Or perhaps the reason I have never been allowed to see the newspaper photograph of Rsu and me together is because I would definitely recognize—in our posture, or our clenched toes, or our tender pink mouths—the single clear protest of we are real we are real we are real.
On Monday, when the mental haze from Jess’s party has almost lifted, I buy an all-day ticket and travel on all the train lines. I pretend I am some sort of queen, surveying my loyal subjects as they parade before me, presenting their various body parts for my critical gaze—chins, ears, fingernails, Adam’s apples, teeth, cleavage. I take their offerings and repurpose them, ink them into an alternative existence. I fasten a woman’s sneer to the spotted face of a teenage boy. With my queenly powers, I tell my subjects: the two of you once boarded a train, at separate times, on separate journeys, and now you are the same being.
This train line runs alongside the freeway, hemmed either side by the backs of warehouses and factories. Their gray surfaces are adorned with giant telephone numbers and slogans. At this particular moment, there is a tow truck driving alongside the train, carrying the shells of damaged cars. One of the cars is missing the driver-side door, so you can see the seatbelt flapping inside like a burnt tongue. This little strip of gray is meant to save our lives.
The man opposite me, whose eyebrows I’m refashioning into the fringe of a hat, is trying to look at me without looking at me. I cap my pen and hold my sketchbook up close to my nose like a diner studying a menu. I watch him through the holes in the ring-binding as he fiddles with his earphones. This is Stirling, the pre-recorded voice announces, seeming to stumble over the consecutive s’s. I try to imagine Tim Spiegel saying it, This is Stirling. This other voice, this not-Tim voice, makes me feel like I am inside an untrustworthy universe. In that real life the waitress mentioned.
The man with the earphones disembarks. The pre-recorded voice observes, this time meditatively, that the doors are closing. It echoes like a gong through a temple. I put my sketchbook back on my knees and uncap my pen.
Two women with exquisitely beautiful noses take the man’s place opposite me. I flip to a new page. The train slides away from the station, and when it reaches peak speed it emits the purest sound, an endless soprano pitch. Beneath it, like a secret melody, the two women are talking in a language that isn’t English. When you don’t understand something, everything sounds so quick, so assured.
My very first job, back in the day, was an appearance in a French educational video. I was twelve years old and I was wearing a denim pinafore. S’asseoir, the voiceover would say, and I would sit. Manger, the voiceover would say, and I would eat. Boire, the voiceover would say, and I would drink. Between each action, the voiceover would wait exactly eight seconds, so that a class would have time to say the word with the correct pronunciation, or recite the various conjugations—je bois, tu bois, il/elle boit, nous buvons, vous buvez, ils/elles boivent. Sometimes, when I am feeling lost, I imagine English words emanating from the ceiling, reducing my movements to a single verb. I make it so that the voiceover is myself, speaking in the same authoritative manner as the voiceover in the French video. Observe, I speak over myself, and I observe the two ladies, one of them plucking a loose hair from her blouse, the other lacing her fingers over her knee. Draw, and I press my pen to the page, forming a woman standing with her neck crooked, while her long tangled hair culminates in a dress worn by the fourteen-fingered woman beside her.
And now—in the other now, as I try to figure out what to type next; the now in which I consider the Scrabble tile drawn from the green bag, the letter I, one point, the most difficult of vowels—the voiceover of myself says, Write, and I write. Because the next part is about to become difficult.
I am waiting for a coffee in Cellar Door. I am served by the same waitress as last time, the one who recognized me from the Ampersand ads. My table number is the Queen of Spades. A little card next to the sugar holder informs me that the wireless password is Ce11arDoor, but I don’t have a laptop or a smartphone. If I did, I would probably Google Tim Spiegel. Who knows what else he’s done, where else I’ve been unwittingly absorbing his voice. He could be the newsreader on the radio, or the television voice that says the following program is rated M for Mature Audiences, or the voice at the ANZ bank that goes ticket number A351—please proceed to teller three. He could be running this entire city.
