Rubik

by Elizabeth Tan

  I attach five of my best drawings, enter tim@spiegelvoice.com in the address field and press send.

  My phone rings. Penny. ‘How’d install go? Sorry for not sticking around,’ she says.

  ‘That’s okay. It’s all going alright. There’s something missing though. Still trying to figure out what it is. I’ll probably be installing right up until the opening.’

  ‘Oh don’t worry, I’ve still got miles to go as well. How are you doing, anyway?’ She doesn’t mention the Cellar Door waitress, but we both know that’s what she’s referring to.

  ‘I’m... okay.’ I switch tabs to Tim Spiegel’s website, that comforting sparseness. ‘I don’t really know what to say about it.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do something?’

  ‘I’m not really sure about anything.’

  Penny pauses. I wonder if she’s going to try, again, to convince me to go back to Cellar Door to demand answers. I hold my breath. I press F5 on Tim’s website, as if something would really change. I wonder whether I should tell Penny about my email to Tim. I almost feel guilty for withholding the truth from her. Some things are just hard to explain to Penny. I am always merely approximating something important. Like, right now, I wish I could explain to her how smugly the waitress had presented the newspaper picture to me. As if to say, look what I own. Look what I know. I want to tell Penny that some bodies are presumed to be more available for scrutiny than others. Half bodies. Brown bodies. I want to ask Penny what exactly one can do about that.

  ‘Well,’ Penny says eventually, ‘I know I’ve said this before, but I’m really sorry it happened. It’s really messed up. Just let me know if you ever want to do something about it.’

  ‘Okay.’ Somehow those two syllables, O and K, seem to carry so much resignation, an unfair weight. ‘Okay. Thanks Penny.’

  Like an animal shifting in the bushes, the tab for Gmail reports (1) new email. I switch over.

  me, Tim Spiegel (2)

  Suddenly it is very cold.

  ‘Take care, hon.’ Penny hangs up.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again. Tim Spiegel. Only a few minutes after I sent my message to him.

  An automated reply?

  I hover the cursor over the email and depress the mouse button. Release it suddenly.

  Hi Ursula,

  I am also located in Perth. I have looked at your art. Please send me a manuscript of what you would like me to record, and I will see what I can do.

  Best regards,

  Tim Spiegel

  I am also located in Perth.

  I have looked at your art.

  I will see what I can do.

  My skin prickles with that warm-cold sensation that is almost like love. A concise message, but not an unkind one. I clasp my hands in my lap. I read the message again, which is short enough to take in all at once, like a painting or a haiku. He doesn’t say how much he’d charge, or whether he’s definitely on board. Or even if he liked my drawings. But he signed off with Best regards—not just Regards—and this little fact is enough to make me hopeful.

  I’m about to start assembling a manuscript for Tim when Gmail refreshes itself. A new email appears above Tim’s. 30111989@ouvert.net, no subject line.

  I tick the checkbox and move the cursor to the trash can button. But then I look at the address again: 30111989@ouvert.net.

  30111989.

  30 November 1989?

  I open the email.

  Hello: Ursula

  We are real

  Watch out for Seed

  Beautiful day

  30111989

  I am writing to you from the future, but from my particular position I understand that there is no ‘future’ as such. It’s just a way of organizing time, like dropping buoys into the ocean. Now I am plunging my hand into the green bag of tiles; now I am running away from Cellar Door. Now I am being born; now I am born again. Now I am the embodiment of Ampersand’s core values; now my body is unsponsored, unincorporated. Now I am inking a woman’s eyes; now I am within the camera’s eye. Lift your chin a little. Hint at a smile. S’asseoir. Manger. Boire. Now I discover the meanings of two- and three-letter words, many classed as obsolete, unuttered out of existence. Now I add and multiply; now I carry the one; now I pencil in the final scores. Now the zygote divides. Now something peculiar occurs. A secret arithmetic. A glitch in the matrix.

  I haven’t been entirely rigorous. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes, even when the event is over, it doesn’t feel like any time has passed, and nothing loses its puzzling glow.

  I am sitting in my bedroom. I am cutting excerpts from fairytale books and stringing the sentences together. This will be the manuscript that I will send to Tim Spiegel. I’ve also taken the Grimm fairytale audiobook from the car and I’m playing it on my computer. Right now Tim Spiegel is telling the story of The Elves and the Shoemaker.

  As I sit here assembling my fairytale clippings, I know: I look fucking crazy. The waitress at Cellar Door confronted me with a newspaper article and my date of birth, but how is it any less creepy that I’m listening to Tim Spiegel narrating the elves’ song about making the shoemaker rich as I hack sentences from fairytale books, or that I burned through $15 of credit listening to Tim Spiegel talk about tech support options for products I don’t even own, or that all the time my ears are waiting—in queues and elevators and department stores—for that melodic voice? As if it has anything to do with anything. As if Tim has any relation to Rsu, to the Cellar Door waitress, to any of the current weirdness.

  The Elves and the Shoemaker is the last story on the audiobook. Whenever we are listening to this in the car, Penny or I will skip the CD back to the beginning. I nudge the mouse so that the desktop jumps out of screensaver. The needle in Windows Media Player is at 5:34, but the total length of this track is 29:32.

