“Well, somebody was,” she said, and peered into her toiletries bag for something.
“This is nonsense,” I said, ruffled. “I don’t have one of those”—pointing to the quipu-like object—“and I don’t do magic, and I’m not a witch, and I shall go put on deodorant right now if you think I smell like one.”
“You act as if I have insulted you,” she said, sounding amused. She took a bottle of witch hazel and a cotton pad from the little silk bag. “I have given you the greatest compliment.”
“Not by my lights,” I said.
As soon as I left her, I confronted Frank, who never understands that the Salem witch hysteria is inappropriate for jokes. He claimed innocence, pointed out that he had never been alone with Erszebet, but then—since the matter had been raised, I suppose—repeated his perennial joke-theory that Mary Estey really was a witch. “Now that we know there really are witches, don’t you want to know?” he said with his eager little knowing grin. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
How could I ever fault him his curiosity? So. Made sure the guests were settled in with bath towels and water glasses, and then went up into the attic to Nana’s trunk, which I have managed to avoid opening for a quarter century, despite Frank’s nudging. God knows why I felt compelled tonight. I already know the family tree; I don’t require seeing it in writing. But something pushed me to go up.
I pulled the string on the bare bulb that hangs from the attic ceiling, knelt down by the heavy cedar chest that lives equidistant from the central chimneys, windows, and attic door. Blew the worst of the dust off the top. Grasped the two near corners and lifted carefully as the wood creaked in protest; the clasp broke at least a century ago.
Inside, I saw the sheaf of family papers I knew would be there—but then I saw something I had never noticed before. I thought it was a cowl or scarf, maybe a battered swaddling cloth. Then I realized. Froze. Felt dizzy. Its similarity to Erszebet’s was unmistakable. I should look at that more closely, I thought. I should reach for it. Yes, I’ll reach for it.
My limbs would not obey me. I watched my own hands carefully close the lid of the chest. I stood up and left the room very quickly as if propelled by an external force, shutting the light behind me. I sat on the top stair, staring into the darkness until I was sure even Frank had gone to sleep.
Diachronicle
DAYS 295–304 (LATE MAY, YEAR 1)
In which there isn’t enough magic to go around
THE NEXT DAY WE RETURNED to the ODEC to begin a more sophisticated series of experimentations. Rebecca East-Oda made it clear that she felt Oda-sensei’s involvement in the project had reached the end of its natural course, and so neither of them returned with us.
We were to essentially sequester ourselves for a fortnight as Erszebet eased back into the habit of performing magic and displayed her skills for us. Although we were free to leave the building to eat, exercise, take the air—even to return to my apartment occasionally to shower—Erszebet and I would sleep in the ODEC room; Tristan was already happily ensconced in his bachelor pad of an office. By the time we arrived that first morning, the Maxes had brought in camp cots, towels and linens, a couple of well-fed lab rats and lab-rat grub, a case of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter for Tristan, toothbrushes and toothpaste (oh God, I’d barter my body for a tube of Crest now! Cleaning my teeth with a paste of borax and ground cuttlefish bones, with anise to “sweeten” it. Ych.) . . . and as many breakfast groceries and snacks as the college-dorm-style refrigerator in the upstairs office could hold. There were also several boxes of seemingly random props from a list that Tristan had texted the Maxes the night before. As soon as they’d set up our bunker, the Maxes packed up and moved on, presumably to their next shadowy government assignment. They took all but one of the Vladimirs with them. We still had a full complement of Lukes to guard the building and assure our security, but they were otherwise useless.
The days that followed were long ones, the take-out food we lived on relatively tasteless (by twenty-first-century standards . . . context really is everything!), and by night we were each too tired even for conversation. Tristan in particular was worn down and preoccupied. My memories of that time are drab and bleary, despite the remarkable nature of our undertakings.
