Sleep and the Soul, page 35
As Omar stepped into the hallway, a man walked through the front door. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Omar didn’t need to look at his face to be sure that it was his father; his mind had already filled in that final detail from all the other cues that led inexorably to the same conclusion.
But then he shifted his gaze a fraction, and his conviction shattered.
“What’s your name, son?” the man asked gently. He couldn’t hide his anguish at the absence of whoever he had hoped might still be here to greet him, but he’d clearly had time to brace himself for the likelihood of the encounter now unfolding.
“Omar.”
“I’m Rafiq.”
“What’s happening?” Omar begged him, as if there was the slightest chance that any human actually knew.
“We’ve lost our families,” Rafiq said. “And I don’t know how we’re going to find them. But in the mean time, we need to look out for each other – in the same way we hope some good-hearted strangers will be looking out for them.”
Omar started weeping, and he began to lower his gaze in shame. Rafiq reached over and grabbed his jaw. “No,” he said. “I know you have no reason to trust me. But the only way we can start to trust each other is if we stay in this together, side by side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, uncle.” Omar reached up and brushed the tears away with the heel of his hand, one eye at a time.
“I don’t know if it’s possible,” Rafiq admitted. “But I don’t know what else to try. If we’re going to fight this together, we can’t lose each other. We can’t ever look away.”
2
Omar sat in the kitchen and watched Rafiq cooking. They’d found plenty of food in the fridge, and it had shown no tendency to vanish – or be magically replenished – when they closed the door and looked again.
Rafiq served the lablabi and invited him to eat.
Omar had been working up the courage to ask a question. “How did you get separated from your wife?”
“I was in the storeroom when it happened,” Rafiq replied. “She was at the till.”
“I’m sorry.” Omar could picture his parents suffering exactly the same fate, in their own store.
“I asked the woman at the till to come here with me, but she said she was leaving Sydney to look for her daughter.”
“I only have two brothers,” Omar confessed. “No sister.”
“And I only have three sons,” Rafiq replied. “It looks like our families are closer than I thought.”
Omar took another mouthful of soup and contemplated making a run for the door – not out of any ill will toward this man, but because he wanted the insanity to end. It was clear that nothing was ever going to change right before his eyes, which meant that as long as Rafiq was in front of him, he would never be reunited with his family.
But on all the evidence so far, rolling the dice wouldn’t bring him any closer either. So maybe it made sense for people to try to form alliances while they learned how to handle the situation, even as they hoped it was all a temporary aberration that would somehow be set right.
“My son Adnan is so much like you,” Rafiq added.
Omar was over the whole cheekbone thing. “When was he born?” he wondered.
“The 7th of August. He just turned thirteen last month.”
“I’m thirteen too, but I was born in February.” Omar found that oddly satisfying: they were not weird doppelgängers who had walked the same path in lockstep all their lives. He’d been out in the world, gurgling and bawling, while Adnan was still in the womb.
They ran through the families’ birthdays together; no one matched exactly, and Rafiq was more than a full year younger than Omar’s father.
“There’s no sense to any of this,” Rafiq decided.
“But you both wound up owning the same store in Marrickville,” Omar said. “You both have a son working as a bricklayer in Darwin, and another one studying at MIT.”
“Where was your father born?” Rafiq asked him.
“Gafsa.”
“Ah, the big smoke,” Rafiq joked. “I was born in Métlaoui. Very close, but not the same.”
Omar took their empty bowls over to the sink, trying not to feel self-conscious as Rafiq turned his chair around in order to keep him in sight.
“How are we going to feed ourselves, uncle?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Rafiq replied candidly. “There are things we can try, but who knows what will work?”
Omar began washing the dishes. That they still had running water didn’t surprise him; like the roads, he did not expect to see breaks in the pipes, and a full reservoir might function without maintenance for weeks. But the electricity felt more like a precarious miracle; even with solar panels and batteries everywhere, it seemed unlikely that the whole power grid could keep running without human intervention. Enough operators and engineers must have kept showing up at their jobs – working beside colleagues they’d never met, with no idea if they would ever be paid for their efforts – to keep the network functioning.
“I need to use the toilet,” Rafiq announced, rising to his feet. Omar said nothing; he’d been dreading this moment, but given the way he’d ended up separated from Tony, he couldn’t just pretend that he could keep a normal distance and everything would be fine. “I’ll get a towel first,” Rafiq added, miming wrapping it around his waist. Omar got the picture; at least they could retain a degree of modesty. In fact, he’d had his back to Rafiq half the time he’d been standing at the sink, and they hadn’t parted worlds; staying together seemed to require only one of them watching the other.
Afterward, they sat in the living room – with the chairs suitably arranged – trying to make sense of what the TV disgorged. If they stuck with one channel it remained coherent, with scene after scene from a single program, but if they flicked to another station and back they usually found themselves watching something different. Omar half wished that Rafiq would stop working the remote, so they could sit back and try to escape into some comedy or cop show on its own weird, pre-apocalyptic terms, but he knew that if that happened he’d just grow restless, wondering what vital news they were missing.
