A LOT MORE FUN THAN TUPPERWARE LIDS

Any fool could have told Ray not to try using the map again. Ray tried not to talk to fools too much. So on the Tuesday after he got back from his trip to The Gap, Ray packed up his maps again and headed out to Craigieburn. He’d finally found a patch of map right in the city that fell in one of the well-worn creases. Trips to and from the city were a much more saleable proposition than trips from one side of the city to the other, he was sure of it. If he could offer both, he’d be on a real winner.

It hadn’t taken Ray all that long to get over the trauma of The Gap. He’d gotten out, right? If it happened again, he’d just get out again, right? And besides, it didn’t seem like time in The Gap was particularly out of synch with time in real life. If he could ever remember to check his watch he’d know for sure, but he was pretty certain he’d been gone about the same time there as he’d been gone here; maybe three hours or so. And nothing untoward seemed to have happened to him as a result – he hadn’t gotten shocking diarrhoea or lost his memory, his phone still worked (thought it must have been years since he’d last gone three hours without a voicemail or a text) and he had all his hair and all his hair was still red. Yep, curtains and carpet.

So, the plan went like this. He’d head out to Craigieburn, patch the maps up so he had the area around Flagstaff Gardens on the back, then tunnel it up. He was hoping not to land in the middle of some biofuel refugee’s humpy, but there were no guarantees. Had to be safer than tunneling through to the middle of some SUV-swamped freeway though, for sure.

A little part of Ray’s brain reminded him that it was only three days ago that’d he’d wished he could be a little more circumspect, just a little more cautious. The big part of Ray’s brain started singing the theme from Mission Impossible to drown it out. He had brought a bag of stuff with him this time though, just in case. Y’know, a spare T-shirt or two, some toothpaste, something to read. He could be gone a while.

In a patch of scrub in the back blocks of Craigieburn, Ray hid his bike and started pacing around. He was really hoping this was the right spot – he didn’t want to try this trick along any of the main roads. He was pretty sure he’d covered the whole area though. Maybe he’d have to try from Hanging Rock again. He stepped sideways.

‘Mind the gap.’

Oh, crap. He was looking at the back of ponytail guy, sitting right in the middle of the square of empty carpet. He bounced on to his feet and ducked behind one of the dividers marking the edge of Suspended Imaginums, hoping none of the zany funsters there were paying attention.

They weren’t, but mainly because there was no one there. He could have sworn he’d heard someone doing the rounds with an envelope when he’d first hit the carpet. He’d expected desks, cubicles decorated with pictures of children and dogs, inspirational posters tacked to the wall by management so they could be ignored or defaced by staff. But instead of passive-aggressive post-it notes about whose turn it was to clean the coffee filter he found nothing. A literal nothing; what seemed to be a yawning, gaping absence of anything at all. Except by his foot. By his foot there was what looked like a karaoke machine. While he was staring at it, it suddenly burst into life, with the sound of coins being jangled in an envelope. ‘It’s for Jasmin’s baby! She’s due in a week! Do you want to contribute? Anything will do, anything but nothing ha ha ha ha!’ The machine fell silent again.

Ray stepped forward, pretty much expecting to fall into an eternal pit of darkness. But instead he stepped into what seemed to be an AFL match, Collingwood and Essendon. Collingwood? Those guys had merged with Carlton nearly twenty years ago. It was definitely the MCG, and the stands were packed to the very brim. It looked like President Hird – plain James back then – had the ball. He’d broken through the pack and was heading for the goals, when a burst of machine gun fire rattled out and the ground was strafed with bullets. One of the backline caught it in the thigh. Someone – he was pretty sure it was Alan Didak, who he’d thought had died of some kind of drug overdose – went down, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Ray stepped back, and the MCG was replaced with the howling blackness.

That was weird. Mountains of odd socks and discarded shadows hanging from chairs were weird, but that was seriously weird. He stepped forward again to take another look, but this time he was in some kind of room, like a club room with leather wing chairs, and there were dogs sitting around a table, and they were knitting. Wrong door. He stepped back, took one step to the left, and he was in the MCG again. The game was still going, despite the ground being littered with bodies. Someone was playing the Last Post. Anzac Day? Was this the Anzac Day game they used to have? He stepped back again.

This was fun. No, really. This was a lot more fun than Tupperware Lids. It probably even beat out Unmade Lists in the fun stakes. Ray took another step to the left and then a step forward. Whoa! World peace! He was definitely looking at world peace. It looked pretty good. He stepped back again.