  A secret track? Does Penny know about this?

  I slide the needle along, catching slices of white noise. The hidden track begins at 29:01.

  In the current crisis,

  our situation

  will utterly transform.

  Reality is a stand-alone document;

  there can be no true maps.

  When you weigh up all the benefits,

  the document is relatively worthless.

  Rethink your monuments,

  your map-making instruments.

  The sky is a tender vacuum;

  the compass turns the traveller.

  Accept the unresolvable loss.

  There is no better way.

  We regret that you no longer exist.

  Kindly

  surrender.

  The track runs out; Windows Media Player falls dormant. I reach for the CD case and flip through the booklet, but it wouldn’t be much of a secret track if it was credited in the liner notes. Track thirteen is labelled The Elves and the Shoemaker and nothing else.

  I pull the needle back and listen to the secret track again.

  We regret that you no longer exist.

  It certainly doesn’t sound like anything the Brothers Grimm would write. I open Chrome and plug phrases from the recording into Google, but nothing useful arrives. None of the Amazon reviews of the audiobook mention the hidden track.

  Gmail reports one new email. 30111989@ouvert.net again.

  Hello: Ursula

  You are the portal

  We are real

  Get ready for the kick

  Beautiful day

  30111989

  And I just want to scream at the universe, STOP IT, JUST STOP IT, stop piling on the mysteries, stop assaulting me with clues—and Tim Spiegel tells me to kindly surrender, and Gmail reports one new email, and Google returns zero search results, and Penny sends me a text, and the banner ad in Gmail says Save 15% on Ampersand Clothing And Accessories Click Here To Find Out More, and the green Scrabble bag delivers a lousy hand, seven tiles, 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.

  This is the last time that I see the waitress from Cellar Door. S
he is rollerskating in the Cultural Centre, doing laps around the amphitheater as I exit the gallery, zip up my hoodie, let my eyes adjust to the giant television’s light. It’s hard to tell, but I believe the waitress is wearing the Seduce the Auditor button-up shirt ($49.95), Darling Assassin shorts ($33.95) and Tricycle Tricycle You Are My Tricycle tights ($29.95).

  Just a few hours prior, Penny had come over to my installation and observed its growing scope. It’s as if the tunnel is actually a wormhole to another realm, expanding into new territory. She watched me crawl through the tunnel setting up the audio equipment, connecting this wire with that wire, but she didn’t ask what it was for. Her mobile was as magnificent and frightening as ever, like a creature that my wormhole had brought from the other side. An undocumented creature.

  And now, I watch the waitress’s hypnotic circles, the buckles on her rollerskates flashing—what is she doing here? Does she know I am watching her? I study the faces of the others in the amphitheater, their faces tipped towards the television, but there is nobody else familiar—no Graeme this time, no Natalie. Just the waitress, circling. Her arc diminishing. Until she coasts to a stop in front of me.

  ‘Hi Ursula,’ she says. The rollerskates make her taller than me. Her cheeks are gently flushed, but she is not out of breath.

  ‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not important,’ she says.

  ‘It’s unfair that you know mine.’

  ‘There’s a poignant asymmetry to it, isn’t there.’

  I pause. ‘I suppose you can call it that. Asymmetry.’

  She doesn’t say anything after that. Now that she is up close, I see she is also wearing the Ace of Spades pin badge ($22) on the cuff of her shirt sleeve. A not-so-subtle pun.

  ‘Have you been sending me emails?’

  She blinks. ‘Emails?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes trawl the Cultural Centre. ‘I suppose it’s possible that my employer has tried to contact you in other ways, but it’s not me who’s responsible. My task is complete already.’

  ‘Your task was to show me the newspaper clipping of my sister and me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you really born on the same day as me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The light of the television swirls. There is flute music, the kind that you can only associate with television because it doesn’t sound like a real flute, as if the notes have been reconstituted somehow, like boxed juice.

  ‘It’s unimportant though,’ the waitress says. ‘I said it only to supply a plausible reason why I might have had the newspaper article. It’s not unusual for parents to keep the newspaper on the day their child was born.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘I didn’t need the excuse anyway.’

  ‘I see.’

  The faces of the spectators turn pink, then blue, then green.

  I ask, ‘Who is your employer?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Is it Seed?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What do you have to gain from keeping it a secret?’

  ‘Who is Seed, really? What is Seed? Is it possible for a corporation to possess consciousness? To possess a will? To want?’

  ‘Are you or are you not employed by Seed?’

  ‘I am only pointing out that it is a philosophically difficult question.’

  ‘What do they want with me?’

  She studies me, as if she is trying to figure out the brand labels of my clothes. ‘They want you for what you do best.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Creating. Repurposing. You know what they say. You’ve got that extra little something.’

  ‘But how is intimidating and harassing me meant to convince me to do anything? I don’t want anything to do with it, whatever it is. I want to be left alone.’

