Lexicon (14 page)

The desk called for first- and business-class passengers and she trudged to the gate. When she surrendered her boarding pass, though, the woman smiled and handed it back to her. “We’ll be boarding economy in a few moments.” Emily looked at her dumbly. She had just assumed. She walked back to the seats.

“Nice try,” said the man beside her, the one hoping for
Lord of the Rings
. He was friendly, and she smiled back, and it was the most fake thing she had ever done.

•   •   •

She slept fitfully, disturbed by rattling food trolleys and people squeezing by her seat. The flight time according to her screen was fourteen hours, which she thought had to be wrong, like maybe that was including the time difference. She didn’t know enough to sleep properly.

Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant bent to her ear. “Excuse me. This is for you.” Emily, tangled in dreams of golf and Yeats, stared at the woman without comprehension. It was nighttime; the only light came from the screens in the backs of people’s seats and the little yellow glow lights embedded in the aisles. The woman handed Emily a folded piece of paper. It was an odd texture, thick, stamped with an aviation authority logo.

“Thank you,” Emily said. The attendant left and she unfolded the paper.

EMILY YOU ARE TO LIVE IN BROKEN HILL AUSTRALIA THIS IS TO BE YOUR HOME UNTIL YOU ARE CALLED FOR NO PREPARATIONS HAVE BEEN MADE YOU ARE TO USE YOUR OWN RESOURCES YOU CAN DO THIS ELIOT

She put the paper away and pulled her knees to her chest and silently cried into them. If she were at the school, she wouldn’t have been able to do this. She would have had to control herself. But here she indulged. She let herself sob. After this, things were going to be difficult, and she would have to concentrate, so it was probably her last opportunity.

•   •   •

She grew hypnotized by the in-flight map. The red line began in Los Angeles, curved across the ocean, and terminated at a cartoon plane that never seemed to move. The screen occasionally switched to statistics, like how fast they were moving and how cold it was outside, and these were fascinating because the numbers seemed made up. It didn’t seem possible for the cartoon plane that didn’t move to be traveling at 580 miles per hour. But it was. The flight was fourteen hours.

Her first problem, she realized, was that she was landing in Sydney with no return ticket, no luggage, wearing a school uniform. She didn’t know what the Australian immigration service was like, but it seemed probable that she would raise a few flags. She would look exactly like an overprivileged white girl disappearing in a cloud of petulance on Daddy’s credit card, and they would ask why she was here and where she was staying and when she was leaving. If they didn’t like her answers, they would turn her around and put her on a plane back home. Which, of course, superficially sounded like a great idea, except for the part where she failed to LIVE IN BROKEN HILL and USE HER OWN RESOURCES. Eliot had told her,
Please appreciate that this is the best possible outcome
, and she had come to believe that. She needed to get through Immigration.

She extracted herself from her economy seat and made her way to the rear bathrooms. In the mirror, she practiced some expressions. Then she washed her face and unlocked the door. On the way back, she stopped beside a girl she had identified who was sleeping and roughly Emily’s age, and opened her overhead locker and rummaged inside. There was a possibility of someone being awake and alert enough to say,
Excuse me, do those things belong to you
, of course, but not a large one, nor with serious consequences, and it didn’t happen. She found a little suitcase and a duffel bag and went through these, standing on tiptoe. Inside were a purse, a wallet, a digital camera, which she took because maybe she could sell it, and a book. Also a coat, which could conceal her school uniform, so she tucked that beneath her arm. She closed the locker. Two or three sets of eyes were on her, but they were glazed and disinterested, their owners critiquing her hair or fantasizing about schoolgirls, and that was fine; she was just getting some of her stuff. She cracked open the book and read it there, right next to the sleeping girl she’d robbed, like she was stretching her legs. Soon enough a man came down the aisle and she could retreat to her own seat without it looking like a getaway.