And then, a reporter stood outside Parliament House, addressing the camera.
“—who claimed to be the Prime Minister spoke earlier, calling on the people of the nation to do their best to help each other through the emergency.”
The reporter hesitated, then lowered his eyes and spoke quietly. “We don’t have that footage?” He nodded glumly then looked back to his audience. “But the woman in question can no longer be located, and most offices in the building are empty now. If anyone really is in a position to take charge, they have not yet made themselves known. Back to you, Linda.”
The screen went blank. Omar waited, but no studio anchor named Linda or otherwise materialized to continue the story. After a few seconds, an ad for a gambling app appeared.
Rafiq said, “You should get some sleep.”
“What about you?”
“When you wake up tomorrow, I’ll grab a few hours.”
Omar said, “What if I wake up, and you’re gone? What if sleep breaks the connection?”
“Then you’ll know that the whole thing’s out of our hands,” Rafiq admitted. “Just remember to teach the other guys how to make good lablabi.”
When Omar climbed into bed, he left the desk lamp on, and Rafiq settled into a chair in the corner. Omar did not believe that this man might turn out to be some kind of child molester, but the only way he could accommodate another presence in the room was to half-pretend that he was still sharing it with Syed, who’d often sit studying long after Omar’s bedtime. He was tempted to cover his face with his pillow to block out the light, but he was afraid that might also stop him being the person Rafiq was watching.
He’d thought sleep would be impossible, but after a while he found himself sinking into a pleasant stupor, convinced that none of what he’d seen throughout the day had actually happened.
3
Rafiq insisted on Omar eating breakfast, before trusting him to stay alert for his own shift as watcher.
Omar was anxious at the start, worried that his mind might wander and Rafiq would get the blackboard treatment. “Just wake me if you need to,” Rafiq had stressed. “If someone knocks on the door. If you need the toilet again. Anything. I won’t be angry.”
Staring at a stranger sprawled across the bed he still thought of as belonging to his parents was unsettling, but Omar clung to the hope that, not only would they have approved, they were probably doing something similar themselves. And just because Rafiq had lost track of his own wife, that didn’t mean his father and mother were apart. Maybe they were taking turns napping and watching over their foster-Omar, as they worked on their short-term plans for food, and their long-term plans for restoring the world to order.
When Rafiq rose, it wasn’t even noon; he’d had less than four hours’ sleep. Omar suspected they’d both need to aim for six, at least, if they were going to stay sane, but it wasn’t his place to start lecturing an adult on the subject.
Rafiq filled some buckets in the laundry with water; the supply was still flowing normally, but he wanted to be prepared in case it failed. Omar was prepared to find the buckets empty when they returned to the room, but that didn’t happen; the buckets themselves changed color, but once the bulk of water was in place, it seemed to be as robust a feature of his world as any piece of furniture.
They each took a shower, keeping their underwear on, changing under a towel the way Omar’s father had taught him to do at the public swimming pool. Omar was beginning to feel less self-conscious; he’d now survived every embarrassing necessity, and he believed he could grow inured to the routine. His father had made it through a year of compulsory military service in Tunisia; for loss of privacy and enforced proximity to strangers, that must surely have been even worse.
Lunch didn’t exhaust their supplies of food, but it did extinguish any lingering fantasy that alter egos in some parallel world where the banking infrastructure had remained intact would devise a way to play poltergeist and slip care parcels into their pantry. The photos in the living room could manifest new faces a dozen times a day, while Omar’s bedroom wall flipped effortlessly from the Periodic Table to the Declaration of Human Rights, but if they wanted to keep eating, they’d need to bring fresh ingredients into the house the normal way.
When they stepped outside there was no one else in sight, though Omar saw a neighbor’s blind twitch. “We should try the store first,” Rafiq said. “I ran out without taking any money, but the woman yelled after me that she’d leave half the cash.”
The car hadn’t changed overnight in any significant way: Rafiq didn’t need to break the door locks for a second time, or repeat the surgery that allowed an easy hot-wire start. As they drove south toward the river, the traffic around them was sparse, but the vibe Omar felt was more public holiday than ghost town. The world hadn’t ended: no one was dropping dead in the street, no buildings were on fire, no bridges had collapsed. Omar did not believe that his family were any more likely to be in harm’s way than he was – and whatever had scattered them, he was sure it would eventually be understood, and reversed.
He had feared that there might have been looting, but as they turned into the parking lot at the back of the store, the premises looked perfectly intact.
“Ideal Electrics?” Rafiq protested. He caught himself and regarded Omar apologetically. “I’m sorry. If your father called it that—”
“Absolutely not,” Omar assured him.
Name change notwithstanding, Rafiq’s key still worked. Omar hadn’t been to the store since the weekend, but inside, it was instantly familiar-but-strange, with a subtly wrong scent to everything, and an alien color scheme for the price tags.
