Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  She closes her internet browser, opens a compiler instead, and starts to play.

  She’s stopped caring about music, clothes, films, books, games (except, dimly, Angels of the Embers, and that’s really only nostalgia) food and sex; all that’s left are mucking about on the internet and this.

  It began as a mess of different projects: she needed to learn new programming languages, and to keep herself from entirely losing the ability to do complex maths. Now, though, it’s wonderfully pointless. She sets up a loop of programs talking to each other in different languages, passing a package of data between them, in a pipeline of digital channels that forms a maze, a labyrinth, a collaborative work of art. It’s possible to turn the results into visual images and in the end she does this, watching the pixels dance into shapes that are like clouds and river systems but also like architecture. But in a way this isn’t where the beauty of it lies for her. It’s the complexification itself, existing somewhere between her mind and the computer, the moment when it seems to lift away from both like a bubble into brief, spontaneous life.

  She turns out the lights at last, and remembers she has a guest.

  “Hullo, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she says, and waves into the empty room.

  It takes longer than she’s used to to fall asleep. If this on top of everything else is going to go wrong too...! But she hasn’t forgotten what to do, so she drags herself up and goes and cleans the bathroom. Girls in trouble, she thinks as she tries to wipe a smear off the mirror that turns out to be a shadow on the wall behind her. What a mortifying category to belong to.

  But when she returns to bed, sleep comes with delicious speed, dark and velvety as it settles over her like a crow on its nest. She does wake once in the night, with a confused sense of the slope of the mattress being wrong, as if someone’s resting beside her. But she rolls over and plummets back into sleep, and when she wakes again, doesn’t remember it at all.

  It’s just before nine. After only a short struggle, Grace gets up and is in the shower before it occurs to her to think about her dreams.

  She can just remember something about building a very complicated book case, and the colour yellow.

  She raises her eyebrows at herself. She hadn’t thought she was so suggestible. But she’s not about to complain about it.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on December 10th, 2012, 22:44 pm (GMT):

  so hey did LEVANTER-SLEET do any good?

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on December 10th, 2012, 23:09 pm (GMT):

  I guess he did! Tell him he’s a good demon.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on December 18th, 2012, 04:04 am (GMT):

  i can’t tell him anything.

  HER LUCK DOESN’T, in any larger way, change overnight. The odd bad dream or two still gets through, but they’re more about missing trains and failing exams and less about mass suicides and plague, and when she wakes she says “Tsk, tsk, Mr Levanter-Sleet, you’re slipping!” instead of weeping under the blankets.

  She starts having coffee with Luke from the Jobcentre after their appointments. His sunburn and his redundancy turn out both to be courtesy of the British Army, and he is amazed – a little too amazed, really– to have met a woman who likes playing computer games. They have already discussed the disappointing third Angels of the Embers sequel half to death. It isn’t quite enough to get her actually looking forward to her appointments, but it does work very nicely as an incentive to get through them without screaming or throwing anything.

  Still, once or twice things are so bad that she stops moving in the middle of getting dressed and has to curl up on the floor for minutes on end before she can go on.

  Then she finds a new comment on her weeks-old ‘post of angst.’

  From_Jupiter on December 20th, 2012, 14:24 pm (DST)

  Hey, sorry I’m getting to this late. RL crazy. So, are things still this bad? Because you don’t sound well, dude. “I hate being awake and I hate being asleep”????? Just look at that, would you? If it was anyone else talking like this, you’d have tucked them under your arm and marched them to the doctor months ago. You have socialised medicine over there. Go take advantage while it lasts.

  Grace stiffens, baffled and slightly offended, then rereads her post.

  She nearly replies that things are in fact somewhat better, it’s only being awake that’s a problem now, but then realises that might not be very reassuring.

  She types, in the end:

  Thank you.

  GRACE IS LUCKY with the anti-depressants. Several of her friends online have had awful trouble finding anything that works, and the doctor warns her she won’t feel better for at least a fortnight; actually things start to feel less dreadful within a week. She feels mildly dizzy for a day or two, but that soon wears off.

  The only other side-effects are the dreams. The leaflet in the box with the pills warns that this can happen, but anything’s better than the nightmares – and these are good dreams, really. It’s only that night after night they grow in detail and complexity, until they’re sometimes exhausting. A painted city carved into the walls of a canyon. A tunnel that’s also a garden, opening at both ends to whirling stars. Building a cathedral in a desert of blood red sand. Impossible shapes, and music she can’t remember when she wakes up. And there’s someone beside her yet half out-of-sight, a pillar of shadow with clawed hands that help her build, bright eyes that watch her climb.

  She would wonder why it isn’t frightening, but the figure is somehow so unobtrusively part of everything else, that she never questions its company, or retains more than the faintest residue of its presence in her brain when she wakes.

  SHE SITS WITH Luke on a bench on Hampstead Heath. Bars of shadow stretch over the grass, longer than the height of the bare trees and the level of the chilly red sun seem to warrant.

  Luke’s started applying for jobs in security, on the Jobcentre’s orders. But he’s not physically intimidating, despite experience of carrying a gun around, and probably does not convincingly project actually wanting to do it.

