In Transit

"Lodged. In transit. Arrived at facility. I had watched that parcel go up the country ahead of me, and then I got on an aeroplane and followed it along the same route, one scan at a time."

I came up out of it badly, all at once, the way sleep ends when something has gone off in the room—and for a moment I had absolutely no idea where I was, or who I was, or what had happened to me.

That was not pleasant and I am not exaggerating it. There was a chime, and a woman's voice saying something over the top of it, and my head was at an angle my neck was going to complain about all day, and there was a smear of my own breath on the window beside me. And in that moment I was nobody at all. I was a warm body in a chair with a headache coming on, and there was no Seth in me, and no envelope, and no wall, and no dust—and then the whole of it arrived at once, in a single lump, the way a wave arrives, and I sat up so quickly that the woman with the paperback looked over at me.

I had slept. That took a moment to work out as well. I had gone under somewhere over the middle of Bass Strait with my head against the seat back and I had slept properly, for the first time since any of this began, and I had not dreamed, or if I had I did not bring any of it back with me. And I did not wake rested, which I had been rather counting on. I woke with the distinct sense that something had been done to me while I was not looking.

The seatbelt sign was lit. The cabin had that grinding pressure in it that gets into the ears on the way down, and somewhere behind me a baby had started up and was plainly going to keep going all the way to the ground, and the woman in the scarf was coming down the aisle with a bin bag collecting cups and reminding everybody to stow their tray tables.

I put mine up, and looked out of the window, and Melbourne was underneath us.

It went on for ever. That was the first thing about it and I could not get round it. It was enormous, and it was flat, and it simply kept going, out and out and out, brown and grey and beige all the way to the edge of the haze in every direction, with no mountain anywhere to stop it and no water to fold it up against.

And it was ruled. That was what I sat there with my forehead against the perspex and could not stop looking at, and it disturbed me in a way I could not have explained to anybody at the time and have only partly worked out since. Everything down there was in straight lines. The roads ran north and south and east and west and crossed one another at ninety degrees, over and over, mile after mile, a great grid of them ruled out across the whole of that plain—with the little rectangles of the houses fitted neatly into every square of it, and the swimming pools going off in the sun like a code somebody was sending. There were freeways running through the middle of it in long clean curves. There were industrial estates laid out in rows the way cars are laid out in a car park. And every part of it looked as though somebody had sat down at a table with a pencil, and thought about it, and got it approved.

I had lived in Hobart for a decade and Hobart was nothing whatever like that. Hobart was a town that had happened to a hill. The streets went where the ground had allowed them to go and then they stopped, and half of them were one-way for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained to me, and there was a mountain sitting in the middle of everything and a river down one side of it, and the whole place was folded up between the two of them like something that had grown rather than something that had been built.

And Melbourne was designed. Melbourne was a document that somebody had drawn up and had approved and had then gone out and executed on the ground, and five million people were living inside it.

And I sat in an exit row above the most rational city in this country with three objects in a locker two rows behind me that made a complete and comprehensive nonsense of every straight line in it, and I put my hand over my eyes and laughed into my own palm without making any sound at all, and the woman with the paperback moved very slightly away from me in her seat.

Then the wheels came down with that heavy mechanical thump they make, and the flaps went out, and the ground came up—and we hit the runway hard enough to rattle everything in the overhead lockers, and the engines went into reverse with an enormous ugly roar that I felt in my back teeth, and I sat with my hands flat on my thighs and thought about the fact that my bag was two rows behind me and could not go anywhere in the world without me.

They stood up before the wheels had stopped turning. Of course they did. The sign was still lit and half that aeroplane was already on its feet in the aisle with their heads bent under the lockers, standing in a queue that was not moving, in order to arrive very slightly earlier at a jet bridge that was not there yet.

I did not stand up. I stayed where I was, in 14C, with my belt still done up, and I let them go.

Because I had thought about this on the way down—in some detail, which will surprise nobody who has ever worked with me—and I had concluded that the very worst thing available to me was to stand in that aisle with my arm up inside an overhead locker, fumbling about, holding everybody up, apologising over my shoulder, with a queue of eleven people watching my hands.

So I let the whole aeroplane empty out around me. I sat and looked at the seat back in front of me while people knocked my shoulder with their bags and said sorry mate, and I did not move until the aisle had cleared all the way back to the wing—and then I got up and walked two rows against nobody at all, and reached up, and opened the locker above row twelve.

