Disappearing off the Face of the Earth Read online

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Published 2017

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright© 2017 David Cohen

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose

  of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

  Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without

  written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Cover design: Josh Durham, Design by Committee

  Author photograph: Alexandra Molnar Kovacs

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-0-9953595-4-3 (e-book)

  For Simone

  One

  I was watching Bruce straighten the trolleys.

  I think it was a Thursday afternoon. I recall sitting in my office at Hideaway Self Storage, studying some of the previous night’s footage picked up by the CCTV cameras in the central loading bay. I did this now and then, just to gauge the level of after-hours activity. But nobody was coming in or going out; the loading bay remained depressingly quiet.

  Suddenly, Bruce appeared on the monitor, practically out of nowhere. He was pushing a flat-bed trolley towards the row of other flat-bed trolleys lined up against the rear wall. I watched with a sort of irritated fascination, and then with a sort of fascinated irritation, as he parked his trolley at the end of the row. But it didn’t end there. Squatting down, Bruce checked that all the wheels of all the trolleys were aligned. Then he started making minor adjustments to individual trolleys, like a yoga instructor, until he was satisfied that they were all straight.

  ‘Bruce,’ I said to the screen, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’

  Bruce had worked for me for nearly five years. He was a weird prick but I’d come to accept his idiosyncrasies. Why he’d be straightening the trolleys at one o’clock on a Thursday morning was a mystery I preferred not to enquire into too deeply. The facility allowed twenty-four-hour access – each tenant had their own security code, enabling them to get to their storage unit whenever they wanted – and there was certainly no reason why Bruce, as an employee, couldn’t come in and do work after office hours. If he was such a sad loser that he had nothing better to do with his time, that was his business. I wasn’t interested in Bruce’s personal life – assuming he had one. And I told myself that, surely, putting too much time and energy into straightening the trolleys was better than not straightening the trolleys at all. If I paused to imagine a scenario in which Bruce neglected the trolleys altogether, a scenario in which Bruce wasn’t in the grip of some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I was actually grateful that things were as they were. Whatever else Bruce might be or not be, he put his heart and soul into the job. And if a man does that, why question his methods?

  Having laid that matter to rest for the time being, I celebrated, in a small way, by putting on a CD: King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon, a prog-rock classic from 1970 and my favourite album at the time.

  I switched the CCTV cameras back to real time, and turned my attention to the other monitor to check the tenant database. I’d barely made a start when I looked up and saw Bruce standing right next to me. He had a way of sneaking up, suddenly appearing in the room. Whereas the trolley thing was a recent development, he’d been doing the sudden-appearance thing for as long as I’d known him.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, Ken.’ Bruce seemed surprisingly bright and alert for someone who’d spent the early hours straightening trolleys. He pointed to the computer screen. ‘Did you see we’ve got another defaulter on our hands?’

  ‘Another one? Shit.’

  ‘Afraid so.’ Bruce leaned over the computer keyboard, as if I wasn’t sitting right there, and tapped some keys, bringing up the record of the tenant from Unit 117. His name was Leonard Stelzer and he was way behind on his rent.

  Bruce said, ‘I’ve already followed it up.’

  I looked up at the CCTV monitor, which now showed actual-time footage of the central loading bay. Business wasn’t great; the bay often remained empty for hours at a time. Tenants defaulting on their rent didn’t help matters. On the plus side, at least the trolleys were perfectly aligned.

  ‘Want me to run through the checklist?’ Bruce said.

  I knew that he’d done everything necessary to close the Leonard Stelzer file, so to speak – Bruce could have run the facility single-handed if necessary – but he enjoyed going through the checklist; any sort of checklist was music to Bruce’s ears. I couldn’t help but indulge him.

  ‘So you’ve emailed Stelzer?’ I said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Bruce said. ‘I’ve emailed him. Plus I’ve called his mobile.’

  ‘Did you try the alternative contact?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you send the letter?’

  ‘I sent the letter.’

  ‘Did you send the second letter?

  ‘By registered mail. That was a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Still no response?’

  ‘Complete silence,’ Bruce said.

  ‘Complete silence,’ I repeated.

  We studied the computer record again.

  ‘Well, Bruce,’ I said, ‘it looks like Leonard Stelzer has disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  Two

  We’d coined that expression, ‘disappeared off the face of the earth’, years ago; Bruce had, to be precise. When someone defaulted on their rent and we couldn’t track them down – and we’d done everything we could to track them down – then as far as we were concerned, they’d disappeared off the face of the earth. We were legally entitled to enter their unit and do whatever we wanted with whatever happened to be in there.

  ‘Let’s get the gear,’ I said.

  ‘Sweet as.’ Another standard Bruce catchphrase; it drove me up the fucking wall, like most things he said and did.

  So began the process of emptying the defaulter’s unit. We’d done this so many times, it had become a silent ritual – silent if not for Bruce.

