Like many people, I expect yourselves included, I first saw the end of the world on a school trip. I don’t think I could have been more than eight or nine; the kids in the seat behind me spent most of the transit trying to pick apart my braids, me elbowing them yelling for Mr Tyndall our geography teacher to come, and someone in the front throwing sweeties at us to make us shut up.
So after five hours I got out of the bus with my hair looking like a bird’s nest with a few choice sticky sweets lodged in there like eggs, feeling very tired and sorry for myself, and entirely didn’t listen to the intro they did. I know it well now as an adult, I know they will have done a really exciting one for the school groups, with lights and a serious voiceover - but I don’t remember any of it at all. All I recall is craning my neck to see the tips of the fenceposts over the outbuildings of the visitor centre, and the uncanny hush that came over our class when the time came to open the door to the viewing platform, because for all that we were very little and not very disciplined, we all had instilled in us deeply that the Half was a place of terrible, magnificent power, forbidden truth and forgotten destiny upon which our very lives depended.
(That part is from the voiceover. They got a proper Shakespearean actor to do it, rolling his Rs.)
As an eight-year-old, obviously, I didn’t get any of that but I was socialised enough to stand up a little straighter, stop scratching cherry drops out of my scalp, clutch my lunchbox very tightly and stay absolutely silent as they opened the doors to reveal a spacious veranda and a few dozen metres of sparse grass, followed by a chain-link fence a little taller than a person, followed by absolutely nothing at all.
Not nothing, technically. Years of first-hand experience later I’ve learned a lot more of the many, many different things people see when they look out onto the Half for the first time. Things like:
“Oh the sky is so… similar!”
“Do you see that tree! That rock!”
“Do you think the grass looks… a different colour?” (It doesn’t.)
“Is that a rubbish bin?” (It isn’t. It’s a slate outcropping around 3m high but the landscape makes it difficult to judge scale.) “It looks awfully like a rubbish bin to me. They ought to do something about it.”
At which point a husband might say gloomily, “What could they possibly do about it, love? The invisible Hand keeps it there.” (I also can’t abide the Invisible Hand-ers. You get a lot of them on pilgrimages of one kind or another. I’ve always felt it diminishes the awesomeness - in the religious sense, you understand - of the Half boundary to claim there’s some magical force making it what it is. The Half is… indescribable, sure - it’s transcendental - but it’s man-made, and it obeys the laws of physics.)
At the time, little eight-year-old me broke the silence by saying something like, “But it’s just grass and rocks and same as anywhere else.”
The tour guide looked very miffed. Mr Tyndall had to take me to one side while the rest of the class went out on the veranda and explain to me that the Half was not the same as anywhere else, it was another world entirely, as I well knew, and not to be rude or cheeky.
“You might not be able to see it with your eyes, but if you use your mind and your knowledge you’ll begin to understand the differences between our world and the Half,” he said, tapping me on the head before grimacing slightly and wiping his finger on his trousers. “It’s the same species of grass as we have in the playground, but here it can grow wild and free without people stomping all over it. It’s the same type of rock as the gravel in the car park, but without cheeky monkeys like you scratching your names into it. And deeper into the Half the changes become more obvious. Forests with no foresters, gardens with no gardeners. Animals that have never seen a person, don’t even know what a person is. The world beyond this border becomes all the more marvellous the further you go.”
“But you’re not allowed to go in the Half,” I said. “That’s the whole point of the Half.”
He grinned, and I remember thinking there was something behind that grin that I didn’t know the word for. “Well, you’d better look at the view all the more carefully while you can, then. Run along now.” And I did. We got ice cream at lunch.
For many years after that I didn’t think about the Half at all. I worked as a tour guide in the Caledonia Market District for a while out of school, doing ghost tours. Then I met Paul and moved with him to New Manchester where he was from, got a job there, got married. Looking back I can’t believe I followed a man I’d only just met to a city practically teetering over the edge of the world, but I was young and gullible and the local pumpkin soup tasted incredible. After the divorce I went to quite a bad place and ended up losing the city job, but an ex-colleague sent me - in pity, maybe? - a vacancy at a Half Viewpoint, doing visitor tours. The biggest one for weeks either way, with a particularly good view of the grass and rock and never-ending forest; the very one I’d been to at school.
