‘What stage?’
‘Where it knows it’s vacuous.’
‘Oh. Yeah, I guess so.’ Does it want. Does it want. Jules thinks about all those smug question-answer signs—Why do we ask you to clear your own tray? Why do we ask you to assemble the furniture yourself?—and the way the same products appear and reappear, relentlessly, in different positions, different pairings, sometimes even in places that don’t make sense. Cheerfully oppressive. ‘It’s not really a store anymore, is it?’ Jules says finally. ‘It’s a theme park.’
Adrian fiddles with the edge of his serviette. ‘Girl I used to know couldn’t stand IKEA. Like, not just mass-produced furniture in general—specifically, IKEA. She was full of that, you know—very specific hatred. It was the actress you were standing in for today, actually. She couldn’t even appreciate it ironically. Couldn’t appreciate anything ironically. She never once bought coffee for any of the crew.’
Jules, having entirely forgotten about the Corona girl sitting in her car, feels her flat white expand coldly in her stomach.
Adrian tips the last of his coffee into his mouth and sets the cup back on the saucer. ‘I’d better get going. Nice talking to you.’
‘No worries,’ Jules murmurs. What is she here for again?
Newly caffeinated, Adrian gathers his equipment more swiftly than Jules expected, and bustles out the door in a burst of sunlight.
Jules lets out a gust of breath like one of the Famous Five after a big adventure. By golly. Her body is still positioned in a scrunched-up diagonal, so she twists herself fully into her seat. Her foot knocks against something underneath the table. A plastic buckle scrapes against the café tiles. Having suffered what felt like the entire length of Fitzgerald with that buckle lodged into her shoulder, Jules hardly needs to look down. Adrian’s camera bag.
That solves it. Jules slings the bag over her shoulder, takes a last sip of her flat white, and makes an exit.
Back at the car, Corona girl snaps, ‘What the hell took you so long?’
Jules sighs, plonks the camera bag on Corona girl’s lap and slams the door. ‘Just get your damn memory card. Do whatever the hell you want with it.’
‘What did you even talk about?’
‘Our retail jobs.’ Jules hooks her thumb on the steering wheel. ‘He mentioned you, by the way.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘He said you never once bought coffee for the crew.’
‘Typical.’ Corona girl rips open the bag and tosses it in the backseat. She flips over the camera, digging her nail under some secret panel. ‘He just doesn’t get it. For a filmmaker he’s not all that perceptive.’
‘Well—’
‘Oh, you fuck.’ Corona girl glares at the empty socket where the memory card should be.
‘So much for that,’ Jules says and shrugs.
‘He knows! He knew what you were up to!’
‘Guess he was pretty perceptive aft—’
‘What’s wrong with you? I bet you’ve never even sabotaged a game of tic-tac-toe in your life!’
‘I’m not sure how to point this out politely,’ Jules says, ‘but you’re still in my car.’
‘Gah.’ Corona girl presses her palms to her eyes, rotating them with an aggression that makes Jules wince. ‘How can I make you get this? What do I have to do to make you understand? It’s like I’m talking to a brick wall!’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Okay!’ Corona flings her hands away from her face. ‘What’s the most annoying product you can think of?’
The sunlight is bearing down hard on Jules’s back. She thinks her body’s going to start buzzing like an overheated computer. ‘I don’t know. I don’t get annoyed at very many things.’
‘No, don’t give me that. What makes you tick? Think about... okay, think about music. Yeah, I bet you hate music. I bet a lot of it just gets under your skin. And I don’t mean shit that everybody finds annoying. No, something that goes deeper than that.’ Corona girl looks Jules up and down, taking in her approximate age and history in one sweep. ‘Avril Lavigne.’
‘What?’
‘Avril Lavigne. That’s who you hate.’
‘What.’