Penny texts me a sorry-I’m-running-late. The barista’s taking a while with the espresso. I open my sketchbook and review the previous day’s work. Penny says she becomes nauseated if she looks at my drawings for too long, as if she can sense the movement of the train. For somebody whose art practice is entirely concerned with mobiles, Penny has a low tolerance for motion.
I turn the page and examine my diagram for the 30/30 installation. A kind of tunnel, or womb, constructed from the op shop blankets, leading to a projector screen of my drawings. I tick off the things I have yet to gather. Pillows. Wire. Scans of my work.
‘Espresso?’ The waitress sets the cup and saucer down.
‘Thank you,’ I say, trying not to meet her eye.
The waitress’s hand lingers on the Queen of Spades. ‘Can I ask you something?’
No. Please leave. ‘Sure.’
She slips into the opposite seat. Today she is wearing the Yodelicious flannel shirt ($44.95) and the Kitchen Whisk pendant ($30). A few stray hairs have escaped her bun and frame her pale face, or perhaps she left them out of her bun on purpose.
She smoothes her apron over her skirt. ‘How can you be sure,’ she says, ‘that you’re the autosite?’
She looks different to when I last saw her, as if she’s been injected with something that makes her eyes glossier, of a higher resolution. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I ask.
‘When’s your birthday?’
‘What—’
‘November 30,’ she says. ‘1989.’
I drop my gaze. She doesn’t have a name badge. I have never been a waitress, but I am very certain that this is not part of the waitress protocol.
‘That’s my birthday too, even the year,’ she adds.
The long black steams silently. It’s the only thing that’s moving.
‘Your name is Ursula Rodriguez, right?’
She waits for me to respond. I wonder if it would be rude to take out my phone at this moment and text Penny—waitress is being rly spooky thx for being late!!!!!!
‘Yes.’
She nods. Her eyes become distant. It’s as if she’s a plane switched to autopilot while the captains swap places. I slip my fingers through the handle of the coffee cup, but I am not able to lift it.
‘It’s not a coincidence that we’ve met,’ the waitress says.
‘You mean, because you’ve been stalking me?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
She’s still got that autopilot look in her eyes. ‘I have something you want.’
‘What’s that?’
She reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a slip of paper. She places it face-down on the table and slides it across to me.
My phone starts ringing, like a warning, as if some tender wire has been tripped within my borders.
I untangle my fingers from the coffee cup. I turn over the paper.
A color photocopy of a newspaper article.
Two pairs of eyes, tightly shut. Sticky like the wings of a butterfly crawling free of a chrysalis.
A knot of pink newborn limbs.
An unbroken fusion of skin. So whole as to not even register as a connection between two beings. Like the webbing between forefinger and thumb. Continuous.
Swollen with life.
Such ripe, new skin.
I flip the paper over and slam it down on the table. ‘What the fuck?’ The couple at the next table stare at me. The phone still rings and rings. All of a sudden the waitress looks blank, as if consciousness has abandoned her. I can almost perceive her turning gray, receding from the foreground.
The phone’s ring becomes elongated, more shrill than reality. All the world’s surfaces are ringing, hard and bright—my hands on the table’s edge, the chair screeching across the hardwood floor, the fall of my footsteps, the bell on the café door.
The outside world, exploding with sunlight.
Penny hands me a mug of Earl Grey. ‘We can call up and make a complaint,’ she says, wielding her new Seed.fon, as if to demonstrate that she is adept at confronting businesses about their faults.
My hands are shaking. The journey home was excruciating. Suddenly everyone I saw was a spy, with their angled hats and oversized newspapers; every gesture was a signal, every glance was knowing. It is only now, in my own house, that I can tell Penny what went down in Cellar Door.
‘Inappropriate!’ Penny proclaims. ‘It was inappropriate from the moment she sat down with you! Ugh. I’m so sorry I was late.’
She hasn’t addressed the part about the newspaper clipping. Not one word about it. I curl my hands around the mug and wait. It’s like when you’re a child and you’re crying about something and the adult comforting you is trying to guess what you’re upset about, and frustration rises in your blood because they’re not getting at what you actually want to talk about.