I took my bike the hour out of town for the interview, through the suburbs then the soy plains then the sun farms, dewy in the morning. As the highway turned to road turned to track I was struck with deja vu from that school trip, the feeling of a looming presence, like the Half was rising to meet me and look me in the eye. At last I pulled into the visitor centre car park and just stood in front of the fence for what felt like a very long time, gazing into the depths. I don’t remember much about the interview, but my mind was so full of the Half I completely forgot to be nervous. I like to think it was the faraway look in my eyes that got me the job.
My tour starts a little like this:
“The forbidden garden is a theme that permeates world culture. Many civilisations, though wildly different, tell of a place where humans are not allowed, where nature runs untamed. It was this myth that the ancient people that first laid out the Half drew on in their vision for a more perfect planet. Their Earth, ruined by overconsumption, deforestation and rampant greed, was showing signs of becoming unfit for human habitation. In their foresight, the Half was set aside to allow nature to heal. Today we are grateful for their sacrifice that taught us how to live in balance with the planet rather than in conflict with it.”
I talk through the exhibits we have on the pre-Half world, the geology and geography of the Half, and displays of artefacts from the Half that have floated in down shadowed rivers and on alien tides. Then I take the visitors out onto the veranda to get their proper view of the Half. From where they stand they get a really lovely view down across the grassland to the edge of the forest. We’re high enough up the slope that you can see over the fence and it doesn’t really obstruct your view at all. Most visitors mutter to themselves in pleasure and awe, and take a few photos, and then start to get restless and wander over to the gift shop. At the end of the world, after all, the gift shop has more to offer.
From time to time we get animals wandering out of the forest into full view of the visitor centre. It’s rare, but if you’re lucky you might see deer, cats, mink. One time there was a yellow bear big as a car, who reared up by the forest’s edge and gazed at us before turning back into the darkness. We gossiped for months about it afterwards. None of these animals have scientific species designations. It’s unclear if they’ve ever been observed by humans or ever will be again.
-
On the day it happened, there had been a good tailwind as I rode in on my bike so I’d gotten in a little early. I greeted Mary in her booth as I arrived. Mary is 180cm tall and butch, so she looks the part of a security guard, but she doesn’t actually have any muscles to save her life so her employment opportunities in that area are limited. Instead she sits in her booth and silently lets visitors know she’s watching them and not to try any funny business. I asked once what she’d do if someone did try their luck, and she laughed. “If anyone wanted to crash the Half, they wouldn’t do it at the busiest point on the continent. They’d go somewhere quiet in the middle of nowhere. And even then the systems would spot them. I’m just window dressing. This is the world’s easiest job.”
My first group came in at 10, and I was waiting for them all starched blazer and smiles. The first to arrive was a young couple from I think Singapore, who must have been doing a Grand Tour. Then a family and another, a total of four kids, a lot - I squinted at the adults trying to guess who was whose parent (in this job you make your own fun). Then an older couple, and some teenagers. I was just about to start my spiel when a middle-aged woman leaned around the corner and said, “Hang on - we’re just trying to get the wheelchair out of the car.”
The wheelchair turned out to hold a withered old man, with a sort of absent expression on his face like he was waiting for a dentist’s appointment. Something about the set of his jaw grabbed my eye, but I couldn’t figure out why so I turned to look at the person wheeling him instead. That was a stern-faced man in his fifties who looked around at the gift shop, the tour group, me, like he was assessing the risk we posed to his patient. No, his father. The same brow. Only in the son it was furrowed with worry, and in the father it was - though creased with age - relaxed, vacant. Like there was nothing behind it at all.
“Have you got his medicine?” said the woman - wife, I decided, not sister.
“I thought you had it,” said the man.
“No,you said you’d keep an eye on it. Is it still in the car? How many times do I have to remind you?”
“Oh, no, it’s here in the chair pocket. It’s with his chair stuff.”
“You need to keep a closer eye on it. It’s like you don’t even care if he’s safe.”
