Chris yawns. ‘I need a coffee.’
‘But what would an article about this footage entail exactly?’ Stace continues. ‘An interview with Jules Valentine? Screenshots from the footage?’
‘Just gonna hop over to the ATM machine,’ Chris says, invoking one of Stace’s most loathed pleonasms, probably on purpose. Arch gives Stace a moment to bristle silently.
‘I guess that’s what I’m unsure about,’ Arch says. ‘This seems important, significant, but I don’t know why. I don’t know how to use this information the way Jules seems to want us to.’
‘What does Jules want?’
Arch idly drags the needle back and forth. Makes Jules fall and jump in stop motion. ‘That’s what I don’t get. There just seems to be a lot of stuff mixed up in this. It’s like she just wanted to get the whole story off her chest for some reason.’
‘Well, Adrian Lorca and Karen Hendricks were students here, after all.’
‘Yeah, we never heard the end of that. Our most famous bright minds. So I guess that sort of explains why Jules came to Lorem Ipsum specifically. And it’s like she wants the information out there, but not right away. But there’s also this thing about her dead friend. It’s like this is all part of her grieving process somehow.’
Stace nods. Her gaze falls back on the uncut footage, and lower, to Chris’s Seed.fon, face-down on the table. ‘I suppose I’m concerned about some sort of fallout if we publish this,’ she says. ‘But I just don’t know what it would be.’
Chris arrives with a takeaway coffee emblazoned with the guild logo. He drops his change on the table. ‘You know what we should do?’ he says. ‘No text. Just run some hi-res screenshots.’
‘We have to provide some sort of context,’ Arch says.
‘Context! Nobody owes anybody context. This way we can protect Jules. No mention of the flash drive, the whole story with Lorca and Hendricks. I mean it’s clear when the pictures aren’t moving that this isn’t Karen Hendricks. And besides,’ Chris flashes a gleeful look at Stace. ‘If there’s only pictures then there’s no text to edit.’
Stace shakes her head. ‘You need to ask Jules, in no uncertain terms, what she wants out of this. Maybe she just couldn’t stay silent about this anymore. Or maybe—’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe, Jules wants something else to happen.’
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Do we forget that the words in our books are written in ink that was once wet? Do we forget that a typeface is still the creation of somebody’s hand? Even a typeface of such vicious ubiquity as Helvetica? For so much is concealed in a typeface like Helvetica. Even its name, Helvetica, is concealment: the typeface’s original name was Die Neue Haas Grotesk. Re-christened for the US market, a typeface born out of postwar idealism and hope, a beacon of legibility, rationality, neutrality. Soon Helvetica was everywhere and on everything, on public signs, tax returns, street posters, logos. A signifier of efficiency and authority. Until it burned with some kind of Orwellian menace, as if there was some dystopian finality in its horizontal terminators. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia is a sentence made to be typeset in Helvetica. Like technology itself, in a way—that startling newness fading into the quotidian. Another promise failing. Is this history of her business card’s typeface lost on Jules Valentine, the real falling girl? Seed missed the memo that there is no such thing as newness anymore, no such thing as authenticity, as trueness, though bless-our-hearts we do try. Whole industries dedicated to the elusive business of making new, of defining again and again the real personality of a corporate entity—rebranding, rebadging, updating, upscaling. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. #GibsonCalledIt; there’s nothing new.
Arch waits until the phone rings out before hanging up. No prompt for voicemail. All her emails to Jules have returned undelivered. She slips Jules Valentine’s business card back into her diary. She’s made the mistake today of sitting next to a computer that’s not working, so every ten minutes someone will come into the packed lab, make a beeline for this apparently vacant computer, and as they repeatedly tap the keys to wake up the monitor she’ll have to tell them the bad news. Everyone in here is purse-lipped and brow-furrowed with mid-semester nerves. Arch is grateful that none of her current units have exams.
Arch jams in her earphones and listens to Jules Valentine again. She Alt-Tabs to InDesign. She’s experimenting with layouts of a would-be article, a random screenshot from the footage posing as a placeholder image. She toggles between serif and sans-serif body copy. Left-aligned, justified. Two columns, three. The columns are padded with lorem ipsum filler that she copied from a generator on the net. She wonders if she could get away with actually publishing these templates instead of an article. Whether anyone would get the joke.