The first week’s experiments, dictated by Tristan, included: manifesting inanimate objects, both those occurring in nature (e.g., sticks and stones) and those man-made (e.g., a cap gun . . . or at least something resembling one); changing the chemical composition of liquids (e.g., water to salt water); moving small things (e.g., the manifested cap gun) from one spot in the ODEC to another. The array of requests evolved over the days from the mundane (“turn this sweater inside out”) to the fanciful (“turn this vanilla ice cream into Rocky Road”) to the creepy (“animate the stuffed cat”) to the startling (“turn this lab rat into a newt”).
Erszebet was willing to show off her powers, although after a day or two of adjusting to having them back, she made it very clear that she found the assignments themselves tiresome and stupid. She would, she informed us, perform magic because it pleased her to do so after so many years deprived of it; she would not perform it simply because Mr. Tristan Lyons required it of her. She was flexing a muscle she’d longed to flex for many scores of years, and to a certain degree she was preening. Once the buzz of that wore thin, we knew she would feel no obligation to continue the dog-and-pony show.
Tristan did not waste breath explaining to either of us what his higher-ups were expecting from this sequestration; I just took his lead, trying to learn as much as we could about Erszebet’s powers, although it was a trying undertaking. Erszebet herself had cast us as good cop/bad cop, and it was natural enough to play those roles. Tristan pushed her; I cajoled. He made her feel significant; I made her feel appreciated. Truth be told, after three days of it, his job proved far easier than mine, for she was, to use a post-Victorian turn of phrase, high-maintenance.
Other than her attitude, our biggest headache was that obviously we could not tape or photograph what she was doing in the ODEC; we could not be in there with her without blacking out. She had to thump on the door just to let us know she was finished with each spell.
Our only recourse for research, therefore, was for me to interview her after each exercise. Since she would not answer Tristan’s questions (or rather, answered them, but only with gratuitous derision), he divided his time between measuring and studying whatever object she’d worked her magic on, and hourly emailing his bosses at the shadowy government entity regarding our progress. Apparently the Maxes had delivered glowing reports on the results of Erszebet’s first spell and it seemed the bosses wanted everything she did to be as attention-grabbing as she herself now was.
Erszebet, in these interviews with me, was not illuminating. Here follows almost verbatim, as I can remember it, the gist of an early attempt:
(Upon the occasion of Erszebet taking my sweater into the ODEC with her and changing it from green wool to lavender polyester, which took much longer than we expected—an entire afternoon—and left her strangely exhausted. NB: Yes, Tristan had specific reasons for such peculiar and frivolous-seeming instructions.)
MEL: Can you explain to me how you did this?
ERSZEBET: Pah. I found where you were wearing lavender polyester and brought that here. It was hard to find. There are not many opportunities to find you owning polyester.
MEL: The physicists would say that in some parallel reality to this one in the multiverse, there is a Mel wearing a lavender polyester sweater.
Erszebet makes her dismissive face, and shrugs to make it clear she doesn’t give a fuck care what physicists would say.
MEL: What we want to understand is, how does it end up here, in this reality, and what happens to the original sweater?
ERSZEBET: I summon it here and get rid of the other one.
MEL: How, though? By what mechanism?
ERSZEBET: The same way you do anything. You do what causes the desired res
ult. If you want something to burn, you set it on fire, if you want something to be wet, you pour liquid on it. If you want something that is upstairs to be downstairs, you send someone to collect it. It is exactly the same. Except it is more complicated to calculate what to do—for example, in that metaphor, what route to tell the servant to take upstairs, how fast to move, and so on.
MEL: But can you explain technically, mechanically—not metaphorically—what you are doing and how you do it?
ERSZEBET: Pah, if you don’t understand a perfectly simple explanation, then you are too stupid to understand a more technical one.
MEL: Fine. Can you at least explain to me why some people can perform magic and others can’t?
ERSZEBET: This is like asking why doesn’t a blind person know what blue smells like.
. . . and thus went all interviews. There are transcripts of two dozen such on that original laptop. They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don’t escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.
