Chapter 7

Home and Away

For several moments, I could not find any other words. Apparently, neither could Wilbur, nor Mattie who looked very glum, his tears now sobs.

Belatedly realising we were all still standing on or near the doorstep, I silently waved them inside and gestured toward the living area. Mattie wiped his tears with a colourful handkerchief.

When we reached the living room, Wilbur broke the silence. “I was hoping Mattie would revive your memories, Ernest.”

“Steven!” I erupted, far too loudly. “Whatever you damned well think, my name is Steven. Will you please call me Steven!?”

Mattie blubbered a little more loudly, but said nothing. Wilbur retained his poker-face, and watched me intently. Apparently, none of us were relaxed enough to sit down.

“Surely now,” I said, “you must realise I’m not Ernest. For god’s sake, I’m not gay. I have two children.” I belatedly realised that was hardly any proof of being heterosexual, not in a world of IVF, surrogate mothers and adoptions. I faced Mattie. “Okay, that’s no longer definitive. Just the same, if I had been married to you… I’m sure I’d remember!”

“O Ernie,” wailed Mattie, fresh tears springing forth.

I sighed loudly. “This is ridiculous,” I said, turning to Wilbur. “I suppose the next thing you’ll be telling me is you and I are lovers.”

Wilbur smiled. “No, we’re just friends. Although we have become close, I would say, having spent so much time on your project.”

“What project?”

“Your latest historical project.” He turned to Mattie, and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry Mattie—I really thought you would bring back Ernest’s memories.”

Calming down a little, and in deference to Mattie’s distress, I restrained from correcting Wilbur about my name.

“I’ll be all right,” said Mattie, sniffling.

“Perhaps you’d like a tea?” Wilbur asked him.

“No, thanks,” said Mattie. “I should just go. My needay starts shortly.” He finished wiping his tears.

“I’ll drive you there,” said Wilbur.

Mattie pocketed his handkerchief and started making his way to the front door, followed by Wilbur.

“Perhaps you should wait a few minutes,” I said, starting to feel compassion, but remaining in the living room. “Until you feel more at ease.”

“No, thank you Ernie.” He stopped, and looked contrite. “I’m sorry, I can’t call you Steven. To me, you’ll always be my sweet Ernie.” He looked like he was on the verge of rushing to embrace me again, but then suddenly opened the door and left without another word or even glance.

Wilbur lingered on the doorstep, facing me. “I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes.”

“I divorced him,” I said, quietly. “Right? Not the other way round.”

“Yes,” said Wilbur. Then, hopefully, “You remember?”

“No, I do not remember. It just figures.”

Wilbur left.

Almost at once, the room darkened. Through a window, I could see a large dark puffy cloud pass over the sun, many more close behind, towering up to stratospheric heights. How appropriate, I thought. For my state of mind. Lightning and thunder when I arrived in this dream, and now soon to return. So soon. How long had it been? Quick recalls of a bush-walk, supposed sleep the rest of that day and most of the next, the rest of that with Wilbur—that was yesterday… so, I’d been in Jibilee just two days. Or more likely one day, if the bush walk was, as I suspected, a dream within a dream.

Jibilee! I abruptly realised that for all I’d learned since ‘waking’ at Wilbur’s, I still didn’t know exactly where Jibilee was—where the hell I was. That suddenly seemed important as I watched storm clouds gather.

So I moved to Ernest’s study, started the computer and the web browser, and quickly found some maps. I barely recognised Australia. Its outline was unchanged (mercifully!), but there was no sign of any states, consistent with what Wilbur had said. Capital cities were gone, too, though hordes of much smaller cities with unfamiliar names occupied their locations. Most of the rural areas—apart from the expansive deserts and mountain ranges of course—were similarly dotted with mostly new names, clustered into small interconnected groups. I magnified the view, to reveal a decentralised fractal network, each level mimicking the next. It disoriented me. “Where the hell am I?” I bemoaned, unaware of having clichéd. Eventually, I found Chord in what should have been marked as Victoria, on the outskirts of where Melbourne should have been.

I was indeed home. Or very near it at least: Chord was a few kilometres further from the old city centre than the house I lived in with Yvette and our children. I magnified the view further to hone in on Jibilee, which turned out to be near the outskirts of Chord—in what I always knew of as a rural area. In a similarly contradictory fashion, I saw no marks of habitation where my house and its neighbours should have been, hardly even any roads. My home might have been only a long walk away, but there was no obvious route to it.

