‘Thanks!’
And then Jules studies you. You smile bravely and try to exude confidence and warmth, which is tricky to do while you’re wearing a Blue Screen Of Death T-shirt. Jules re-secures her Aviators higher up on the bridge of her nose. ‘Let’s establish some ground rules.’
‘Okay.’
‘Rule number one,’ Jules says as she retrieves a white card and a blue biro from her jacket and writes down a ten-digit number. ‘If we get separated, this is my number.’
‘Yep! Hey, why does this card say “STFU” on the back?’
‘Private joke. Rule number two,’ Jules says. ‘If you want out of this, tell me. At any time. I won’t ask any questions.’
‘Yep!’
‘Rule number three,’ Jules says. ‘You can ask me questions. Any question you want. But you can’t ask me questions about why I’m not answering a question.’
‘Yep! Don’t worry, Jules! That’s standard protocol for the writers at Lorem Ipsum. Arch is pretty good like that.’
Jules gazes at you with something akin to sadness. Where are you getting these cues from? Sad? Wary? Pensive? There is something uniquely expressive about Aviators, perhaps, some subtle capacity for emoting. Oh. You wish you could write that down or tell the dictaphone. ‘Okay,’ Jules says. She snaps the lid on the biro and returns the Canon. ‘That’s all the rules for now.’
Jules starts the car and indicates right. She rolls down her window.
You gaze at the Canon and flip through the pictures, smiling. You watch the red marble work its way backwards through the Rube Goldberg machine.
As Jules pulls out into traffic, your smile falters. You hold the camera close. It’s a shot of the marble poised at the beginning of the machine, the very start of the sequence, right after Ursula selected the marble from the bowl—but in this particular shot, the marble isn’t red. It’s blue.
You stare at it, strafing between photographs, but you can’t correct your vision, can’t turn the marble red.
April Kuan! Strapped into the passenger seat of Jules Valentine’s car, the wind fuzzing your hair. April Kuan, heading off into the afternoon, on a mission to do... what?
‘Mind if I take some notes?’ You wiggle the dictaphone.
‘Sure,’ Jules says.
‘Field note the third,’ you tell the dictaphone. ‘Sitting in a car with Jules Valentine.’ Jules grimaces slightly, so you try to talk rapidly and softly like you’ve watched Arch do many times in the past. ‘Just escaped a shootout at HarvestTime. What was that all about? Jules said that the Brad Ruffalo thing was a cover. A cover for what? And who was shooting at us? Were they there for Jules, or for me? April Kuan, intrigued.’
‘They were there for you,’ Jules confirms.
‘They were there for me,’ you whisper to the dictaphone. And to Jules: ‘Why?’
‘They want the Rube Goldberg machine and they think that you can help them get to it.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Who are they, ever?’
That makes you think. ‘Who are they, ever,’ you whisper to the dictaphone.
Jules is going ten kilometers above the speed limit. You pass another one of those Seed billboards, floating in the sky. The scenery blurs, lags, skips.
‘Where’re we going, Jules Valentine?’ you ask.
‘Taylor & Sondergaard.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re busting out Ulysses.’
‘Who’s Ulysses?’
Jules doesn’t reply. She flicks her indicator grimly.
‘Right. Rule number three.’
Blurs, lags, skips.
You arrive at the Mt. Lawley branch of Taylor & Sondergaard. Jules fetches a parking ticket and displays it on the dash. You appreciate that kind of law-abiding conscientiousness in an assassin. You hurry to follow Jules across the road. She takes long, even strides, one for every two of yours, even when you’re jogging, and it’s only now that Jules seems familiar to you, the same way Ursula was familiar to you, as if the both of them were part of some memory implanted in your unconscious that has since been imperfectly erased.
‘Where’ve I seen Jules Valentine before?’ you whisper into the dictaphone.
Waiting outside Taylor & Sondergaard, sitting on a bench, is a boy who can’t help but look small for his age. He’s wearing a fancy private school uniform and his companion is a bulky schoolbag that probably contains his entire life. ‘Peter,’ Jules says. ‘Are you ready?’