‘You would’ve been in late high school when she first came out. I bet you were one of those outsider kids, right? There you are, flying under the radar with your shitty misfit bangs, reading all the wrong magazines and watching all the wrong TV shows, and then Avril comes along and everyone thinks you’re meant to like her because she supposedly represents everything you’re going through. She’s safely unconventional. She wears ties, for fuck’s sake, in the most tepid appropriation of nothing. She’s trying to sell outsiderness back to you. Some glamorous version of it. Pseudo empowerment. I’m not talking about whatever the hell she does now, I’m talking about her first entry, her embittered, eyelined, generically rebellious teenage incarnation.
‘And that’s what made her more insidious than every Britney, Christina, or whatever doll-faced cash cow they tried to sell you before. Now they’re taking the identity you specifically cultivated to resist all that fakery and they’ve turned it into a package. Turned the rejection of packages into a package. They’re prescribing the terms of your rebellion. They’re trying to fix it down, and so they’re invalidating the sincerity of your own identity, your own actions.
‘And that,’ Corona girl says, ‘is why Adrian’s fake indie film is the spawn of fucking Satan. That’s why I oppose it, and that’s why you should too.’
And as the sun injects a buzzing swarm of static into her head, Jules wonders what the inside of Corona girl’s brain must look like. If Jules sliced Corona girl from hairline to chin to reveal a cross-section of skull, she imagines she’d see a brachial network of colored wires and a ticking bomb, digits spilling to zero, and you can’t stop it because you don’t know what leads to what, can’t trace the logic of any of Corona girl’s bizarre conclusions.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Corona girl snaps.
And Jules decides that she’d really like her afternoon back.
‘Of course I’m listening to you. You sound like a first-year who’s discovering capitalism for the first time. Everyone is a package. Everyone knows that everyone is a package. You’re just outraged at the packages that are the worst at hiding it. What you’re saying is old news.’
‘Oh, right, so that’s your solution. Complacency is complicity, you know.’
‘I’m not complicit. I know what you’re talking about, I’m just saying it’s old news. This thing with Adrian’s film has already happened to supposed garage-to-recording-studio musicians, except the garage was MySpace. You and your little Fuck the Man revolution are decades too late. And please get out of my car.’
‘But this isn’t a Fuck the Man thing! This is personal! This is me, us—my face, your body—being used. It’s one thing to just let it wash over you and be smugly self-aware about it, but it’s another thing to be a participant. A perpetrator. This affects me, this affects you, on a personal level, don’t you get it?’
And then Corona girl reaches some previously unattained level of untranscribability.
‘Yes, I know this is old news. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I know—yawn—some people over there are doing a thing, people way over there, in the distance, far apart from me, doing a thing. Yes. Yes. Boring, right? Well don’t worry because I am so bored right now. Yes. I am bored but I am also, well, I am also livid, bored and livid, do you understand? Things just—things just don’t cease to be evil when they’re boring and old, you know.’
Corona girl is staring at her with such fluorescent intensity that Jules has to look away. She watches a mother cross the road with her kid in tow, and cars walloping over speed bumps with a kind of oceanic buoyancy. Indifferent as assembly line commodities. She’s thirsty. Her mouth is dry with the taste of coffee. She can almost perceive the microfoam yellowing on her tongue.
Jules sighs. ‘Adrian didn’t even say what the fi
lm was for.’
‘No,’ Corona girl says, relieved. ‘He didn’t ask your permission.’
‘He gave me the impression it was all part of his thesis project.’
‘He didn’t get the full permission of the crew, either.’
‘He didn’t tell me what the film was about.’
‘He’s an asshole.’ Corona girl drops back down in her seat.
Jules rests her hand on the gear stick. She’s still trying to coax herself into caring completely but she’s still only approximating it. It might have to do. She sighs again. ‘What now?’
It’s impossible for Jules to think of herself as resembling Corona girl, not even for a ten-second take spliced into a narrative that’s become, in Jules’s imagination, a swirling black hole. Even with Corona girl’s head turned to the window, darkly observing the hotel apartments and a fenced golf course, Jules isn’t sure if there could ever be a resemblance. Corona girl is just too keenly present, so aggressively foreground, in a way that Jules will never be.