‘What are you going to do, Ursula? Ugh. I never want to set foot in Cellar Door again. I can’t believe that waitress, freaking you out like that.’
Close enough. ‘How did she have it?’ I ask, loud and wooden, like I’m performing in a play. ‘Why would she want me to know that she knows about my past?’
‘Do you want me to go back for you? Or we can go back together, when you’re feeling up to it? She said she had the same birthday as you, as if that’s meant to explain something, but it still doesn’t make sense. Just makes it more creepy, like she’s been obsessed with you her entire life. That’s if she even has the same birthday as you. She could’ve made it up.’
‘I don’t want to go back there.’ I know what will happen. We’ll get to Cellar Door, all ready for a confrontation, only to discover that the waitress has moved on. Skipped town. She didn’t even have a name badge.
Or we’ll get there and Cellar Door won’t even exist—instead there will be, in its place, an abandoned hardware store, dusty gray windows, crushed light bulbs. The scowling passers-by will say that the place has been empty for years, whaddya talking about, Cellar Door?
If only I hadn’t fled. But then I remember those fat pink limbs, those raw eyelids. Inflating violently across my inner gaze like a billboard for the United Colors of Benetton.
Rsu, I remind myself, you call her Rsu. Not just a tumor of flesh.
But isn’t that a kind of arrogance, I wonder. To call her Rsu. To not give her a name separate from my own.
I take a trembling sip of the Earl Grey.
‘Well then, what are we going to do?’ Penny asks. ‘We can’t just—I don’t know—let this go...’
I imagine myself reaching out and twisting a knob on Penny’s abdomen until she powers off, like an old television, a slow fade and then click—off. Do those things even exist anymore? Things with dials instead of buttons? Instead of smooth glass interfaces?
Later, when the sky has darkened, I drive Penny to her house. When I arrive home I sit in the car with the lights turned off and the stereo on. I let Tim Spiegel’s voice surround me, warm as liquor amnii, and I wonder if this is what being born is like—sitting in a car in your own driveway, a home waiting, prepared just for you. Summoning the courage to slide the key from the ignition, to open the door. To lift yourself up. To break the seal between yourself and the world.
I slip my phone out and dial the number for Seed tech support. I stay on the line, pressing five—Tim Spiegel in the car stereo, Tim Spiegel in my ear, echoing and echoing, until my credit runs out.
The installation is almost complete. I sit inside my tunnel of blankets, the fabric expanding and contracting in the air-conditioning. Far off, the projector clicks through my ink drawings. A warm yellow light at the end of the tunnel.
The fabric heaves gently. I crawl out of the tunnel and stand at the entrance as a spectator would. I stare at the ambiguous clicking light. I feel all at once the uncertainty of a thousand adolescent fairytale protagonists. A child carrying a basket for her grandmother. An orphan searching for a vanished trail of breadcrumbs. They all must enter the forest. It is always what stands between them and some crucial understanding. A metamorphosis.
Somewhere behind me, I know that Penny’s half-complete mobile is swaying soundlessly. Hovering rods and beams. Like scaffolds for magical creatures—aids in their child-swapping operations, their changeling economy. On another floor of the gallery, an artist is assembling a series of glass vessels; another artist, a sound installation. I am the only one in this space right now. Opening night is in two weeks.
I crawl back through the tunnel and switch off the projector. In the darkness I wait for some feeling to come, but the enchantment is over. There is no magic.
Later, outside the gallery, the giant television screen in the Cultural Centre casts a pale fluorescent light. People tip their faces towards it, glowing like mushrooms. The sound from the television is large, unreal: the reverberating voice of your conscience. I zip up my hoodie. There is a couple walking diagonally across the amphitheater space, in perfect synchrony, like they are riding a sociable. The boy part of the sociable is looking at me. As I pass them, he says, ‘Ursula.’
At first he appears to be a stranger—I wonder if he’s a spy for the waitress—but then the light from the television changes and it’s Graeme, my fellow Ampersand ambassador. Graeme in real life.
