Rubik

by Elizabeth Tan

  ‘Okay. Here, let me.’

  Bette’s been working at Ampersand for two years and Michael for one-and-a-half. It is pre-winter, and today, a little behind schedule, is the changing of the guard. New Ampersand ambassadors, a fresh catalogue. Michael unclips the old poster from the lightbox. ‘Goodbye, Graeme and Ursula,’ he says. Bette says nothing. Michael thought she’d have some quip ready. She’s probably pleased to see the old posters go. When Graeme and Ursula were first unveiled Bette said she’d never felt more aggressively marketed-to in her life. She said this because last year was the first time that the girl-side of the Ampersand ambassadorship hadn’t been unambiguously white. Ursula still had the vague, unfixed gaze and cinematically knotted tresses of Ampersand ambassadors past, but she was decidedly (and as Bette argued, calculatedly) less translucent, less waif-like. She was even a bit curvy, maybe a size ten or even twelve, not androgynously straight-edged like most ambassadors. Bette wasn’t sure how to feel about the appointment of Ursula, Bette herself not white, herself tending towards softness, lumpishness, the likeness of a pear. Should she feel grateful for this attempt at diverse representation, or wary? Was this even to be read as a genuine attempt at diversity? For Ursula’s particular brand of beauty was different enough to register as Other without being alienating; she was safely transgressive. They’d never have someone darker than Ursula, someone with a thicker waist, someone shorter. It’s all about passing, Bette would say. You can be outside the norm, a little bit, but not too much. You still need to pass. Passing is the most important skill one can ever learn.

  But Bette still bought the Penny-Farthing shirt. She still bought the Cherry Sundae Unicorn pin badge.

  Today she is, after all, wearing the Executive Decision Guillotine earrings.

  All last year Bette and Michael labored under the vague gaze of each iteration of Ursula and her evolving repertoire of outfits, twinned dutifully by Graeme, autumn, winter, spring and summer, this last of which Michael now slides from the frame. ‘Hello, new ambassadors.’ Michael unfurls the fresh poster.

  He’s immediately distracted by the T-shirts slung over the pair of lithe bodies. Plain white T-shirts, slightly oversized. Printed on each T-shirt is the falling cat. That black cat from the internet with the red collar whose airborne body is contorted in very much the same style as the falling girl from the old Seed ads. A meme of a meme, now on a T-shirt, available from Ampersand.

  ‘Did you stick in your earphones?’ Bette asks.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Into the audio port. Did you try sticking in your earphones? What was it playing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I had to get off at my stop.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have been, you know, something for people with disabilities? Announcing the stations, maybe?’

  ‘I’ve never seen one before. There weren’t any signs or anything.’

  Bette shrugs. Two ladies enter the store, approaching the jewelry display case. They chorus good thanks and you to Michael’s ‘Hey, how are you?’ Bette’s disappeared into the back again. Michael looks back at the new Ampersand ambassadors. Platinum blondes. The guy’s wearing glasses, a first. It’s that safely transgressive thing again. Michael scans the fine print for names. Asher and Kimberly. He nods to his new ambassadors, and the twin falling cats.

  There’s another customer looking through the rack of coats that Michael didn’t see come in. She rubs the lining of the Private Eye trench between her thumb and forefinger to appraise the thickness. Michael considers saying hello but he has no idea how long the customer has been here, and saying hello might be weird if she’s been here for a while. The customer moves on to a different coat. Now that Aeris has died, reviving his memory of the Rubik3 mystery, Michael is tempted to return to that old, futile game. Futile, because there’s no real way of knowing, no actual clues. But he plays anyway. He retreats to his post at the counter, keeping the customer in his peripheral vision, and thinks: Are you Rubik3?

  It kind of stuns Michael, actually, when he counts backwards and finds that the WhiteKnight debacle happened almost five years ago. Has he really been a member of Luxury Replicants for that long? Longer, even? Because surely they weren’t yet in high school when Bette discovered the forum by way of Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus fan fiction, the way Bette was always discovering the cool things before Michael, and they both signed up one after the other, as SparkleCat and Renzo respectively, names that would later mortify them.

