Rubik

by Elizabeth Tan

  Michael thought Bette would appreciate this story, given her critical observations of Ampersand. Because Michael is now processing some facts using Bette’s lens. The matching outfits adorning the Ampersand models would always be unisex, as is Ampersand’s brand mission—to design and manufacture clothes that can be worn by both men and women—but these outfits would never include a dress. They’d never make the boy-side of the Ampersand ambassadorship wear a dress. The version of gender neutrality peddled by Ampersand will always veer inexorably towards maleness. It’s that safely transgressive thing again.

  But why would Michael want to tell that Aeris story to Bette, anyway? He can imagine what she’d say already: What do you want, Michael, a cookie? A Hallmark card that says CONGRATULATIONS? Michael knows. You don’t get extra credit for figuring stuff out. You still cross-sell and up-sell. You still buy the Executive Decision earrings. Users like Rhesus get a temp-ban and reassimilate with barely a ripple; users like—it’s so telling that Michael can’t even remember the cross-dressing user’s name—slowly withdraw from public space; users like Aeris pay the social cost of speaking out but it’s a cost they can afford, snug and safe inside their bodies—even Aeris, whose cancer-ridden body would eventually overthrow him, was still in some way kept safe by it; and users like Michael remain silently disapproving of how it all plays out, the injustice of it all, but silent nonetheless.

  The train sways, trembles along the rails. It seems to be moving more sluggishly than usual, though Michael, too preoccupied with the voice in the audio port, with Aeris, with the history of Luxury Replicants, does not linger on this thought for too long. Instead Michael notices, for the first time, a woman sitting opposite him. At first Michael is tempted to play the are you Rubik3 game, but she looks too young. She is bent over a book of thick cartridge paper, drawing with a fine black pen. Her hair is long enough to brush the edge of the page, dark and carefully loved as the ink strokes she commits to the paper. Focused on some detail near the bottom of the page, she unconsciously tips the book towards Michael, so that, upside-down, he can just perceive that the drawing is of himself—a stretched-out version of Michael, elongated and thin, skin buckled with age. The earbuds are fashioned as Venus flytrap–like pods with sinuous stems, cupping his face tenderly. Then the woman’s fingers close around the spiral spine of the book and she tilts the artwork out of view. She crosses one leg over the other and props the book on her thigh. Michael realizes he’s seen this pose before. In an artfully cluttered house flooded with sunlight, one figure tipping a book from a well-stocked shelf of creaky paperbacks, the other figure sitting like this woman now, a paperback pinned open with one hand.

  ‘Ursula?’

  The woman looks up just as the lights go out. The carriage jackknifes. Arcs backwards. Upwards. The train abandons the tracks, sleepers snap free of their rails and fling themselves at the sky. The gray plastic handholds lash sideways until they dangle near-parallel with the ceiling and the distant cars on the freeway hurtle like firelit arrows across the window. Michael slides across the carriage floor as if dragged by a tablecloth in a botched magic trick, and Ursula too, her book escaping her grasp, pages fanning out from the spine, black veined on white. The fall snatches Michael’s rightmost earbud from his ear, whips across his cheek, and the last thing Michael will remember is the voice saying in his left ear, There are a number of ways to load credit on to your SmartRider card— before it cuts out, replaced instead by familiar, earnest violins, trumpets gently galloping, as if in outer space. Oh, Michael will have time to think. Oh. And then the vocals kick in, misted, monochrome, from up above, Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.