The boy nods and slides off the bench. A long-ago graffiti artist has affixed a grubby sticker of the falling girl to the back of the bench where the boy was just sitting. Jules takes up his schoolbag by the handle. The bag’s contents rattle. The boy squints at you but doesn’t say anything. ‘Well, hi!’ you chirp. ‘I’m April Kuan!’
The boy looks pained for a second. The crest on his school blazer is bigger than his fist. ‘Hello. I’m Peter Pushkin.’
‘Nice to meet you!’
Jules pulls the glass door and holds it open for Peter. ‘April, just follow my lead, okay.’
‘Sure!’
The three of you enter the waiting room. There are only four clients waiting, eyes cast down onto their phones or magazines. What does Taylor & Sondergaard do, anyway? A barely audible wall-mounted television murmurs in the corner. Jules and Peter approach the counter as if they have been here before. The receptionist is saying, ‘Yes, that will be top-notch. Yes. Goodbye,’ into his headset, and then, to your assembled party, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ Jules says. She puts a hand maternally on Peter’s shoulder. ‘We have an appointment for Peter Pushkin with Dr. Lee.’
‘Certainly.’ The receptionist makes a few clicks on his mouse. Then he looks at you. His brow furrows in that tactful receptionist way.
‘This is April Kuan,’ Jules says. ‘Peter’s mentor at school. Dr. Lee requested that she be present at this meeting.’
‘Of course,’ the receptionist says. ‘Please take a seat.’
‘Thank you.’
Jules and Peter choose the seats closest to the children’s toys. You trail behind them. In this corner of the waiting room, there is a jumble of loose Duplo bricks on a solid, cube-shaped table, which has a green grooved Duplo playbase fixed into the top surface. That receptionist is kind of ...looking at the three of you. Jules folds her arms and Peter clasps his hands on his knees. Jules is still wearing her Aviators, which is super weird. It’s probably why the receptionist is still staring at the three of you, right? I mean, it’s not you, is it? Because you’re totally not acting conspicuous. To prove it, you slide a magazine off the top of the nearest stack and begin to read. ‘April Kuan, reading about summer thighs,’ you murmur.
Then the phone rings and the receptionist is hello-yessing into his headset again. Jules nods at Peter, who kneels next to his bag and unzips it. He removes a handful of blue bricks and places them next to the bricks on the Duplo table. Jules joins Peter on her knees on the floor, and then the two of them start grabbing brick after brick, locking them together into segments, and locking the segments to the playbase. They move deftly, with frightening accuracy—not once do they reposition a brick once it’s laid down. They’re constructing some kind of city. They start with four walls at the edges of the playbase and then set to work on a broad central watchtower with four turrets.
‘We have a nine o’clock, ten o’clock and eleven-thirty on that Friday,’ says the receptionist.
They’ve almost exhausted the pile of bricks. They’ve been careful to rotate through the colors. You lift the Canon and document their progress. At the Canon’s click, Peter interrupts his building to look up at you with that same worried look as before. You glance over your shoulder at the other clients, but none of them is observing this.
‘I’m afraid those are the only times we have available,’ says the receptionist.
All the bricks are gone. It’s not quite a city, you realize, but ...almost like a chunky model of a safe—the central to
wer is actually the dial of a combination lock. Peter twists a pivoting segment in the middle of the structure, first one way, then the other.
And then the safe utters a click, and the table seems to exhale. Peter flips the playbase up from the table. He reaches into the recess. Jules quickly grabs Peter’s schoolbag, splitting both zips to the base, while Peter scoops a black cat out of the safe.
Wait—
Jules widens the mouth of the schoolbag and the cat dives out of Peter’s arms and into the bag. Jules connects the zips. Peter shuts the lid of the Duplo table. He threads his arms through the backpack straps and Jules gets to her feet and grabs you by the sleeve. The magazine falls off your knees and slaps the floor but Jules keeps you moving, elbowing the glass door, while the receptionist says, ‘Excellent, eleven-thirty it is, then.’ Before the glass door shuts you manage to glimpse one of the waiting clients glancing up idly, belatedly, at your fallen magazine.