Call it homesickness, but I felt a burning desire to see it. I felt no certainty that I would—as the map implied, this dream might well decide to have something entirely different there in its place—but I felt an overpowering urge to try.

When Wilbur returned, I wasted no time explaining my desire, showed him the location on the computer, and pointed out there was no point me trekking blindly about in unfamiliar territory when someone who presumably knew his way could help me. He immediately agreed. Perhaps he thought the exercise would prove to me that I was wrong.

But when we exited the front door, storm clouds building above us, and lightning flashing, I froze. There under the carport was a two-seater car like those I’d seen since waking in Wilbur’s room—but with the exact deep violet colour as the one driven by the demon! Just as I saw it, a thunderclap erupted. Clichéd even for a dream, though I was too stunned to realise it at the time.

“Are you all right?” said Wilbur, snapping me out of my shock.

“Uh… yeah, sure,” I lied, still staring at the car. Dreams within dreams, I silently reminded myself. But my mounting sense of discomfort did not ease.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Wilbur.

With an effort, I turned my attention to him, and tried to hide my anxiety. “Not quite. Just surprised by the thunder.”

Wilbur did not look entirely convinced, but must have decided to put his doubts aside. “Well, if we’re going, can I suggest we get in before the rain starts?”

I hesitated before nodding agreement, and moved to the car. There must be plenty of cars the same colour, I tried to convince myself—I just hadn’t seen any until now. Surreptitiously, or so I hoped, I checked inside for demons ready to pounce. Finding none, I cautiously took a seat.

As Wilbur entered the car, his prominent wrist bracelet clinked against the door.

“Is that a family heirloom?” I asked.

Wilbur suddenly smiled, almost slyly. “No.”

Only then did I notice that the car had no steering wheel or floor pedals. I turned to Wilbur, ready to voice my surprise, only to see him hover his Babel over what looked like a small button on the blank dashboard—which suddenly lit up with mostly familiar but entirely digital signs: speedometer, odometer, econometer, others. Wilbur gripped what looked like a joystick—atop an arm rest on the door—and in apparent response to his gentle pressure, the car backed out of the driveway. The engine was inaudible. Only when I lowered my window and listened for it, could I hear its faint hum. But I had to close the window almost immediately, as rain began to fall—lightly at first, then torrentially.

I said nothing, but watched Wilbur carefully, eventually realising that pulling back on the stick caused the car to break, tilting it to the left or right steered the car, and a button near the top of the stick switched from reverse to forward (and back again presumably). As well as seeing no gears, I felt none being changed.

As Wilbur drove, I kept expecting him to speed up. After what seemed a small eternity but was probably no more than two minutes, full of rolling thunder and dazzling lightning, I could stand the slow-motion no longer. “Even this rain doesn’t warrant such sloth,” I exclaimed. “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

“Considerably, but not without breaking the law.”

“You’re only doing thirty kilometres an hour!”

“Yes, the limit.”

“Thirty?! Fifty, surely?”

“Thirty is the maximum speed allowed on any residential road—except for emergency vehicles of course.”

“But it’s so slow. How can you hold yourself to such a speed?”

“Like most things, it’s a matter of practice. Or would be if it weren’t for the automatic speed limiter. Those who are in a hurry, like yourself apparently, must simply content themselves with knowing that the speed limit makes it very difficult to cause a fatality. The traffains, of course, are considerably faster.”

“Traffains?” I said, half expecting another tail feather to sprout.

“The main traffic arteries.”

Almost as soon as he said this, we turned onto something resembling a freeway, but augmented by well separated and protected bicycle lanes, a rail line down the middle, and with a traffic volume barely as much as a typical main street after midnight. Wilbur quickly accelerated to one hundred kph, matching the handful of Concorde-cars within sight.

Lining both sides of the road were dense screening hedges and trees, not a house or construction in sight. I thought we must have left Chord, but when I quizzed Wilbur, he said we were still on its outskirts, houses not far on either side of us. I looked in vain for them—only giving up when Wilbur announced we were leaving Chord. Try as I might, I could not see any transition in the landscape whatsoever.

To my further inquiries, Wilbur explained that intra-city traffains had different ‘levels’, depending on their location: slower, less spacious ones were linked to faster versions. Ours was the fastest in Chord, connecting it to neighbouring cities.

A winding exit put us on a straight bitumen road just wide enough for two cars, but devoid of traffic. Wilbur slowed slightly.