  Tako, something horrible has happened. Last night I had a dream. A proper dream—though, as always, you can’t really be sure of that, the way things are, here, now. I had arrived home from school but you were not in the living room. You were not in the kitchen. You were not in my bedroom. You were not in the bathtub. I called for you, Tako, Tako, Tako. I wondered if you were in trouble. I knew you had been home recently because your novel was open on the table, and your knitting needles were in the middle of casting on, and the newspaper was folded back where you had circled some jobs that you liked the look of. But then I noticed on the mantelpiece that the photo of us was missing. I was going to leave the apartment and look for you—I’m not sure where I would have looked, but everything seemed closer together in this dream, like I could go anywhere in a few footsteps, as if all the locations of my life were stage settings connected by doors. I ran to my bedroom to gather supplies. But this time when I went into my bedroom I saw you. You were on the floor in the middle of my room. But you weren’t yourself. You were deflated, boneless. You were a heap of skin. You didn’t look dead so much as empty, like the poncho you knitted me for the play. You didn’t look dead so much as never alive. I screamed. I could not look away. I reached for my totem but I woke up before I could even touch it. I was trembling. I found my totem and I checked it all over. I counted seven colors on one face. But then when I turned the Rubik’s cube in my hand I saw that the opposite face had been solved. One side was entirely blue. I didn’t make my totem this way. I think someone is trying to trick me, Tako. I am changing all the audio ports to play something else. Please find me quickly, Tako. I am so scared that you are gone.

  The first person Michael meets again is Bette. They stand on the edge of something vast, like an oval, or a beach, or the hard blue sky that is so much a part of every universe, regulation issue, a blue screen perfect as death. They don’t know what’s true, but they’ll take it, whatever it is. They are happy to take this moment as true, the baseline of true, and adjust everything else in their memory accordingly.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Bette asks Michael, which Michael knows is Bette’s approximate way of saying that she missed him.

  She is wearing her purple It’s HarvestTime™ hoodie. She scrunches her hands in the bib pocket. Michael is about to respond to Bette’s question, even though he doesn’t know the answer, but everything seems to travel slowly, even his thoughts—sliding along straight, silent trajectories, like cars on the freeway as observed from a train. He gets far enough as parting his lips, but Bette says, ‘Never mind. You’re here now.’

  They walk through Bette’s tiny house. There are photographs pinned to the walls, each carefully framed, and they feature an orange-haired girl and a brown octopus, selfies all of them, so that none of the photos contains all eight of the octopus’s arms and the girl is, more or less, always in a loose kind of embrace. Bette leads Michael by the hand, gently, as if she is a child guiding a wheeled toy across a cracked footpath.

  ‘Are we almost there?’ Michael asks.

  ‘Maybe.’

  They pick up a little speed. They are walking on the conveyor belt of an airport luggage collection carousel. ‘Where are we going, Bette?’

  ‘We’re trying to find the beginning.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bette steps off the carousel into the arrival hall of the airport. ‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? The easiest way to test that you are dreaming is to try to remember how you arrived.’

  They are walking through a factory of workers dressed in mechanics’ overalls sorting through broken bits of animals. Then the public library near Bette’s house, the brass cover of the after-hours return slot catching the light and flashing like a lost piece of jewelry.

  ‘This way,’ Bette says, still gently. ‘This way.’

  And then they are walking through the Leederville outlet of Ampersand, the repurposed milk crate and wooden pallet shelves, the astroturf, the bunting cut from comic books, the glossy piles of T-shirts and giftware, the backlit posters of Ursula and Graeme. At first Michael is disappointed that Ampersand is here too, wherever here is, but like a car on the freeway the feeling just passes on, melts at the edge of perception, disappears.

  And then they enter Michael’s bedroom, lit only by the screen of his Mac, perched lopsided on his unmade be
d, open to the dark Blade Runner skyline that forms the header image of Luxury Replicants, the nested subforums bristling with alternative endings, alternative timelines, alternative theories. At this moment, the random quote generator underneath the Luxury Replicants header says: You have everything necessary to begin.

  ‘Are we almost there?’ Michael finds himself asking.

  ‘Maybe.’ They are in the street now, outside Michael’s bedroom. The Cho family car is parked on the street, a blue Ford EA Falcon. Bette’s green provisional licence plates are affixed to the front and back windscreens with gobs of Blu-Tack. Bette unlocks the car. ‘Let’s go.’

  She climbs into the driver’s side and stretches across the gearbox to unlock the passenger’s side. She waits for Michael. The whole shimmering universe waits. Michael takes one last moment to look at where he is, seeing his bedroom for the first and last time from the outside. How small and safe it looks, he thinks, studying it as a scientist might study a diorama. How dear, how precious.