The three of you regroup around the corner at the falling girl bench. Peter gently slides the schoolbag off his back and pulls down the zips. The cat climbs out. ‘Nice work in there,’ Jules says. ‘I think we’ve really got this, this time.’
‘Thank you,’ Peter says. ‘Do you have it?’
‘Sure.’ Jules reaches inside her jacket. She takes out what looks like a scrunched-up ATM receipt. She massages out the folds. It’s a diagram of a bird, rendered in thin, precise pencil. She offers it to Peter, who trades it for a red leather pet collar that he recovers from his blazer pocket. He also gives Jules two glossy tickets, still connected by a perforated line. All the while the cat just sits there, watching the exchange. You’re feeling so left out right now.
‘Hey,’ Jules says. ‘Good luck, Peter.’
‘Thank you.’ Peter slowly pulls on his schoolbag, stowing the bird diagram in his pocket.
‘Sure I can’t give you a ride?’
‘No, it’s okay. I can walk back to school. Thanks.’
‘Be careful,’ Jules says, but Peter’s already wandering off, in his slow, ruined way. Jules watches him leave, and then glances down at the pet collar in her hand.
You activate the dictaphone. ‘ULYSSES, the tag says. 29 SIGMUND ST. No suburb. No phone number either. Field note the fourth: Jules Valentine has just received a possibly entirely ineffective pet collar.’
Jules looks at you and you quickly shut off the dictaphone and back one step away from her. ‘So, uh, Jules, where’s Peter going?’
Jules purses her lips. She unbuckles the collar and bends down to fix it to the cat, who sleekly extends his neck to accommodate her.
ULYSSES HAS JOINED YOUR PARTY.
The cat and Jules share a look as if they, too, have seen each other somewhere before. It’s like that scene at the end of Jumanji when Judy and Peter meet Alan and Sarah and it’s really creepy and strange because they have met before, and they know it, but all that stuff happened in another timeline so it would be super awkward to discuss it.
‘Jules? Where’s Peter going?’
‘He’s also trying to find someone,’ Jules says. ‘I don’t really know.’
‘What did you mean before, Jules,’ you ask, ‘when you said to Peter that you think we’ve really got this, this time?’
Ulysses begins to lick himself. Then—CLAP!—he flinches, green eyes darting across the road, to the pedestrian path, where Peter staggers sideways, one strap of his schoolbag falling off his shoulder. Another shot claps out and Peter jolts, teeters on his feet; Ulysses jumps off the bench and races towards him; Jules unholsters her gun—‘Get down,’ she says—and she shoots at a black Holden Barina parked in front of her Toyota, but the car’s already taking off, and the bullet only knocks the side mirror. Peter collapses and the car speeds away, the side mirror dangling like an eye from a socket. Ulysses swerves and chases after the black car, ears flattened, but the car’s already too far, small and smug in the distance. Jules runs to Peter. Jules runs to Peter. Jules runs to Peter. Jules runs to Peter.
K X 02
ULYSSES HAS JOINED YOUR PARTY.
The cat and Jules share a look as if they, too, have seen each other somewhere before. It’s like that scene at the end of Jumanji when Judy and Peter meet Alan and Sarah and it’s really creepy and strange because they have met before, and they know it, but all that stuff happened in another timeline so it would be super awkward to discuss it.
But, whatever! There’s no time to spare. You see the black Holden Barina parked behind Jules’s car, the open window, the glint of a pistol. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING DO SOMETHING! You spy the handgrip of Jules’s gun protruding from her jacket so you yank it free and shoot at the first shape you see in the Holden. The Holden’s alarm goes off. Peter turns around, sleepy, horrified. You blitz the trigger again and then Jules pushes your wrist down. ‘That’s enough,’ she says. The driver of the Holden faceplants the steering wheel and adds the baaaaaaaaaaaaaaa of the horn to the soundtrack. Peter hitches his schoolbag higher and breaks into a jog. He drops out of sight.