Someone pulls out the chair next to her workstation and taps the spacebar on the vacant keyboard. ‘It’s not working,’ Arch says, taking out one earphone and looking up. Chris nobody-owes-anybody-context Riley looks back at her.
‘Chris,’ she says, taking out the other earphone.
‘Hey Arch. Still hung up on J-Val?’
‘She’s not returning my calls.’
Chris consults his Seed.fon for the time. ‘Had lunch yet?’
‘No.’
‘Wanna grab something?’ He gestures to the students shark-circling the room. ‘Come on. Give up your place to one of these needy bastards.’
They take their lunch to the lawn outside the glossy engineering building. ‘I’m beginning to think you were kind of on the right track the other day,’ Arch says as they drop down on the grass.
Chris pops the cap of his orange juice. ‘With what?’
‘Publishing screenshots of the footage without context. I don’t agree entirely. But I think making the footage the focus, the bulk of the page, is a good way to go. Leaving it open to interpretation, kind of.’
‘There’s definitely something striking about those images.’
Arch bites into her alleged Homestyle Country Pie. She watches a magpie hop closer and closer to a discarded sandwich wrapper.
‘What’s our fascination with this story, really?’ Chris continues as he struggles to wind fried noodles around his brittle plastic fork. ‘I mean, does anyone really care about the true identity of the falling girl? This behind-the-scenes bonus insight into Adrian Lorca’s famous film? Is it the fact that Lorca and Hendricks have disappeared—and maybe Jules Valentine will follow? Is it that we’re so desensitized to the falling girl that any new image of her reawakens something? Does it throw the party line of Seed into doubt—that they “discovered” this indie film, already made-up and waiting to be shown to the world, and that you too—yes you, an ordinary sucker—can make shit, can be an artist, now that Seed is on your side? Didn’t we, at the back of our minds, doubt all that anyway?’
Arch sighs. She scrunches down the plastic wrapping of her pie. ‘It’s like you’re asking me to pinpoint why exactly the falling girl became a thing. It’s impossible to say. I think it’s kind of like... I feel like I’m always just coming to terms with the horrifying emptiness of that image, that falling girl. Like it’s just absolutely meaningless in a way that’s actually quite frightening. A chance image, one out of the many takes that Adrian Lorca could have picked. And yet it holds such sway over us. It persuades us somehow.’
‘Persuades us to believe what?’
‘Nothing. It’s persuasive for nothing.’
Arch’s eyes lift to the university banners lining the footpath, advertising to the converted about bright minds and innovation and making tomorrow better. Some time ago the university changed its official typeface to Sansa Soft, a queasy mixture of Aller and Calibri and Comic Sans, a type that has always reminded Arch of those curved beige classroom chairs with the slit in the back. Something weird about that font. Its sleazy soft angles.
A hundred students exit the lecture theater across the pathway. Hundreds more are huddled in computer labs, smuggling caffeine into
the library, circling the car park, arriving at the bus stop, working part-time shifts, checking their HECS debts. Thousands of minds worried about the future, if they have the right grades or credentials or foot-in-the-doors for the future. If the future will accept them.
Wednesday night. Arch PDFs the pages of the Jules Valentine story and sends it to Chris, CCs Stace. She’s making a celebratory cup of chamomile when her phone rings. A private number.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi Arch. It’s Jules.’
In the moment when Arch’s stomach twists, she admires the particular quality of telephone silence. The harmonious crackling pitch of it.
‘Um,’ Arch says. ‘Silly question: are you still in Perth?’
‘I am.’
‘Are you able to meet up? I want to show you what we’ve decided to publish in Lorem Ipsum. I would really like it if we could go to print with your approval.’
‘Sure.’
‘...I mean, I could email it to you if it’s easier, it’s just that, well, all my emails to you have bounced.’
‘I’m okay to meet up.’
‘Okay. Um. Where’s good for you?’
‘Hyde Park. William Street side. I’ll be at the bus stop.’
‘Okay. That’s a little bit far from me, so I’ll be about half an hour.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Thanks Jules.’