So this was Suspended Imaginums, right? He had a bit of a think about it, played with a few ideas, and came to the conclusion imaginum was some kind of noun form of imagining. Did people say ‘noun form’? He thought he’d heard something like that once. OK, he thought, and he stepped forward again into someone’s garden, a multi-coloured hammock slung between two poles of a pergola, some guy lying back in it, one hand behind his head, the other hanging on to a longneck of beer. So let’s say I’m right, he thought, as the guy lifted his head to see what was going on. What are imaginums? Well, maybe they’re the things people imagine.

‘G’day,’ the guy said.

‘Oh, g’day,’ said Ray. Which would mean this guy was imaginary. That he was something someone imagined.

‘You here about the fence?’

The guy sounded Kiwi. Looked a bit Kiwi too; Maori maybe.

‘The fence?’

‘Yeah, didn’t see you come in mate, sorry. Must’ve drifted off!’

‘Yeah. Yeah … nah … That the cricket you’re listening to?’

‘Yeah bro.’

‘How’re we doing?’

‘Who’s this we, bro? En Zed’re two for two-eighty. Youse blokes are looking all washed up.’

‘Shit.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’ The Kiwi made to get up out of the hammock. Ray waved him back down.

‘Nah, I’m just …’

‘You’re what?’

‘Yeah, I’m not sure.’

‘You OK, bro?’ This time he really got up, pulled himself up to sitting. ‘You want a glass of water or something?’

The bloke looked kind. Ray liked his beard, all scruffy, and the knitted stubbie holder he had for his beer. He must’ve had a cool wife.

‘OK, this’ll sound kind of weird, but where is this?’ Ray asked.

‘This? You’re at number six. You’re not the fence bloke? You got the wrong house, mate? Which one are you after?’

‘Yeah. Oh yeah, must have the wrong house. I’m after number twelve.’

‘No number twelve on this street, mate. Two, six, eight, eight a, eight b, eight c, ten. That’s it. Your boss must have messed you up. You need to use my phone or anything?’

‘Nah, I’m alright.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ Ray sat down on the edge of the back step.

‘Want to hang round and listen to the cricket for a bit? No point rushing; not your fault your boss can’t count, eh?’ The Kiwi laughed. ‘Might as well kick back for a bit, eh, have a beer?’

He didn’t have a cool wife, Ray remembered. He was imaginary, right? This guy was imaginary. Man, this was weird.

He kind of wanted to ask this bloke for a beer, just hang out for an hour or so and listen to the cricket. But what happened if you drank imaginary beer? Did you get stuck in imaginary land? It wasn’t so bad here, in imaginary land.

‘You’re not imaginary or anything, are you mate?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Yeah, nothing. Hey look, I’d better get going. You know how it is.’

‘Sure bro, no worries. If you’re sure. You’re sure eh?’

Ray nodded.

‘OK mate, well, have a good one, eh?’

‘Yeah, you too,’ Ray said, pulling himself up off the step. ‘Go Aussie, right?’

‘Bugger off, mate!’

Ray laughed and stepped back out into the void. The Kiwi, getting back into his hammock, trailed off in the middle of whatever it was he was saying, then disappeared.

Suspended Imaginums? Ray tried to find a back step to sit on out here in the howling void, but there was nothing but void. He tried standing up and thinking instead.

Maybe people imagine stuff, he thought. Well yeah, he thought, duh. He knew people imagined stuff. He’d imagined some stuff about that sheila at shadow storage, for example. OK, so people imagine stuff: imaginums. But then they get bored with it or something good comes on telly or they fall asleep or something. They never do anything about it. They don’t end up pashing the girl from Shadow Storage. They don’t get around to making that trip to Disneyland or running for an hour every day or writing that song or that story or that letter to the editor or that email to the AFL in which they request that on Anzac Day, for authenticity, players be strafed by a Turk using a chronologically accurate machine gun. They imagine doing it for a bit, and then they get on with something else.

OK, but say you give up on imagining something, but the thing you’re imagining doesn’t give up. There’s an idea. You’re getting on with watching a rerun of Water Rats and meanwhile the imagined version of you keeps right on giving it to the Shadow Storage chick. Here. In Suspended Ims, where one doesn’t have to be crazy to work, but where insanity is a definite advantage.

Ray liked it.

He wondered if any of his abandoned ideas were living here. From what he knew of The Gap, he thought it was a safe assumption that they were. Was there any way of navigating this place? Some kind of index? GPS coordinates? Would his ideas – sorry, imaginums – be filed under his name? Did they give them all a title? Oh, he bet they gave them all file numbers. File numbers totally unrelated to anything other than some arcane system they had of allocating file numbers. That’d be it. There was no point trying to find anything he’d imagined. He took a step to the left and stepped forward. Stepped back.

