One thing could be agreed upon: the pie has a troubled and complicated subjectivity; it and its component parts will endure a variety of hostile temperatures, will have time stopped and started, will age and die according to schedule.
Watch—there it goes—our Homestyle Country Pie, bobbing optimistically along, sealed in a dotted plastic wrapper that bears its batch number and two use-by dates—one for fresh, one for frozen.
The Australian five-cent coin, like many silver coins, is an alloy of three parts copper to one part nickel. On the obverse side is Queen Elizabeth II; on the reverse side is an echidna, all puffed and jolly. From time to time there will be some talk of rendering the five-cent coin obsolete, to cease rounding at intervals of 0.05. But, through all of these attempts on its life, the echidna will prevail, rolling sunnily on. A bit of Wikipedia trivia, now: for a brief time in 2007, the five-cent coin enjoyed a bullion value that exceeded its face value—due to the rising price of copper and nickel, a five-cent coin’s metal was worth six-and-a-half cents.
The five-cent piece is the most liminal, the most transgressive, of all the coins. Its sigil, after all, is an egg-laying mammal.
Of the 44.8 million five-cent coins that were minted in 2011, we are concerned with just one. We can start when it had no face, a blank, punched out from a thin sheet of cupro-nickel, a humble mass of 2.83 grams. Just about everything that happens after the blank is punched out is a procedure intended to cancel out the side-effects of the procedure before it. The force required to flatten the metal has made it too hard, so now a furnace must make it soft. The temperature required to soften the metal discolors it, so the coins must be dropped in a tank of water and then shuffled in a washing machine. Through its many cycles, the coins are cleaned and soaked in chemicals, and then dried in a tube. Then, off to the upsetting mill, which gifts each coin with a raised, protective rim.
When our five-cent coin arrives at the Royal Australian Mint, it is snug inside a bright blue drum, very nearly the same shade of blue that will appear, like a beacon, at key junctures of its existence. Indeed, the coin presses themselves are painted blue, arrayed like army tanks. The floor of the Mint is presided over by three robots. There is an orange one, a kind of large pivoting claw-arm, who is responsible for moving the drums. The staff members of the Mint call this orange robot Titan, because it can bear extraordinary weights, but the robot doesn’t call itself by that name. It just isn’t consistent with its self-image. Sometimes, when there are tourists watching, the orange robot will become shy. It will spend long moments contemplating the drum it is about to lift. It will be seized by the eternal problem of subjectivity. It often wonders why it is a robot and the coin presses are machines; it wonders why they, and not it, have been denied personhood. Eventually, the orange robot will bring itself to lift the blue drum of five-cent blanks. With slow resignation, it will tip the blanks into the coin hopper. They will cascade like so many cheap trinkets.
From the hopper, the blanks will be elevated to the ceiling in buckets, and dropped into one of the waiting coin presses. Our five-cent coin will receive its echidna and Elizabeth, struck by anvil and hammer. It will also acquire its characteristic reeded border.
The five-cent coin’s notched circumference is not unlike the crimped edges of our Homestyle Country Pie. Like two celestial bodies, they are headed for eclipse, for tragic collision.
The coins regroup in their blue drum and return to the orange robot, who, this time, tips them into a hopper that sucks them into a counting and bagging machine. There is another robot here, this one called Robbie, who, unlike the orange robot, is entirely comfortable with its name. It suctions up the bags of coins and packs them in cardboard boxes.
Every Australian coin in your wallet or pocket or bank account, as the tour guide is fond of saying, was made at the Australian Royal Mint. But it will be some time before our five-cent coin will see the inside of a pocket. For at this moment it is being shipped out to an ANZ branch in Perth, a bank of the same ominous blue as the drum it sat in as a blank, where it will be counted out, mixed with older coins, and sorted into rolls; where it will be picked up and deposited in a cash register in a Gull service station, again, of that same ominous blue.
