The Real Vivarium

how to break out of negative patterns

Loneliness had a way of being absorbed in the miles of dry sclerophyll. There was no point in wishing for anything else. The closest neighbour, an unreconstructed Pedder Dam greenie, no longer invited herself over for coffee. Cherie had attacked her for bragging about her Oxfam donations, knowing that the worst way to hurt someone in poverty was by showing them how it felt to feast. She knew this because she used to rent an apartment in Melbourne, where she never saw a single spider.

The neighbour had been friends with her mother, who never understood this either. One night when Cherie was nine she hid her footsteps in the noise of a gale and moved with her bedding into a tent she had secretly erected behind the garden, because tents had no hidden nooks or passageways. She was caught before she closed the zip. While abrading her damp skin with a rough towel her mother explained how stupid this was, in terms inarguable except through the forbidden logic of sentiment, just as she would explain a decade later how stupid it was for Cherie, after graduating from matriculation college in Launceston, to move so far from everything that had been built for her.

This too was inarguable. That the cities of the mainland were populated by false people, thieves and scammers, leeches, hypocrites, and drug addicts—how could this have been otherwise? But it would never have occurred to her mother that the simple absence of things that crawled would have such an effect on the average resting temperature of Cherie’s brain. When everything came apart, this difference in thermal output did not figure into her mother’s summation. Cherie had only wasted time, ending her journey right where it began, only several years in debt.

It made no difference that the air in Launceston was cleaner. Increasingly every funding cycle her organs were coated with slime from exploratory studies and terminal metastudies. These entered her inbox through an institutional proxy and exited clean of spelling and formatting mistakes, but she could not safely dispose of their residue. Cognitive decline associated with mine drainage. Glyphosates detectable in the water supply. Birth abnormalities clustering in the north-east, endocrine dysfunction, strange trends in strange cancers. On Saturdays, when she emptied a self-discharging aerosol insecticide in every room to secure her borders for the coming week, she found herself struggling to breathe.

Then her mother died, and because nothing made sense to the contrary, the small protection afforded by the plaster cornicing of her dilapidated rental had to be shed. It took a long time to drive from her small city to the winding mountain pass in the municipality of Glamorgan where a blind exit turned into the driveway of her childhood home. When she arrived, she found it difficult to settle. It required two aerosol cans per week, then three. An inexhaustible spring of phlegm started to tickle the base of her throat. She needed a different solution.

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In Melbourne she had liked to walk in crowds, though she hated when they brought their sounds and smells inside. She liked to detect pleasure in the estate agent’s face when they passed her inspection with perfect marks. She had a boyfriend, for a while, who spoke little and did not try to injure her with judgements. The nicest thing would have been to live in that apartment forever, if only the cabal of adjacent tenants, with their rave parties and dogs, had not used the girl downstairs to bully her out. The tattooed little hooker had weaponised youth and friendliness to twist Cherie’s responsible self-advocacy into something repugnant. Being slandered as a harasser was too much to bear, so Cherie tearfully abandoned her lease and flew home.

The little prostitute was first to be miniaturised. Then came to boyfriend, who had lied by feigning to respect her allergy to manipulative nonsense and sheepishly departed when he could no longer carry the burden of his deception. She enjoyed crafting his felt cardigan and tiny round glasses, and she placed him in the pinebark where the roaches would thrive. Most recent was the hippy neighbour, who had used Cherie’s toilet without cleaning the brush and now ruled the bracken from a porcelain throne.

The last pieces were what she thought about when night vision outpaced the onset of sleep and every knot in the panelling grew eight legs. Cherie, who wrung her hands at nothing, could not settle on the design of her mother’s miniature. In the dark, hemmed by unsealed walls that flexed and groaned, she wanted to dress her in a tattered shift and drape her hair in sticky mats. She wanted to lighten her bronze-leather skin to pale blue and place her in the remotest corner, wilfully crazed, a frumpy tyrant snap-frozen when the wind changed southerly.