FURTHER, ERSZEBET WAS capricious, and she knew she held all the power. We were demanding something of her (quite a lot of something, to be fair), while there was nothing we could offer her in recompense. Her greatest desire was fulfilled by circumstance: as a nineteen-year-old bombshell, she would never be re-incarcerated in the retirement home. She had other desires, but expressed them only erratically at first. Most significantly, on our twelfth day in seclusion, when we had stopped for lunch, she announced she wished to go to Hungary “to spit upon the graves of my enemies.”
“We don’t have the budget,” said Tristan, and took a bite of his tuna sandwich. He had said nothing about it, but his mysterious revenue stream seemed to be drying up. Deliveries of liquid helium were fewer and further between, and seemed to involve his spending a lot of time in exhausting phone conversations. He kept having to call Frank Oda in to help debug the ODEC, which I could see he felt bad about, since Frank wasn’t getting paid. And he kept pressing our Lukes and our Vladimir into service doing things that, to judge from the looks on their faces, weren’t in their job descriptions. Tristan had always suffered from a certain ADHD-ness, which was alternately charming and exasperating. His phone had lately been going off every few minutes, which made this even worse. He’d programmed it to produce different ringtones and vibrate-patterns for different incoming callers, so he could tell without even looking at it who was bothering him. One of those was a snatch of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March.” It was typical American patriotic bombast, military parade stuff. Overlaid on that was a whole different set of associations based on the fact that it was the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Every so often I would hear it coming out of Tristan’s phone. When it did, he would drop what he was doing and visibly snap to attention and take that call without delay, hurrying off to a quiet part of the building and saying “Sir!” and “Yes, sir!” a lot. Obviously, this was the ringtone he’d assigned to his boss. What I didn’t know, and what I was dying to ask, was its meaning. Was “Liberty Bell March” just a snatch of patriotic music to him, or a wry allusion to an absurdist British comedy show that had been canceled before he had been born?
We were in the office just outside the ODEC, at the small table where I usually interviewed Erszebet. I had been about to suggest we repair outside to stroll down to the Charles, perhaps even drive to Walden Pond for some fresh air and sunshine (it was Memorial Day weekend in New England and we were living, working, and sleeping in a basement under fluorescent lights. I mean really, WTF.). Often I still wonder how things would be different now if I had pressed for such a constitutional. Surely in some other—better—universe, Mel made that suggestion, and so the trio left the building and was not there when General Schneider arrived.
But in our universe, the trio stayed in the basement, having this conversation:
“If you cooperate with us,” Tristan continued, swallowing his bite of tuna salad, “we can probably get funding, and then if you really want to go spit on the graves of your enemies, we can discuss it.” And then, putting down his sandwich, eyes lighting up: “Wait a minute! We can get our own funding. If you can change water to salt water . . . why not change—”
“—lead to gold,” she said with him, with an adolescent groan of disapproval. “Or anything to gold. That is the most unoriginal suggestion in the world. From the dawn of magic this is the first thing people ask of witches.”
“And?” prompted Tristan.
“We don’t do it,” she said. “Obviously.”
“Why not?”
“Ask the Fuckers.”
“What!?” Tristan and I exclaimed in unison. Erszebet had many disagreeable traits, but use of vulgar language was most certainly not one of them.
She was taken aback by our reaction. “The Fuckers,” she said. “You know. The Fuckers.”
Tristan and I looked at each other as if to verify we’d both heard it.
Erszebet laughed in a way that suggested she wasn’t really all that amused. “You people have such dirty minds. It is a perfectly normal German name. Maybe you spell it F-U-G-G-E-R just to be polite.”
“Oh,” I said, “Fugger, as in the old German banking family.”
“As in them, yes.”
“So, back to where we were,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “You’re saying we should ask some old dead German bankers why you don’t change lead into gold.”
