Bloop.
Chris Riley is messaging you!
Chris Riley
look at that attachment yet?
Archna Desai
Yeah. I don’t really know what to make of it.
I’m trying to think of a reply to her now.
Arch pinches the bridge of her nose. She has an essay due next week, a clutter of journal articles to read—but this one routine email, she knows, will somehow take the rest of the night. She gets up to make a cup of tea.
When she returns, her Facebook tab is flashing with something new from Chris.
Chris Riley
i wonder how she got hold of it
Arch frowns.
Archna Desai
What do you mean?
Chris Riley
well its not the same as the movie
like this shot doesnt occur in the actual falling girl movie
She tabs over to the JPEG again. Arch missed out on that whole falling girl collect-a-fragment thing when it happened a while back, actually, because she hadn’t owned a smartphone yet. But she did receive one of those prank calls that played ‘Little Waltz of the Telephones’, the less well-received feature of Seed’s campaign. Arch is familiar with the falling girl only through her copies, the endless afterexposure of her hype. But even Arch—who scarcely gave a shit about the whole phenomenon—can discern, now that Chris mentions it, a peculiar inauthenticity in the girl’s pose. And yet it is undeniably her.
Archna Desai
So what are you thinking then, Chris?
We should meet Jules Valentine?
Those pixels emanating an aura of portent.
Chris Riley
im curious
so yes
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. This is what Arch does when she needs to clear up the thoughts in her head. It’s easy—you just say to yourself: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit... and then whatever comes next, until the columns of your mind fill up and you are the illusion of a full page. If you do it just right your eyes can skim over the whole of you and appreciate your form, your typeface, your kerning, without the distraction of having to read into things. You can confirm to yourself that as far as human beings go, you fullfil all the necessary functions. You can say whatever you like in the filler text, even facts that you already know. The most important thing is that you feel like a coherent human being at the end of it.
About Lorem Ipsum: Lorem Ipsum is a student magazine named after the nonsense faux-Latin placeholder text that designers often use to demonstrate the layout of a document. The magazine is a collaboration between majors in graphic design, writing, photography, and journalism. About Arch: Archna Desai is twenty-two years old and undertaking her final year of a double degree. She is the current chief editor of Lorem Ipsum. This will be Arch’s last edition at the helm. A new chief editor is elected each year. Today Arch will be meeting Jules Valentine, a mysterious correspondent with a screenshot of falling girl footage. The tight scheduling and multidisciplinary pressure of Lorem Ipsum means that sometimes production occurs in reverse—designers create a layout and the writers match it with content. So with this Valentine interview, it’s nice to be proceeding the way a publication actually should proceed. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Everything in its right place.
Arch and Chris wait at a small bar on William Street, watching a four-wheel-drive attempt and re-attempt an ambitious parallel park. A faded notice painted into the pavement reminds pedestrians that there were once wetlands beneath this four-wheel-drive’s uncertain pivoting wheel. Arch wonders what the city would be like if everything was labelled like that. This bar that she and Chris sit in, on the former site of an accountant’s office, on the former site of a Chinese restaurant, on the former site of Mew’s Swamp. Surfaces upon surfaces upon surfaces.
Jules Valentine is five minutes late. Chris is the one who chose this meeting place. The stools they sit on are actually stacks of old books lacquered together. The menu is clipped to one of those Sunshine children’s books. It’s the kind of menu that doesn’t have dollar signs. espresso 3.5. flat white/latte/macchiato 4. extra shot/decaf/soy .5. The menu also spells out everything in lowercase, including the café’s name and all proper nouns. ‘When did this become a thing?’ Arch says to Chris, tapping the letters on the menu.
‘When did what become a thing?’
‘Using all-lowercase. No caps. Especially in company logos. BP, Woodside. Woolworths. Bankwest.’
‘Guess they hope to appear more friendly.’
‘I mean, I know why they do it. I’m just trying to remember when exactly it became a thing that everyone did.’
Chris snorts. ‘And not just e.e. cummings.’
‘Yeah. When it became used as a twisted signifier of trust or something.’
Arch spins her dictaphone on the countertop. She considers the menu and wonders if she is prepared to part with 5.7 for a muffin.
The door swings open and a woman with copper hair and Ray-Ban Aviators steps in. She slides her sunglasses onto her head. Takes in the café with one sweep. Zeroes in on Arch and Chris.
‘Jules?’ Arch says, getting to her feet.
‘Yes. Hi.’ Extending a hand immediately. ‘Archna Desai?’
‘Yes—call me Arch. And this is Chris. He works with me on Lorem Ipsum.’
Chris says, ‘Nice to meet you. I’m getting coffee. Coffee, everyone?’ He’s already walking backwards to the counter. ‘Flat whites?’
A smile interrupts Jules’s impassive face. A strangely bitter smile. ‘Yes. A flat white would be great.’
Arch sits down, and observes Jules slip into her seat. That copper hair is a dye job. There’s something weirdly familiar about Jules. Arch is trying to place it when Jules catches her staring. Arch smiles quickly. ‘How did you hear about Lorem Ipsum? Do you study?’