Arch hangs up, closes the Vostro and slides it into her bag. She’s about to leave when she gets a thought. She reopens the laptop and inserts the metallic blue flash drive.
Later, Arch drives along the endless stretch of Wanneroo Road with the radio turned off. A somber song plays on loop in her head. She sails through amber lights, indicates to invisible cars. The sound of the road outside reminds her of that telephone silence. She pretends she is a signal sliding across time and space. She is data. She is divisible by eight. ‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,’ she says.
She parks her car across the road from Hyde Park. Jules Valentine is framed in the gold glow of the bus stop advertisement, a pencil-moustached Leonardo DiCaprio peddling a wristwatch. Arch crosses the street on the diagonal so that she lands exactly in front of Jules. ‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Hi Arch. How’s it going?’
‘Good.’
Jules shifts aside on the bench, so Arch sits down. She takes out her Vostro. The power button glows blue.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said,’ Jules says. ‘About implanted memories. Like when you can’t remember when something happened, so it’s like you retrospectively edit your memories so that the stuff happened at the right time, and not when you actually remember it happening.’
The Vostro makes audible thinking sounds. Creaking and grinding. Arch watches Jules. The two screens—Leonardo, the laptop—watch them.
Jules continues, ‘This is slightly different—but I was thinking about how weird it is when you think in the opposite direction, you know. Like when someone you know dies, and several years pass, and technology advances. It creates a new normal. Until your present day is different from what the present day was to the person who died. Like in Cast Away when Tom Hanks arrives back home after being on an island for four years, and he’s like: let me get this straight, we have a pro football team now? I mean, sometimes I just think about what kind of conversations I’d have with Elena, you know, if she came back from the dead. We have Timeline now? We have Seed? What’s the deal with the falling girl? And suddenly there’s all this distance between us, even though we lived in the same time. And then your perception sort of breaks up and you don’t think of the present as the present anymore. All of a sudden it’s the future.’
The laptop stirs, cricket-like. It prompts Arch for her login details. ‘Why did you come to us, Jules?’ Arch asks. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Jules gazes at the delicatessen across the street. Latent plastic fly strips and dark windows. Gutted fresh flower buckets. She says, ‘Let’s say you go through some kind of event, that, for some reason or another, changes you, in some devastating way, and there is no going back. It can be an event or a series of events, one moment or several moments: you pick. The more inarticulable, the better. Whatever it is, it is enough to create a rupture in your universe. A terrible wound. And then, nothing. Nothing else happens after that; the event or events are over. Whatever is happening to you stops happening. It is just you and your wound now. So, what do you do? You pore over the facts. You pore over your memories. You replay the moment and the moments surrounding the moments. But after a while there’s nothing new. The event is over, after all. What do you do when you run out of facts? You pore over them again. You reread and relive and re-analyse. You go mad, eventually. You want to look for clues when there are no more clues. You want to do something. You want to make something happen. So you can get new information, new facts. Even if you have to make a new wound. You need new data.’ Jules looks at Arch. ‘I am creating new data.’
Arch, numbly, brings herself to nod. She watches Jules slip into her impassive face again, her gaze floating, hesitating, and then leaving reality entirely. Arch offers a small, sad smile that Jules doesn’t see. She turns back to the Vostro and enters her login details. The laptop alerts her to three wireless networks in the area but she ignores it, opening the PDF that she sent to Chris and Stace about half an hour ago. ‘Here,’ she says, passing the laptop to Jules. ‘This is what the article’s going to look like.’
Jules lets the laptop rest on her thighs. She angles the screen. And looks at herself, repeated across several pages, light as an epiphany, recurring like a memory. In another time Stace might have disapproved of this, padding out the magazine with full-page images, but Arch thinks in this case Stace would think it is entirely appropriate, these alternate-universe falling girls. One page is white except for a perfectly rectangular column of text, a long verbatim quote from Jules—not the story of Adrian Lorca and Karen Hendricks, but Jules’s description of the experience of the shoot. Unedited, unindented, sparsely punctuated. Sometimes I think I’m still stuck in that moment, it begins. Jumping over and over without context.
The reader falls with her. The comforting tedium of it.
