Rubik
Page 5
Adrian walks down the row of blank monitors, sets down his camera, wallet, and paper cup at his terminal. He executes a series of quick clicks, and then pulls a cheap blue flash drive from the USB port. ‘Here,’ he says, tossing it to Jules, who barely catches it. ‘It’s all the stuff we shot today. You can hang on to it.’
Jules casts a final glance at Corona girl: hollow now, like those first pure CGI movie characters. Those unnerving stares. ‘Thanks,’ Jules says. ‘Um. Good luck.’
And, perhaps Jules imagines it—perhaps her eye wants to see this, out of loyalty to some sense of continuity—but, just as she steps beyond the red door, letting it return home, click shut, she thinks she glimpses the Corona girl slip a hand behind her jacket. Reaching into the waistband of her jeans.
The falling body will, in some ways, come to stand for a generation, its privileges and anxieties, the tension between intent and accident, a persistent narrative that delegates control to something external and omniscient—gravity, mathematics—her image, a perfect mimesis of the forces that will make her iconic, an exercise in recursion—across her endless cultural iterations she will evade identification—for some she may even escape context, the pastiche encountered before the original—but in the everlasting present tense she is both active subject and passive object—plunging like a syringe into memory—the poise of her muscles, her action-ready limbs—announcing that she jumps knowingly, and accepts the impact to come.
Jules finds herself lying on her stomach with her face squashed into her pillow, sleep-encrusted eyes, head full of static. Her phone is lodged into her upper thigh. She arches her back, digging down there to excavate it. The time is 8:09 PM.
Her temple aches with the memory of the sun. She rolls onto her back, and in that sluggish turn she catches sight of the cheap blue flash drive on her bedside table. She groans.
Elena had gone somewhere by the time Jules arrived home. Not that she thinks she can tell Elena about any of it. Not only because Jules doesn’t want to piss off Corona girl, or whoever’s pulling the strings with Adrian’s film, but because, like the root of all her troubles today, she feels like she has absolutely no context.
She grasps the flash drive and flicks the cap off with her thumb. She drags her Acer out from under a pile of clothes, powers up, brushes lint off the keyboard. She hears one of her other housemates flush the toilet, and another boiling the kettle. There’s only one file on the flash drive, and a gigantic one at that—Adrian must have shifted all his other files off, rather than shifting this one on. Jules double-clicks.
And re-watches that part of her day, looping over and over. Each fall is different but she always returns, like a typewriter sliding back into position, or a teleportation device malfunctioning relentlessly, blinking her backwards and backwards. She’s already forgotten the chosen take. The loops are becoming indistinguishable.
Backwards, backwards.
Like a thought you just can’t get over.
Rocketing through that starry sky in reverse.
She remembers Elena’s timely missed call and smiles. Perhaps if Elena had not called, Jules would still be stuck there, with Adrian and Corona girl, sucked into their plot, transfixed not because she was invested in the drama but because of her peculiar listlessness, the Jules Valentine circuitry that found the whole day less of an emotional rollercoaster than a mildly perplexing see-saw ride.
She ejects the flash drive and recaps it. A possible birthday present, she thinks, for Elena. Inside knowledge on whatever shit goes down when Adrian’s film is released, if it gets released at all. A sly wink that won’t make any sense until sometime after Elena’s birthday, perhaps, or maybe it’ll be just in time. Jules likes the idea of that. Subtle. Maybe not enough to beat STFU cards. But still pretty cool.
Jules drops the flash drive in her bedside table drawer. She rubs the broken skin on her lower back. Tomorrow is Monday, a work day, and she expects a slightly thicker layer of dust, instructions for maze reconfigurations, a new special at the cafeteria. The static in her head buzzes at a softer frequency. She hopes she remembered to wash her uniform.
Light
She remembers the first time she inserted a contact lens—the mild itch, the initial distortion like peering into an oily lake. The pop of air when the lens fastened to her eye (remember that it wants to be in your eye, the optometrist said)—and then, perception, a sharpness she had been accustomed to believing was unnatural, reserved only for televisions or computer screens or photography. Do people really see like this all the time, she thought, sitting in the car on the way to school, marvelling that the world can be a hard, bright place, each object discrete and outlined.