‘Oh hey.’ We do the shuffle two passing acquaintances who aren’t sure whether to stop and chat or keep walking do. We decide to stop. ‘How are you, Graeme?’ I ask.
‘Good thanks, and yourself? This is Natalie, by the way.’ Indicating his partner. ‘Natalie, this is—’
‘—your comrade!’ Natalie exclaims. She has very red lips. ‘Sorry, Ursula, it’s a joke we have. Some of the shots from the last catalogue—you two look like you’re soldiers in some kind of hipster army. The way they match up your outfits and all that, like a uniform. Kind of creepy.’
‘Yeah, I guess it’s a bit like that. I’m glad we’re not matching tonight, Graeme.’ In fact it is Graeme and Natalie who are matching tonight, with their just-showered neatness, their clean denim and cotton T-shirts.
‘Where are you heading?’ Graeme asks.
‘Just home. I was at the gallery. Installing.’
‘Ursula’s an artist,’ Graeme says to Natalie. He turns back to me. ‘We’re off to see a play.’
‘Oh! I hope it’s good.’
There seems to be little more to say after that. The sociable continues its journey to the theater and I continue mine through the Cultural Centre. The television says, there are many undocumented creatures that dwell in the deepest depths of the sea. It isn’t Tim Spiegel’s voice, but shouldn’t it be? The Grimm audiobook, the Seed tech support hotline—there are always three things. The fairytales promise it.
The word BO, like many two-letter words, has multiple significations. It is a weapon which takes the form of a long staff, and it is also a fig tree. As a proper noun, Bo is the name of a minority population in Southern China, remembered by Wikipedia for only two things: one, being massacred by the Ming army; and two, their funeral tradition of making hanging coffins. Upon learning this last fact, I had imagined something like Penny’s mobiles, coffins supported by strings and hooks, but in actuality the coffins are placed against cliff faces, resting horizontally on two rods protruding from the rock wall. Scattered along this uneven surface, the coffins are like irregular watchpeople, posted on invisible footholds, facing the sky. It is suggested that the hanging coffins prevent animals from stealing the bodies.
Despite seeing the pictures, I still think of those words, hanging coffin, like they signify some presence just outside perception, in the air behind my head
, the dead watching the living.
It is the same night that I encounter Graeme in the Cultural Centre. In my silent bedroom, I open Chrome and type Tim Spiegel into the search bar, enclosed in quotation marks. Google delivers 16,000 results in 0.18 seconds. A Tim Spiegel on LinkedIn. A Tim Spiegel, MD. A Tim Spiegel on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook. Thousands of Tim Spiegels, jostling for individuality. But like a new mother on some TV drama, walking past a row of hospital cots each containing furrowed babies only a few days old, each a discrete uncomplicated unit, I know which one is mine: Tim Spiegel Voice Recordist, www.spiegelvoice.com.
It is a sparse website with a clean white background. The sans-serif type is a few shades short of black. There is a concise list of past work, but no audio samples, as if everyone who visits this website, like me, is already steeped in Tim Spiegel’s voice. There are no external links, and the contact email, presented so as to avoid being picked up by spam crawlers, is tim AT spiegelvoice DOT com.
If fairytale things always arrive in threes, then I suppose it would be better to make the third thing come to me, instead of simply waiting for it to drop in my path.
I switch tabs and compose a new email:
Hello Tim Spiegel,
My name is Ursula Rodriguez. I am an artist who resides in Perth. In about two weeks, I will be exhibiting some of my work as part of a show called 30/30. I have attached samples of my ink drawings, but my installation for 30/30 incorporates many other media. My art practice investigates fairytale literature and bodily integrity. This may sound very strange, but I seem to be encountering your voice very often recently—first on an audiobook of Grimm fairytales, and another time when my friend called tech support for her Seed.fon. I would really like to incorporate some sort of aural component into my installation, and I thought of you instantly. Perhaps a short reading of some kind, which could play while visitors interact with the space I have created. I understand this is incredibly vague (and also incredibly short notice), and I am not sure what your fees would be like for such a collaboration, but please let me know if this is something you would be interested in doing. Hope to hear from you soon, U
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