Nine Lines

"I write specifications for a living. Give me any process on earth and I will set it down so that a stranger can follow it. Then somebody hands you the one thing that actually matters, and you find the language has nothing in it."

I could not write it at my desk, and I could not write it anywhere else, and I spent the better part of an afternoon discovering this.

The first problem was that I could not think, because I could not stop being hungry.

It had become an emergency. It had gone past appetite and into something with a pulse in it, a low animal insistence that shoved every other thought aside and stood in the middle of my head demanding to be dealt with, and eventually I gave up trying to ignore it and walked to the kitchen and stood at the bench and ate four Scotch Fingers, one after another, straight out of the tin, too fast, without sitting down.

I ate them the way a dog eats. I have never done anything like it in my life. I stood in a government tearoom with crumbs down a shirt already ruined beyond salvage and shovelled biscuits into myself with both hands, and when the fourth one was gone I put my palms on the bench and breathed and felt, immediately and comprehensively, sick.

Sugar and shock, presumably. My body had stopped consulting me about anything at all by that stage of the afternoon and was simply taking whatever it could get.

The tin sat there with its worn tartan and its unreadable Scottish scene. I put the lid back on. It made the small tinny noise it has made every day for six years.

Then I went back to my desk and got out a legal pad, and clicked a pen, and wrote Josh at the top of the page.

And nothing else, for a very long time.

The absurdity of it was not lost on me even while it was happening. My job—the actual job, underneath the meetings and the acronyms and the steering committees—is to take something complicated that lives inside somebody's head and get it down onto paper so precisely that a stranger who has never met them can build it. That is the whole of the discipline, and I have been at it for eleven years. I sit with a woman from Housing who has spent nineteen years processing tenancy applications, and I ask her questions for six hours, and then I go away and write forty pages that let a developer in Melbourne who has never seen a tenancy application in his life reproduce her judgement exactly.

I am good at it. I am, without false modesty, one of the better people in this state at doing it. It is the one thing I have ever been unambiguously good at.

And I sat in front of a legal pad with my brother's name at the top of it and could not write a single sentence.

I tried.

Josh — I know how this is going to look. Before you do anything else, I need you to understand that what you are holding is a piece of technology built by an ancient civil—

And I stopped, because I did not know that. Seth had said it. Seth had said it in a letter written by a man being hunted, on the run, out of time, and I had taken it as established fact within about four seconds because a wall had disappeared. I had no idea who had built the device in my pocket. I had no idea whether built was even the correct verb.

Thirty-one words. I had explained nothing and asserted something I could not have defended for thirty seconds.

I tore the sheet off and screwed it up.

Second attempt. Be honest. Be a person.

Josh — I'm sorry. I have thought about this all day and I cannot see any other way to do it, and if you never speak to me again after this then I will underst—

I read that back and heard, quite clearly, what my brother was going to hear.

He would read four lines of that and he would not open the envelope at all. He would put it down on his kitchen bench and stand there for a minute and then he would ring our mother, and then he would ring the police in Hobart, and by that evening two constables would be knocking on a door in Battery Point to establish whether the man inside was still alive.

It read like a note somebody leaves.

I tore it off.

Third attempt.

Josh — please just keep an open mind and read all of this before you do anyth—

No. Every man who has ever opened a conversation with me by asking for an open mind has turned out to be selling something. And Seth had never once, in ten years, asked me to keep an open mind about anything. He had simply put the thing in front of me and let me decide what to do with it, and that was precisely why I had always listened.

Tore it off.

Fourth.

And on the fourth I did something that I have never been able entirely to account for, except that I was frightened and exhausted and out of ideas, and I reached for the nearest tool to hand, which happened to be the only one I have ever been any good with.

I wrote a specification.

1. Contents: 1 x device (grey, approx. 35mm), bubble-wrapped.
2. Prerequisites: private location. No observers. Minimum one hour uninterrupted.
3. Orientation: device to be directed at a blank vertical surface, minimum 2m x 2m, unobstructed.
4. Actuation: thumb pressure applied to the recessed indent at the terminal end.
5. Note: actuation will draw blood. This is expected behaviour.

I got to point five and I stopped and looked at what I had done.

This is expected behaviour.

I was writing a work instruction. For my brother. About a device that had put a needle into my thumb and drunk from me. I had taken the single most extraordinary event in the history of my family and rendered it into numbered clauses, in the passive voice, because the passive voice is where I go to hide and I have been hiding there for as long as I have had a career.

I sat with the pen in my hand and my ears going hot.

Then I tore it off, and screwed it into a ball with rather more violence than the paper deserved, and threw it at the bin and missed.

Four sheets in the bin, and one on the floor, and I sat back in an ergonomic chair in the middle of an open-plan office and looked at the ceiling, and I thought about Seth Holder.

I have started this letter four times.