“They are not all dead,” Erszebet corrected him. “If you go down to the financial district, you can probably find one right now, sitting in a nice discreet office.”
“Well,” I said, “obviously bankers would have something to say about changing lead into gold.”
“They would not like it,” Erszebet said. And this was the first time I ever got the sense from her that she actually cared whether someone else would or wouldn’t like a thing. She considered Fuggers—or Fuckers, as she pronounced the name—people to be reckoned with.
“Let’s try a different example, if you don’t like gold,” Tristan said. “I’m going to show my cards a little bit more than I usually do.” And he pocketed his phone, which he’d been looking at under the table, and laid both hands on the table’s upper surface—as if literally showing his cards. “To hell with gold. Could you produce enriched uranium?”
She considered it. “The stuff they use in bombs?”
“The stuff they use in bombs.”
She shook her head. “Certainly not. This would cause too much change too quickly, and bad things happen when magic is used that way.”
“What bad things?”
“Bad things,” she said with finality. “Worse than your ‘nukes.’ We don’t even have words to describe them. So we don’t do that.”
“Then there are rules,” I said, opening the laptop to take notes. “Not changing things too quickly is a rule. What are some other rules?”
“There is no rule,” she said. “We just don’t do it. Is there a rule telling you not to jump off a cliff? No. But you don’t do it.”
“What else don’t you do?” asked Tristan.
“What a ridiculous question,” she said. To me: “He only asks ridiculous questions. I hope he is not your lover, because he is not worthy.”
“Why is it a ridiculous question?” pressed Tristan.
“Can you tell me all the things you would not do? No. You only know what not to do when you’re faced with the prospect of doing it. It’s like that with everything, including magic.”
“Can you give me some examples?” he asked with exaggerated patience.
She looked thoughtful, and for a happily deluded moment, we both thought she was going to be cooperative. “I am tired of doing all the giving,” she said. “So. Your turn to give me something. You will give me a cat.”
After a confused pause, I asked, “As a pet?”
“No, as a cat,” she said.
“A live cat?” asked Tristan.
“Of course a live cat! What
would I do with a dead cat?”
“Okay, you can have a cat,” said Tristan indulgently. “We’ll get you a cat next week, as soon as you’ve done something we can show the brass.”
“I will show the brass something after you give me a cat,” she corrected triumphantly.
“Erszebet,” I said in a friendly, intimate tone. “We have no time to go fetch you a cat, or a litterbox, or any of the other stuff a cat needs. But if you would like to be employed again by powerful people, who can give you as many cats as you like, then please cooperate with us for the next few days.”
She pursed her lips and glanced between the two of us. “Put me with those people you speak of. Why am I wasting my time doing stupid tricks for minions?”
“Because these minions have an ODEC,” said Tristan abruptly and openly irritated. “Without this ODEC, you are nothing. And this ODEC is ours. So play nice.”
She gave him a furious, disgusted look. “I want to be very clear with you about something,” she said in a warning tone. “There are many novels in which there is a handsome man and a beautiful woman and they argue all the time and are at odds and constantly clash and it is because secretly they want to make passionate love to each other. That is not the case here.”
At this, Tristan let out a huge guffaw, a rumbling, raucous belly laugh, head thrown back.
“I am serious,” she protested hotly.
“I’m so glad you clarified that,” he said, huffing with laughter. “Because I gotta tell you, with General Schneider breathing down my neck to learn what your magic is good for, with my spending every free waking moment trying to convince him and his bosses that this is useful even if you haven’t already materialized enriched uranium for them, I gotta tell you, when I am so totally preoccupied with your being seen as a valued commodity that the time it takes me to shave feels like a personal overindulgence, I love knowing that your number one priority is devaluing me even more than my bosses want to devalue you. That’s awesome. You’re the best. I’ll be so fucking devastated when they pull the plug on this and you end up in the street without even a nursing home to take care of you.” He stood up and stormed to the far side of the room, his hands at his temples. “Jesus.”
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