The Boundless Sublime (11 page)

I could see it. I could see myself on that path. School. Uni. My own family. Supermarkets and nail salons and new cars and summer holidays. I’d never forget Anton. And I’d never forget Fox. Never forget the possibilities he showed me, the glimpse of a bigger world. And I knew in that instant that if I didn’t go with him, I would regret it, every single day, for the rest of my inconsequential little life.

‘I know what you need,’ said Aunty Cath.

So did I.

‘You need chocolate. Tomorrow I’ll take you to this place I found where the hot chocolate is so thick you can stand your spoon up in it.’

I grimaced a smile at her. I definitely wouldn’t be going anywhere with Aunty Cath tomorrow, let alone to a place where I could coat my insides with sugar and fat and chemicals.

I went to my room and waited, lying fully clothed on my bed, until I was sure everyone was asleep. Then I left a carefully composed note on the coffee table and slipped out the front door into the night.

7

Lib opened the door in a white cotton nightgown, taking in my backpack without comment.

‘I’m so sorry to wake you,’ I said. ‘Um. Is Fox around?’

Lib hesitated and, for a moment, I feared she was going to turn me away. Then she stood back and opened the door wide. ‘You’d better come in.’

She ushered me into the kitchen and handed me a bottle of water.

‘I want to go to the Institute,’ I told her. ‘I— I can’t stay at home anymore.’

‘Fox left this afternoon,’ Lib said. ‘With Welling and Stan.’

‘Am I too late?’

‘Val, Maggie and I are leaving tomorrow. I can take you with us, if that’s what you want.’

I nodded.

‘Are you sure?’ Lib’s expression was troubled, as if she were searching for something in me that she wasn’t sure she wanted to find.

‘I’m sure.’

She led me up to Fox’s room, telling me we’d be leaving first thing in the morning. I put my backpack on the floor, kicked off my shoes and crawled into the bed. The sheets still
smelled of Fox. I buried my head in the pillow and breathed deeply, imagining him lying right here beside me, his fingers curling into mine, my head resting on his shoulder. We could have that, soon. At the Institute. Fox and I could be together.

Lib shook me awake just after seven, and I followed her downstairs into the kitchen, where I found Val and Maggie sitting at the bench eating bowls of quinoa. Val didn’t look up. Maggie grinned at me, and saluted me with her spoon.

‘I hear you’re going to be a sublimate,’ she said. ‘Congratulations.’

I slid onto a stool next to hers. ‘Thanks. What’s a sublimate?’

‘A new recruit. A new team member.’

‘Are you hungry, Ruby?’ Lib asked.

I shook my head. My stomach was fizzing with nerves and I wasn’t sure I could keep anything down. Lib nodded and bustled out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with Val and Maggie.

‘What’s it like?’ I asked Maggie. ‘The Institute?’

Maggie chewed thoughtfully. ‘It’s … different,’ she said at last. ‘It’s not like here. It can be a bit of a shock to the system. I know it wasn’t what I’d been expecting.’

‘When did you first go there?’

‘About four months ago. I’d been here at the Red House for maybe a month before that. Then Lib said I was ready to meet everyone, and she took me to the Institute as a sublimate. I … I didn’t like it at first, to be honest. But you get used to it.’

She swallowed her last mouthful of quinoa, and stood up to wash her bowl in the sink. When her back was turned, Val raised his head and looked directly at me. It was the first
time he’d made eye contact. He shook his head, slowly and deliberately.

It felt like a warning.

Maggie turned away from the sink, and Val’s gaze sank back down to his quinoa. ‘Sometimes I have doubts,’ Maggie said. ‘But … I guess at the end of the day, I have more doubts about the world out here than I do about the world in there. You know? So there has to be some truth in it all.’

I stared at Val for a moment, waiting to see if he’d do anything else. My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out. There was a text from Aunty Cath. I replaced the phone in my pocket without reading the message, turning back to Maggie. ‘Truth in what?’

Maggie smiled. ‘You’ll understand when you meet him.’

‘Him?’

The smile grew wider. ‘Zosimon.’

A white van was parked out the front of the Red House. Maggie, Val and I climbed in while Lib locked up. Val’s hands were cupped, holding the cicada husks he’d collected.

‘You don’t have a bag,’ I said to Maggie.

‘Nothing to put in it,’ she said with a shrug.

‘Nothing? What about underwear and books and a phone? Or did you leave that stuff behind when you came here?’

‘I don’t really have any stuff,’ Maggie said. ‘None of us do.’

I wrapped my arms around my own backpack, balanced on my knees. I hadn’t packed much – a change of clothes and some extra undies and socks. A couple of books that I thought Fox would enjoy. My phone charger. A small toiletries bag with toothbrush and deodorant, a box of tampons and a strip of condoms. I couldn’t imagine not having anything at all.

Maggie glanced out the van’s window to the Red House. Lib was still inside, checking the locks on the windows. With a furtive glance down the street as well, Maggie leaned forward and pulled up the hem of her shirt, revealing a secret pocket sewn into the seam. Inside the pocket was a gold necklace with a little jade pendant – a milky green disc engraved with whorls and waves.

‘It was my grandmother’s.’ Maggie tucked the pendant away and straightened her shirt. ‘I didn’t want to give it up when I arrived. I … I wanted to have something that was just mine, you know? Something that nobody could take away from me.’

I nodded. I hadn’t brought anything sentimental with me, because I didn’t have anything. I was going to the Institute because the one thing I wanted was already there.