In the morning a gracious sun announced the last days of winter and her mother became Boudicca. Her dubious inheritance showed its other face—a moat of dewy grass dug against the snakes and spinifex, marauders stymied by a ward of druid magic. She saw how her mother, a great economist of speech, had created a geography to teach deeper lessons than any bloviating lecturer could. Her miniature should be earthy and erect, watching from the porch in her long green coat, leaning on the butt of her shotgun.

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The room was lined with green plastic sheets ironed together at the seams. Airlocks built from a tent frame were placed at either side of the door. PPE coveralls hung outside. No face coverings or air filters—just enough protection to balance effort and safety, so she would not shy from the regular chores. Last time the colony starved because she could not bear to approach the glass.

It was a collision of ideas that unexpectedly completed each other. One day, before the miniatures knew their fate, she was watching someone wrap presents in a video. Outside the video, ABC Radio was interviewing a psychologist who had written a book about social media. Cherie did not bother with social media except to watch videos. Nor did she admire psychologists, and she hated the prim-voiced women of ABC Radio who wanked about symphony orchestras and animal liberation in the same motion. But she listened, like she always did, because of the house. The steam-warped Philips portable in the kitchen had its dial rusted to 91.7, and no other noise seemed able to fill the space.

The psychologist averred that although the phenomena of social media were mass phenomena, the individuals responsible for particular cases of harmful online behaviour were almost certainly very hurt and traumatised, and were trying to purge their sensorium of things that might recall their injury. These avoidances were naturally very unhelpful for traumatised people, for the same reason paracetamol could not raise fallen arches or disinfect a wound.

As the psychologist’s excitable voice tickled her inner ear, the video she had been watching transitioned into a spectacular artificial habitat construction. Suddenly the miniatures came to life. She watched more of these videos, as many as she could find, and found an online seller who delivered invertebrates in the mail. The first batch died in the post office, waiting for collection. This was her third.

When she watched the videos, she restricted herself to technical detail. She skipped lurid close-ups of the creatures about to populate it, and stopped watching before the creatures were triumphantly placed inside. One day that would change. On that day she would wake indistinct from the world and go downstairs to meet it as mist from the mountains, without inspecting the shadows at the edge of her vision.

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The knocking repeated in a deep unconscious pattern. It waxed jaunty and regular, then stopped, then mercilessly restarted in an elusive time signature. Cherie heard her name called as though it would make her more likely to answer the door. She wrapped a pillow around her head, wishing she could fill her ears with fingers without retching.

A knot in the ceiling whirled her counterclockwise. She threaded past a dozen recollected terrors and humiliations, arriving finally at something she could not certainly claim was a real memory. She laid supine, borne over by someone large who did not yet see the dark shape above. In the memory, Cherie believed she was laughing.

She watched the knot for as long as she could before needing the bathroom too urgently. When she rose she hoped that the person at the door was gone.

Inside she was full of fibreglass. Her body tried to vomit, managing only to sear the nerves behind her tongue. She felt other things: the tank throbbing downstairs, home to a system of captives she did not definitely remember securing, and a smaller tank resting in her recycling bin, empty, which had contained the poison she used to embolden herself.

She tried sitting at her desk but could not remain upright. In bed she clogged the vents of her laptop with linen and opened her inbox. A certain mould known to viticulturalists, which had already been detected in the northern poppy fields, was now conclusively present on the surfaces of supermarket apples. No medical data existed on the strain, but related fungi had been associated with skin lesions, depressive disorders, lung damage, and alcoholism. Cherie felt relieved that the only apples in the house were tinned.

The thought sent her imagination downstairs, where tinned apples and brown sugar waited in the pantry. She liked to make crumbles for herself when she was unwell, with ingredients that were always at hand on the days when her mother yielded to the proof of a digital thermometer and left her alone in the house. But the pantry was a dark place, prone to cobwebs and mysterious detritus. If anything had escaped confinement, it would have taken residence there.