That was how his letter began. I had read it in a cold meeting room that morning and had barely registered the sentence—I had skated straight over it on my way to the impossible parts, the Portal Keys and the Guardians and the prophecy, and if I had thought about it at all I had thought it was Seth being Seth. A flourish. A bit of drama from a man who had always enjoyed the drama.

I have started this letter four times.

He had not been performing. He had been reporting. He had sat somewhere—and I still did not know where, I still did not know where that man slept—with a pen and a pad and a thing to say that could not be said, and he had started it, and failed, and started it again, and failed, and started it again. Four times. And what he had eventually produced was a letter that I had privately judged to be unhinged, badly organised, and hopelessly inadequate to its task.

It was the best he could do. It was the fourth-best he could do, and it was the best there was.

Something went through me then that I did not enjoy in the slightest.

I had spent the entire day being angry with him. Underneath the fear, underneath all of it, there had been a small steady flame of resentment burning away since the moment I first saw that yellow square on my monitor—why me, why like this, why couldn't you just tell me properly—and I had carried it into the laneway and through the meeting room and out onto that plain and back again, and I had been perfectly certain, the whole time, that Seth had been careless with me.

He had not been careless with me. He had been defeated, which is an entirely different thing, and I had not been able to tell the two of them apart until I found myself sitting in the same chair.

Then they started going into the room.

I heard it before I saw it—the particular sound of five or six people converging on a doorway with laptops under their arms, the greetings, somebody's laugh, the scrape of chairs on carpet. The big room. Two doors down from 4B. Two doors down from the wall I had walked out of the world through.

I did not look up. I sat with my head bent over a legal pad and did not look up, and they went past my desk in ones and twos, and I heard the agenda in their hands.

My agenda. I had written it in November. I had written every line of it.

At three o'clock the door closed and the meeting began, and I could hear it.

Not the words. The partition took the words. What came through was the shape of it—the low rumble of a man talking for a long time, a pause, a woman's voice going up at the end for a question, the rumble again. The rhythm of a discussion I had spent eight weeks preparing and had built my entire month around.

Somebody laughed. Two or three of them. Somebody had made the joke that always got made at that point in that conversation.

I sat forty metres away with red dirt in the creases of my knuckles and listened to my own project happening without me.

And I found that I could not do it. I could not sit at that desk and hear that room. There was something in it that I could not put a name to—not shame exactly, and not grief, but something in the same family as both—the sound of my own life carrying on quite well in the next room without any assistance whatever from me, the sound of how easily the world had absorbed my absence, the sound of the whole ordinary machine turning over smoothly on a Wednesday afternoon while I sat outside it with two thousand acres of another planet in my pocket and a note I could not write.

So I picked up the pad and the pen and my bag, and went and sat by the western windows, where there was a low sofa that nobody ever used and a coffee table which existed principally to hold a pot plant, and I put my back to the room and looked out at the water.

The cloud had gone.

It had broken up and blown out while I was on the other side of the world, and the afternoon had turned clean and hard and gold, and the Derwent lay down there in the light doing what it had always done—the ferry going across, the small boats at their moorings, a bulk carrier working slowly up the channel with its deck all rust and orange. Somebody was flying a kite on the Domain. Beyond it all the eastern shore lay long and brown and dry with the summer, and the whole thing was so ordinary, and so beautiful, and so entirely indifferent to me, that it steadied something.

You cannot explain it, I thought. Stop trying to explain it.

Seth had spent four attempts trying to explain, and had produced a letter that made him sound mad. And what had actually convinced me—what had genuinely, finally convinced me—was not one single word of it. It was the wall. It was the thing itself. Nothing Seth had written moved me an inch, and the device did the entire job in under two seconds.

So don't explain. Don't argue. Don't defend.

Get him to the wall.

Everything else—the plain, the sea, the voice, the choosing, the whole impossible weight of it—could wait until he was standing on the other side of it and I could talk to him as one man who had seen it to another. Until then, every word I wrote was a word he could argue with, and Josh could argue with anything.

What he could not argue with was a hole in his lounge room wall.

I wrote nine lines. It took me forty minutes.

Josh.

Don't open this where anyone can see you. Not at work. Not with Mason there.

Somewhere you can be alone for an hour.

Point it at a blank wall. Press the button on the top with your thumb.

It's going to hurt for about a second. Don't let go when it does.

Then look.

Ring me straight after. Any hour. I'll have the phone on me.

I'm sorry.

Nate

I read it back.

Then I read it back again, and again, and I would have gone on reading it back all afternoon if I had let myself, because it was not right and it was never going to be right and there was nothing left in me with which to make it any better.

It still read like a note somebody leaves.

I knew that. I could see it perfectly clearly: the flatness of it, the instructions, the abrupt I'm sorry sitting down there at the bottom with no explanation attached to it, the way it made no mention of anything ordinary at all—no how's the dog, no say hi to Mum, none of the small furniture that people put into letters in order to prove that they are still themselves.

