My memory of Callum is frozen in a particular image of his face, an image left behind like the husk of a cicada. There was a period in my life when I saw him all the time, and I got to know his preoccupations well. To begin with the little things: he insisted on boring spacey music, and the only movies he could watch were impenetrably arty or overloaded with violence. He also took a lot of drugs, but he couldn’t handle them. I remember once we all took mushrooms—me and Callum and my ex and maybe two other guys, at my ex’s house. Callum disappeared for about forty minutes, and just when we were wondering where he had gone, he burst through the door and screamed:

“They’ve got a human skeleton on a leash in there. They’re walking it around like a dog!”

When they heard this, my ex and everyone else laughed until they began to hyperventilate. I laughed too, but even at the time I knew that what had happened to him wasn’t funny at all. Callum just stood there watching us with a sad, confused expression on his face, slowly coming back to a reality that didn’t look so familiar anymore.

I had always liked Callum, but that experience upset me and scared me a little. I broke things off with my ex pretty soon after, and Callum was really his friend, so I didn’t see him around so often anymore. He stayed in touch, though, mostly by email. I was working casual hours at a call center and trying to write nature poetry. He was unemployed and seemed to have no prospects either, so it felt like there was a sort of kinship between us.

I later found out that Callum hadn’t been so idle after all. One day he wrote to tell me that he had made himself a millionaire from a computer program he had written. It was a kind of early AI that could spit out advertising copy for just about anything. It did have a few bugs. In particular, it liked to use the same word over and over again. For instance, a house for rent would be described as “a spacious residence, with spacious windows, two spacious bedrooms and a spacious kitchen.” But the code itself was valuable, and the company he had sold it to went on to do something big with it.

Money seemed to sober him. He bought a house in Fitzroy, right next to the park, and then, to everyone’s surprise, he got his girlfriend pregnant. I used to bump into him sometimes, pushing his daughter around the neighborhood in a stroller. She was a cute baby, and I could tell he was trying to be happy, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to work out for him. He ended up leaving the situation, as honorably as he could, when the kid was about two years old. He used to joke that she didn’t look anything like him, anyway. It sounded like a joke he told himself frequently.

The next I heard, he was living up north, in Port Andrew. It was a resort town where, so he told me, his parents had gotten married, and where he had probably been conceived. He asked me to come up and visit him. He said that he was working on a new course of research, not involving computers. I thought from the cadence of his emails that he might have started taking drugs again, and I put him off as politely as I could.

Even if I had wanted to go, I couldn’t afford the flight. I had just wasted a year writing a poetry collection called Dreams of Life Waking. It contained a series of small odes to various native animals—kangaroos, crocodiles, pelicans, that kind of thing. It did well, for a book of poetry; I was nominated for a national literary prize, and a poem about a dingo even found its way onto the high school curriculum. But nobody gave me any money at any point in the process. I had a feeling that Callum would give me money if I asked, but I didn’t want that.

More time passed without any communication between us. Then, one day, I was contacted by the tourism authority of Port Andrew. They offered to fly me up and pay me five thousand dollars to write some poetry about the local wildlife. The council had reserved a large area of estuarine land as part of the town’s re-brand as an ecotourism destination. There was to be a boardwalk so that visitors could admire the insects and the birds without having to walk through mud.

The idea was that I would write short poems about six local species, which would be inscribed on metal plaques around the boardwalk. The tourism authority would arrange for a guide to take me out to the estuary—although one of the species, a type of large moth, was nocturnal and almost extinct, so my chances of seeing it were basically zero.

I accepted the offer immediately, and then, relieved to have a reason of my own to get in touch, I emailed Callum. He was happy to hear from me and insisted I stay with him; he had bought a large property on the edge of town. He had loved Dreams of Life Waking; he always knew that I had talent. He said that there was a beautiful deep lagoon he could show me.

My flight arrived in Cairns in the late afternoon. It was midwinter, the dry season, but the sky was grey and the line of palm trees on the airport concourse looked out of place in the dim light. The bus to Port Andrew was full of silent families. We passed the harbor, where a grey frigate sat off in the middle of the water, with pleasure yachts drifting past to find their berths. The sea was metallic in the afternoon light, and the tide was rising, the curve of grey sand melting away.