I heard the front door to the Red House close, and turned to see Lib making her way down the garden path towards us.

‘Don’t tell anyone, okay?’ said Maggie urgently. ‘We’re not supposed to have jewellery or anything.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I won’t say a word.’

Lib hauled open the van’s sliding door and glanced in at us. ‘Ready?’

We nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lib, holding up three strips of dark cloth. ‘But the Institute’s location is top secret. I’ll have to blindfold you.’

I almost laughed at her. Blindfold? What was this, a James Bond movie? I glanced at Maggie and Val, but they had both already taken strips and were tying them over their eyes as if this were a totally normal occurrence. So I shrugged, and leaned my head forward so that Lib could blindfold me.

‘Here we go,’ I heard Maggie say, as the van sputtered into life and it pulled forward. ‘Down the rabbit hole.’

The van rumbled along, turning corners so often that after a while I felt rather carsick. But it was also soothing, the darkness, the vibration of the engine, the musty smell of old vinyl. We were stop-starting regularly, so we couldn’t be going far – either that or Lib was avoiding the freeway. I didn’t hear much other traffic noise, so I also guessed she was taking the backstreets. It was all so clandestine – these guys really took themselves seriously.

Maggie was silent beside me, as were Val and Lib. After a while I slipped into a half-doze, and time spooled out around me so I couldn’t tell how long I’d been in the van. My stomach growled and I regretted skipping breakfast. On the other hand, breakfast probably would have made my woozy motion sickness worse.

Suddenly the van stopped, and I started out of my nauseous reverie.

There was the sound of squealing metal – a gate opening? The van rumbled and pulled forward slowly. The metal squealed again, and the van stopped.

‘We’re here,’ said Lib’s voice.

Maggie elbowed me in the ribs. ‘You’re going to hear some crazy stuff over the next few days,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Some of it is pretty extreme. Just … go with it. It’s easier than making a fuss. I find it helps to understand it all as a kind of metaphor for life, you know? It’s like the Bible. All the woo-woo is there to help us to process those ideas.’

‘Right,’ I said, feeling suddenly nervous.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Maggie. ‘Nobody’s going to force you to do anything you don’t want to. You don’t have to believe in any of it. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. You are totally in control. These are good people, they’ll look after you.’

My eyes were flooded with brightness as someone pulled off the blindfold. I squinted and blinked, and the whiteness slowly faded to something more manageable.

It wasn’t what I’d expected.

I’d thought we’d be somewhere … remote. In the middle of nowhere. A secret country home. The kind of commune I’d seen on TV – with a farmhouse and barns and chickens and orchards heavy with fruit.

But as far as I could tell we were still in the suburbs. The van was parked in a concrete car park, surrounded by high grey walls. Most of the car park had been dug up to make a large vegetable plot, and a few people were on their hands and knees, digging and planting. They looked up as Lib cut the engine and yanked on the handbrake.

‘Welcome to the Institute of the Boundless Sublime,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure if it was the name or the grey chill of the day, but a shiver ran through me.

I climbed down from the van and stood on the hard-packed earth, studded with broken concrete rubble. Looking up, I could see long strings of powerlines, and the tops of warehouses on the other side of the wall. Traffic rumbled outside. Wherever we were, it wasn’t remote.

A large dark warehouse rose to the left of the vegetable plot, a monstrosity of corrugated iron and crisscrossed steel girders. To the right were three squat brick buildings painted a bleak gunmetal grey. Small, high, barred windows of whitish opaque glass stared out from the grey bricks like milky blind eyes. Several were broken, and the whole place looked as though it had been abandoned for years.

It seemed a million miles from the tranquillity of the Red House, or the rustic nature-loving communes of my imagination. But at least the garden was impressive – neat rows of
cabbages and broccoli and silverbeet. Young pea plants were being staked, and broad beans sprouted fat pods and crimson flowers. Vertical herb gardens lined the thick concrete walls, sprouting coriander, parsley and other things I didn’t recognise.

‘I’m busting to pee,’ Maggie declared, and dashed off towards one of the buildings. Val lumbered off after her, his hands still cupping the cicada husks.

Lib explained that it had once been a food distribution warehouse, before they had moved in.

‘Why live in a warehouse?’ I asked, thinking of the comfortable elegance of the Red House.

Lib shrugged. ‘We don’t ask those kinds of questions.’

‘How long has it – the Institute of the … what did you call it?’

‘The Institute of the Boundless Sublime.’

‘How long has it been here?’ I asked.

‘Long enough.’

I remembered how open and encouraging Lib had been when I’d first gone to the Red House. What had changed? She seemed different here, after only a few minutes. Perhaps she was just tired from the drive.

I persisted. ‘How often do new people join?’

‘We get many visitors at the Red House,’ she said. ‘Only a select few are invited here to the Institute.’

‘And how many stay, once they come?’

‘It depends,’ Lib said. ‘Some people become a part of our family. Others decide the Institute isn’t for them. Nobody is forced to stay, or forced to leave.’ She pointed at the building closest to the vegetable plot. ‘A Block is our communal area – the kitchen and the mess. The Inner Sanctum is in there too. B Block is living quarters. Everyone has their own room. We encourage solitude at night. The mind needs time to recharge, with no distractions from other bodies.’

Thank goodness. I’d been terrified of having to sleep in a dorm room with a bunch of strangers. And it meant that Minah had obviously been wrong about there being weird sex stuff going on.

‘What about the other building?’ I asked, pointing.