Surprise Me

"What you can’t make yourself do, you can still make unavoidable."

The numbers didn’t work. I’d been through them twice now, the papers spread out on the doona in their labelled rows, the safe open at my feet, and the answer came out the same both times. What was left across every account I had the codes for would carry Bixbus for weeks. Not months. Weeks.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the laptop balanced on my knees and wrote the latest figures onto Paul’s paper anyway, because the rule was the rule even when I was the only one keeping it. Date. Amount. Account. My handwriting had gone small and cramped somewhere in the last week, as though it too had started rationing.

The house held its quiet around me. From here I could see the wardrobe standing open, the bare hangers on Jamie’s side, and I’d stopped noticing them the way you stop noticing a mark on a wall you pass every day. That was the trick of it. Everything became furniture eventually, if you left it in place long enough.

Tonight there was the shop. I kept coming back to it the way the tongue goes back to a loose tooth—not because it hurt but because it was there, and because it was simple. Come up on the floor inside the change room, take what the camp needed, send it through, walk out of nothing into nothing. A thing with a start and a finish. After today, I understood the appeal of a finish better than I ever had.

But a shop was a subtraction, same as the accounts. Everything I sent through got eaten or worn out or used up. Tinned food fed the camp for a day and then it was an empty tin. That was the whole shape of the problem, when I made myself look at it straight: I was pouring one world into a hole in another, and holes don’t fill. They just take.

I pulled the laptop closer and went looking for the things a settlement actually needed—the search terms getting longer and more honest as I went. Somewhere between water storage and soil improvement the results turned green. A nursery site, pages of stock photographed in flat catalogue light, fruit trees and vegetable seedlings and herbs in their black plastic tubes, and I was three pages in before I understood why I hadn’t clicked away.

Karen. Standing over that patch of broken crust, telling me about the coriander. Seeds in the soil beneath the hardened layer, and green through the surface within minutes. Minutes. She’d said it the way you report something you don’t expect to be believed, and I’d filed it with everything else in this place that didn’t behave.

I looked at the seedlings on the screen and felt something turn over that had been lying flat all day. Everything else I carried through the Portal was already dying—cut, tinned, sealed. This would be the first cargo that arrived alive and got more alive. Plant it once and it kept answering. In soil like that, a hundred dollars of seedlings wasn’t a hundred dollars of food. It was a hundred dollars of beginning.

The camp didn’t need more tins. It needed something that grew back.

I reached for my phone, copied the link across, and typed the rest before I could find a reason to sit on it.

11:37 AM Luke: Check out the following website. Use Paul's credit card details that I gave you before. I need you to order as much as you can. Spend several thousand dollars. Critical.

Critical. I looked at the word after it had gone. Everything I asked of Gladys arrived wearing that word now, and it had stopped grading anything—it just meant do it without asking me why. She would, too. That was the terrible convenience of her.

The order needed an address, and there was only one city it could go to. Paul’s house stood empty in Broken Hill—keys labelled, letterbox dead, nobody home to ask a courier’s questions. The clean choice. I knew it was the clean choice while I was typing the other one.

11:39 AM Luke: Deliver it to my parents' address in Adelaide. And forward me the order confirmation and expected delivery date.

I sat with what I’d just arranged. Some days from now a truck was going to pull up at the one house I hadn’t been able to walk to, and unload several thousand dollars of living things onto the driveway, and somebody was going to have to explain to my father what they were and where they were going. I’d sat on a train and let their station slide past the window, and then I’d come back and bought myself a deadline instead. That was the shape of me now. I couldn’t be trusted to walk up the path, so I’d arranged for a delivery I couldn’t stay seated past.

The delivery date wasn’t logistics. I wanted to know exactly how long I’d given myself.

11:46AM Gladys: What exactly am I getting?

I went back to the site to give her a proper answer. Fruit trees. Vegetables. Herbs. Climbers and natives, things I recognised from Greta’s garden and things I’d never heard of. I started a list, got four items into it, deleted it. Started another built around what the camp could eat soonest, and deleted that too. The truth was I had opinions about none of it and stakes in all of it, and every list I made was a guess wearing a plan’s clothing.

Twenty-five minutes, in the end. Twenty-five minutes of a grown man failing to choose plants.

12:11PM Luke: Anything... everything. Surprise me!

I even gave it the exclamation mark. Cheerful. Decisive. A man on top of things, delighting in a little spontaneity. And there was a version where it was true—in soil that turned coriander around in minutes, it hardly mattered what went in; it would all take. That was the version I’d hand anyone who asked. The truer one was that I’d failed to choose anything all day—a station, a sentence, now a seedling—and handing Gladys the list was just the pattern holding: when I couldn’t choose, I found something to carry me past the choosing.

While I waited, I pulled the notebook over and gave the Book of Kin another run at taking shape. It wouldn’t. It sat there being a title with nothing underneath it, the way it had for days, and I put it back and returned to the thing that did have a shape: the numbers.

Several thousand dollars was more than Paul’s card had left in it. I went down his paper line by line to be sure, but I already knew—I’d written most of the lines myself. And beneath Paul’s bag, in the same neat rows, sat Adrian’s. Two cards. Money that was no use to him where he was, sitting on Earth doing nothing but waiting for somebody to notice he’d stopped touching it. Because somebody would. A wife, a workmate, a bank’s software. Sooner or later a machine somewhere would flag the silence, and every one of these accounts would freeze solid, and all that stranded money would stop being ours to put to work.

12:43PM Luke: I'll send you Adrian's credit card details. He has two of them, so max one out. We may as well use it before the accounts get frozen!

The second card could stay in the safe, in reserve. Everything in its place, everything labelled, every transaction going down on its paper in small cramped handwriting—date, amount, account—as though the neatness of the record could stand in for the rightness of the thing recorded.

I set the phone down among the papers and looked at what the last hour had produced: a shop to empty tonight, another man’s cards to bleed, and somewhere an order being picked for a truckload of green things bound for my parents’ driveway. Either I’d be standing there when it arrived with the words finally in order, or Dad would open his front door onto several thousand dollars of seedlings and start ringing his sons to find out which of them had lost his mind.

The conversation was coming either way now. I’d made sure it could no longer wait for me.