The last page of the article is blank except for a QR code positioned, like a Helvetica slogan, in the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Jules asks, ‘Where will this go?’
‘To the footage. Chris has uploaded a copy of it. Here—this is yours.’ Arch slips a hand in her pocket and retrieves the metallic blue flash drive. She looks carefully at Jules. ‘Is this what you wanted?’
Jules scrolls up through the pages again. ‘It’s good, Arch. Thank you.’ She accepts the blue flash drive and exchanges it for Arch’s laptop.
‘I’ve copied the PDF to the USB as well,’ Arch says. ‘In case you can’t get a copy of the magazine in print. You said you were getting out of here. I took it to mean you were disappearing.’
Jules nods. ‘I am.’ She gets to her feet, pocketing the flash drive and taking out her car keys. ‘It was nice meeting you, Arch.’ She extends her right hand.
They have their final handshake over the brim of the Vostro’s monitor. ‘It was nice to meet you too,’ Arch says.
Arch watches Jules cross the street, unlock her car, slam the door. Snap the headlights on. She watches the wheels pivot, the car turning out. Gliding like a cursor down William Street.
The laptop becomes warm on her knees, so Arch closes the lid. She wonders what it is like for Jules, living in the future, living outside the future. Making copies of herself across the universe in a trail of falling girls. Arch lets her body sink deeply into the bench, lets the bench hold her in the light of the wristwatch advertisement. Hugs her laptop. Allows the columns of her mind to explode with words until there is only whiteness.
Jules’s car turns the corner. Light fades like a touchscreen drifting into standby.
Everything That Rises
What can we say is the true origin of the Homestyle Country Pi
e? Where do we begin the story? Perhaps at the scathing assessment of Valued Participant #4 of Focus Group #7, who declared that the Evergreen Pie Company’s latest offering was soulless? Perhaps at the board meeting when it was ascertained that a certain clumsiness, a certain un-uniformity in the pie filling, the presence of ‘chunks’, were crucial to the pie’s perceived possession of a soul? Ought we begin with the breakthrough that the pie top should not be completely flat, but possess a dome, a broad and only slightly mammary-like parabola? Or the realization that, if we were to get to the bottom of the cloud of meaning surrounding that signifier, pie, what we would find is the enduring image of a pie cooling on the windowsill, in a country house that never existed, in some fabulous pastoral or woody landscape—that this is the true character of the pie, our deepest wish; the pie for which we eternally yearn, the pie in our hearts.
Or would it be more correct to chart the beginnings of this particular Homestyle Country Pie, from Batch #9300730, the last in the procession? Should we begin with the sheets of dough, youthfully elastic, dulcified with a combination of pastry-relaxing agents and overnight chilling? Perhaps we could say that all pies were once one entity, one dough, which is then machine-perforated into segments, blocked into base and lid. And there it is now—our Homestyle Country Pie, its unfilled body proceeding, with so many others, like the schoolgirls from Madeline. Our Homestyle Country Pie is not the smallest one, nor the naughtiest one; it is not the best or most at anything. It lines up to receive its filling, a mixture of diced and minced beef flesh, peas, tiny carrot cubes. The protective gravy is only three-quarters as thick as its regular consistency to account for evaporation during freezing and baking. Then, conveyed onwards, the uneven mound of its contents wobbling, to be lidded and sealed, excess dough trimmed, edges crimped, punctured with breathing holes, sprayed with glaze.
Perhaps you disagree, thinking that the essence of the pie—the soul, perhaps—is its filling, and so we ought to properly begin at the moment of slaughter; at the cattle, like this pie, conveyed in single file, the path strategically curved to obscure the sight of what’s ahead. Rendered unconscious, then rendered dead; halved, quartered, chilled. (The meat used in Evergreen pies is ground onsite; the better to articulate the ‘chunks’ required for the Homestyle Country Pie.) Perhaps we ought to begin at the moment when the vegetables are torn from the earth in their hundreds, washed, diced, blanched, and tunnelled through liquid nitrogen. These bright vegetables, their perfect geometry, crisply suspended in youth—sealed in plain bulk packages, ripe for the moment when they will be thawed, will join the gravy and meat, will be deposited into our Homestyle Country Pie.
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