It’s not the same with glasses, she thinks. You can always see the frame, the division between clarity and natural sight. Beyond the frame is pure peripheral ambiguity.
When she was very young, she used to pretend her spectacles were a unique body graft, like a mechanized limb. She had been the only child in her class who wore glasses. ‘Why does that girl need to wear those?’ she once heard a classmate whisper—not maliciously, but to a six-year-old kid there’s no difference.
‘I AM NOT A GIRL,’ she announced in her Outside Voice. ‘I AM A ROBOT. I HAVE THREE LIGHT-PROCESSING SETTINGS FOR OPTIMAL VISION VERSATILITY. THESE SETTINGS ARE, ONE: MAXIMUM-POWER MODE. TWO: POWER-SAVING MODE. THREE: OFF. MY ABILITY TO COPE WITH SENSORY DATA THEREFORE EXCEEDS YOURS. I AM A SUPERIOR BEING.’
A lunchtime spent in Time Out and a parent-teacher meeting did little to change her perspective. She christened herself Robobec, or BECCA, which—given her recent discovery and appreciation of acronyms—translated into Body of Exceptional Cunning, Coordination and Adaptability.
The teacher condemned BECCA’s outburst but admired her vocabulary. BECCA’s mother wasn’t sure how to tell the teacher that this vocabulary was a direct result of BECCA’s particular TV and medical pamphlet diet, fed to her in an attempt to surmount the child’s initial dismay at wearing glasses. The incident at school was less an outburst than a recitation of a prepared statement.
Her parents decided BECCA needed more extracurricular activities, new outlets to siphon away her contempt for the non-mechanized.
For her outdoor activity, they chose netball, where, outside the goal circle, precision was not so crucial. Non-spectacled perception is not blindness—the way cartoons depict stumbling nerds with arms outstretched when their glasses have been knocked off—but more like an Impressionist painting: semblance without detail. Soft reality. Without glasses, BECCA could easily identify and pass the ball to members of her team and stay within the right lines. She played netball until the end of high school.
For her indoor activity, the parents chose piano lessons. Hard reality would only suffice here, as even in children’s books the musical notation is small, subtle as Braille. Perhaps her parents supposed that BECCA ought to learn to privilege other senses besides sight. Both her piano playing and netball improved when she switched to contact lenses just before her seventeenth birthday: she liked to think of herself, finally, as possessing 180 degree vision, the fog beyond the spectacle rim suddenly incorporated seamlessly into her perception. Her contact lenses were her most favorite things in the world, and it seemed criminal to discard them at the end of each month. It wants to be in my eye, she remembered, and it pleased her to think of her lenses as sentient.
This ocular upgrade coincided with BECCA receiving her driver’s licence. Without hesitation she put herself down as an organ donor, ticking all the boxes except cornea.
Throughout BECCA’s life, her corneas have been the topic of much inquiry. Keratoconus, the ophthalmologist called it, a degenerative disorder in which the cornea thins and the eye becomes conical. Each year, BECCA’s lenses thicken in parallel with her pointed eyeballs—but one day, she is warned, her sight might degenerate beyond the help of contact lenses.
Now, at nearly thirty years old, the possibility of losing her eyesight fills her with grief, but
she remembers the last attribute of BECCA, Adaptability, and swears she will adapt. A piano accompanist for choirs and solo performers, she investigates measures that will allow her to continue her occupation. It will be difficult, she knows, but entirely possible. At her ophthalmologist’s advice, she joins the waiting list for corneal transplants.
Sometimes she smiles at remembering her six-year-old self, who translated her deficiency into versatility, different perceptual modes. In a way it could be true, she thinks, because it can be exhausting sometimes to see everything so sharply. She remembers one night when she forgot to remove her lenses, and woke up to a world that was invasively bright, her eyes peculiarly airless as if sealed with cling wrap. On some weekends she sits outside in power-saving mode, enjoying soft reality, its muted brushstrokes.