‘What’s the film about, anyway?’
Corona girl glances at her. ‘It was an experiment.’
‘In what?’
Corona girl rethinks. ‘A series of experiments. This movie—it’s old footage. We’ve been playing with it for years. The purpose always evolves. At first it was meant to be a short silent film that looped perfectly back on itself, so it could be played continuously.’
‘Has that been done before?’
‘I’m not saying it was new. It was just a particular challenge we set for ourselves.’
‘Okay. And then it evolved?’
‘Yes. Because of QR codes.’
‘QR codes?’
‘You’ve seen them. On movie posters. Magazines. Posters for stores. Those squares, like a pixelated Rorschach test.’
‘Oh, those.’
‘Object hyperlinking, right. We wanted to mark the landscape with our film. Hide it all over the city. That’s why it was so perfect that the movie was looped. It could be divided up into segments. You could start anywhere and hunt for more fragments. The effect was even better if the location of the QR code corresponded with the location in which the segment was shot. There you were, watching events taking place in the very spot you’re standing. Like watching ghosts. But this isn’t new either. I bet somebody’s already done it before. It was just for us.’
‘So the film is actually finished?’
‘More like, at one stage, there was a complete film, a particular edit that would have worked. What Adrian’s doing now, he’s just expanding it, recutting old footage, inserting new footage. Making it sellable. Making it fit the next purpose.’
‘But why your film?’
‘It could be anyone’s film. I don’t know how they found Adrian. Maybe they found his pretentious website. Or maybe his style has just the right amount of edginess and the right amount of mediocrity. You gotta have both. You gotta be an Avril. Here, take this exit.’
Jules indicates off the freeway. Negotiates the merge. ‘Who’s “they”?’
Jules glances over at Corona girl, but she doesn’t say anything.
Does it want.
They drive past a post-apocalyptically silent Chicken Treat installed in a shopping mall that seems permanently under construction, witches’ hats scattered like Minesweeper flags all over the buckled tarmac. Cars queue up at the KFC drive thru. The university billboard across the road advises: It’s the brightest minds that will make tomorrow better.
Corona girl directs Jules to the empty staff parking lot.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jules says as she turns the car off.
‘I don’t know.’
It’s a more austere campus than Jules’s alma mater. Even for a Sunday, there’s a particular desolation to it. Corona girl pushes her iPhone deep in her pocket, slings Adrian’s camera bag across her chest and marches down the path with the authority of a post-disaster rescue operative. The Film and Television building is concrete gray, an Orwellian ministry humming with vending machines. Jules follows Corona girl through a side door, up a stairwell that makes multi-level car park fire escapes look cosy. At the top of the stairs, at a red door, Corona girl retrieves a faded student card from her back pocket and swipes it. A medical blip.
They move through a corridor and into a classroom lined end-to-end with anaemic Mac terminals, the monitors blank-faced as cult members. Jules sees the signs of Adrian—City Surf bag, blister pack of blue Halls, bent STFU card—at the one terminal that’s awake, linked up to a projector that casts its images onto a giant screen pulled over the whiteboard. They’ve caught the film in mid-transition—now, fading in: the face of a young woman, expressive and open, lifting an orange telephone receiver. Corona girl. A strange thrill of recognition ripples through Jules. Completely soundless, the film has a paradoxical energy—a kind of consciousness, alertness. Jules looks at Corona girl. Awash in her own light, her eyes flick around the room, completely disinterested in the screen.
The medical blip sounds. The door springs open. Jules turns back and comes face to face with Adrian—wallet tucked under his armpit, student card between his lips—protecting, in his gentle hand, a thin paper cup of Nescafé.
Adrian takes the card from his mouth and lets the door click shut. ‘Jules. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m just the driver.’
She steps away so Adrian and Corona girl can look at each other unobstructed, but what she doesn’t expect is for the atmosphere to change the way that it does. For it to become so warm, not with animosity, but like old friends meeting. Long lost comrades-in-arms.