Just before the plane began to descend, she switched seats, to avoid a potential
where’s my coat
situation. She was among the first off the plane, and she walked briskly toward Customs, her new coat flapping around her ankles. The lines were short, not at all like in Los Angeles, and she was able to take her pick of Immigration officials. His name was Mark, and he was a 114 or 118, good-natured and reasonably intelligent but resigned in his job, which he considered important but dull. This she could tell right away. No glasses, no beard, a simple hairstyle but not a severe one, so no overt arrogance or vanity. No cross or religious markings. So she went for mirroring: She was Emily Ruff, simple and straightforward, slugging hours into a customer interface job as a DMV inspector. An entry-level position, but if you didn’t do your job right, people could get hurt.

“Hi,” she said. “Just right up, I don’t have a return ticket. I’m sorry, I know that means you have to give me the third degree.”

Two hours later, they released her from the interview room. They’d asked a lot of questions, but she never felt in real danger, not from the moment Mark’s face relaxed into her opening statement. She had lied a great deal, inventing a traumatic case at the DMV and a late-night Australian tourism ad culminating in a spur-of-the-moment urge to get away (
You understand that, right, Mark? The need to leave?
). She was charming and forthright and understood more about how the brain reached decisions than these guys did about anything, so that was that. She got rid of the coat before Arrivals, in case the owner was still hanging around filling out lost-and-found forms. She found a currency exchange place that let her sign for up to five hundred dollars on a credit card. Australian dollars were hilarious, she discovered: bright and shiny, like money for children. She liked them a lot. She bought a magazine and ate a cookie. She went to baggage claim and watched luggage go round and round, waiting for something wealthy, female, and unattended. A gray-suited official led around a beagle in a purple jacket, which sniffed luggage; when it found a banana in someone’s carry-on, it sat on the floor and the official gave it a treat. In Los Angeles, they’d been German shepherds. Eventually a purple Louis Vuitton suitcase completed a third lonely loop on the carousel, so she tugged it off, balanced her Pikachu bag on top, and headed for the exits.

•   •   •

The sun was brighter. The air smelled salty and felt wider, somehow. She found a cab rank and the driver wrestled her stolen suitcase into the trunk while she climbed into the back.

“Where to, love?”

The driver was white, something else she wasn’t used to. “Broken Hill, please.”

He turned in his seat. “Broken Hill?”

“Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. It’s a thousand kilometers, is that a problem?”

“What are . . .” She felt stupid. “How far is that in miles?”

“Seven hundred miles, give or take.”

Why had she assumed Broken Hill would be near Sydney? “I’m sorry. In which state is Broken Hill?”

“New South Wales.”

“And where am I?”

“New South Wales.” He smiled at her face. “We have big states, love.”

“How do I get there? Which is the closest city?” She hoped he was not about to say
Sydney
.

“Adelaide.”

“So I can fly to Adelaide,” she said, “and drive from there.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Thank you. Sorry for your trouble.” She began to get out of the cab.

“Only three hundred miles from Adelaide to Broken Hill.” He was grinning. “Welcome to Australia, love.”

“Thanks,” she said.

•   •   •

She couldn’t secure a flight that day, so she caught a cab downtown and checked into a mid-priced hotel. With the balcony doors open, bringing in a breeze from the green-flecked bay, she sifted through the suitcase, inspecting skirts and jackets. She found a romance novel, the kind you wouldn’t read on the plane, and a diary, for appointments, not confessions. Still, she turned the pages. This woman saw someone named Matt R. a lot. Emily wondered if they met in hotel rooms like this. If, after sex, the woman talked to Matt R., telling him her hopes and problems and idle thoughts. She closed the diary.

She had to get organized. Her stolen cards were already too dangerous to use; she wouldn’t reach Adelaide on those. She turned to the mirror and fiddled with a shirt. It was a little big, but she could work with the cuffs. She picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “I want to play poker,” she said. “Something informal.”

Eventually, the guy stopped recommending casinos and steered her toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turned out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while she lost the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover her losses. By then she had a queen under her left thigh and a king and an eight under her right. It had been three years since she’d done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught her. At one point, she tried to feed a jack into her sleeve and missed so badly that the card landed on the table. She tensed to run, but they only laughed and one man said, “That’s enough grog for you.” The man had red cheeks and was divorced, although he didn’t know it yet. “Sorry,” Emily said, and put the card back in her hand.

