a silent flat before dawn and peeled it off, and the plastic popped and crackled under my fingers, obscenely loud, and I kept expecting somebody to hear it. And each of them came out bare into my palm, grey and small and entirely unremarkable, and the feeling I had, which I did not care for in the least, was that I was undressing something.

I put them in the front pocket of the backpack. Not the main compartment. The front pocket—the shallow one with the pen loop and the loose change and the biscuit crumbs in the bottom of it, the pocket where a man keeps the things he wants to be able to get at without stopping.

Hiding in plain sight, in the most literal sense the phrase has ever been put to. The safest place on earth for three doorways to another world was the one place where nobody would think to look at them twice.

Then I put the bubble wrap in the bin, and I put the drawing pins back into my grandfather's tin, and I carried the tin down the hall and put it in the drawer of the bedside table where it had sat for eleven years, and I shut the drawer.

And it was, at that point, once again a tin with drawing pins in it. There was nothing in that flat for anybody to find. There was nothing in that flat at all.

I stood in the bedroom doorway with my hand on the frame and looked at the closed drawer for rather longer than there was any reason to, and I felt something I could not have named then and have never managed to name since. Not grief. Something adjacent to it. Something living in the same house.

The packing took four minutes, which was the only estimate I made in the whole of that week that turned out to be correct, and I took what comfort I could from it.

A change of clothes. A toothbrush. A phone charger. My wallet, containing a driver's licence, a folded yellow Post-it note, and a receipt for a parcel that had never been lodged. And my own Portal Key, which went into my right-hand trouser pocket, where it had been living since Wednesday and where it now sat against my thigh with a familiarity that I found, when I stopped long enough to think about it, frankly disturbing.

Three of them in the bag, and one of them on my body, and I stood in my own kitchen at the end of it with four doorways to another world about my person and a backpack from Kathmandu hanging off one shoulder.

I did consider leaving some of them behind. I went through it properly, standing there, and it took several minutes, and the argument for it was straightforward and sensible and I could have presented it to a steering committee without embarrassment. If the bag goes, everything in the bag goes with it. Do not put the entire holding through a single point of failure. Distribute the risk. It was precisely the advice I had given other people, standing in front of whiteboards, for money.

And I could not do it.

And the reason I could not do it had nothing whatever to do with the argument, and I knew that too, standing there in my kitchen with the bag in my hand. Leaving them here meant leaving them here—in a drawer, in a flat, in a suburb, four kilometres from an airport and eight hundred kilometres from wherever I was going to end up, entirely unwatched and entirely unreachable, for however many days this took. And I had spent the whole of Friday afternoon finding out exactly what that felt like: standing in a meeting room with hold music in one ear and my hand going out, all on its own, towards a drawer that was not there.

I was not doing that to myself again. Whatever else happened that day, I was going to be able to put my hand on my own bag.

It was not the correct decision, and I knew it was not the correct decision at the moment I was making it, and I made it anyway. And I did not much want to look at what that said about me, so I did not look at it, and I picked up the bag.

The coffee had gone stone cold on the bench, so I tipped it down the sink and rinsed the mug out and stood it on the rack—which was not a thing a frightened man with a plane to catch had any need whatever to do, and I did it anyway, because I could not bear the thought of a dirty mug sitting in the sink of an empty flat for however long I was gone.

The basil plant on the windowsill had been dying by degrees since about November. I gave it some water. Then I stood and looked at it for a moment and gave it some more.

And out through the window, over the rooftops, the mountain was nothing at all yet—no shape, no outline, just a great black absence sitting where the sky ought to have been, exactly as it had sat there on every morning of the ten years I had lived beneath it, and on every morning of the ten thousand years before I ever turned up.

I put my shoes on. I put the backpack on. I checked the front pocket, and then I checked it again, and then I made myself take my hand away and leave it alone.

And then I stood at my own front door with my hand on the latch and had what was, on any reasonable assessment, the most useless thought of my entire life.

I did not know whether to lock it.

Not because I had mislaid the key. Because I could not work out, standing there in my own hallway with a bag on my back, what it was that I would be locking it against.

Whatever had reached into the postal system of an entire country and lifted a parcel clean out of the record of the world had not done it by picking a lock. It had not needed to come up my path, or lean on my window, or stand about under the streetlight on Colville Street in the small hours with a cigarette, watching my front door. It had done whatever it had done from somewhere else entirely, in the middle of an ordinary Friday afternoon, while I sat in a meeting room on hold—and nobody, anywhere, had heard so much as a floorboard.

A deadbolt was not going to trouble it. A deadbolt was not going to be so much as an inconvenience to it.

And I stood there in the dark and understood, with a clarity I could very easily have done without at that hour of the morning, that the lock on my front door had never in its life been anything more than a piece of theatre—that it had only ever worked at all because the people it was designed to stop had broadly agreed, for reasons of their own, to be stopped by it.

Then I locked it. Obviously I locked it. Both turns, the way I always did.

And I went down the path in the dark to wait for the taxi.