And there our coin will stay, for a long time, at the top of the unbroken stack. It is older, actually, than our Homestyle Country Pie, who, quite soon after packaging, is sent forth into the world, an emissary for the Evergreen brand. Let’s come back to it, nestled in a box in the refrigerated body of the dispatch truck, among an assortment of Evergreen favorites. The Creamy Chicken & Mushroom Pie, the Nanna’s Shepherd’s Pie, the Classic Beef Pie—all jostling in their wrappers.
When the pies are slotted into their heated display case at the Gull service station, they have already been browned in an oven at the back of the store. Under the yellow lights they will come into their element. They will each radiate like the tanned, golden cheeks of a veteran TV celebrity. The Homestyle Country Pie will be in the center of the display, its plastic wrapper bearing the cartoon image of a pie cooling on a windowsill, the curls of steam unravelling wistfully upwards. Like game show contestants, each of the pies are positioned in front of a label with their name printed neatly, and their price. The Homestyle Country Pie is $4.90, only slightly costlier than its fellows, on account of its chunks.
The Homestyle Country Pie will be one of the last selected. It will remain unpurchased throughout the lunchtime hours. It will sit patiently and eagerly; it will never allow its face to fall. As the evening deepens, its golden aura will deepen too. The heat-lamped food display will glow like an incubator of something marvelous, some small daily miracle.
It is nearly eleven o’clock, close to the last hour of the day, when the Homestyle Country Pie is pulled from the display with a pair of tongs and slid into a paper bag. This is the moment when destiny is fulfilled. This is the moment when the Homestyle Country Pie sits on the countertop, the heat of its body warming the laminate through the paper bag. The customer, a young woman, hands the cashier a ten-dollar note. It is beautiful what happens. The cashier conveys the ten-dollar note to the till—presses a button, releases the spring-loaded cash drawer. The cashier first peels off a five-dollar note, then looks for the coins. The smallest denomination available is twenty cents, so the cashier reaches for the side of the tray, where the rolled coins are. This is the moment. There are no more ten-cent pieces. A rare phenomenon. The cashier takes up the roll of five-cent coins. Taps the roll against the counter as if he is breaking an egg. Splits the cardboard open. The coins spill out into the small black compartment. The cashier takes our five-cent piece, the one minted in 2011, and pairs it with another piece, minted ten years earlier in 2001, and drops them into the woman’s cupped hand.
For a few seconds, the woman actually holds both at once—the pie, the coin—each now on the brink of circulation. It is only a few seconds, and then she slips her change into her pocket. The veteran 2001 five-cent piece, not prepared for this particular fate, bounces off the hard seam of the woman’s pocket and lands soundlessly on the Gull welcome mat, so it is only the 2011 piece that will leave the store. The woman doesn’t notice. She tears open the wrapper of the pie. They share each other’s warmth—the pie, the woman. She coaxes the pie out of the packaging, just a little bit, enough for a gentle first bite. The pastry is tender, the filling eager to spill. She is the end-consumer, the site of culmination. She is fulfilling a prophecy, redeeming a longstanding promise, a mission statement, a guarantee.
She is walking out into the street. She is walking past the tall sign, like a blue obelisk, that bears the prices of gasoline. She is surrounded by trajectories, not just those of our coin and our Homestyle Country Pie, but the unleaded petroleum, the sterilized ice, the light globes, the advertisements stuck to the bowsers, the song on the radio.
She has barely taken a second bite of the pie. This is it. This is the moment. One second ago she was walking, firmly affixed to the ground, mobile and aut
onomous, but now she is in the air. She is in the air and the Homestyle Country Pie has left her hands, leaping halfway out of the paper bag, flaking as it arcs into the sky. She is in the air and a Ford EA Falcon passes beneath her, powerful as a whale. She is in the air and the five-cent coin hits the ceiling of her pocket. She is in the air and the message of pain travels out from the point of impact, bristling her nerves, persisting upwards and upwards until her brain is alight with the news; so efficient is the report, so succinct. She is in the air but she is falling now, and so is the pie, and so is the coin, three vessels of meaning, consummating the final slope of their trajectories, destined for asphalt. She is falling like the fading tail of a warning flare.