  “I’m going to be out of the army, I want to be out of the army,” he tells Grace. “Not army-lite.” He frowns into the middle distance. “I think I’ll open a flower shop. Call it Guns and Roses.”

  Grace feels slightly guilty about telling him she’s just had an interview that seemed to go really well, though she knows she’s being silly. But Luke is delighted for her. So – not quite to celebrate, because she hasn’t got the job yet – and not quite to console him because of course he doesn’t need it – she buys him a drink. Then she takes him home to play computer games and when they’ve blown up enough things they get into her bed. Collapsed over him, afterwards, Grace thinks that remembering the reason why people make so much fuss about this almost makes forgetting in the first place worthwhile.

  Around three in the morning, she wakes and finds Luke sitting on the edge of the bed, taking long, slow, deliberate breaths. She reaches for his shoulder, finds it damp with sweat and he flinches slightly.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Just – bad dream.”

  She strokes his back in silence and thinks, of course, the army. They get this, a lot, don’t they – he hasn’t told her anything, but surely he must have seen awful things.

  Or done them, possibly. But then Luke lies down, looking so wan and battered, she’s ashamed of herself.

  “People were stabbing themselves in the eyes,” he whispers.

  Grace kisses him and strokes his hair, then lies beside him and drifts straight back into a wonderful dream about a labyrinth in a forest full of flowering creepers and a black shape, stamping sullenly along a parallel path, just the other side of the hedge.

  EVEN THOUGH THE interview went so well, even though she was nearly sure she’d got it, when the email comes through she still knows it will be a rejection. When it says I would be delighted to offer you the position of Systems Administrator, she has to read it several times to be sure she’s unders
tood it properly.

  It’s not exactly what she wants but she’ll get, at last, to train in C-bloody-# and the money is decent and she doesn’t have to go back to the Jobcentre on Tuesdayand she feels she could turn into a bright vapour of relief and float away.

  When her first paycheque comes through, she calls friends she’s been too miserable to talk to all this time and goes into a cocktail bar in Soho. She still shudders at drinks that cost £8 but orders them anyway – and wonders, too late, if it was unkind to bring Luke here, when he still can’t do this, can only accept what she buys for him. He doesn’t seem at ease – little to say for himself, pale under the fading remains of the tan.

  But on the last Tube home Grace watches their reflections in the black mirror of the opposite window and it’s nice, to see them from the outside; a young couple companionably sprawled over each other, half-drunk and half-asleep. She dozes, and imagines she sees two points of pale light reflected above her head; a black shape, blacker even than the tunnel walls, protectively crouched over her.

  Luke jolts awake beside her with an embarrassing cry of alarm, shocking other passengers. He flushes and sits up straight, mumbles something about more dreams and people turning into trees, which doesn’t sound so horrific but evidently was. The phrase doesn’t like boys scrolls through Grace’s mind before being instantly censored.

  LUKE’S BEEN OUT of contact long enough that Grace is starting, crossly, to suspect she’s been dumped. But then his Facebook is suddenly crammed with Get Well Soon messages along with anxious inquiries from people who, like her, don’t know what on earth has happened. Grace leaves a similar message and a few voicemails and texts on his phone and eventually, Luke does call her. “Are you okay?” she asks at once, and there’s a long silence.

  “I’ve been in hospital,” says Luke quietly, and she hears him swallow. “I’ll just say it, I guess. I... everything... got away from me and I... cut my wrists. A bit. And...”

  “Fuck,” gasps Grace. “Luke, Christ. I’m, God, I had no idea...” (but is that completely true?) “I’m so sorry.”

  Luke sighs, weary and staticky across the radiowaves. “It kind of crept up on me. I mean, yes, there’s the whole Unemployed Ex-Military thing but I just... thought I was handling it all right. But evidently not. So. I’m clearly not exactly in a relationships position at present.”

  “Okay. I mean, anything you want, of course. But, if there’s anything I can... if I can help at all...”

  Luke hesitates. “No,” he says carefully. “I really like you. But I don’t feel I can be around you.” He sounds puzzled at himself. Apologetic.

  “Right,” says Grace. And again, “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” says Luke.

  Grace lays the phone down gently and carefully on her desk. “You vicious bastard, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she whispers, and then runs out of the room and out of the house, away from what has happened and from having said that.

  THAT NIGHT SHE has horrible nightmares for the first time in months. The next night she puts off going to bed as long as she can, sculpting with code to soothe herself until three in the morning, and that’s followed by some of the richest, most complex dreams yet (worlds of staircases and stars; whispering places under the sea).

  She forces herself to believe it doesn’t feel as if someone is making a point.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on March 30th, 2013, 05:12 am (GMT):

  I really need Mr LEVANTER-SLEET back.

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on March 30th, 2013, 09:49 am (GMT):

  Fine. Take him then.

  Seven_Magpies sent you a direct message on April 1st, 2013, 03:32 am (GMT):

  I’ve tried and tried.

  THEY HAVEN’T UNFRIENDED each other on Facebook, so she continues, feeling mildly stalkerish, to keep an eye on Luke. He doesn’t post much over the months that follow, never anything very personal (unless perhaps he does and she’s on a restricted access list). She can’t tell how he’s doing. But he’s alive, and he’s away from her and she knows those facts can’t be related.