One day, after BECCA exceeds thirty, an individual vacates the corneas that BECCA will inherit. Notified of this availability, she is permitted a few facts about the donor: woman, twenty-five, Western Australia. These details coalesce in BECCA’s mental index, codified as a default avatar, a silhouette in a square.
Corneal transplants are most successful when performed within twenty-four hours of the donor’s death, so BECCA does not have long to say goodbye to her own corneas. She has learnt that although corneal transplants do not necessitate the donor and recipient to be matched, there is still a chance her body might reject the corneas. As she succumbs to anaesthesia, she thinks of this risk, and thinks of herself anew as Robobec—her parts modifiable, improvable. She enters off-mode with the faintest smile.
After the operation and recovery, BECCA still needs contact lenses, but because her eyeballs are now of a more conventional shape, her prescription is simpler. It doesn’t disappoint her at all that she must still wear lenses, that she may still perceive both hard and soft reality. For detecting signs of transplant rejection, she is supplied with a new acronym, RSVP: Redness, Sensitivity to light, Vision loss, Pain.
In that first month she enjoys scrutinising her eyes for stitches, the little nylon darts that point to her pupil. It is a most pleasing recursive act, to perceive what allows her to perceive. She is fascinated by her body.
She thinks frequently of her donor: the lawful unknowability of her. BECCA has determined the most statistically probable cause of death of this woman, twenty-five, Western Australia. At every traffic intersection she wonders if this was the place, or this, or this; she wonders what it was that her donor saw last. It fills BECCA with sad warmth that light may still touch her donor’s eyes, may pass through, may become meaning.
It is not clear to BECCA what happened to her own discarded corneas. Perhaps, so thin and unwanted, they simply dissolved upon removal; or, perhaps they are kept in a lab cabinet for further inspection, supine in womb-like liquid. When she sits down at the piano for important recitals, she wonders if her old corneas will choose this moment to exercise vengeance from beyond the grave, to RSVP aggressively. It can happen any time, she’s told, even years later when the stitches are gone and the new corneas have assimilated to her convexity.
BECCA has given the transplant coordinator a letter of gratitude addressed to the donor’s family, kept on-file somewhere, for when the family decide they are ready to receive it. Her transplant coordinator tells her that BECCA’s post-op progress is monitored, logged, and reported back to the donor’s family. It is only these data, this fact of her wellbeing, that BECCA exchanges with the donor’s parents.
Two years later, when BECCA is renewing her driver’s licence, she remembers that she herself will be a donor one day. If the circumstances of her death permit it, she will be dismantled, her parts incorporated into other bodies. This information strikes her in a way that it hadn’t when she ticked those boxes years ago. It is freshly terrifying.
But, after that cold fear recedes, she is left contemplating the idea of herself persisting in other bodies, and other bodies persisting. Her vision glitches. Returns.
Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus
And here’s Pikkoro, in the sudden quiet, on this hot afternoon—sighing over the asphalt, school hat low on her brow. Textbooks add ten pounds to her back and ten years to her face; hunched by rote wisdom, she awaits the green man and labors through the crossing. She is surrounded by cicadas and bicyclists and blurry-faced commuters. On days like this, Pikkoro’s eyes can withdraw so deeply into her head—can resort to oversimplification, express themselves with single lines.
—Hmm?
Her eyes grow round at the sight of a truck cutting the corner, tipping slightly on one wheel. Overloaded with crates, the truck punts one piece of fruit from the pile—which bounces brightly, then makes a getaway roll for Pikkoro’s foot. She stoops for a closer look: a hard yellow mango, see-sawing to a stop, sticker-side-up. It’s HarvestTime™. The silhouette of a tree growing lovehearts instead of foliage.
Pikkoro scoops up the mango. She decides to take it home.
Pikkoro lives on the second floor of a gray apartment building. It has palm trees at the front gate and a communal pool with uncleared leaves floating on the surface. Her young ankles swell with each gray step. She passes the other homes piping with afternoon television programs and microwave bells. She stops at her welcome mat to peel off her shoes.
—Wah, it’s so hot.