  ‘I see.’ Her face is so serene. I imagine that if this conversation was taking place on television—a show like Lost, where there is mystery upon mystery, knowing glances, pregnant silences, shadowy cashed-up puppetmaster figures—I would be screaming, ask more questions! But I can tell you, in the moment of meeting somebody who knows more than you, the questions don’t occur. It’s like the totality of your ignorance approaches the sublime. There can be no true maps.

  The waitress says, ‘We probably won’t see each other again.’

  ‘I’d be okay with that.’

  She nods. She rolls back a few inches. I wonder if she will disappear, pixel by pixel. Reappear somewhere else in the city with a new face, new directive. I slide my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. A voice in my head says Walk, so I walk. As I reach the amphitheater steps I hear the sound of her wheels rolling over the bricks again. Those relentless, infinite loops.

  What I like about the word OVA, apart from being an easy way to dispose of a V during endgame, is that it’s one of those plural forms that uses fewer letters than the word it pluralizes. In some ways it does an even better job than the singular at conveying what it represents: more compact, almost symmetrical. It’s another reminder, however small, that language is arbitrary. It isn’t important to know what the words I lay down on the Scrabble board mean, just that they mean something, or meant something.

  Words are all I have right now, though. That’s the paradox. They don’t bear any actual relation to what they represent, but they’re the only tools you have to make sense of existence. And words are okay, for the simple things—when the plainest stimuli pass through me, are turned into code, are understood. But sometimes there is an error in the translation; the stimuli are too overwhelming or ambiguous.

  Like Tim Spiegel quietly supplying the recordings I requested, his painfully succinct emails that ask no questions and resist questioning. Like the waitress and her revolving uniform of Ampersand clothing. Like 30111989@ouvert.net, to whom I wrote my first email last night:

  Hello. We are real. Do you want to talk to me?

  Sometimes when I’m installing, it feels like the gallery is the entire world. If it were possible to exit the gallery, the outside would just be black space, unformed and uncreated. I sit inside my tunnel, making this adjustment and that adjustment. Perhaps I am trying to recreate some prior universe, a home to which I can never return.

  ‘Ursula.’

  I apologize again for not being rigorous. For the failures of this record. My map-making instruments will always be deficient. Reality is a stand-alone document.

  ‘Ursula,’ Penny says, bending down to look at me through the tunnel, so that the tear along the right knee of her jeans opens like an expectant mouth. ‘Is everything okay?’ She takes a hunchbacked step inside the tunnel. ‘It’s looking good in here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, falling silent for a little while, pretending I am an ovum, or ova. Full of potential. Singular, plural. Like ill-fitting clothing, language slides around our bodies, and our bodies slide around our selves, and our selves slide over and around and into each other.

  Penny still hovers. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes, please come in. I’m about to press play.’

  ‘What’s going to play?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  Penny crawls inside the tunnel. There is enough room for us to lie down side by side. I take her hand, which is small and warm, and with my other hand I press play on the stereo concealed between two quilts.

  The tunnel fills up with that blank sound of digital air. Far off, the projector clicks through my drawings, like a brain in a dead body, casting a slideshow of memories long after the audience has gone. When Tim’s voice begins, Penny’s hand tightens, and I too feel as if my heart is rising in my chest, pushing up against my skin, as far as the branches will let it. The cords, the bones—whatever it is that insists on the unity of these parts, the weak circle drawn around the collection of matter christened with the provisional signifier Ursula. I accept the unresolvable loss—there is no better way—and the tunnel heaves like the ocean, and the letters slide b
ack into the green bag, and it all keeps on going, and going, and going.

  Coca-Cola Birds Sing Sweetest in the Morning

  But Audrey is partial to the Panasonic birds, a cheaper but no less handsome variety; they acknowledge the dawn without extravagance, pip pip pip pip pip, little notes of fixed widths, such deft even spacing. They are not meant to be here, in the city; Audrey suspects they have migrated from Russet Hill, a network over a hundred kilometers away, renowned for wildflowers. The birds have a talent for evasion, as Audrey has never seen them at the reassignment plant; just as well, perhaps, for to crack open such a tender body, to see the inert parts that produce the sound of her dawn—it would surely be an act of violence. Audrey slips into the morning—or perhaps the morning slips into her, like a suggestion, pip pip pip pip pip—opens her eyes to a crisp blue sky, so bleeding-edged in its clarity. It is the kind of sky that reminds her that she was once loved.

  The traffic is not so loud that she can’t discern the Citrus Man cycling down the street, the clicks of his wheels, the brittle music-box tune that pings from his gramophone. That old song—oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement’s. She has never purchased fruit from the Citrus Man, but, as with so many things in this city, she cannot help but have affection for his presence, a belief in his importance—that not one part of this city is dispensable, not him, not the birds, not her, as she slides her legs into her overalls, fills the kettle with water, scoops black tea leaves from a battered tin.

  Gently caffeinated, Audrey turns the locks of her apartment, exits briskly to the streets with their striped and creaking awnings, passes the buoyant results of the stock exchange. A man punches a code into an automatic teller machine, removes the bright bills; a publican overturns barstools. Audrey can still hear the Citrus Man’s music box, camouflaged now by the eight-fifteen tram, the Coca-Cola birds, the queues shuffling through the bureaus and banks and offices, the shop bells ringing with their first customers of the day.