  Bette does not urge Michael to get in the car, does not hurry him along, but Michael doesn’t wish to keep her waiting. He gets in the car and shuts the door.

  Bette inserts the key into the ignition. She creates a shear line. She turns the key.

  The street outside is marked by poles, lights, blue fluorescent signs—Amcal, Officeworks, Domino’s, Gull—all of them flattened, turned sepia, passing through the car as stripes and shadows, and Michael, having no memory of strapping on the seatbelt that crosses his chest, feels more and more like a child. Time experienced as a dim slideshow.

  Pepsi, ANZ, Facebook, DELL.

  Bank of Queensland, Taylor & Sondergaard, KPMG, Big W.

  Simplicity Funerals, IBM, Bupa, IKEA.

  Poles and lights, stripes and shadows.

  Bette flicks the indicator, glances up at the rear-view mirror, and then across at Michael. The indicator clicks five times. She commits the car to the turn.

  Kuan × 05

  K X 05

  April Kuan is not expendable! April Kuan has more than two lines of dialogue! April Kuan is you! You have seven different outfits. Today you are wearing Outfit Two: gray jeans, green sneakers, Owls in the Navy tee that’s the same blue as the Blue Screen of Death. These outfit components can be intermixed, so really you have more than seven outfits.

  Today’s got a Disc One feel, gleaming like a full health bar. There are zero items in your inventory and a round number of dollars in your pocket. There’s a camera on your desk that’s trying to pop into the foreground, so you pick it up and hang it around your neck. APRIL KUAN HAS RECEIVED THE CANON.

  Your default movement is a brisk run but your home is too small for that kind of exertion. You make coffee. It has no effect.

  The first thing you have to do is find your Nexus. It’s chirruping in the bedroom somewhere. When you find it, the caller ID says: ARCH.

  ‘Yo!’

  ‘April, where are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stace and I are at the gallery. Thought we agreed to get here at ten.’

  ‘$#*@!’

  ‘Listen, don’t worry about it. There’s been a delay and they’re starting at eleven instead. Will you be able to get here by then?’

  ‘Yeah! I’m sorry!’

  ‘It’s okay. See you soon.’

  Cripes. Scull the last of your coffee, tumble out the door and down the stairs, zig-zag all the way to Bull Creek. Swipe your SmartRider and sprint down the escalator and swerve onto the platform.

  You can’t know about the woman in the Ray-Ban Aviators watching you dodge the closing doors. You can’t know that this lady’s gaze follows the train as it takes off towards the city, sliding down the center of the Kwinana, the morning sky still glib and blue.

  April Kuan! Nineteen years old! An only child, erratic and a little bit lonely; you eat your greens but don’t iron your shirts. You might have a dark past? Some secret trauma buried beneath that crazy exterior? Who knows!

  There you are, a few minutes past ten o’clock, dashing up the stairs to Peric Chambers, a former law firm turned small gallery, all gray concrete and white walls; sparse, desperate artworks pinned at precise intervals. But what you can’t miss is the sprawling contraption in the center of the gallery, a what’s-it, a Rube Goldberg machine, resting on a long knee-high plinth. Two artists are bent over a section of the machine, carefully aligning dominoes. Arch and Stace are already there. Arch is asking questions whenever there seems to be a pause in the artists’ work; and Stace, bent over her iPad, well—you suppose she’s drawing up yet another indecipherable spreadsheet of something or other: so opaque is the nature of her work to you.

  ‘The Rube Goldberg machine has became a metaphor for my entire life,’ one of the artists is saying. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by plots. Everywhere, plots.’

  ‘I see,’ Arch says. Archna ‘Arch’ Desai, chief editor of student-run magazine Lorem Ipsum, the only student to be elected chief editor for three consecutive semesters. It’s all because of that falling girl business in the last issue, what we in the biz might call an exposé, but what Arch has always called plain stupid luck.

  Stacey ‘Stace’ Calbourne, lead copyeditor, so solemnly dedicated to the cause of grammar that even her text messages are properly capitalized. She has no God except the Macquarie, a staunch banner-woman of House Style.

  Arch looks up. ‘Hey April,’ she says, while Stace issues a grim smile.