The woman and the pie meet the ground. Their borders rupture. They become broken containers, meaning spilling forth, but there is not enough meaning to take the full shape of its new container; two tiny universes have just now exploded and it makes hardly any difference at all. The mass of the Earth remains in balance. The coin, whole and secure in the woman’s pocket, still denotes an exchange value of five cents, still announces this tiny message of its worth to an absent audience. The woman, the pie, the coin—each of them glistening, each meeting the standards for typicality, impeccable examples of their kinds. Somebody, at some point in time, wanted the best for them, wanted them to go far.
Later, the Homestyle Country Pie will be washed off the road. The person tasked with this responsibility will remove the largest pieces first before resorting to turning on the hose. He will take them up in his gloved fingers—the bruised crust, the slippery bits of filling—and drop them into the paper bag for disposal. The chunks will make it a lot easier.
Later, the authorities will retrieve the five-cent piece from the woman’s pocket. It will join other personal effects collected in a stiff brown envelope that is presented to the woman’s next-of-kin. It will never re-enter circulation. It will never participate in another transaction. Like its ancestors in 2007, this five-cent coin has acquired some other secret, richer value.
Later, the woman will be cremated. She is slid into her own container and mounted onto a moveable hopper that conveys her—deftly, to avoid temperature loss—downwards into the furnace. It takes ninety minutes for the incineration to be complete and a further twenty minutes for her bone fragments to be sufficiently pulverized. Soon she will have no borders at all, and nothing that can be held within borders. Her body will be simplified into gas and dust.
Later, the hour hand will rise imperceptibly, like the baton of a conductor, guided by subliminal vibrations, interring the minute before that, and the one before that, and the one before that. Later, a million goods will softly expire—will, in a matter of seconds, become unsaleable. Later, all the dies in all the coin presses will be altered to read 2012, then 2013, then 2014. Later, the price of a Homestyle Country Pie will increase to $5.00, to $5.10, to $5.20—climbing ever higher, for all things must keep pace. Later, the hour hand will complete a revolution, will assume the same position as before—but it will not signify the same hour, will never signify the same hour; nothing ever truly returns, reverses course; nothing is permitted the same trajectory twice. Everything rises, for everything must rise—will flare out in a moment of preciousness, bring itself to fruition. Everything reaches the height of itself, and then disperses, evacuates the orbit of its being. The hour rises. It oversees the exhaustion of everything living, the accumulation of expiries.
Luxury Replicants
You need a totem.
A unique object.
Small, solid.
Something that can fit inside your pocket.
Something only you can recreate.
This is how you confirm that you’re not in someone else’s dream.
This is how you confirm that you are in control.
Do not show your totem to others.
Keep your totem hidden.
If you must refer to your totem, do so discreetly.
Guard it with your life.
Aeris dies and someone makes a thread commemorating his death. It’s all official—the mods have confirmed it’s not a hoax—and TheGreatDekuTree tentatively sets up a drive to collect monetary donations for Aeris’s family, and because TheGreatDekuTree is a respected long-time member of Luxury Replicants he does manage to collect quite a bit. At first Renzo stays away from the entire thread because it’s triggered something for him, he doesn’t know what. He’s been thinking about Rubik3 again. Not that they were ever friends. Well. They were, sort of.
Renzo-as-Michael Lim is on the train to work, and because he’s sitting on the wrong side of the train, the side with the sun blaring through the window, he is feeling very conscious about the weight of his head, its specific and painful submission to gravity. He’s wanted to change seats for seven stops now. He scrolls down Aeris’s commemorative thread and each time he lifts his thumb he notices the minute streak of warmth—the elliptical print of his finger pad—disappearing on the touchscreen, absorbed after a half-second lag, as if his soul is vanishing. He’s listening to Miko and the Exploding Heads and he totally relates to the exploding-heads bit. This sun. He scrolls and he scrolls.
