The Windy Season by Sam Carmody

things.
    What did Mum think?
    She called them back and told them to go hang themselves. Said if these people really wanted to help missing persons, they would go looking for them.
    Do you think you might come up? Paul asked him.
    Well, look. It’s just not a great time. It is the end of semester. He paused. We have all had a bit of a knock-around. I think it might be best if we stay down here.
    Okay, Paul said.
    Got something for you, though, his father said. Your mum is sending up a Chrissy present.
    That’s cool, Paul said. I’ll be alright.
    Good on you. His father coughed.
    How are you, Dad?
    I’m good, Paul. Good.
    Mum sleeping?
    His father paused. She’s up at Grandma’s, he said. Staying there for a bit.
    What? Why?
    She’s just looking after her mother, that’s all.
    Oh. Okay.
    We just all had a bit of a knock-around, that’s all, his father repeated, and Paul had the sense that he was speaking as much to himself as to Paul.
    Michael and Shivani were in bed by the time he got home. It was after midnight but he felt wired. Overheated in his clothes,unsettled by the events of the evening, the conversation with this father. He thought of the boy in the bar and the look on Roo Dog’s face. Thought, too, about what Shivani had said. Was he really at the site of some kind of danger, being in Stark? Swimming in an undertow? He had no hope but to get thinking about what Shivani knew that he didn’t. Michael, too. And the rest of the town. He felt suspicion build in himself, the compulsion that came with it.
    Michael’s computer was on the kitchen table. Paul sat down in front of it, scanned the search history. The Oxford University website, Department of Economics. He found a photograph of Michael standing under a dim sky in front of a world that looked ancient, buildings yellowed like old bone. His blond hair was darker. Shorter and combed. But his smile was the same. He wore a grey blazer and held a certificate. A Gibbs Prize for the best overall performance in three papers in Economics.
    Paul stared at the photograph for some minutes, processed it all. It was always wounding, in a way, to uncover the secrets of people, however small they were. There was pain to confirming that things were not as they seemed.
    Paul listened to the wind. He glanced up at the hallway.
    It was a shitty thing to do, Paul knew. Poring over other people’s information. Like rummaging through drawers in his brother’s bedroom, and that same excitement. The fear of being caught, the fear of what you might find.
    With Elliot, the search history was mostly surfing destinations. Remote Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal. North Sentinel Island. There were desertscapes he’d looked up, national parks in the Northern Territory. Daydreams of isolation. Elliot was rarely on the computer but Paul wondered if he had missed something, if he could uncover the necessary clue. A name. A location. Whenno one spoke to each other, the computer was like a sort of oracle. The great revealer.
    The Professor was brilliant with computers, of course. But he didn’t seem to care enough to cover his own arse, to clear the search history and the traces left. It almost felt cruel, how easy it was to find things that his father would have thought he’d hidden well enough.
    It was sometimes porn, softcore stuff. Cheerleaders. Photographs instead of videos. It was weird to come face to face with the Professor’s fantasies when one could have wondered if the man was even capable of any feeling or desire at all.
    Paul had found other photographs his father had searched of the first gulf war. They were mostly aftermaths of Baghdad missile strikes. Gutted government buildings, hard sunlight on mounds of debris. Bodies woven within, blood bright against the powdered rubble. The incongruent collage of hard materials and then the softness of human tissue. Concrete and iron and then a body without a face. A severed hand.
    The search history was a gallery of horror.