The bus dropped me at nightfall on the main street of Port Andrew. There was a waitress going back and forth amongst the empty tables of the restaurant opposite, relighting candles that the wind had extinguished. I waited at the taxi stand until a cab arrived.

We drove along the esplanade and past a large pool, enclosed by concrete, but open to the sea on one side. As I watched, a ribbon of water burst into the air and disintegrated. There were clusters of small round shapes across the concrete.

“It’s the lagoon,” the driver said. “They built it for the kids to use. But everyone just goes to the beach. It’s full of crabs.”

• • •

Callum’s house was big, with patches of naked earth on either side. It had high cinderblock walls and an iron portcullis leading into the garden. The lights were on in the upper windows of the house. I pressed the bell and waited for a few minutes, but there was no response. I pushed the portcullis and it swung open.

In the paved garden an enormous orb weaver was spinning a web between the trunk of a potted fern and the hot water tank, going back and forth deftly on a silver line. There was a light on in the hallway, and when I tried the front door I found that it was unlocked. Inside, the front room was carpeted with a grey-blue office pattern. There was no furniture. In the kitchen there was a tin of instant coffee and a saucepan full of brown water resting in the sink. I called out Callum’s name. There was no response, so I continued into the house.

In the living room the floor was tiled white, and there was a couch facing a huge plasma television, unplugged from the wall. A group of large, pale moths had collected on the exterior of the darkened window, like a drift of dead leaves. There was a burnt electrical odor, reminiscent of the thin smoke that rises from a soldering iron.

I called out Callum’s name again and waited. After a minute I decided to look for him upstairs, thinking he might be asleep. The electrical odor faded as I climbed the stairs and on the second floor it was unnoticeable. The door opposite the landing was ajar, and I saw some tangled bedding through the gap. I opened the door. A large, expensive-looking mattress lay on the floor; the blanket was crushed red velvet. There was a desk with an unplugged computer and a glass bong full of black water.

I sent Callum a terse, puzzled email, and then I went downstairs to wait for him to come home. I plugged the television in and turned it on, but the sound didn’t work. I watched the presenters champ voicelessly like horses. Every now and then I caught a trace of the electrical odor.

The couch did not seem designed for human comfort. I considered going upstairs to sleep in Callum’s bed, but I was worried about what he might assume if he came home and found me there. I eventually fell asleep, and when I woke up there was clear light, no Callum, and a pattern of raindrops on the window.

There was nothing to eat in the cupboards in the kitchen, only an abundance of clean white crockery. I decided to call the Port Andrew police station, and although they took my details, I could tell that nothing would be done.

The constable asked me about my connection to Callum, and I said that we were friends but that we hadn’t seen each other in about five years. The constable made a hmmph noise and suggested that perhaps Callum had made other plans. When I asked if I should keep staying in Callum’s house he replied, “That’s a matter for you.” Which was indisputable.

• • •

Without my luggage, it was possible to walk into town. The tourism authority had arranged for me to go out in a motorboat with one of the traditional owners, to try and spot some of the species I was expected to memorialize in verse.

I stopped at the man-made lagoon on my way to the jetty. From a distance I watched the land crabs walk slowly along the damp concrete. They seemed to have a hard time recognizing the physical reality of one another and often formed pileups of three or four crabs at a time. There were small children running back and forth and splashing them with handfuls of water from the fountains.

I met my guide at the jetty. He was a tall man about my age, in shorts and sunglasses, with an air of dignified boredom. We went out to the estuary in his little motorboat. From a distance, Port Andrew had the sombre appearance of a penal colony or a coastal fortification.

We went slowly up and down the shoreline of the projected nature reserve. The tops of the trees were a luminous green in the sunshine, forming a partial canopy. Insects with glittering bodies hovered in the shade, sometimes flashing like fragments of rare metal when they burst into the sunlight. We stopped at the mouth of a shallow creek. Cans and bottles with an antique appearance lay half-buried in the golden sand of the creek bottom.