My hands were not steady, and there is no getting round it. I had to reach up and in, past a rucksack with a Bunnings sticker on the flap that some bloke had gone off and left behind, and my fingers went into the dark of that bin and found nothing whatsoever for what cannot have been more than a second, and in that second I stopped being a rational adult entirely.

Then I touched canvas, and it was mine, and I got hold of the strap and dragged it out—and it was heavier than it should have been, in the way it was always going to be heavier than it should have been, and I stood in the aisle of an empty aeroplane with my bag hanging off one hand and had to put the other one down on the top of a seat back.

"You right there?"

The woman in the scarf, up at the front of the cabin with her bin bag, looking down the whole length of the aeroplane at me with an expression of pure ordinary kindness on her face.

"Yeah," I said. "Long night."

"Aren't they all," she said.

I unzipped the front pocket out in the airbridge, where nobody could see me do it, and looked inside, and there they were. Three of them, loose among the coins and the crumbs and a dead biro, exactly where I had left them. I zipped it shut, and I did not take that bag off my shoulder again for the rest of the morning.

And then I came out of the jet bridge into Melbourne Airport, and it arrived the way noise arrives when somebody opens the door of a room with a party going on in it.

It had not once occurred to me that the airport at the other end might be an entirely different order of thing. Not in all those hours lying awake in the dark modelling an X-ray machine, not in the taxi, not in the queue, not anywhere. I had thought about Hobart Airport, and I had solved Hobart Airport, and it had never entered my head that Hobart Airport was the small one.

Thousands of people. Not hundreds—thousands, moving in every direction at once down a concourse the width of a street, under a ceiling I could barely see. Announcements coming over the top of one another in three languages. Roller bags, and coffee machines, and somewhere a piano, or a recording of a piano. Shops—actual shops, proper ones, with security guards standing at the doors of them. And screens; hundreds and hundreds of screens.

And cameras. I did not have to go looking for them. They were set into the ceilings and mounted on the walls and hanging off poles at the intersections, black hemispheres of them, dozens I could count without turning my head—and every single person in that building was being watched continuously, from several angles at once, and not one of them had ever thought about it, and neither had I, in the whole of my life, until that morning.

I had walked out of a small quiet regional airport where a woman had said everything out, love to me, and I had walked into the most heavily observed building I had ever set foot in, and my connecting flight was two hours away.

I found the gate first, because that is what I do, and because knowing where a thing is has always been worth something to me even when I have no intention whatever of going to it yet. It was an extraordinarily long way—I walked what felt like a mile of it, past the bars and the bookshops and a wall of duty-free perfume I could smell from thirty metres—and when I got there I stood underneath the board and looked up at the word Adelaide for a while, and then I took my phone off flight mode.

The little aeroplane in the corner went away and the bars came back one at a time, and the thing shuddered in my hand and told me it had found a network, and began pulling everything down out of the air.

An email about my bank statement. An email about a fire drill. A message from a woman I had been out with twice in 2016 who now sold something on the internet.

Nothing from Josh.

I stood in the middle of that concourse with my thumb on the screen and refreshed it, which does nothing, and which I have always known does nothing, and I did it three times anyway. The two small grey ticks sat there underneath my own words exactly where they had been sitting when I put the phone away, and there was nothing whatever underneath them.

He had had the whole of that flight. He had had all morning.

And I stood there and built him a life out of nothing, the way I had been doing since the gate in Hobart. He was asleep. He was in the shower. He had gone out to the yard and left the phone face-down on the bench. He had read it and put it down and gone off to make a coffee and have a think about it, because it was an extraordinary thing to have been asked and he had never in his life answered anything without turning it over first.

All of that was true. Every word of it was reasonable, and any one of those explanations would have covered the whole thing comfortably, and I could not make myself believe a single one of them—because I had watched a parcel go into a plastic tub with EXPRESS stencilled down the side of it, and I had watched it get all the way to Adelaide, and then I had watched it never have been lodged at all.

The silence was not a silence any more. It had become a result.

I put the phone in my pocket and went and bought a coffee, and found a bank of seats off to one side of the main flow of the concourse, next to a large potted plant that I looked at for some considerable time before concluding that it was not a real plant—and I sat down in one of them with the bag on my knees and both arms round it, and the coffee going cold in my hand.

It was a bad coffee, and it was very probably my own fault rather than the coffee's, because I had bought it from a stand out of pure habit without looking at what I was buying or who was making it, in a building where nobody has ever cared. It tasted of something that had been burnt and then reconstituted. I drank about a third of it and after that I simply held it, because holding it was the entire point of it.