A man who was intending to hurt himself might well write those nine lines.

And I could not fix it, because every single thing I might have added to make it warmer would have been a thing Josh could take hold of and pull on until the whole structure came apart in his hands. He would have found the loose thread. He always found the loose thread. That was the entire reason it had to be him.

I'm sorry. That was as much as I could give him. Two words at the bottom of a page, doing the work that Seth had done properly, standing in front of me, with his hands shaking, looking me in the eye.

I folded it in half.

Then the Portal Key came out of the envelope and lay in my palm.

Matte grey. Drinking the light. Thirty-five millimetres of something that had opened a hole in the world, sitting in my hand on a low sofa in a government office with the Derwent glittering behind it.

I turned it over with my thumb and found the indent.

And I sat there and did not put it down, because it had occurred to me—clearly, and for the first time—that I did not have to send it. That there was nothing in the universe compelling me to put that device into an envelope. That I could keep all four of them, and go home, and lock them in a drawer, and go in to work tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, and let the whole business be a private madness, mine alone, carried quietly for the remainder of my life.

Nobody would ever know. That was the extraordinary part of it. Nobody would ever know. The world had already demonstrated, comprehensively and at some length, that it had no intention of noticing.

I could put the dust in the wash and let it go.

But Seth was disconnected, and there had been a van, and there was a plain the size of a suburb sitting on the other side of a wall with my footprints all over it and a voice that had said my name and was, I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever, still saying it—patiently, endlessly, into a silence, waiting for me to come back.

I could not carry that alone. I had known it standing at the sink with the water running red off my hands. I had known it on the concrete step with my thumb over Josh's name.

I wrapped the Portal Key in bubble wrap—far more of it than the thing needed, three times round, and then again—and put it into a padded express envelope with the folded note, and I licked the strip and pressed the flap down, and it made a small sound.

Every rational faculty I possess stood up at once and objected in the strongest possible terms.

You are about to hand a piece of interdimensional technology to Australia Post. You are going to put the impossible into a red bin on Elizabeth Street and trust a van. Seth stood in front of you with a cut on his face and blood in his beard and told you to be careful, and this is what you have done with the afternoon.

"I know," I said, out loud, on a sofa, in an open-plan office.

Nobody looked up.

There was no gentle way to do it. I had spent the whole afternoon hunting for one and it did not exist—there was no arrangement of words, no careful staging, no letter written four times or fourteen times that was going to make this thing land softly on my brother. The only decision actually available to me was whether I could live with the weight of it when it landed on him. And I had made that decision somewhere between the fourth torn sheet and the flap of the envelope, without ever quite noticing that I was making it.

I put the envelope in my bag and zipped it, and behind me, two doors down, my three o'clock rumbled on without me.

I stood up to go, and I got three steps.

The door opened, and Verity came through it with a manila folder under one arm, and stopped.

Twice in one day.

She looked at me. That was all. She had the folder held in against her ribs and the meeting behind her and that morning behind both of us, and she stood in the doorway with the afternoon light coming down the length of the office and she did not ask me a single question.

"You missed the three o'clock," Verity said.

"I know. I was—"

"I told them you'd gone home crook." She said it to the folder. Flat. The way she would read out a figure from a column. "There's a bug going round. They were very sympathetic."

Something went through my chest that I have never found the word for.

She had lied for me. She had sat in that room with six people and my agenda in front of her and she had opened her mouth and said a thing that was not true, in order to cover a man who had stood in front of her that morning and lied to her face.

"Verity—"

"Don't." Not sharp. Just closed, the way a door closes when somebody is being careful with it. "I'm not asking. I've had all afternoon to decide whether I was going to ask and I've decided that I'm not, and I would rather you didn't make me change my mind."

She shifted the folder to her other arm.

"Just don't make me do it twice."

"I won't," I said.

Second lie. She heard it go past. So did I. Neither of us said anything about it.

And then she stepped aside.

She had done exactly that at twenty to twelve that morning and she did it again now, in exactly the same way, moving out of my path without any fuss at all, and I have never in my life felt so thoroughly and so gently condemned.

I got as far as the door.

"Nathan."

I turned.

Verity was standing where I had left her, in the light, with the folder against her ribs. She was not doing anything with her face. She has one of the great faces for not doing anything with.

"There's red dirt on your collar," she said.

The whole floor hummed around us. Somebody's phone rang and got answered.

She looked at me for a moment—those grey-green eyes going across my face the way they went across a set of accounts, taking in the whole of it, filing every part of it—and I stood there with two thousand acres of another world dried into the cotton of my shirt and could not produce one single word of English.

Then she went to her desk, and sat down, and opened her folder, and began to work.

I went out through the door with a Portal Key in my bag and my brother's name on the front of an envelope, and the last thing I heard behind me was the meeting laughing at something, two doors down, in a room I had booked in November.