“I said I put it in the chair pocket - ”
We were running a little late, so I cleared my throat. “Thank you everyone for signing up to the 10 a.m. tour, we’ll be starting shortly so can I just remind you to leave any large items in our cloakroom.”
That stopped the soap opera short. I wondered if they were going to leave Granddad in the cloakroom. They certainly didn’t seem to be involving him in the conversation. I made myself look busy for a bit fiddling with my walkie-talkie just to give everyone a moment, then when the teens had stopped punching each other I started the tour:
“The forbidden garden is a theme that permeates world culture…”
I was interrupted by raucous laughter. Everyone turned around. To my surprise, it was Granddad. He was sitting up straight in his chair, the look of blankness gone, replaced with animation. “Forbidden garden!” he shouted, a little too loudly. “The Half isn’t a garden! It doesn’t exist for our benefit. It is tended by no-one. It doesn’t care about us.”
I made myself smile, but he’d thrown me off kilter. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m not a philosopher. I just do the history side.”
“Nobody remembers the history of the Half, really,” said Granddad. He was sitting forward in his chair, taut as a ship’s rigging. “We talk about sacrifice but we don’t know what the ancients had to do to make the Half happen. And now we have forgotten what we once knew about the land beyond the fence, and what we left behind. All those miracles.” His speech was speeding up and becoming slurred. “A marvellous land.”
The son had woken up and was trying to hush the old man into submission. “Dad, Jonathan, the lady is trying to do her job. Be nice. You can tell us about the miracles in the car on the way home.”
The old man brushed his hand aside. “Gerrof me. I don’t want to go.” He seemed to be slowing down again, like a clockwork thing running down. But he consented to being settled back into the chair without uttering a word, though he did have a scowl on his face throughout. The rest of the tour passed without incident.
Afterwards I was in the cafe to grab lunch when I saw the couple with the old man again, eating sandwiches off flimsy bamboo plates. Granddad was napping in his chair. I was passing their table when the woman noticed me and quickly stood up to talk. “I’m so sorry about earlier,” she said. “That was the most animated I’ve seen him. Thank you for being so patient.”
“It’s my pleasure,” I said, meaning It’s my job. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit so far.”
“Oh, very much! I’ve never seen the Half before. Sit with us, won’t you? And Ellis was born near here, but he grew up in Caledonia.”
“Don’t bother the woman, Net,” said the son. That made me immediately take the empty seat next to Granddad and say, “Thank you, of course.”
“Oh, Ellis, she’s staff, not a robot. Yes, Mr Tyndall was working here when Ellis was born.”
“Tyndall?” I blinked. The familiarity of that jaw suddenly clicked into place. “Did he… used to be a geography teacher?”
“For nearly thirty years,” said the son.
“Surely not! I had him at school. I was in his class. He had the most amazing luscious hair. All the older kids were in love with him.”
The son was still wary but I could detect him warming up. “What are the chances.”
“He even took us here, on a trip. Or he was one of the teachers who came with us. I don’t remember. I remember him telling us about the flora and fauna in the Half. And thinking that fauna was just deer. Because, fauns.”
I was babbling now, but the wife/daughter-in-law/whatever caught my enthusiasm. “You know, Ellis, that must have been only a little after his work on the Half perimeter.”
My eyes must have boggled because he sighed, a bit “I’m-tired-of-telling-this-story-but-I’ll-suffer-again-for-politeness-sake”. “It’s entirely possible. They finished the fencing in ‘79, and he was working on it through the 70s. He was a landscape surveyor, you see - but after the work was completed he went into teaching.”
“But…” I stammered like I was meeting a celebrity. “But that means he’s been into the Half!”
The son paused. “I suppose he must have done. He laid a number of the posts himself, I know that much. They didn’t have such a clear boundary at the time, you have to understand; people rarely came here and when they did they had GPS. It was the moral panic about trespassers that precipitated them building the fence.”
A slow trail of saliva was making its way down Granddad’s cheek. I was seized by the urge to reach out and touch him, like there would be physical evidence left on him from going across the boundary. Maybe glowing residual radiation, or he’d phase out of existence under my fingertips. I sat on my hands. “Why did he quit?”