  I went to the cupboard where we kept the boltcutters and the camera. You had to jiggle the key in the cupboard’s lock in a specific way before the cupboard would open; it seemed to get more stubborn each time. It was just one of many little things in the facility that needed fixing. The problem was that there were also big things that needed fixing, and since I couldn’t afford to fix the big things, I didn’t bother with the little things.

  Bruce looked on while I struggled with the lock.

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ he remarked, ‘that our business revolves around locking and unlocking doors, but we can’t open that cupboard.’

  ‘Good thing you’ve never said that before,’ I said.

  I finally got the cupboard open. I took out the camera, the boltcutters and a torch. Then we took the lift to Unit 117, one of the two hundred units of varying sizes that made up the facility.

  When we reached the end of the corridor, I could hear a faint buzz – barely perceptible – in the fluorescent tube directly above us. That meant it was on its way out and would at any moment start to flicker.

  ‘That’ll have to be replaced,’ I said. I may have overlooked a lot of repair jobs, but fluoro lights were a different story.

  Bruce nodded. ‘Sweet as.’

  ‘And don’t keep saying “Sweet as”. It’s fucki
ng annoying.’

  Using the boltcutters, Bruce sliced through the inverted U of the padlock on Unit 117. I noticed that it was a Sargent and Greenleaf high-security combination padlock, made of hardened steel, with a silver body and a black dial. Nine out of ten padlocks I could spring open with a couple of paperclips. Not the Sargent and Greenleaf, though: it’s a notoriously tough fucker – US government agencies use them to lock up munitions stores – and boltcutters are the only way to go. Whoever Leonard Stelzer was, he knew a good padlock when he saw one.

  Bruce opened the roller shutter, and some of the light from the corridor spilled into the unit, illuminating the corrugations in the walls. Even after all those years, I paused a moment to speculate on what treasures lay within. Nine times out of ten a unit contained the typical mundane artefacts of the defaulter’s life: kitchenware, crap furniture, camping gear, computer hardware, bikes, books, filing cabinets, old clothes. But once in every fifty units or so, you got something that made the procedure worthwhile. This was one such unit.

  It was, in short, a collector’s wet dream. Superhero comics: mint condition, plastic-wrapped, neatly stacked in twenty-odd milk crates. Superman, Batman, Spider Man, various other men, and some women. There were also a hundred or more pristine action figures, still in their original packaging. I was no expert on comic books, but I knew enough to know that these were worth money.

  ‘Sweet as,’ Bruce said. For once he was right.

  We passed five minutes or so flicking through the stacks of comics.

  ‘Do you recall this Stelzer guy?’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ Bruce said. ‘Not that he had the sort of face that sticks in your memory.’

  As if Bruce could talk. I can describe Bruce’s face very easily: simply imagine an interesting, striking face, and then subtract everything that makes it interesting and striking. Bruce’s face was, more or less, what was left over.

  ‘He’d been renting this unit for months,’ Bruce said. ‘We crossed paths once or twice, had a little chat. He was your typical comic-book collector: fat, goatee, ponytail – usual thing. What is it with these guys and their ponytails?’

  I rested my foot on the edge of one of the crates. ‘You had a little chat, did you? What about?’

  ‘You know me, Ken: I like to talk to the clients, ask them what sort of things they’re storing away here – only if they care to tell me, that is. But I like talking to people in general; you’re bound to learn something interesting.’

  ‘So what interesting thing did you learn about Stelzer?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t much of a talker, but he told me about the comics. And I could tell by the way he described them that he valued them above pretty much everything else. I said, “Why do you keep them here, then?” He said these were the ones he couldn’t fit in his flat. He said it’s a one-bedder and it’s chock-a-block. These are the overflow; can you believe it? You can imagine what his place looks like: probably no room to move, especially for a guy as fat as he is.’

  I could see Bruce was on a roll, so I made myself comfortable – as comfortable as I could in a concrete storage unit full of heavy crates.

  ‘So I said to him, “What if you want to invite some other comic collectors over to see your stuff? Bit cramped, isn’t it?” You know what he said?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’

  ‘He said he never has anyone over to his place, and he doesn’t go over to anyone else’s place. He does it all on the internet; that’s how he communicates with other collectors around the world. He’s one of those people who does everything online.’

  ‘A reclusive type then, you might say.’

  Bruce held the broken padlock in his open palm, as if guessing its weight. ‘If he really was to disappear, I doubt that anyone would even notice.’

  ‘But why,’ I said, holding up a 1977 issue of Marvel Comics’s Iron Fist, ‘would he just vanish and leave all this behind?’

  ‘Why do those guys always have a ponytail?’ Bruce said. ‘Both questions are unanswerable.’

  True enough. Idle speculation gets you nowhere. Who knew where the hell Stelzer was and why he’d abandoned his cherished collection? Bruce and I could do only so much to find a defaulter, and we’d done everything we reasonably could do. As Bruce often said, we weren’t the police.