  Rubik3 was the only other user on Luxury Replicants, to Michael’s knowledge, who lived in the same city as him and Bette. He’d gathered that she was quite a bit older than them, from her references to living with housemates or studying at university, so, for the longest time, they never really talked beyond leaving comments on each other’s threads. It was only a few years ago that they exchanged PMs, trying to recruit the other to their favorite fandom—which was for Michael, Pikkoro, and for Rubik3, Seeds of Time. Rubik3’s incomplete Inception fic, End of the Gun, hasn’t been updated since 2011. It was around that time when Michael sent Rubik3 a PM to wish her a happy birthday, and received no reply.

  Michael revisits Aeris’s commemorative thread. It’s possible that, at the back of their minds, the members of Luxury Replicants are thinking about the WhiteKnight incident, comparing one ‘death’ with another, but he is somehow sure that nobody is thinking about Rubik3, whose disappearance was so quiet, the smallest of subtractions, like a pebble sinking through water.

  Bette hadn’t been all that interested in Rubik3, since they moved in different fandoms. Michael thinks it really sucks that he can’t share stuff about LR with Bette that much these days, even though he knows there are good reasons why. Maybe Bette has been mad at Michael, all these years, for sticking around Luxury Replicants while she moved on. But it’s something Michael’s always noticed about Bette: a kind of withdrawal from him every time he shows interest in something that she’s not interested in, or if he fails to show interest in something she’s interested in.

  To be fair, though, sometimes Michael feels a similar kind of betrayal. The other day when they caught the bus together, Michael noticed Bette browsing Seek. She wasn’t looking at other retail jobs, but full-time positions and internships, office-type jobs. And Michael did feel something, a small piping voice of panic. Bette hadn’t mentioned that she’d been job-hunting. He can’t imagine continuing working at Ampersand by himself. He feels left behind already.

  There’s a fic in the Miscellaneous subforum titled Rubik, by a new user called lkjv, which has zero comments, which isn’t surprising because the convention in the Miscellaneous subforum is to clearly title your thread with the film or series or book you’re basing your fic on, otherwise nobody will click on your thread, because the Miscellaneous subforum is for fandoms that aren’t large enough to have their own subforum. It first appeared yesterday but it was quickly buried by newer threads; indeed, Michael wouldn’t even have found it if he weren’t searching for Rubik3’s posts. Judging from the scant introduction about choosing a totem, Michael had supposed it was an Inception fic, but this most recent update makes reference to Tako, the octopus of Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus, so maybe it’s some kind of Inception–Pikkoro crossover.

  I will do this. I will do this right. I have made up a totem, and this is the secret I will share with you. My totem is larger than recommended, a Rubik’s cube, but get this, it’s a Rubik’s cube with seven colors, seven colors, get it? Seven colors for six faces. An unsolvable Rubik’s cube. Kind of like you, Tako. You know. You have more moving parts than an octopus should have. You are endlessly formful and formless. You have everything necessary to begin.

  It is autumn and Michael and Bette are turning twenty-one. Soon it will be two months since they graduated, and then three, and then four. This year, Easter and Anzac Day fall on consecutive weekends, and everyone in this city is filled with inertia, only slackly conscious. Michael and Bette ought to be marching towards their future, holding their
bachelor degrees aloft bravely; the time for decision-making is swiftly waning. Michael and Bette have committed to shifts almost every day at Ampersand, and while it’s nice money to have, it is undoubtedly interim money, temporary money. But whenever Michael gets home all he wants to do is pull his Mac into bed and open one million tabs and read until 2am.

  A text from Bette Cho: my mum says your mum was gonna transfer $$$ for pineapple tarts do you know if she’s done that yet let me know ok also come over tomorrow night my parents are going out we can watch TV.

  Michael texts back, Sure, okay, but it’s late and Mum’s already asleep, so he sets the alarm on his Seed and turns it on silent. He scrolls further down the Rubik thread.

  This is how you will find me, Tako. You have to go to the school. You have to go to the auditorium. You have to crawl underneath the stage. This is where I hid that time, from the HarvestTime™ play. I have recreated the space from my memory, which is also against the rules, but I think it will be okay. There will be a hole in the wall, just a little hole, with a picture of headphones above it. Make a pair of headphones and connect yourself. You can do that, right? Make a pair of headphones and listen. You will hear more instructions.