That was gross. He made a mental note not to step in that door again.

Ew. People really imagined that?

He took three steps to the left this time, just to be sure he wouldn’t step back in by accident.

Hang on! This time he was going to look at his watch. One twenty-five in the afternoon. Alright. Consider it remembered. That bloke in the hammock was a good bloke. He could kind of imagine imagining someone like that, on one of those days when all your actual mates suck arse. He stepped forward.

Foggy. A city. A foggy city. He was on a hill at the top of a park, and the fog was coming in over the hills behind it. Here, where Ray was, the sky was still blue. Two men, both in artfully loose-fitting jeans and tight white T shirts, were walking a pair of pugs, one caramel coloured, one black. A woman wearing a straw cowboy hat was lying on her stomach on the grass, propped up on elbows, reading a magazine while one hand fiddled with a mobile phone, picked it up every couple of minutes, perhaps to check if she had a message. Six – no, seven – university aged guys, a couple with goatees, a couple with trucker caps, all of them wearing T-shirts in different shades of brown, yellow and orange, were throwing a frisbee. One of them stepped out of the game for a minute to pull a tall – boy it looked like beer – from an Esky. Ray could hear him call out, ‘Anyone for a Bud?’ Everyone stopped playing and they all gathered around the Esky. Further down the hill a man with dreadlocks and a woman whose hair was tied back in a brightly coloured scarf were playing bongos. One of the Esky havers yelled over at them, ‘Hey hippie, get back to Golden Gate!’

Golden Gate? Ray cast his eyes over the horizon, but there was nothing he saw that he recognized. Was this San Francisco?

San Francisco wasn’t imaginary. Ray was pretty sure of that, even though he’d never been there himself, never seen it with his own two eyes. That said, the MCG wasn’t imaginary either. It had existed once, he knew that. Ray had always wanted to go to San Francisco. Maybe this was his chance. Though maybe this thing had been imagined by the same person as that last room he’d been in. What if imaginums were arranged in order of imaginer? That could be bad.

Shut up, sensible brain, Ray said, and took a few more steps forward, then turned it into a stride. Sensible brain, he said, we’re checking this city out.

He walked to one of the streets bordering the park and wrote down its name: Dolores. Then he looked at the nearest cross street: 20^th. ‘See, sensible brain!’ he said. ‘Now I’ll be able to find my way back here. Everything is going to be fine.’ After a quick game of eeni-meeni-minie-mo, Ray set out along Dolores, heading what seemed to be north. Fog began trickling over the hills, pouring into the streets Ray was walking along, and by around three the weather had turned grey and blustery. He ducked into a bookshop on Church Street to get out of the weather and to browse some second-hand guides to San Francisco, but found himself glued to the window, watching the cool damp settle over the uncrowded streets. Maybe he could stay here. Not the bookshop so much, but the city. He wondered how far this imaginary place stretched – was there a whole imaginary United States around it, or did it just fade off into black where the imaginer had lost interest? There were so many cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, the people in them young and not in any way rich looking. Sure, there were people begging, sleeping in doorways, selling second-hand crap on the side of the street, but there were so few of them and none of them were children. And he’d seen pretty much no one dead in the gutter.

Ray turned away from the window and started reading one of the guides. It was only five dollars. ‘What the hell,’ he thought. ‘It’s a souvenir.’ It listed the bar next door, the Pilsner, as ‘gay friendly’; Ray was feeling pretty friendly, so he took his bag and his guide in and asked for a can of VB. The bar man thought that was pretty cute and asked if he’d like a pint of Red Hook instead, which he said he would. Ray’s brain nearly exploded from the flavour of the stuff, but it kept him company – along with its mates, a pint of Sierra Nevada and then a pint of Sam Adams – for the rest of the afternoon as he read his guide book and watched the traffic in and outside the bar.

Around five thirty, Ray decided he wasn’t going home. Not today, at any rate. He wanted to see how this place lit up at night. He’d barely scratched the surface of the city – he’d sat for a little while in the quiet cemetery of the Mission Dolores, and eaten a taco at a little Mexican restaurant, all good stuff but not enough to make a ‘When I was in San Francisco (imaginary version)’ story out of. So he asked the bartender, a little slurrily, if he knew of anywhere good to stay the night, and the bartender kind of hinted that he’d be welcome back at his place, but Ray demurred as politely as he knew how, and the bartender – having established Ray’s budget – recommended a little boarding house around the corner on 18^th street. So Ray went.