“Boredom, I think.” The son scratched his nose. “Miles and miles it goes but the fence is always the same. Straight line all the way to the ocean. And by this point he and Mum had had me, and he wanted to stop travelling so much.”
“It’s so lovely he got to see it one final time,” gushed the wife. “It is so rare that he is lucid but he always said he wanted to see it before he died. And you saw how he was today. That is the clearest he’s been for years. It feels like a beautiful way to say goodbye.”
I said, “I’m very sorry to hear about his health.”
“Oh, it’s been a long time coming,” said the son. “We took him in last week and the doctor said he meets the criteria now. So he’ll make the trip to the euth clinic on Friday.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “I’m so sorry. That must be really hard.” (Am I doing this right? It sounds awfully… bland.)
“Don’t be,” said the son. “He’s been gone for a while now. All we see are snatches. He’s only half there.”
The table fell silent after that, looking out across the grass. I excused myself and took one final look at Mr Tyndall in his chair. He had woken up and was back to staring dead-eyed into the middle distance.
It happened around half an hour after that, when I was getting ready to start the 2pm group and the unhappy Tyndalls were getting up to leave.
I missed a few key parts, but I understand it to be a bit like this. The son had wheeled his father out of the cafe back onto the viewing veranda, but forgotten a bag at the table and gone back to get it. The wife was at the till paying for lunch. Mr Tyndall was left in the middle of the veranda in his chair, on his own, the space unusually quiet for there not being any school groups. From the tours meeting point I had full view of it.
My memory of what happened next is wildly hyper-precise for me having gone over it time and time again subsequently. How much of it is invented I can no longer tell. What happened is, I looked up, and the wheelchair was empty. I remember thinking to myself, “Well that’s funny, isn’t that Mr Tyndall’s chair” and then the screaming started. I dropped my slate, whose screen shattered on the floor, and ran out on to the veranda to see a figure running away from me towards the fence. It was Mr Tyndall. For all that he was mentally frail and very old, it was clear this was a physically fit man who was perfectly capable of running an impressive distance.
I reached for my walkie-talkie on my belt, and as I started off down the slope I yelled into it for Mary to come. But I could tell she wouldn’t get there in time. I glanced over my shoulder, compulsively. The son was standing dumbfounded by the empty wheelchair, with the bag in his hand. The wife was in the cafe with her nose pressed to the glass, as were dozens of other horrified guests. Surely he won’t get as far as the fence, I thought to myself. I was definitely gaining on him. But Tyndall was surprisingly sprightly and before I knew it he’d run headlong into the border, hands clasped against the fence.
A siren had started behind me - I didn’t know we had one of those. I shouted, “Mr Tyndall! Jonathan!” but the old man had bent over by a fencepost and didn’t respond. He seemed to be fiddling with the fence. Abruptly - and to my horror - he straightened through the fence. He was on the other side. There was a gap in the fence. He had gone through it. He was in the Half.
I was close now but I stopped in my tracks. I think I shouted something incomprehensible. The old man turned very briefly and looked me in the eye. I saw a spark there, something wild and blazing. Then he turned away and took three long steps into the Half.
Then there was an almighty CRACK from the heavens and he fell to the ground, still.
Mary caught me from behind and hugged me tightly. I realised I was kneeling on the ground. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s over,” she said. I watched the blood pool from his back and soak into the ground, into the unreachable grass, the untouchable rocks.
There are one hundred and fifteen satellite wardens in orbit above us right now. They watch the perimeter of the Half and very occasionally they intervene. Each is equipped with a railgun which is capable of firing slugs towards the Earth’s surface at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. By the time they hit the ground atmospheric drag has slowed them to only a few hundred metres per second, but they make up for that by reaching temperatures upwards of 500K. There was a big furore recently about one of them going out of service and them taking longer than intended to replace it, but there’s quite a lot of redundancy in the system so its neighbours would probably have been able to pick up the slack.
The oldest of the satellite wardens dates back three hundred years, compared to the perimeter fence which was built in our lifetimes, by (amongst other people) Jonathan Tyndall. The fence reminds us how not to do anything stupid but it’s the wardens that really guard the Half.