She tuned out the groaning laptop and probed the knot as sleep came and went. Somewhere in its vortex her mother knocked on the downstairs ceiling.

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Strange light penetrated the outer walls and radiated inside, a polluted glow that stitched the stars into one mottled fabric, like an aurora made of halogen gas. Her laptop had died. The bedside lightswitch did nothing, but she could see well without it. She observed that if the power was out her pumps and filters would stop working and the wet areas of the tank would have to be cleaned manually. This did not panic her.

The weird light appeared to concentrate at a point in the roof, where she thought the knot had been. Now something jutted out, becoming clearer as the particles swimming down from the stars gained definition. It was a nautilus coil, covered in fine hair, yearning glacially towards her. Deep enough in time it might have straightened and brushed her forehead. It might have been green, or light brown. It might have been the source of the light.

Cherie threw the covers aside and started downstairs. There was nothing uncertain on the periphery—some power had made her whole field of vision sharp. Dark shapes cast no shadows. At the airlock she climbed into her coveralls because it was the procedure, but she did not bother to wear a mask.

Everything was passionately alive. The transplanted bracken was busily establishing roots, preparing to mingle with the roots of its neighbouring cycads. Colonies at every scale met for the first time: mites living in the palm bark, films of bacteria distributed in irregular clumps, and gods standing over them—opalescent beetles, Scythian jackjumpers, roaming arachnoid titans.

In the new light, distances changed their meanings. Cherie stood outside in her overalls, and also inside the little prostitute’s platform boots, marvelling at the intricacy of her own tattoos. From his vantage in the rotting pinebark the ex-boyfriend stood eye-to-eye with a lurking huntsman, crouched under a petrified log. Its brittle fur recalled the capybaras Cherie had seen at Tasmania Zoo. Its many eyes were wet and frightened.

She knew, suddenly, how her mother should look, and where to place her.

The power clicked back on and Cherie returned to bed. She watched the thing uncoil from the ceiling. It revealed the studded young leaves of a bracken frond, with a flower bud at its tip, reaching out to kiss her. It peeled open when she touched it, coughing green spores.

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The neighbour knocked and knocked, switching hands when one became numb from cold. The air, which in this place should have smelled only of wattle blossom and faintly sometimes of cannabis, was infused with smoke. The smoke did not concern the neighbour, who knew the difference between a house fire and a kitchen accident. What concerned her was that she had known Cherie since she was a girl, and knew her not to be the sort of person who made accidents in the kitchen. The neighbour did not want to use her key, but the door continued to go unanswered, and she needed to use the bathroom.

She followed the smoke into the kitchen, opening windows, finally rescuing the oven from a blackened casserole dish. She filled the dish with tapwater and set to washing out the empty apple tins that cluttered the benchtop. They had been out for long enough to attract cockroaches.

Something crunched on the floor, and a troop of beetles scuttled clear of her boot. When she looked, instead of a crushed insect she saw a ceramic figurine with grey-streaked hair and split ends, separated from the miniature toilet which had comprised its lower half. The hair, thought the neighbour, was real.

She clenched her core and followed a trail of dirt into the living room. A strange horticultural disaster had occurred. Uprooted ferns and trees like overgrown bonsai strewed the hardwood, spawning pests from mounds of wet dirt. Some of the pests were dead or dying—a half-dozen huntsmen limped and curled by the skirting boards, and another handful clung to the upper parts of the walls, not yet sickened by whatever hung in the air. Huntsmen did not typically disturb the neighbour, but she had never seen so many in the same place.

She stepped over a mess of crumpled PVC sheeting and entered the adjoining room. Against the back wall an enormous fishtank was missing its front panel, spilling soil like an hourglass. The soil pooled around the base of a kind of teepee, transparent green plastic draped on a spearhead of metal poles. Inside the tent, facing her, was Cherie, dressed in her mother’s long coat with the badges from their striking days arranged like combat medals. Her friend’s daughter’s face was darkened with dirt. She was aiming a shotgun.