  Today’s new arrival is the Crumple Cup, set of four. They are made in the style of Rob Brandt’s iconic 1975 design. They have the likeness of a slightly scrunched-up disposable plastic party cup but they are actually made from porcelain. While each original handmade Crumple Cup was uniquely crumpled, these homages are uniformly crumpled to enable easy stacking. They are dishwasher and microwave safe and may contain hot or cold beverages. Crumple Cup, set of four, $45.00.

  ‘All I’m saying is, Rubik3 could be dead, and we wouldn’t know. How can you not find that even a little scary?’

  ‘Remember those two kids from school?’ Bette says, folding a returned Falling Cat T-shirt. She’s having trouble lining up the edges because the hemline is slightly asymmetrical. Michael wonders if he’s stepped into an entirely different conversation. ‘Remember?’ Bette insists. ‘The ones who broke into that house? Everyone thought they were crazy. They kept saying that some piano teacher had disappeared. A really quiet Year Three boy and his friend with a broken arm.’

  ‘When was this? I don’t remember this at all.’

  ‘Really late. Year Eleven or Twelve. It was news, for like, one day. Anyway. You know what the worst part is? The teacher didn’t disappear. She had a nervous breakdown. She was in hospital.’

  ‘What? How do you remember this?’

  ‘It happened, I promise. Anyway. It was like they had this whole mythology mapped out. They were bright kids. They thought they’d solved some big mystery. They believed every word they were saying. And who’s to say, really—maybe they were telling the truth. Maybe both stories were true.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Rubik3’s dead. Rubik3 got sick of fan fiction. Rubik3 left LR. Rubik3’s in a coma. Pick one. Pick any. Pick all of them.’

  A customer brings the Mounted Forces Cowboy Hat to the counter and Michael rings it through. ‘Hey, how are you,’ he says, and can’t bring himself to say anything else. Coralee wanted to know yesterday if they’d been cross-selling anything. Earlier today, Michael had attempted it. ‘We have belts too,’ he said to a customer trying on the Quick Brown Fox jeans. ‘Okay,’ said the customer. And then the scene wouldn’t advance, like a video game freezing mid-dialogue.

  ‘Hey, are you back on LR?’ Michael says to Bette when the customer’s gone.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? Because last night I was reading this Inception fic and it mentioned an audio port in a wall—’

  ‘Inception, huh? Yeah, let’s watch that tonight. My mum wants us to use these pizza coupons before they expire, by the way, so I hope Domino’s is okay. Did you ask about the pineapple tart money?’

  ‘Not yet. Sorry.’

  ‘S’okay,’ Bette says. She is wearing her Uppity Giraffe earrings today. She turns out the swing tag on the Falling Cat T-shirt and ferries it to the display shelf, and Michael realizes that she has, with the elegance of Falling Cat, deftly twisted her way out of a Luxury Replicants conversation again.

  Did you know that this hat goes with the Honey Ranch neck-scarf?, he could have said to that customer. Did you know there is twenty percent off all colored pencils and pencil sharpeners today?

  A customer asks Bette if the Pantone socks come in any other shades of blue. Whenever a customer asks Bette a question instead of him, Michael always feels relieved, and guilty for feeling relieved. It’s like swinging clear over an alligator-infested gorge while your fellow adventurer plummets to her death.

  On 16 May 2009, a user named Sweetpea, who had joined Luxury Replicants about two months earlier, created a thread announcing that her dear friend WhiteKnight—a member of Luxury Replicants since June 2006, real name supposedly Clint Baron—had died the night before, hit by a car while assisting a motorcyclist who had fallen off his bike. He was generally active in the Harry Potter, Fullmetal Alchemist and Final Fantasy subforums, and so his path crossed with Bette’s more often than Michael’s. Sometimes he left comments on Bette’s fics. They may have exchanged a few PMs. And, judging by the accumulation of comments on Sweetpea’s thread on that first day, WhiteKnight was more than an acquaintance to many others at Luxury Replicants. Only two users, however, had known Clint Baron in real life: Sweetpea, and a newbie, cedricD.

  It is always at this point in the story that the self-appointed shrewdest members of Luxury Replicants insist that they knew exactly what was going on.