Jules says, ‘Actually, I graduated ages ago. My friend went to the same uni as you. Worked on Lorem Ipsum. She was chief editor for one year, I can’t remember which. Before your time, I suspect.’
‘Perhaps I know her. What’s her name?’
‘Elena. Elena Rubik.’
‘Ah, okay. I’ve heard the name, but I don’t think I know her.’
‘She’s dead.’
Shit. That’s right. Arch isn’t sure how to react with Jules watching her so closely for a reaction. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Arch says.
Jules shrugs and drops her eyes. Then Chris returns, carrying their table number, a playing card mounted on a silver holder. Queen of Spades.
Arch regroups. She slides her dictaphone to the middle of the table. ‘You don’t mind, Jules?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘We’re just going to have a casual conversation, but this’ll help me jog my memory later. We won’t publish anything without your approval.’
‘That’s fine.’
Chris flips back the cover of his Seed.tab. From the glossy darkness of the touchscreen, he retrieves the JPEG from Jules’s email. Fuzzy with motion, inexpertly cropped. This particular unused incarnation of the falling girl.
Jules isn’t touching her coffee. Her gaze is still stuck on the table. ‘It’s weird what becomes famous,’ Arch says, to fill the silence. ‘What sticks. How you can’t remember where you first saw something, some iconic image, and it’s as if you’ve always known it.’ She glances at the JPEG. ‘When something just appears in your memory, totally without origin, you believe whatever history Wikipedia invents for the thing. It’s not like you can verify it yourself. I mean, what year was it when I saw the falling girl for the first time? I have to trust the historical narrative that it was late 2011, that I couldn’t have known about the falling girl before 2011, and yet it’s like I’ve got all these implanted memories of people using Seed gadgets, or of people Photoshopping the falling girl into whatever humorous circumstances they can imagine, way before 2011. Before it was even possible.’
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Arch looks at Jules, who says, ‘I know what you mean,’ and nothing else. She’s not being sarcastic or polite. It’s as if it’s just too much effort for her to be insincere. Arch replays the moment when Jules said her friend died, and wonders if she responded right.
‘Anyway,’ Arch says, gesturing to the JPEG, ‘it was Chris who noticed, not me, that this screenshot you’ve given us doesn’t occur in the falling girl movie from all the Seed ads.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And I’m sure you’re aware that Adrian Lorca, the maker of the falling girl film, has been missing since last year.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the starring actress of the film, Karen Hendricks, went missing way before that.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you rock up,’ Chris finishes, ‘with a screenshot from Adrian Lorca’s unused footage of Karen Hendricks. To us. A low-circulation, low-budget amateur student magazine.’
‘Right. Except for one thing.’ Jules pokes Chris’s Seed.tab. ‘That’s not Karen Hendricks.’
‘Who is it?’
Jules slips a hand into her pocket. She places a metallic blue flash drive on the table. Arch feels like she’s in some kind of David Lynch homage. All they need is an amnesiac and a handbag stuffed with cash.
Arch asks, ‘What’s on there?’
‘A video file.’ Jules slides it across to Chris. ‘Watch it now, if you want.’
Chris flicks off the lid and slots the flash drive into the Seed.tab. He swishes his fingers across the touchscreen. The file springs open.
Daylight. A clapperboard says: 15/05/2011. AN EXCHANGE OF SIGNALS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE. ADRIAN LORCA. SCENE 30. TAKE 1.
And they watch that famous falling girl take her first jump.
Even at normal speed, there is something beautiful about watching her fall. This short moment of weightlessness. The human body out of context.
Take two. Back to the beginning. She jumps, falls, runs.
Blinking back. Like the most difficult video game of your life. Like time travel. Like the final scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel and Clementine playing endlessly in the snow. Like the universe looping back, going through the motions into infinity. Everything slightly rearranged, but always the same. The take number increases. Each new number inscribed with more agitation than the last. The girl, jumping, in hypnotic repetition.
About eleven takes in, Arch realizes. She looks up from the endless iterations of falling girls, to Jules Valentine. ‘It’s you.’
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Arch can trace her interest in typography and design to the Galaxy Drive-In theater near her home, reputedly the last Drive-In in Perth. During the Drive-In’s heyday in Arch’s childhood—the Desai family freshly immigrated, developing a surer hold on Western English—there was a huge signboard facing the road that would announce the two featured movies, using those sliding tiles of capital letters. NOW SHOWING it would always say on the first line. Then it might say THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS on the second line, AND on the third line, ERIN BROCKOVICH on the last line. Arch’s favorite was when HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT was showing in the 90s, the longest movie title Arch had ever seen, so long that they had to squeeze the AND onto the previous line with the first movie. She wondered what would happen if the cinema needed to show two movies with really long titles. Well, young Arch reasoned, they’d just always make sure the second movie showing would have a really short title. The Drive-In’s popularity faded by the time Arch was a teenager—they ceased to spell out the movies on the signboard and the permanent message became MOVIE STARTS 7.30. Teenage Arch reflected that her childhood logic was silly—as if the cinema would alter their schedule of features for the sake of the signboard. But now that Arch is even older she knows that people prioritize form over content all the time—that countless editors all over the world make minute alterations to writers’ text because there isn’t enough room, or a widow or an orphan needs a snip. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Content dictates form; form dictates content.
