The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  If she received visits from Octavio or Lady Septima, it was all very discreet. Ophelia noticed that she sometimes left in the middle of a carousel circuit, led away by an observer, and reappeared an hour later. What was astonishing, not to say worrying, was her presence within the first protocol. According to Octavio, his sister had been interned since early childhood; she was now entering puberty. A long time for a single stage of the program. Second was never accompanied by a nanny-automaton, but the collaborators did follow her extremely closely. They took notes and exchanged whispers from the shadow of their gray hoods as soon as she took out her pencil. Every drawing she did was systematically requisitioned by them. Ophelia would have found them ridiculous had she not been herself equally disturbed.

  She didn’t know whether it was down to her being a new arrival, but Second sought tirelessly to communicate with her, more than with anyone else. She rushed toward her as soon as she spotted her, gripped her by the wrist, and cheerily spouted nonsense at her: “Bristle the taste buds!”; “The umbrella wrecks everything”; “Are shovels without mess needed?” Even when she tried to write her thoughts down, it was the same gibberish. One time, she had launched into an endless speech featuring the weather’s tactlessness, crushed prawns, lunar axes, distracted missiles, a falcon reported missing, and dental hairiness. Despite trying her utmost, Ophelia understood absolutely nothing, to the great frustration of Second, who ended up giving her a drawing with an annoyed flourish.

  Unlike her language, her sketches were strikingly realistic. Those she did for Ophelia always featured Octavio, from different angles, but all had in common that he looked dreadfully tormented. The collaborators confiscated all of them, without exception. Ophelia didn’t know what to think of it. Was Octavio aware of these drawings? She hoped not. They would give the impression that his little sister yearned to see him suffer.

  Ophelia revised her opinion somewhat when, one afternoon, she caught Second giving a drawing to another invert on the Alternative Program. It depicted a simple nail, but Second redrew it several times and handed it, always insistently, to the same person. A few days later, that invert trod on a rusty old nail when climbing aboard a carousel, and had to be taken urgently to the infirmary. Ophelia was surprised to see, once again, on Second’s dissymmetrical face, the annoyance she showed every time she hadn’t made herself understood. Had she really anticipated the accident? Ophelia had lived with some Seers during her apprenticeship at the Good Family; none of them would have been able to foresee something so specific so far ahead.

  It suddenly struck her that perhaps Second, despite her communication difficulties, had the answers to her questions. And answers were something Ophelia desperately needed. She had no intention of continually reliving the same day, week after week, month after month, when the Other could cause a new collapse at any moment.

  One morning, however, something happened that broke the routine of the protocol. Instead of leading her to the screening room, with the others, as usual, the nanny-automaton said to her:

  “NOT TODAY, CHÉRIE.”

  They walked together between the carousels, rusted and faded by time, and invaded by weeds moaning in the drafts from the cloister. Here, a circuit of aerial tracks with no train. There, a mechanical planetarium with frozen orbs. The park’s only amusement was in its name. Its very gravel burnt the soles of the feet.

  The nanny-automaton went over to a carousel that Ophelia had never seen working. It was entirely separate, almost concealed behind heaps of defective objects, and so dilapidated that it creaked as soon as they climbed onto its platform.

  “SIT DOWN, CHÉRIE.”

  “This carousel . . . is it the second protocol?”

  “IT’S JUST A LITTLE GAME.”

  Only one seat remained in the middle of the carousel; it didn’t look that much fun. Ophelia had barely sat down before the nanny-automaton strapped her in tight enough to wind her.

  “That’s too tight. It’s hurting me.”

  “EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY PERFECT, CHÉRIE.”

  The nanny-automaton pulled a key from her cleavage and put it into a lock on the carousel. The circular platform remained immobile, but the seat sank under it. Turning like a screw, it made a ghastly racket of steel and wood as it descended deeper and deeper into the ground. Ophelia was plunged into stifling darkness. Her heart pounded, constricted by the strapping. She tore her fingernails trying to unstrap herself. She was still going down.

  Her eyes flickered when lightbulbs started flashing all around her. The seat had finally come to a stop. She couldn’t undo the strap, but in any case, the only way out was the very well she’d been forced down. The air itself smelt of stone. She found herself sitting in the middle of a subterranean room, facing a table.

  Upon the table, a telephone.

  Ophelia instantly forgot her fear. It was the cellar of Eulalia Gonde’s memory. Despite her myopia, she recognized the walls, the dimensions, the height of the ceiling, as if she personally had resided in it. Did this telephone harbor all the secrets of the old world, and have all the solutions for the new one? Could it be the Horn of Plenty?

  Ophelia forced herself to make a cool assessment of the situation. Yes, she finally found herself where Eulalia Gonde had worked on the Project centuries ago, but it wasn’t the same telephone. The one in front of her, like all objects in the observatory, had a manufacturing fault that made it almost unusable: the numbers on the dial were so distorted, they were illegible. This certainly wasn’t the Horn of Plenty.