‘What are you doing here?’ Adrian asks, now a curiously lonely question.
Corona girl tightens her lip. Her on-screen counterpart leans into the telephone receiver tenderly. ‘You lied to her,’ she says, pointing at Jules. ‘She wants her part of the film back.’
‘You’re getting real lousy at sabotaging my movie. Is that my camera?’
‘You broke their rules.’
‘Oh yeah. I’ve broken their rules loads of times by now.’ Adrian motions at the screen with his paper cup. ‘This character isn’t just you anymore. There are four or five others I’ve used. In snippets, like I was shooting today with Jules. Who knows. Maybe if I keep at it long enough you’ll be edited out completely.’
‘Edited out completely.’ Corona girl nods. Her face flickers as if she’s trying to decide whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing.
‘It’s kinda cool, actually. Like that other experiment we did ages ago, remember, when we tried to get as many people as possible playing the one guy—’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
Adrian shrugs, lets out a little disbelieving laugh like a stand-up comedian trying to get the audience on his side. ‘You disappeared. What was I meant to do?’
Corona girl bristles. ‘Who says you’re meant to do anything? Are they making you do this?’
‘No! Of course not. It’s a collaboration. And shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t that be how it goes? Our work doesn’t have to be invalid just because there’s corporate interest involved. We can’t do it alone. They can’t do it alone.’
‘It’s a phoney power shift. You know it is.’
On the screen, Corona girl runs down a Perth street made unfamiliar by the pace of the shot, wearing the same outfit that Jules wore today—or, perhaps more accurately, the outfit that Corona girl is wearing right now, in real life. Dark red leather jacket, black jeans, Converse high-tops. Everything except for the gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
Adrian does that disbelieving laugh again. A drop of Nescafé jumps the paper rim. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t get what you’re trying to do here. This was our project. Whatever you delete or destroy I can find again. I can recut and rebuild. I can reshoot the whole damn film. That was your whole philosophy at the beginning, wasn’t it? Continuity’s a cheap trick. Everything can be repurposed.’
At
that moment the film arrives at Jules’s scene. The jump. They all have to look at it—Adrian, Jules, Corona girl. Bathed in pixels.
There’s something about the way she falls.
The artful cut to black.
And in the reverberating darkness, Corona girl shuts her eyes softly. She takes in a quiet, deep breath, like a ballerina about to pivot into her opening position, about to embark on the most astounding and convincing performance of her life. Or at least this is what Jules thinks at first, but it must have been a sigh of resignation instead, because when the Corona girl opens her eyes she unslings the camera bag and holds it out to Adrian. He takes it in his spare hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Adrian finally says, and for some reason Jules knows that it’s true.
Corona girl glances at the screen and back again. ‘You know, sometimes I wish it were real. That all the shit we buy and believe in could actually level the playing field. Like it was actually possible for us to make whatever we wanted to make, without all these other considerations entering into it.’
‘Of course it’s possible for us to make whatever we want to make. It’s why we started doing this. What you’ve always said. Nothing is permanent. Nothing can’t be redone.’
Their eyes meet just as the film begins again.
The Motorola whirs in Jules’s pocket. The ringtone cuts in a second later, and, like characters in a dream sensing their time is up, Adrian and Corona girl look at Jules.
Jules fishes the Motorola from her pocket and flips it open just as the caller hangs up. One missed call, the phone reports. Elena.
As Jules wonders whether it’d be rude to call Elena back, the phone perks up with a text message. Sorry! Meant to call someone else. Did you say you were coming back home btw?
Corona girl and Adrian are still staring at Jules. Jules feels obligated to apologize, but she finds herself saying something different. ‘Look. This is a sweet moment and all, but I have to go.’
She finds her car keys, slides her phone back into her pocket. She steps out of the film’s light, edges past Corona girl, past Adrian. Depresses the handle of the red door.
‘Jules.’
Rubik Page 4