It’s Friday, a day without classes, a Get Shit Done Day. Arch sits at her desk, chair angled for contemplation. She holds the metallic blue flash drive between her index finger and thumb, probing the edges, its weight, as if she is considering a totem. Is this someone else’s dream?
Her diary is open beside her DELL Vostro, radiant with blue-inked deadlines. Jules Valentine’s business card is caught in the fold. On one side is written, in Helvetica Bold, STFU. On the other side, Jules had scribbled her mobile phone number. At this moment, by coincidence, Arch’s dictaphone recording arrives at the part where Chris asks why Jules’s business cards say ‘Shut The Fuck Up’ on them. Private joke, Jules replies, and Arch sees again the impassive face of Jules Valentine, a collection of empty signifiers. Eyes on standby.
I’m not sure if we can meet again. I’m kinda getting out of here, Jules says on the dictaphone. But give me a call if you want to. I might be able to arrange something.
Arch stops the recording. She slides the cap off the flash drive. Her laptop is static except for a blinking cursor, but Arch can sense all the activity twitching in the other windows and tabs—her News Feed updating ceaselessly, the banner ads flashing in Outlook, the artist and album title scrolling in her dormant iTunes like a blimp flying over an empty landscape. Everything is just an Alt-Tab away. She can almost perceive the CPU usage in Task Manager jumping from eleven to five to thirty-two percent all in this blinking cursor.
She switches to her inbox. A crisp email from Stace.
Dear Arch,
Please find attached my copy-edited version of your piece. You will find that most of the changes are minimal, though I have a few queries marked in the document. In particular I am wondering what you think Lorem Ipsum house style should stipulate in regards to interrupted dialogue (e.g. ‘Oh, but I couldn’t—’ on page 1). I myself prefer using an unspaced em rule for all interrupted forms of speech, though I have noticed we have been using en rules which are followed but not preceded by a space in other cases, as in instances where the interruptions do not terminate in a quotation mark (e.g. in last semester’s issue, the Rodriguez piece: ‘one vicious mouth– one vicious mouth– one vicious mouthful’). I am wondering whether it would be simpler, in these particular circumstances, to replace the en rules with unspaced em rules, but otherwise retain spaced en rules as our default dash style. Do you have any thoughts on this?
In any case, if you could please get back to me with your approval of my edits or any queries of your own by Monday 5pm, I would very much appreciate it.
Also, regarding your other query about the travelling coin piece: I would be inclined to reject it, but only because I find that particular literary technique offensively elementary—I am sure my mother gives that very same writing exercise to her Year Three students—but, as Chief Editor, the decision is, as always, entirely yours. But thank you for asking my opinion on it.
Kind regards,
Stace
Arch begins an email to Stace about the Jules Valentine story. She gets as far as typing, Hey Stace, Chris and I are working on a piece that might raise some problems. But she can’t just write to Stace without addressing all that em rule business. Arch saves the draft for later.
Arch flips over to VLC Media Player, where her dictaphone recording is loaded. She slides the needle back to halfway.—had some sort of history, Jules says. The movie had been recut and repurposed over many years. It was their ongoing project, an experiment in continuity. Even after their falling-out, you know, they still seemed to like each other. Like, they just got each other. I can understand why they’ve disappeared. You know, now that their movie is pretty much everywhere.
Chris asks, So after that day when you shot your scene for Lorca and you had your run-in with Hendricks, you never saw them again.
There’s a pause here, a pause Arch has experienced in interviews before. It’s not that the
interviewee doesn’t know the answer. They’re just letting themselves sink through the memory, to appreciate the loss of something.
No, Jules says, I didn’t.
Arch changes windows, shuffles tabs, and plugs Elena Rubik into the Facebook search bar. She finds an Elena located in Perth and approximately the same age as Jules. Arch doesn’t know whether a relative has changed her profile, or if Facebook has found some way to account for people who have died, but the information in Elena’s profile has been switched to past tense. Worked at. Lived in.
Still, Arch could send a friend request to Elena Rubik, if she wanted. She scrolls down. Her eyes alight on Facebook’s question, that chipper faux-innocent helpfulness:
Do you know Elena?
A question that seems to shimmer with loss. Arch replies out loud, ‘No, I don’t.’
In the library lounge, Arch watches Stace watch the falling girls. Stace Calbourne’s face is impassive in a different way to Jules Valentine’s. She’s the only person Arch knows who probably thinks in complete sentences.
They’re coming up to take number twelve. The next falling girl—Arch knows, having scrutinized the footage several times—was the chosen one. Arch watches Stace as the girl takes her jump, and wonders if Stace will catch it. Perhaps...? And there it is. A faint flicker in her discerning editor’s eyes.
‘Intriguing,’ Stace says when the file ends.
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