I could see why the area had never been developed. The land looked unfirm, and the air emanating from beneath the trees was cold and smelled of decay.

“What are you after again?” asked my guide.

I read him the names of the species.

“They’ve sent you to the wrong place,” he said, when I had finished. “You don’t see those here anymore. You might see—” and here he said an Aboriginal word which the tourism authority had not supplied to me.

We sat in silence for half an hour, both of us peering into the darkness under the trees. It was quite peaceful, with the rhythm of the waves and the chopping of the outboard motor.

“There you are,” he said, pointing and killing the motor. I looked and saw a large seabird with gray-black plumage resting on a branch. While I watched, it slowly and pridefully stretched its wings and showed its clean white breast to the sun.

We stared at it for a minute or two. Then, remembering why I was there, I reached into the bottom of the boat for my notebook.

“So, you write poems?” the young man asked, taking a vape out of his pocket.

“That’s right,” I said.

“How long does it take you to write one?”

“It depends. Sometimes I can do it in a few hours. Usually it takes a lot longer. It depends on the animal.”

“My brother writes raps,” he said. “Listen to this.”

He started to play a song on his phone. I listened politely but it was hard to hear it over the sound of the wind and the water. He turned it off after thirty seconds.

“That was good,” I said.

“He’s alright. Do you only do poems about animals?” he asked.

“Mostly, yeah.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always liked animals. They’re a lot simpler than people. It’s easier to describe them.”

“Yeah,” he replied, blowing cherry-scented steam out of his nostrils. “People are fucked.”

• • •

I once told Callum (late at night, one of those lurid nights) that the trick to describing an animal was to capture the tension between its particularity and its nature—to express this tension in a striking image. Since each animal is both itself and the universal embodiment of its species. Just like human beings, I added pompously. We are ourselves, and we are everyone… That’s the problem, I said, flourishing my cigarette. I think it was later that night that he saw the skeleton on a leash.

When I came back to the house, I noticed that the recycling bin had been knocked over. I couldn’t remember if it had been like that before I left.

I could hear a rhythmic knocking noise coming from the rear of the house. I went to the glass door and turned on the light. I saw that the deck was covered in land crabs, the same species that I’d seen by the lagoon. They were gently tapping the wooden boards of the deck with their claws like they were testing its integrity. I turned away in disgust, going up the stairs to the second floor, leaving the light on.

In Callum’s bedroom, I saw that the sheets and blankets had been carelessly thrown back, as if somebody had just climbed out of bed. It took me a few moments to recall that they had been in that state when I arrived. All the same I peered cautiously into the bathroom, half-expecting to see Callum standing in front of the mirror, or leaning over the toilet sleepily waiting for his urine to flow.

I shook the bedding and checked the black fitted sheet for stains, but it all seemed clean. I did not feel so tired now, but I turned off the light in the bathroom, undressed and climbed into bed. I tried to think of a few lines that might describe the seabird I had seen that day. Nothing came. The part of my mind that might address itself to such things had fallen completely silent. I wondered instead why I had accepted Callum’s absence so easily.

Perhaps it was because it had never really felt like he was missing; and even now, lying in his bed, I felt a kind of nervy, not unpleasant anticipation that he might return at any moment. I would hear his footfall on the stairs, then the sound of him clearing his throat on the landing. The door would open smoothly. I would confront him, demand to know where he had been—this was no way to treat an old friend. And what would he think, if he found me in his bed, waiting for him?

I fell into a fitful sleep, waking frequently with the impression that I had heard someone in the hall, or a car entering the driveway. At one point I dreamed of the concrete lagoon by the beach; the young man who had taken me out on the boat that morning was going back and forth, collecting the land crabs and throwing them into a wheelbarrow. When the barrow was full, he pushed it to the edge of the lagoon and dumped the crabs into the oil-streaked water, where they drowned silently.

At three in the morning, I woke up and checked my phone. I rubbed my face and looked around the room. The lights were still on. I got up and sat at Callum’s desk. The dirty bong gave off an unpleasant odour of chlorophyll, and I flicked some ash off the desktop and opened the top drawer. Inside I found a huge ziplock bag full of mushrooms; that, at least, answered some questions. I closed the drawer and opened the larger drawers beneath the desk.