  ‘Hello! Sorry I’m late! Tell me what to shoot, Chief!’

  Arch smiles. Addressing the artists: ‘This eager one is our photographer, April Kuan.’

  Arch is being too kind. Last week, you accompanied Arch and Stace to a flashmob at Bedshed. You took one hundred photos with the lens cap on. Arch was cool about it, but you looked into Stace’s eyes and saw APOCALYPSE. BURNING. FLESH-EATING ACID.

  You snap back to the present. Arch says, ‘April, this is Ursula Rodriguez and Penny Birch.’

  ‘Hello!’ you chirp, forgetting their names instantly.

  ‘Shall we start the performance soon, then?’ Penny(?) says, lining up the last domino. She says to you: ‘Maybe you want to document the installation before we begin?’

  Arch smiles at you as if to say, yes, that’s a good idea. Stace smiles as if to say, I am adding your lack of punctuality to my List of Grievances.

  ‘Yeah! Sure!’ You make sure you flick off the Canon’s lens cap and pocket it for safekeeping. ‘April Kuan, documentin’ the installation.’

  ‘You were saying that you feel like you’re surrounded by plots, Ursula.’ Stace, shepherding the interview back on track.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean by plots?’

  ‘Well, conspiracies. Other people’s plans. There are too many moving parts. You can’t trace anyone’s motives because you can’t see the whole machine.’

  This one, the one called Ursula, is kind of familiar. Where’s she from? There is something slippery and uncategorisable about her. Something atypical. She has really nice hair.

  Tune out, peer through the viewfinder. Through this limited perspective, you attempt to follow the logic of the Rube. It’s pretty nice to look at even when nothing is moving, everything conscientiously aligned, like in a kikki.K catalogue, or a miniature scale model in a Wes Anderson film. You can imagine a marble navigating the precise rows of pencils and the grooves of open notebooks, guided by dislocated typewriter keys and pegs. There is even a little origami box on an inclined string cable line. The climactic finish appears to be the dominoes, as the last one’s fall will trigger a xylophone mallet to swing like a pendulum and strike a bell. The starting marble will not travel to the very end of the machine; instead it will set off other marbles on meticulously planned journeys.

  ‘So this “conspiracy”, like a Rube Goldberg machine, might be a complicated undertaking to achieve a very simple task,’ Arch says.

  Ursula nods. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. There is a kind of aesthetic ple
asure to it. The elaborate plot.’

  ‘And you’ve said before that your individual practice, Ursula, concerns fairytales—do you see them as elaborate plots too?’

  ‘Well, I suppose the antagonists in fairytales can create unnecessarily elaborate plots. When I was younger I often wondered why the wicked witch didn’t just transform herself into someone more beautiful than Snow White, for example—I mean she had the power to make herself ugly, why not the power to make herself beautiful? It would’ve simplified the whole operation.’

  ‘Do you think plots are inherently evil then?’

  Ursula laughs. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps! But with fairytales we have the benefit of omniscience, you see. But in the real world? No.’

  Penny says, ‘But I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of plots, Arch.’

  Hold the phone! Stace’s eyes turn guarded, but Arch remains level. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. You found the falling girl.’

  ‘I didn’t find her, actually, she came to me. To Lorem Ipsum.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ursula says. ‘What’s this all about?’

  Penny sighs. ‘Oh Ursula, the way you manage to miss huge pop cultural events, it’s amazing. This is like the time I had to explain what lolcats were.’ Penny puts her hands on Ursula’s shoulders and stares at her like a hypnotist or a really intense parent. ‘The falling girl, Ursula. She was from that short film that Seed used when they became a thing. Everyone went apeshit; the falling girl was everywhere. On everything. That T-shirt that you almost had to hawk for Ampersand, my dear, with the falling cat... anyway. Then the filmmakers disappear, and then Arch publishes unseen footage, Seed freaks out—’

  ‘Lorem Ipsum.’ Arch looks pained. ‘Lorem Ipsum published the footage.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Penny asks, dropping her hands from Ursula’s shoulders. ‘The falling girl.’

  You have never seen Arch look so uncomfortable before. ‘She was...’