  The point was, Stelzer’s loss was our gain.

  I switched on the camera and filmed everything in the unit, while Bruce did the inventory. It was important to follow the correct procedures.

  When we’d finished, Bruce said, ‘Sweet as.’

  ‘Shut up, Bruce,’ I said.

  Three

  It was nearly five-thirty in the afternoon by the time we’d itemised Stelzer’s gear. Bruce went off to do whatever it was he did in his own time. I stayed behind to clear up some admin before heading home.

  Hideaway Self Storage was located right next to the M1, just past Springwood as you headed towards the coast. As I drove home, I passed a big block of land, about 15 kilometres up the motorway, back towards Brisbane. I’d driven by this site every day for the past six weeks.

  I’d mentioned the site to Bruce.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ I said.

  ‘I know what it is,’ he said. ‘Pharaoh’s Tomb.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know.’

  Evidently, Pharaoh’s Tomb Self Storage, a franchise with facilities all over the country, had decided to build another one – although I knew its growth had been slowed somewhat by the downturn of recent years. Self-storage is all about things: the more things people have, the greater the need for somewhere to put them. That’s where the storage part comes in. But when times are hard and people have less money, they tend to get rid of their surplus things rather than pay someone else to put them somewhere. And they buy fewer things to begin with. Many commercial storers – independent building contractors and the like – were getting less business, so demand for storage space from that quarter was also shrinking. When I bought Hideaway Self Storage, people had all kinds of things they didn’t know what to do with. It was a golden period. And the best part was that the tenants did most of the work. I rented them the units, and they filled and emptied them as they pleased. They gave me money and in return I gave them a cube of empty space. But the ratio of empty space to things was changing: too much space, not enough things.

  Despite all this, Pharaoh’s Tomb was still doing quite nicely. Maybe that was due to its unique brand. The most striking thing about its facilities was the design: rather than your standard giant box housing a bunch of smaller boxes, every Pharaoh’s Tomb facility comprised three pyramid-like structures containing storage units of ever-decreasing capacity as you moved, via a central elevator, from the base to the tip. Judy Moss, who started the company, was inspired by the pyramids at Giza – or so Pharaoh’s Tomb would have us believe. As it happened, I’d once worked in one of its Melbourne facilities – Box Hill North – where, as it also happened, I first met Bruce. We both left after an unpleasant episode involving a tenant, which I will talk about in due course.

  When I started working at Pharaoh’s Tomb in Box Hill North, things weren’t going so well for me. I’d resigned – technically speaking – from my last job due to an ongoing difference of opinion with my supervisor, a comprehensive fuckstick who’d had it in for me from the outset. Maybe the stress of the situation was too much, because I didn’t leave my flat for the next three months. I passed that time obsessively playing Jethro Tull’s Songs from the Wood – a foretaste of the prog rock I would come to embrace more fully. Meanwhile, Mum covered the rent. I didn’t feel good about that; she was getting on in years and it wasn’t right for her to be paying my bills.

  As my sense of personal wellbeing improved, I seriously considered, even back then, moving to Queensland, where Mum’s brother Dennis had made a shitload of cash investing in Gold Coast holiday apartments. I’d always liked Dennis, and the more I thought about
it, the more I became convinced that he was an ideal role model.

  I rang Mum and asked her for Dennis’s phone number.

  ‘Dennis?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Dennis,’ I said. ‘I need to start earning some decent money, and he’s my role model.’

  My mother paused to process this statement. Songs from the Wood played softly in the background. Ian Anderson was singing about Jack in the Green and his velvet gown.

  ‘Your role model? What are you on about, Ken?’

  ‘For achieving financial independence.’

  ‘Since when is Dennis your role model?’

  ‘Since recently. Why not Dennis, anyway?’

  After all, who else could it have been? Certainly not my father. Why? Well, (1) he wasn’t exactly a genius when it came to making money, and (2) he died of a brain tumour when I was twelve – a shit time for all concerned, and frankly the less said about it the better.

  ‘Ken,’ my mother said, ‘when did you last speak to Dennis?’

  It was true: I hadn’t been in contact with him for some time.

  ‘Because if you had spoken to him, you’d know that he’s pretty much retired, and you’d also know that he’s not very well these days. You’d know, if you paid any attention.’

  ‘Shit. I had no idea. What’s wrong with him?’

  My mother paused. Ian Anderson immediately commenced a flute solo, as if it had been created especially for that pause, or vice versa.

  ‘Not cancer?’

  ‘Physically he’s in pretty good shape for a bloke his age,’ she explained, ‘but he’s … forgetting things. You need to be pretty sharp in that game and he isn’t sharp like he used to be.’

  This was all quite unexpected. I’d been relying on Dennis. Why hadn’t I contacted him before now?

  ‘Why don’t you go back to teaching?’ my mother said.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Mum.’

  ‘Language.’

  ‘Sorry, but as if that’s ever going to happen.’