  It started ringing before Ophelia had time to wonder what to do with it. Restrained by the straps of her chair, she had to make several attempts to pick up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  It was just an echo, which wasn’t surprising. But might there be someone at the other end of the line?

  Of course there was.

  There could be no doubt that, for this particular experiment, whatever its nature, Ophelia was being listened to. After all, “observing” was the very purpose of this institute.

  Her fingers tightened around the receiver. No longer being able to read objects made her feel deaf to everything. Other hands had inevitably touched this telephone before her, but she detected no thought, no emotion.

  And her? What was she expected to feel? What was she supposed to do?

  It was then that she noticed, on the table, just behind the telephone, in the flickering light of the lamps, a stand on which was placed not a musical score, but a booklet. On the page was an uninterrupted string of words and numbers even more nonsensical than Second’s utterances. They were printed large enough for Ophelia to make them out without glasses. She knew she wouldn’t be brought back up as long as this experiment wasn’t concluded.

  She read out loud, but was immediately bombarded with echoes from the telephone. To those echoes were added those of the cellar itself, acting like an echo chamber. There were so many of them! It was virtually impossible to remain focused on the text. When Ophelia reached the end of the page, a mechanical device turned it so she could carry on reading. What was there followed suit: nothing but words and numbers. Just a little game, eh?

  Time passed, the pages turned. Ophelia’s throat and ears were starting to ache.

  This experiment was unfathomable. And yet she was convinced that all the absurd things she had been made to do since her arrival at the observatory—the screenings, the gymnastics, the workshops—were simply aimed at preparing her for this. They had reproduced exactly Eulalia Gonde’s work conditions for Project Cornucopianism. But what, then, did it consist of, that work? What was supposed to happen here, with this telephone?

  Ophelia would have given anything for there to be, at the other end of the line, someone finally to give her an explana . . .

  She stopped abruptly in the middle of her reading. For a few long seconds she heard nothing
but her jerky breathing against the receiver. A sharp pain whistled in her ears. It wasn’t coming from the telephone but from inside her own head. Ophelia cracked like an eggshell to allow a new memory to hatch. She could . . . yes, she could now recall what had happened in this cellar.

  She, Eulalia Gonde, sits in the same place. Exhausted. Excited. Her whole arm aches from holding the telephone receiver. Months in a cellar voicing a succession of words forwards, and then backwards, with no result.

  Until now.

  “You are impossible.”

  “Impossible?”

  The voice in the receiver is as cracked as her own. Anyone would have thought it an ordinary echo, but Eulalia isn’t just anyone. She has prepared herself for years in expectation of this moment. She spent her childhood at the orphanage with an arm tied behind her back, one heel higher than the other, an eye patch, wax in one ear and cotton wool in one nostril, totally deforming herself so that her left side would become overdeveloped. She was born for this.

  That echo well and truly deviated; she’s certain of it.

  “Unlikely, if you prefer.”

  The sudden silence in the receiver worries her. She hasn’t halted the call for one moment since yesterday evening, not even to eat or go to the restroom. Above all, she mustn’t lose him. Not him. Not after her entire family.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Still there.”

  She breathes a sigh of relief.

  “Good. I feel a little lonely.”

  “A little?”

  “A lot in fact.”

  Eulalia smiles through her tears. Crying isn’t professional, but she can’t stop herself anymore. She’s overflowing with joy and sadness, hope and fear. She remembers, as if it were yesterday, the first time she heard mention of the phenomenon. She had just arrived at the military orphanage. Often, after lights out, in the darkness of the dormitory, there would be talk of the army’s experiments on the echoes. “To scramble enemy radio communications,” explained the supervisors. And then some information leaked out. The impossible had happened. An echo, it was said, had deviated on contact with a left-handed person. It had only lasted a few seconds, the echo hadn’t stabilized, but Eulalia had immediately known, with all the wisdom of youth, that that was what she had to do.

  Befriend an echo. And, from this first miracle, generate new miracles.

  Forgotten in her cellar, she has just succeeded where all her predecessors failed.

  “My spurriers . . . superiors . . . ” she says, “ they don’t often come down to see me. I haven’t yet told them about you.”

  “About you?”

  “No, not about me. About you.”

  “About me.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know if they’ll handstand you when . . . if they’ll understand you. Even me, I’m not really sure I understand you. I find it hard enough to understand myself.”

  With the receiver wedged in the hollow of her shoulder, Eulalia unfolds a handkerchief and blows into it. She glances at her typewriter, gathering dust in a corner of the cellar. It’s been weeks since she last eked a sentence out of it. Her current typescript, The Era of Miracles, remains unfinished. Eulalia is forced to admit that she almost had doubts about her stories. About her own story.

  This echo, this . . . other, whoever it might be, had given her back all her convictions.

  “You’ve not yet told me your name.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And yet I think we’re sparking. . . starting to know each other well. Me, I am Eulalia.”

  “I am me.”