  Still the RIPs flowed—even Michael himself had left a feeble ‘I didn’t know WhiteKnight very well but sorry for your loss’ message in the thread—and Sweetpea and cedricD regaled the others with stories about Clint Baron’s heroism, his all-round-good-guy-ness, his humor and sense of fun.

  This is how Sweetpea met Clint Baron: she was at a petrol station filling up her car when she was accosted by her violent (only-just-that-night-turned ex-)boyfriend, whom she’d finally worked up the courage to leave. Now there he was, having apparently followed her. It was night-time. She was scrunched up against her car while he hassled her. The gas station wasn’t empty—there were at least three other cars there, but nobody came to her rescue. Nobody, that is, except Clint, a white knight from the first time she saw him, striding over from his second-hand Honda, his casual but brave, effective words: ‘Is this guy bothering you?’

  The funeral for Clint Baron was held on 18 May 2009. They played his favorite song, ‘Learn to Fly’ by Foo Fighters, as the casket was lowered; his best friend Seth made a speech. Seth made an ID on Luxury Replicants, Seth_g, to thank members for their support, which would be his only post on the forum. The mods, meanwhile, were hanging back from the thread and quietly investigating. They could not find any record of the death of one Clint Baron from Denver. TheGreatDekuTree was the first user to gently ask Sweetpea and cedricD if either of them could post a newspaper obituary for Clint Baron in the thread, but his request was ignored.

  Peach was the first mod to make a comment on the thread. She said that it was clear that WhiteKnight was a friend to many in the Luxury Replicants community. She did also, however, reiterate TheGreatDekuTree’s request for a newspaper obituary. She noted some confusing points in Sweetpea and cedricD’s stories and asked for clarification. And how was it, Peach asked, that Clint Baron’s funeral was held so soon after his death?

  Peach, the mildest of all the mods. Sweetpea and cedricD were swiftly upset. What was Peach implying? How dare she accuse them of lying, in a time of such grief? Peach’s post emboldened some of the more skeptical members of the forum, and one or two mods, to publicly express their doubt, while others, Bette among them, testified that they knew WhiteKnight. They’d had conversations with him. This is a delicate situation, they said, shouldn’t the mods tread lightly?

  How was it, Michael thinks now, safe in 2014, that it all spun out of control? When did it become such a dogpile?


  We thought we were savvier than this. We were meant to be savvier than this.

  On 20 May 2009, WhiteKnight’s memorial thread was locked. WhiteKnight, Sweetpea, cedricD and Seth_g were all banned. Peach created one post explaining what had happened—something to do with IP addresses, like WhiteKnight was posting from various devices and work computers as each of his sockpuppets, but slipped up somehow along the way—and requested that this be the end of the discussion.

  But it wasn’t, of course, the end of the discussion. Small fires started all over Luxury Replicants. This is the hardest bit to talk about, because there is hardly anything nameable. Users sneaked references to the WhiteKnight incident in comments. He became a joke, a meme. To ‘WhiteKnight’ was to pull a tasteless, poorly executed online prank, or to concoct a self-aggrandising story, particularly one that represents you as a Nice Guy Who Saves Women. To be ‘WhiteKnighted’ was to be duped, led astray by an obvious plot. Threads would spiral into contemplation on WhiteKnight’s motives, or a step-by-step breakdown of why the incident was obviously a hoax and anyone who didn’t see it coming was an idiot. Then there were others who argued that anyone still discussing the incident was an idiot. Then others argued that anyone criticising anyone else for discussing the incident was an idiot.

  But a strange thing happened to Bette. She just didn’t want to post anymore. It’s something that Michael gets and doesn’t get. It’s not like Bette was one of the most vocal WhiteKnight supporters. It’s not like she, specifically, was being targeted by all the commentary afterwards. But something about that incident was just too much for Bette to recover from. For a little while Michael would notice SparkleCat lurking on Luxury Replicants, but then, after a time, she stopped signing in altogether. She began to follow fan fiction on journals and blogs rather than messageboards; she would email links to Michael of fics that she liked but only vaguely engaged with anything Michael might have said about things that were happening on Luxury Replicants. The WhiteKnight incident, although its spectre would fade a little over time, remained a steadfast item of Luxury Replicants’ lore. But the truth is that despite his distance from it, even Michael felt poisoned by the WhiteKnight incident, as if it was some kind of test that he didn’t quite pass.