And what a relief it is to finally slump inside the apartment, drop her schoolbag on the tatami and throw herself into the sofa.
Tako, in the kitchen, suctions ice cubes from a plastic mould. He pops the ice into two glasses.
—Sorry. I should have come to pick you up.
Pikkoro mumbles into the cushion. Her after-school bowl of ramen is steaming on the table. On the mantelpiece there is a row of framed photographs of Pikkoro and her parents, ageing slowly from right to left. In the final photograph there is a snapshot of Pikkoro and Tako. One of Tako’s tentacles is outstretched, off-frame, as he is holding the camera.
Tako shuffles to the sofa with two glasses of iced tea, offering one to Pikkoro. She groans, rolling onto her back, accepting the glass with both hands. Tako notices the mango peeking out of her knapsack.
—What’s this?
—It fell on the road.
Tako picks up the mango. Pikkoro wriggles off the sofa and slips into her chair. A novel, Seeds of Time, is splayed face-down on the table, alongside a pile of unfinished knitting. Pikkoro sets her glass on the placemat and blows weakly on her ramen.
—Har-ve-s-t T-i-me.
Tako puts the mango on the kitchen counter.
The afternoon changes color. Pikkoro is stretched out on the tatami, her mathematics textbook spread inside the glowing square of television light. She frowns at her spidery calculations and rubs out her latest answer. Tako is sitting on the sofa, knitting with four arms and holding his novel open with two. Although Pikkoro’s head is drooping into her homework, although her sighs grow heavier, Tako clicks through his knitting and there is contentment here, discernible in their soft faces. There’s a game show on television that neither of them is fully watching: warbling with uncertainty, pinging with success, buzzing with failure.
—We’re going to take a short break, folks; don’t go away!
The theme song booms, and Pikkoro finally lays her head down on her exercise book and shuts her eyes.
But she is compelled to open them again when the television falls silent. She raises her head to a commercial unfolding in the hypnotic quiet. The fattest apples, pears, oranges—and mangoes, just like the one Pikkoro plucked from the road—spinning against a backdrop of idyllic orchards, giant and seductive as planets. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to—Pikkoro sits up and lets the fruit spin inside her irises. Her pencil escapes the fold of her exercise book and rolls away. Even the clicking of Tako’s knitting needles has ceased.
Then, fading in: the loveheart tree. It’s HarvestTime™.
—Pikkoro-chan.
—Hmm?
—Your costume is finished. Come try it on.
—What do you think?
Pikkoro sways appreciatively.
—It’s perfect.
The next day, Pikkoro’s costume is wrapped in a brown paper parcel and secured to the top of her school bag. It’s set to be another hot day—the sky is white with humidity, and those clouds just seem far too close to Pikkoro who, accompanied by Tako, trudges on humpbacked through the heat. Even with Tako carrying the heaviest of her textbooks, she still feels as if she’s bent double. The gradient of the slope to school seems more aggressive than yesterday.
A discerning viewer could perhaps believe that Pikkoro is accustomed to sadness, a kind of non-specific melancholy that infuses her eyes and slides down to her bones, pooling in the young creases of her skin. Sadness that not even her bright hair can obscure; so pedestrian that it could just be neutrality or fatigue.
Pikkoro arrives at school, reddened by thirst. She stops at the water fountain, then shows Tako to her cubbyhole. When all her heavy things are stored, Tako says goodbye.
—Take care today, Pikkoro-chan. I’ll see you after school.
Tako is wearing a mint-striped ice cream parlor hat. Pikkoro watches him slide-walk through the corridor, against the flow of students, and it seems that her day might become a little duller now. But she looks back into her cubbyhole, revived by the brown paper parcel, which turns see-through for a moment to reveal the red costume inside. A piccolo trills.
Pikkoro’s teacher is a drowsy but kindly man, young but worn, talking the class through a long mathematical equation from last night’s homework. Pikkoro stares at it, compares it to her paper, and marks her answer incorrect. The teacher puts down his chalk and Pikkoro’s gaze now expands to take in her entire paper, the red strokes written over last night’s gray pencil, like a village ambushed by mercenaries.