THE OWNER OF THE WATERFALL
He is content because the gastric mill of his digestive tract is grinding the body of an orange-footed scrubfowl swallowed whole some way back through the vine forest. And he’s almost home.
The crocodile’s slender, darkly speckled snout pushes through a wall of evergreen ferns whose serrated fronds barely register on his pebbled and armoured scales. He can smell the waterfall almost as well as he can hear it, and he can see it all in colour. He stops at the edge of the black pool and his heavy, shielded triple eyelids open and close as he scans his surroundings for threats and prey. He moves his nine-foot body slowly forward to the smooth black rocks that edge the pool, but then he stops because his eyes have locked onto an object across the water. It is blurred to him, too far away to be clearly visible, but he registers it as a threat and, as always, his instincts are correct. Were he to slip into the water, swim nearer and, with his two eyes just above the surface, observe the object closely, he would see that it is organic. A thing of flesh and blood with a thick moustache, wearing a black hat and sitting on a rock. A man. A shadow. In his right hand he carries a gun. In his left he holds an empty can. He’s reading words roughly scribbled on a rock.
No weights of gold to measure
Only scales of truth and lies
For we are living treasure
Under all our shimmering skies
The man in the black hat looks up at the waterfall, stares through it to the cave behind its cascading freshwater veil. He is so transfixed by what he sees that he pays no heed to the crocodile, which remains frozen at the water’s edge, breath slow, heart slow, then retreats quietly through the wall of evergreen ground ferns, convinced the waterfall now belongs to a new creature of the forest.
ON THE PLAIN OF HIGH HEAVEN
He dreams of Darwin. His Zero fighter plane has stopped in the centre of Smith Street, the fuel gauge reading empty. He pushes open the cockpit canopy and he can see the town’s destruction. Every stone building ripped apart by bombs. A silence so heavy his own breathing sounds intrusive. No wind. No movement in the town. Only desolation.
He climbs down from the cockpit and stands in the street, the only man here, the only man alive in all the world. He looks to his feet and he sees that he’s standing on a silver road, a road of glittering mica. And he walks up this straight silver road and he turns left and then right and he sees that this silver road is not fringed by vine forest but by the limbless bodies of dead Australians. Piles of bodies, hundreds of bodies, their arms and legs branching into other arms and legs like the limbs of the sprawling and nightmarish forest trees that he saw with the gravedigger girl and the actress. Flesh-and-blood pavements of women and men split by a thin silver road that he must walk down. He removes his soft pilot’s helmet out of respect for the dead, but he can’t bring himself to look sideways anymore so he looks down at his boots, his war boots crushing the silver flakes of mica as he walks and walks and walks until his boots have no more silver road to walk on because they are blocked by a bed.
It’s Nara’s bed and Nara lies upon it, sleeping. And Yukio Miki wants to lie down beside his wife but his body won’t move forward. His legs won’t walk and his arms won’t move. He wants nothing more than to fall asleep with Nara’s breath on his face, but he can only call to her. ‘Nara,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ And she wakes and she coughs twice because she is sick, but she smiles for him because she is strong and she always smiled for him like that.
‘Forgive me, Nara,’ Yukio says.
‘Forgive you for what, Yukio?’ Nara replies.
‘I was coming to you,’ Yukio says. ‘But I could not leave this world.’
‘You saw the woman in the grass,’
‘I thought there was no more beauty left to see,’ he says. ‘But then I saw it everywhere in this strange place. There was so much of it here I thought it must be Takamanohara.’
‘But, don’t you see, Yukio,’ Nara says. ‘It is. All of it. It always has been.’
‘I’m coming Nara,’ Yukio says.
‘But what about the girl?’ Nara asks.
‘The woman in the grass?’
‘The gravedigger girl, Yukio.’
‘The gravedigger girl,’ Yukio repeats, and he turns around to look at the ruins of Darwin town. Rubble and dust and waste. But there are no bodies in Smith Street now. There is no silver road. There are only butterflies, hundreds of white butterflies rising up to the blue sky.
‘Wait,’ Yukio calls to the butterflies. ‘Wait.’ But the butterflies keep rising.
*
He wakes in sweat. His flight jacket wet with it. The bed he lies on wet with it. An orange glow. Firelight. Rock walls. A dining table. Stretcher beds and daybeds and armchairs. All empty. He’s the only person there. His mind is slow and his brain is heavy, trying to replay the events that placed him inside this cave.
His heart races and he stands quickly and collapses immediately, but then he stands again slowly and he moves to the dining table where he recalls spooning mouthfuls of onion soup, but little else. He stumbles groggily to an opening in the rock face and he looks down the corridor beyond it, but he can see nothing in the darkness. He moves back to the other side of the cave where another opening leads to another