Rafiq opened the till. “She kept her promise!” he announced, taking out a handful of bills. “Or ... someone did.” Cash was not a big fraction of the business, but if money still meant anything they could eat for weeks. Omar experienced an odd pang of emotion, halfway between a genuine response and the kind of thing a tearjerking movie might have wrung out of him. Maybe one or all of his “mothers” had deserted him to go chasing after their firstborn, but at least they’d left a decent child support payment behind.
Rafiq held up a twenty-dollar bill, frowning. “The whole thing looks right, but ... have you heard of ‘Mary Reibey’? I don’t think that name was on my citizenship test.”
Omar shrugged. “It looks right to me, too.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t counterfeit in the criminal sense. All they could do was see if anyone was willing to accept it.
They drove to a nearby market, which appeared to be doing plenty of trade. It was only as they approached a vegetable stall that Omar spotted a handwritten sign that read: ALL BILLS VALUE $5.
Rafiq muttered obscenities under his breath, but when they reached the stall he addressed the vendor calmly, pointing to the sign. “What’s this, brother? Would you take advantage of people at a time like this?”
The man shook his head, apologetic but firm. “You give me a hundred-dollar bill, and tomorrow I check it. Will it be a hundred, or will it be twenty? Ten? Five?”
Omar thought this actually sounded defensible, but Rafiq was not persuaded. “American bills are all the same size. But you know that’s not true here.” He fished out a twenty and a fifty, and lined them up together. Omar had never noticed before, but the higher denomination was at least five millimeters longer.
The vendor grew angry. “I lost my daughter yesterday.” He held up a hand with his thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart. “You think someone promised you nothing would change by that much?”
“We’ve all lost people,” Rafiq replied, with genuine sympathy. “But this cash sat in my till all night, and it’s lost no value.”
“Mashallah,” the vendor replied, sarcastically. “But here, each bill is worth five dollars. No more, no less.”
Rafiq stood in silence for several seconds, then he nodded slightly. “Okay.”
They walked around the stall, selecting vegetables from what remained; they’d probably come late in a surge of panic buying, but between the problems with cash and the lure of less perishable alternatives, the shelves here had not ended up stripped bare.
Omar tried to quash his own disappointment and think through the competing claims about the banknotes. Things changed, but they didn’t change at random, even within the constraints of size; the posters on his wall never turned into sheets of butcher’s paper, or priceless works of art. Because, he supposed, they could only be things that someone else who’d lived a life much like his own had actually put there.
So, what could a polymer banknote become? Not just any random object of about the same size and shape, because no one would have reason to carry such a thing in their wallet, or keep it in their till.
And not every till would be the same. He’d never seen anyone buy a fridge or a TV and pay for it with five-dollar bills. But equally, who paid for their vegetables with fifties? So maybe both men were right: Rafiq’s fifties hadn’t turned into fives, but the stall owner couldn’t count on the same thing holding true.
They paid for the vegetables and moved on. The whole market had adopted the $5 policy; by the time they were done, Omar guessed they’d spent half their cash on about a week’s worth of food.
They drove to a garden center, but all the seeds and seedlings for edible plants had sold out. Rafiq kept trying, visiting different horticultural outlets across the suburbs, until the battery range warning light came on.
Omar hadn’t been paying attention to the car’s navigation system, but when he looked from the console to the street signs around them, he realized that it was showing the car’s location as reliably as ever. It probably kept its own copies of the maps it used – only needing the internet for information about roadworks and traffic conditions – and the GPS signals themselves would be more like a one-way TV broadcast than an exchange of data over the net.
“If we could look down on the city from a satellite,” he wondered, “and our eyes were good enough to keep track of everyone ... would we see people disappearing?”
“I doubt it,” Rafiq replied. “We don’t see that any other time.”
“So would that be enough to keep them all together, from their own point of view?” Omar tried to think it through, but it wasn’t obvious to him what the outcome would be. “And if it was a machine watching, would that be just as good?”
Rafiq didn’t answer. Omar dropped the subject; what mattered most right now was food. With their cash half-gone, what else was left? The washing machines and TVs in the store seemed likely to remain as stable as any other weighty objects, but the fact that no one had bothered to loot them suggested that they wouldn’t be worth much.
“In the lockdowns,” he said, “and the bushfires, a lot of people helped each other. Like those Sikh food trucks handing out meals.”
“And Muslim groups, too,” Rafiq protested.
“Do you ever go to mosque?” Omar’s father was not religious at all.
“No, but credit where it’s due. And of course you should feed your neighbors, if they fall on hard times and you have enough to share. But charity’s not a bottomless well. The food has to come from somewhere in the end.”
“Why should the farmers stop growing food?”
“Should they work for nothing? They still need to look after their families. They still need fuel and fertilizer.”
“Why should the fertilizer factories shut down?”
Rafiq scowled. “And ... what? Will the farmers pay them in sacks of wheat? And will the factory workers pay for everything in fertilizer? There’s a reason people moved beyond bartering.”