  Eulalia wipes the tears that won’t stop running down. The deviation is becoming more pronounced. This echo learns fast.

  “That’s an interesting response. Where do you transmit from?”

  Silence once again in the receiver.

  “Alright, my question was a bit complicated. Where are you, right now?”

  “Here.”

  Oh yes, it learns very fast.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Behind.”

  “Behind? But behind what?”

  “Behind behind.”

  Ophelia gazed at the telephone before her, as though finally seeing it. Her migraine had stopped at the same time as the memory. It had lasted but a heartbeat, a tiny fragment of time during which everything, absolutely everything had become obvious to her. But, already, that impression was weakening.

  The only certainty left to her was that neither the cellar nor the telephone was really important. They were just the conditions necessary for an exceptional encounter. That was how the Other had burst into Eulalia Gonde’s life. He wasn’t her reflection. He was much more than that: he was an echo, one of a kind.

  Intelligent.

  Helen had been right, back in that amphitheater stand. All that had happened, all that was happening, and all that would happen was directly linked to the echoes. One of them had, in the past, communicated with Eulalia Gonde, and it was from this contact that everything had followed. She had conveyed to it what was most personal to her—her desires, her memories, her humanity—and she had received something in return, something that had enabled her to create the family spirits, change identity at will, turn her stories into reality.

  The Other had revealed the secret of plenty to her.

  So this was what the Deviations Observatory wanted. To reestablish a dialogue with the Other. They needed him. Their Horn of Plenty was dysfunctional, as the boxes of faulty objects cluttering every corner made clear.

  That is what Project Cornucopianism was. Or that, at any rate, was its starting point, the threshold of a far more extensive experiment.

  Ophelia started to shake feverishly. She had often wondered why the Other, once released from the mirror, hadn’t stepped out through the one in her bedroom, on Anima, in front of her whole family. What if Octavio was right? What if the echoes evolved on a different frequency? What if the Other had, all this time, been right there, beside her, without her being able to see him?

  She stared at the stand, where the mechanical device was tapping the page with an oppressive clatter to make her continue her reading. She knew she was being listened to, but maybe she had a unique opportunity here, in this cellar, to communicate with the Other, just like Eulalia long before her.

  “You used me to leave the space between the mirrors,” she said into the receiver, “so you owe me one. I don’t know whether this message will reach you, but it’s time that we met again. Show yourself. Speak to me. Come and find . . .”

  A click and a dial tone indicated to Ophelia that the line had suddenly been cut off.

  Her seat starting rising, forcing her to let go of the receiver. The sun hit her in the face once she reached the surface, back on the carousel. The nanny-automaton unstrapped her. The disturbing face, a bad caricature of her mother’s, gave her a fake smile.

  “THE LITTLE GAME IS OVER, CHÉRIE.”

  THE MEETING

  “Send me down again.”

  Ophelia tugged as hard as she could on the dress of her nanny-automaton, but the latter continued to cross the amusement park with dogged little steps, distancing them ever further from the carousel, and the cellar, and the telephone.

  “Let me continue the experiment!”

  The nanny-automaton didn’t even deign to respond. Totally indifferent, she ploughed on, while her stomach churned out an insufferable ditty. She alone held the key that allowed access to the secret room.

  Ophelia couldn’t stand the idea of returning to her routine as if nothing had happened, while the Other was perhaps reachable by telephone. If the observatory wanted to communicate with him, so did she, so why not let her do so?

  The heat bearing down on the cloister was stifling. As if the air had created a thick curtain behind which all truths had retreated. The inverts had finished
their morning workshops and were just starting their lunch break. All Ophelia could see of them was some pathetic figures. They were scattered across the amusement park, each in their corner, shaded by stalls, munching the vile rice the nannies served them every day at this time.

  Eulalia Gonde had been one of them long before their birth. She had trained hard to become an invert herself, as if that were indispensable to enter into dialogue with the Other.

  Ophelia had had enough of this solitude, imposed on them the better to exploit them. By squinting, she spotted Cosmos. He was sitting on the edge of a carousel that had sinister wooden tigers instead of horses. His nanny-automaton watched over him from a distance.

  Ophelia went straight to him. Her own nanny would soon notice that she was no longer following her; she only had a few spare seconds.

  “We must talk. Fast.”

  Cosmos immediately looked away from her. Going by the smell, he was munching a lentil fritter. He must have contacts among the cooks always to get food for himself that was worthy of the name.

  “Calm down,” was all he said.

  “You’ve been at the observatory longer than me, and you said yourself that we had to help one another. I need to know now all that you know.”

  “Calm down,” repeated Cosmos.

  His voice had become imperious. He was no longer the lively young man who had given her his brioche on the first day. Ophelia had come to realize that his inversion resided in his bipolarity. In other circumstances, she would have left him alone, but she was burning with impatience.

  “They put you through the telephone experiment, too, didn’t they?” she insisted. “Can you at least tell me if you heard something? Maybe an echo that wasn’t norma—”