She took him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turned incredibly red, like a balloon. No one was smiling now. The game’s operator approached the table, but she didn’t need to be told; she gathered her winnings, thanked them, and when she reached the street, ran as fast as she could back to her hotel. That was how she got to Adelaide.

•   •   •

From there it was a bus ride, the world outside draining green until it was the color of snakeskin. The air-conditioning barely worked and she kept being woken by little trickles of sweat. There was only one other passenger, a woman with skin like coral who nodded off before they were even out of Adelaide and slept like she was dead. Emily wriggled around in her seat, seeking escape from her own body heat.

Eventually she opened an eye to a passing sign:
BROKEN HILL, POP.
10,100. One corner was missing and the rest was peppered with gunshot. It flared in the afternoon sun, leaning drunkenly out of the baked red earth. She sat up and saw a gas station, abandoned, and a tin structure with no windows that was she didn’t know what, also abandoned. A flat, sagging house with a dirt yard full of disemboweled cars. She glimpsed a tall iron structure, vaguely Soviet, but it was on the other side of the bus and she couldn’t see it properly. A thin dog scratched in the dirt. Another low store, this one advertising
CHEAP PARTS
, although for what she didn’t know. The windows of the stores on either side were blank. Everything was widely spaced, the center of its own little wasteland, and why not, because, she was quickly realizing, that was all there was out here: land, land, and land. She passed signs that said
SULPHIDE ST
and
CHLORIDE ST
, because they had named their streets after
minerals
, apparently, and the bus turned onto
OXIDE ST
and began to slow. She saw a sign that said
CITY CENTER
and thought,
You have to be kidding me
. When she stepped off it was into burning air, the heat crawling into her nostrils and down her throat, and they hadn’t updated that population sign in a long time, like maybe twenty years, because there might be ten thousand flies here but not people. Definitely not people. She was standing at a crossroads; the streets were single lanes in each direction but still as wide as highways. There were a handful of buildings like they had fallen from above. The sky felt oppressively low, as if it were pressing down, combining with the blasted earth below to crush this town to nothing, and it made her feel as if she were expanding, like her insides wanted to crawl out of her body like supposedly happened in space, where there was nothing to hold you in. “Home,” she said. It was supposed to be funny, but she felt like crying until she died.

CONFUSION OF TONGUES

Event in which a common language is abruptly replaced by many disparate ones. Considered mythical; see:
origin tales.

Prominent examples:

1. Tower of Babel
• Judaic myth

i. construction

ii. dividing of speech

2. Enki
• Sumerian deity

i. divides speech

ii. “The Deluge”

3. Great Dividing
• Kaska origin myth

4. Hermes
• Greek deity

i. conflict with Zeus

ii. divides speech

iii. punishment

5. Jabbering Madness
• Wa-Sania myth

i. famine

6. Tongues of a Thousand Corpses
• Kaurna myth

i. cannibalism

7. Vatea
• Polynesian deity

i. construction of tower

ii. divides speech

8. The Sun of Wind
• Aztec myth

i. construction of
Zacualli
(tower)

ii. dividing of speech

iii. crossover mythology: Mayan, Nahuati

More >>

THE STORY OF TAJURA’S NAME

Myth (Confusion of Tongues): Indigenous Australian

In the Dreaming the land was flat. There were no gorges and no hills, and no rivers. The animals lived in one tribe and spoke with one tongue, so they could understand one another.

One day Tajura, the Rainbow Serpent, carved his name in the bark of a coolabah tree. He said to the other animals, “Look what I have done, I have written my name on this tree, so you must do what I say.”

The animals were impressed and did as Tajura said. They offered their food and made him a great shelter. They brought dirt from the land together and put it beneath the coolabah tree so that it was raised up, so they could admire Tajura’s name, and that was the first hill.

But Borah, the kangaroo, was not impressed. “Why should we give Tajura our food, our best bark, and work for him?” he asked. He climbed the hill and tore the bark from the coolabah tree where it spoke Tajura’s name and buried it in the ground.

The animals were ashamed and said, “We shall speak in our own tongue, so we will not be impressed by Tajura’s words.” They went away, some north, some east, some west, some south, and that is why today the dingo howls, the frog croaks, the cockatoo screeches, and none can understand the other.