Jonathan Tyndall became a real hate icon for at least three famous televangelists, who broadcast long tirades about “violating the divine sanctity of the Half” and “inviting upon mankind wrath the likes of which God has never known”. The best known one, the one which got shared the most and must have struck some kind of chord, started with: “As Adam did sin and so was cast out from God’s garden, so too…”
The son and the son’s wife were arrested, but soon let go without charge. I kept seeing interviews with them but I always switched to something else as quickly as I could.
I stayed in the job and still work at the Half Viewpoint but I don’t do the tours any more. Mostly I do backoffice, which don’t require me to interact with visitors or look at the view.
That night, after the police had gone and the crowd dissipated I sat with Mary on the steps to the car park until it got dark. I cried a little. Mary put her arm around my shoulder and left it there for a while. Then she had to leave to catch the transit back to town and I was left alone. It was a windy evening and the moon shone dappled through fish-scale clouds, catching the body lying on the ground half in cool blue light, half darkness.
A little after midnight I heard wheels on tarmac and turned to see a van coming along the road towards me. The moonlight fell across it and I read, CITY ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES, no contact code. I wiped the snot from my nose and stood.
It pulled to a halt in the car park and out jumped four figures in dark uniforms. Two immediately swung around to the rear of the vehicle and started fetching out equipment: battery-powered lights, power tools, a stretcher. One was tapping into a slate. The fourth noticed me under the awning and strode over towards me.
They resolved into a solidly built woman with a sprawling afro stuffed into a black helmet. She didn’t look surprised to see me; she just looked tired. “Tour guide?” she said. I was too taken aback to do anything but nod. “This won’t take long. We can give you a lift back after if you want.”
The other figures had started pulling on haz suits. “You’re surely… not going in there, are you?” As I said it I felt a growing sense of panic.
She glanced around. “Were you expecting us to just leave him there?” (I hadn’t thought about it. I had thought about it. I’d thought about his flesh desiccating and rotting away, insects crawling in and out of his cheeks, fungi sprouting in his chest cavity, his bones crumbling and being blown away by the wind.) “That jacket is polyurethane. An antique. It won’t degrade for a few decades, maybe more. The rest will go faster but we still can’t have tourists gawking at it while we wait.”
She turned towards the van. Impulsively I clutched her wrist. I must have sounded like a traumatised child. “But the Half… You’d be going into the Half.”
“You didn’t know?” She pointed at the fence - no, through the fence, towards the open grass where the body lay and to the woods beyond. “This isn’t the Half boundary. That’s just the safety barrier for visitors. The Half actually begins about three hundred metres that way. It’s a little into the forest. This way we get some leeway for… accidents.” At this she looked around distastefully. “Besides, the view wouldn’t be as good.”
At this she left me standing, swaying with shock, and went to put her haz suit on. I watched as they trudged out through the gap in the fence and lifted Mr Tyndall onto the stretcher with what I thought - hoped - was gentle respect. Then they carried him back out and one stayed behind to seal the breach. Afterwards I let helmet woman walk me into the back of the van, sit me in a passenger seat and strap me in. I rode back to town with them, bike long forgotten, with one of the uniforms, a burly bald man, staring at me and the body between us, fastened to the table but shuddering each time we went over a bump. I had to contain myself from reaching out to touch it just to see what it would feel like.
After a few weeks, when I was back at work, I checked what helmet woman had said for myself. My slate geolocation was adamant that the Half started at the fence, but when I bought a little GPS widget in a mountaineering shop I did the lat/lon by hand and found that yes, the Half started 312m away, to the west. In between shifts I sometimes stand on the viewing platform with the tourists and squint, try to guess where it starts, which trees in the forest are on our side and which aren’t. They look the same.
I think Tyndall must have known that the fence wasn’t actually on the border. He had worked on it, done the geo surveying, must have done the same maths that I had done. Even in that semi-lucid state, at the very end, I believe he knew he would never make it into the Half, and still that he did it deliberately, that he knew what he was doing when he ran. His son seemed very sure this was the final self-destructive act of a madman, but today there is a half of me that still wonders.