And I sat there under those lights.

The light in that place did something I had never noticed light do before. There was no shadow anywhere in it. It came from everywhere at once, out of a ceiling full of panels, and it did not fall on things so much as simply arrive at them—so that every person on that concourse looked faintly wrong. Grey under the eyes. Flat in the face. Nobody looked well. I could see the tiredness on every single person who went past me and not one of them could see it on any of the others, and all of us were being lit as though we had been laid out on a table for inspection.

And I sat in the middle of it with a bag on my knees and the two thoughts arrived, one after the other, and I have not managed to put down either of them since.

The first was this.

What if they don't work any more?

I had not opened one since a cold meeting room in a government building, and in the days since then a device that I had wrapped in bubble wrap with my own hands, and put into an envelope, and paid thirty-four dollars to send, had been removed from the record of an entire country. Not lost. Not stolen. Taken out of the world so completely that a woman on a telephone could not find so much as a lodgement scan for it.

And I did not know what that meant, and that was the difficulty. I did not know whether the thing had been switched off, or unmade, or reclaimed. I did not know whether, somewhere inside whatever system these objects belong to, there was now a red line drawn through my name. And I did not know whether the three in my bag and the one against my leg were still doorways at all—or whether they had quietly become three small grey lumps of nothing, and I was a man carrying a bag of pebbles across the country to a brother who had not replied.

I could not answer that question from a plastic chair in Melbourne Airport, and there has only ever been one way for anybody to answer it.

And the second thought was worse.

What if they can be found?

Because whatever had taken that parcel had never needed to lay a finger on it. It had not needed to break into a depot, or intercept a van, or bribe a driver, or so much as be in the same state. It had reached into the systems of the Commonwealth of Australia and lifted an object clean out of the record from somewhere else entirely, in the middle of an ordinary working day, and nobody had noticed, and there had been no field for it anywhere.

Which meant that whatever it was could see. It had looked at a national database and known precisely which line to take out of it, and it had taken that one and left everything else standing.

So could it see these?

Was there something, somewhere, that knew there were four Portal Keys sitting in a bank of plastic chairs at a gate in Melbourne Airport?

Had using one already lit something up?

And if I pressed my thumb into that indent now, in a building full of cameras and strangers, would that be the thing that finally put a pin in the map?

I sat in that chair for a long time with a cold coffee in my hand and turned those two questions over and over, and they cancelled one another out completely, and that is precisely why I could not leave them alone. Because if the devices were dead, the only way to find out was to press one. And if the devices were being watched, then pressing one was the single worst thing available to me.

The same act, either way. The only act I had. And it was either the thing that would save me or the thing that would finish me, and there was no way on earth of establishing which, and no expert to consult, and no precedent anywhere, and not one person in the whole recorded history of the world I could ring up and ask.

I put the coffee down on the floor beside my shoe, and saw that the lace was still undone. I had walked the entire length of Melbourne Airport with one shoelace trailing behind me across the tiles and had not noticed it until that moment. So I bent down and tied it, and it took me two attempts, and I got it done.

And then I sat back up, and I knew what I was going to do about it, and there was no good reason for it. I did not have one at the time and I have not found one since.

The nearest thing I have to a reason is this.

Before very much longer I was going to get onto another aeroplane, and at the far end of it I was going to walk out into an arrivals hall in Adelaide and look for my brother's face in a crowd of strangers, with no idea whatsoever whether it was going to be there. And I was going to arrive at that moment—the most exposed and the most frightening moment I had left in front of me—carrying four objects that I could not be certain were anything at all.

Every single thing I had done since Seth put that envelope into my hands had been done on the assumption that these things worked. I had bled for that assumption. I had put one of them into the post and destroyed my own peace of mind for it. I had frightened my brother, and lied to a friend who had never once lied to me, and spent four hundred and ninety dollars I did not have.

And I had never gone back and checked. Not once.

That was what I could not sit with, in a plastic chair, under those lights. In eleven years of doing this for a living I have never signed off a single document, not one, on an assumption that nobody had tested. It is the entire content of what I am for. I have made grown men take a proposal away and go and look, and I have been thanked for it afterwards more than once, and I have been quietly and privately proud of that for the better part of my adult life.

And there I sat, about to walk onto an aeroplane on nothing whatever but faith.

I stood up and put the bag over one shoulder, and I picked the cold coffee up off the floor, because I was not going to leave rubbish lying about on the floor of an airport, even in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

And then I went to look for somewhere in that enormous, bright, watched building where there was nobody at all.