With the storm starting to ease, I tried to see into the thick open bushland flanking the sides of the road. There was nothing about it in particular that I recognised, yet it held an eerie sense of familiarity…

Constant rain… constant wipers… dripping kangaroos… dim rain-drenched forested hills… one like a truncated pyramid… a bridge over a creek… steep banks…

“Stop!” I shouted, moments after crossing the bridge. Wilbur obliged without the half-expected screech of tyres, braking gently and unhurriedly. “Can you back up to the bridge?” I said. He did so, and as I looked through the car window at the creek, its surface dappled by rain, I knew this was where I had rested shortly before seeing the demon. I was on the same road I had walked two days before.

“This road stops being straight about now,” I said, “doesn’t it? It starts winding and curving, right?”

Wilbur studied me carefully it seemed, with just a hint of surprise on his poker-face. “Yes, I think so. Is your memory starting to come back, Ernest?”

“Not of Ernest’s life—but of what happened to me, soon after this dream started. You can drive on now.”

He did, and yes, for the next two or more kilometres, as the rain eased, the road curved and was exactly as I remembered it.

My bush walk couldn’t have been a dream, after all, I realised.

Or at least not a separate one.

But then that meant the demon was part of this dream too.

Unless only my bush walk was part of this dream and, without realising, I fell asleep within it and dreamt of the demon?

Aaagh! It should have been academic which level of the dream the demon appeared in, yet it wasn’t. I wanted him as far away as possible.

The last drops of rain ended, and storm clouds began to lift, as Wilbur slowed and stopped the car on the edge of the road. “This is it,” he said. “Where you wanted me to take you. Or as far as we can go by car at least. The spot you’re interested in is about a hundred metres through there.” He pointed into the bush on the left. It looked no different to the remainder of the surrounding landscape—there was nothing to distinguish it as a residential area, or as ever having been one.

We left the car and tramped up a gentle slope.

“What is it you hope to see here?” Wilbur asked.

“I don’t really know. Something! A sign, perhaps. I don’t know.” This journey was a mirror image of my walk when the dream began, but I had to admit there was every chance it would prove to be utterly futile.

“All you’re likely to see is more bush,” said Wilbur. “There’ve been no houses here for two or three decades, not since the local land use structure was finalised.”

“You mean there were houses here,” I said, surprise and hope mingling just beyond the grip of rationality.

“Yes. A few. Mostly old and fairly scattered. But they’ve been recycled and the area returned to natural bush—apart from some farmland a few kilometres to the north. You can see how recent the changes were: other than a few older specimens, the trees here are all less than thirty years old.”

We walked in silence then, but my mind kept running over Wilbur’s words. I could not put my finger on it—or perhaps deep down I did not want to—but there was something very unsettling about what he’d said.

Lost in unresolved thoughts, it did not seem long before Wilbur halted. “Well,” he said, “as near as I can make it, we’re here.” He looked at me. “This is where you wanted me to take you.”

I looked about us. It was just more of the same non-descript bush I’d seen before, full of tall native grasses, dense shrubs and towering trees. This couldn’t have been where my home was meant to be. “Are you sure?” I asked, plaintively.

“As sure as I can be. Nice spot.” He suddenly raised his eyes skyward, bent forward at the waist to almost a forty-five degree angle, and, pressing thumb and forefinger of one hand lightly together near his mouth, fluttered the remaining fingers. “A hamburger joint’d really clean up here,” he said in a lazy American accent.

I was too surprised by his actions, and disappointed by what we’d found, to realise for some seconds that Wilbur had just done the worst Groucho Marx impersonation I’d ever seen.

As if mockingly, storm clouds suddenly parted for the sun to cascade off raindrops suspended in the surrounding greenery. A taller tree, perhaps thirty metres away behind many others, stood out, its striking white bark almost blinding in the sudden sun.

I rushed towards it.

Wilbur followed hurriedly. “What is it?” he asked, mercifully impersonating no one.

When I reached it, I was in no doubt: it was the same tree I had seen just after the dream started: the taller thicker version of the one outside my bedroom window. And there too was the other one, with the scar from a fallen branch, exactly where I remembered it relative to the first tree—in the same position as at home.

“This is it,” I brayed. “Where I first woke up in this dream.” I immediately realised the contradiction, but couldn’t be bothered correcting it. “And this tree, and that one over there,” I added, pointing, “they’re in my garden at home. Except, here they’re taller. I’m sure of it, we’re standing where my bedroom should be.”

A sudden and, I must admit, belated realisation struck me. “Where my bedroom was! This is where my home was!” The trees were those outside my home, but older. Even the creek was the one Yvette was involved with, but after decades of devoted care, it had recuperated and thrived.

“I have travelled in time,” I whispered in shock.