Michael watches an old man slowly rise out of his priority seat and disembark at Glendalough. Michael needs out of this sun, even for just one stop. He swipes up his bag and crosses to the opposite side of the train. He sits down in the old man’s place and hopes nobody judges him for it. Leans his head back against an advertisement that features a giant baby holding a stop sign.
He looks at his Seed again but in the seat-shuffle he’s accidentally closed the thread. It’s probably time to stop thinking about Aeris and Rubik3 anyway. Michael slips his phone into his pocket. He turns his head to one side. It still hurts.
Shuts his eyes. Opens them.
There’s a perfectly round hole next to the giant baby in the white resin wall of the train. A subtle aperture, circumscribed by a barely perceptible green ring. Michael looks around the train, but nobody else is seeing what he is seeing. He runs a finger over the recess. There’s something else. A mark above the hole. He leans closer. An image? The omega symbol?
No. Headphones.
It’s an audio port.
Michael looks around the train again. He unjacks his earphones. Cuts off Miko and the Exploding Heads mid-refrain. But that’s as far as he gets, because now he’s at Leederville, and he has to go to work.
Today’s new arrival is the Message-in-a-Bottle Kit. It consists of a box that is about the size of a spectacles case that contains a small glass bottle, a cork, a shiny slip of paper, a candle, and a packet of red wax pellets. The slip of paper contains helpful prompts for the message you should put in your bottle. ‘This bottle was released at [place] on [date] by [name].’ Then you’re meant to seal the bottle with wax. The candle is for melting the wax. The Message-in-a-Bottle Kit is $24.95.
‘Aeris died,’ Michael tells Bette during a lull at Ampersand.
‘The nineties called, Michael. They want their spoiler back.’
‘No, I mean, Aeris. From LR. Cancer.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘No, he’s—oh, right. No, I mean Ares, like the Greek god. After you left, he changed his name to Aeris, like the Final Fantasy character.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a reference to—’ Michael starts, but he’s lost her, and she’s noisily sorting through a bucket of coathangers. ‘Sorry. Should I not talk about this?’
She shrugs. She takes the bucket of coathangers to the storeroom. Bette was SparkleCat on Luxury Replicants. Was. She quit Luxury Replicants back when they were in high school, years ago, after the whole WhiteKnight debacle. She hasn’t so much as lurked there since.
A young man with a tastefully scruffy beard enters the store. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ Michael says, but the young man just nods, once. He surveys the table of giftware and inspects, in this order: the knitted cactus, the garden secateurs with the enamelled floral handles, the stack of th
in notebooks with brown cardboard covers, and then, the Message-in-a-Bottle Kit. Michael thinks of this guy purchasing the Message-ina-Bottle Kit, for his partner, or his friend, or maybe himself. Filling in the [place] and [name] and [date]. Scrawling his favorite Murakami quote. Rolling up the paper and sealing the bottle and tossing it into the ocean.
Some time later all these identical glass bottles with identical red wax will wash up on some distant beach, like an exhumed primary school time capsule, [place] and [name] and [date] diligently filled. No urgent messages, no dying words. Just doing a thing for the sake of doing a thing.
The young man puts down the Message-in-a-Bottle Kit and exits.
Bette returns. She’s got the new posters for the autumn collection, bundled under her arm like giant drinking straws.
‘Hey,’ Michael says. ‘Hey, Bette. Today, on the train, there was this audio port in the wall.’
‘A what?’
‘An audio port.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Above one of the priority seats.’
Bette’s eyes drift and Michael wonders if he’s lost her again. She’s wearing those guillotine earrings she acquired last season. ‘Coralee said we have to put these up,’ Bette says, raising the bunch of rolled-up posters. ‘Right away. They arrived late, she said.’
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