Inside there were three plastic white binders, unlabelled. I picked one out and opened it. It was full of plastic sleeves used for holding photos. There were six identical photos of Callum’s face in the first sleeve. He had a blank, disconcerting expression, and his hair was longer, but otherwise he looked basically as I remembered him. The wall behind him was an off-white colour and he appeared to be staring past the camera, at whoever was taking the photo.

I flicked through the binder and saw the same image, repeated again and again—although now I realised that in each photo there was perhaps a very slight change of emphasis in his expression, or a subtle difference in the quality of the light. Whatever it was, none of the images were, in fact, identical to one another.

I put the first binder back and opened the second. It was also full of photographs; in this case it was clear that they were only reproductions of the one image. It showed a couple on their wedding day: a young man in a dark suit and his bride, wearing a simple white dress, standing beside each other without touching. They were posed on a green hilltop with a white bungalow behind them. It was an old photo; a nostalgic warmth seemed to suffuse the faded colours. The bride had striking red hair and was smiling demurely. The groom looked pensive; I could tell, just from looking at him, that his body was rebelling against the heat, the narrow suit, the impostures of the occasion. The blue sky of the tropics flowed above them with sublime indifference.

When I opened the last binder, I recoiled. There were six close-up photos of a vulva under a bright light. A woman stood with her legs spread in front of the off-white wall, only her groin visible. I turned the sleeve and once more, the binder was full of the same image, repeated again and again. Had she stood in front of that wall for hours on end, while the camera clicked with metronomic regularity, documenting, each time, an imperceptible shift of emphasis?

I put the folders back, dressed quickly, and went downstairs. The electrical odor on the ground floor seemed to have intensified. I became worried that something might have caught fire beneath the house.

I opened the door beneath the stairs and saw at first, darkness; then a fluorescent bar flickered on automatically and showed smooth concrete steps leading down to a second white door. As I descended the steps, the smell of burning wire surged to a degree that I could barely stand. I opened the second door and entered a small room beneath the house. The carpet was pink and gray. I recognized the off-white wall and the bright light.

Something had burnt the outline of a circle several feet in diameter into the carpet. The artificial fibers had melted and fused into a glassy black substance resembling obsidian. Melted candles resting on white dinner plates stood at eight points around the circle. Propped up in front of each candle was a photo of Callum’s face like those I had found in the binder upstairs. I froze in the doorway and his likeness watched me with mute inquiry from his different stations.

At the far end of the room, on a table, there was a rectangle covered with a sheet. I could hear small sounds coming from the box, like many gloved fingers tapping gently on plastic.
I approached the box, circumventing the ring of candles. As I came closer, I heard faint breathing noises, like the sighs of children. I drew the sheet back.

Beneath the sheet was a large glass box. Inside, there were many small shapes in motion. The light seemed to have startled them: as they settled I realized that they were moths. The breathing noises I had heard had been caused by their wings as they attempted to take flight in the confined space. There was a severed branch at the rear of the box from which several brown chrysalids hung; one chrysalis was beginning to stir. The floor of the box was covered with decaying leaf matter. There were dozens of caterpillars growing fat on the dead leaves.

I watched the moths bounce around their cage for a while, and then I decided that I would not release them.

As I picked up the sheet to cover the box up again, I noticed one of the moths, trying to force its body through a thin vent in the side of the box. It had pushed its bruised feelers and head through the gap, and now it appeared to have become stuck. It looked like it would have to tear its wings off to escape. I felt an urge to help it, but I was disgusted by its struggling.

Suddenly it broke free of the vent, with its wings intact. It took to the air, stumbling up towards the light, and then appearing to falter. It dipped in my direction and I stepped aside reflexively. It drifted past me and settled on the off-white wall.

I watched it settle itself and slowly, almost pridefully, close the wings that had proved so resilient. When the wings were snug against one another I saw, in their mottled brown-black pattern, the reproduction of Callum’s face. His lips were slightly parted in an expression of surprise. Like a skillfully painted image, he held my gaze.