  SHE MOVES OUT of the house-share and gets a place of her own in Archway, still offensively expensive for what and where it is, but it’s wonderful to have her own sitting room and to do the washing up in her own damn time. Nevertheless, she’s no longer quite so blissfully grateful for employment that she enjoys running to the assistance of every idiot who’s forgotten their password. There’s a particularly annoying creature in Client Solutions called Jawad, who appears to believe it’s charming that he can barely make a computer turn on, besides which he’s into amateur theatre and keeps muttering Shakespeare to himself in the office kitchen when he makes coffee. The worst of it is, she has to go to the play; Jawad has got everyone in the office going and the company is very into Team Bonding, so she knows it’ll look bad if she doesn’t.

  The theatre is a black box studio above a pub in Camden, and when she files in among the rest, Jawad is standing alone in the half-dark on the stage, wearing vaguely Victorian military dress, a brace on his leg and a hump on his back. Then the lights come up and Grace braces herself for the worst as Jawad starts telling them that a war has ended and he can’t stand peace.

  It’s some time before Grace even comes back to herself enough to put into words that he’s wonderful. The play is wonderful, but the pace flags noticeably whenever Jawad is offstage, which fortunately isn’t often. Jawad surges through it all: restless brilliance and sarcasm and rage. By the end the charm’s gone, she can see his mind coming to pieces and yet, though she knows he has to die, she’s sorry to see it happen.

  “That was amazing.And I never even liked Shakespeare before this, I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have to,” she tells him in the bar afterwards, still stunned into tactless truth,

  “That’s the best thing you could say,” says Jawad. Now Richard has gone, he seems like someone new. His hair – harshly slicked back for the play, lightly gelled for work – is tousled over his forehead. “I was too shy to even audition for anything when I was at university. So I have to get it out of my system now.”

  “You should be a professional,” says Grace.

  Jawad shakes his head wistfully, “I admit, I do sometimes dream of the RSC descending in glory to whisk me away. But I have friends who are pros, and it’s so hard – I don’t think I could live that way. Also it would count as matricide if I tried it, so here we are.”

  Watching someone act in a play is surely a terrible reason for changing one’s mind so thoroughly about a person, but Grace finds she keeps thinking about the bit when he seduced Lady Anne and hoping his computer will go wrong so he’ll drag her over to fix it.

  Fortunately Jawad remains an utter idiot with his computer.

  He gets into another play almost immediately and Grace helps him run lines in the kitchen at lunch. They linger talking on the steps of St Paul’s after work and, at last, kiss at the Tube station and Grace goes home, her body humming with excitement and fear.

  She is surely no longer a Girl in Trouble, so Mr Levanter-Sleet would probably have wandered off by now, even if he were real. But it’s been eight months since Luke, and she doesn’t really believe in nine-foot skeleton demons made of shadows who don’t like boys.

  (Though she’s off the anti-depressants now, she still has those beautiful, elaborate dreams).

  She wakes up beside Jawad one Sunday morning and studies him anxiously as he sleeps, but his face is smooth and quiet, black eyelashes lying still on his cheeks. Nothing happens. Does it? He never mentions nightmares, she never sees him moving restlessly in his sleep. But is he a little more subdued, does it mean anything when he decides he’s too tired and busy to go to the next audition that comes up, or the next?

  Then one morning he wakes with a groan and puts both hands to his face and Grace asks “What?” while cold rinses through her blood.

  “Are you brewing LSD under the bed?” says Jawad. “I always ha
ve the most messed up dreams when I sleep here!”

  “You didn’t say anything,” says Grace, almost accusingly. Jawad shrugs. “What was it about?”

  “Drowning,” says Jawad, and something hollows in his expression. “It’s often drowning... and it went on and on and on.”

  “And this always happens when you sleep here?”

  “‘For never yet one hour in her bed, Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep’,” says Jawad hammily, “‘but have been wakened by my hideous dreams.’” Though that wasn’t his line, Grace remembers – that was Lady Anne. Talking about the evil king she’d married.

  She’s suddenly weak with affection for him. All this time he’s borne it.

  “Would you say,” she asks carefully, “that it’s getting worse?”

  Jawad doesn’t answer for a while. When he makes himself smile again she can see the effort, but there’s nothing but warmth when he folds her into his arms. “Never mind,” he says. “You’re worth it.”

  “Leave him alone. You leave him the fuck alone, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she hisses into the bathroom mirror when Jawad is gone. “And you can drag my brain through hell all night long, I don’t care, you’re not getting him.”

  You sent Seven_Magpies a direct message on November 12th, 2013, 22:16 pm (GMT):

  I need to see you.

  OF COURSE THE lift isn’t working. Of course Seven Magpies has to live at the very top of the tower. Grace slogs grimly upwards, past ripped binbags, through a stubborn reek of urine, floor after floor, and rehearses what she’s going to say to Morgane when she sees her. How could you do this to me. Fix it. Fix it fucking now. Panting she lurches onto the top floor.