There’s something strange about the driver. ‘Who’s that in the black car?’ you ask but Jules untangles the gun from your fingers. The alarm is still screaming. ‘Get in my car,’ Jules says, nudging you, scanning the street with gun raised. ‘Ulysses, go.’ And in a tumble of central locking and slamming doors you and Jules and Ulysses are blasting outta there.
You wriggle onto your knees and watch the black Holden grow smaller in the back windscreen, the driver’s horn a perpetual note. ‘Who was that in the Holden?’ you ask, but then Jules executes a particularly sharp turn, so you slide right-way-around in your seat and belt up. Ulysses is bracing himself in the passenger seat, spreading his claws. How did you lose shotgun to a cat?
‘That was a waste,’ Jules says.
‘What?’
‘Going back for Peter.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wasn’t necessary anymore.’
‘Necessary?’
‘To accomplish our task.’
‘I know,’ you say, even though you’re not sure that you know. ‘But... it seemed like you cared a little about him, Jules. Even if you were just working with him temporarily. Ulysses seemed to care, at least.’
Jules tightens her jaw and says nothing. Ulysses decides to safeguard against the car’s momentum by rearranging himself into the bread loaf position.
Something else occurs to you. ‘Hey, what do you mean, going back for Peter?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘No I don’t,’ you say, even though you do.
Cars race by you like asteroids. Like exiting souls. Like facts that are avoidable for only so long.
Like the worst segue ever, burning a hole through your periphery.
Jules pulls into a car park off Riverside Drive, leans out the window to press the button for a ticket, and proceeds through the boomgate. It’s getting close to three o’clock now; the sky is just beginning to sour. You’re outside the Perth Concert Hall, perched atop a mountain of stairs, the oblong windows arrayed like the spines of books. ‘Field note the fifth: the Concert Hall is quiet today,’ you whisper into the dictaphone. ‘The courtyard, vast. It proclaims the following architectural statement: We Have Stairs.’
Jules and Ulysses exit the car. You’re pretty exhausted. You turn on the Canon and appraise the blue marble again. ‘Let’s review,’ you tell the dictaphone. ‘Arch sent us on an assignment to interview Brad Ruffalo, but Brad Ruffalo doesn’t exist and instead we fell into stride with Jules Valentine, who’s trying to stop some mysterious trigger-happy forces from getting their hands on Ursula Rodriguez and Penny Birch’s Rube Goldberg machine. Now Peter Pushkin’s pulled a cat called Ulysses out of a Duplo table and narrowly avoided an ambush from a lone shooter and exchanged a pet collar for a diagram of a bird.’ You lean back in your seat and sigh, off-the-record, ‘This is going to be one strange-ass article, even for Lorem Ipsum.’ You slide out of the car.
The foyer of the Concert Hall has th
at same deserted, distant feel as HarvestTime, set up like a museum, as if everything is separated from reality by a Windexed pane of glass. Jules presents the tickets she received from Peter to a black-clad usher. As the usher examines them, you try to peek at the name of the show, but you’re distracted by Ulysses brushing past your leg and slipping into the auditorium with barely a rustle of the bell on his collar. The usher hands back the tickets, and you follow Jules up some cushioned red steps.
The auditorium is lit by a ceiling gridded with square amber lights. It’s quiet, muffled as an aquarium. There are a few people sitting in the balconies but the lower area of the hall is completely vacant. Ulysses has already staked out three seats in the middle of a row. You sit like this: Jules, Ulysses, April. You all stare, unspeaking, at the empty stage. At the microphones suspended by wires from the ceiling. At the dormant organ pipes like bones in an upturned ribcage. You raise the Canon.
The row of seats tremors a little. There’s a man with floppy hair making his way, crabwise, down this row, on Jules’s side. He chooses the seat next to Jules, sinking into it slowly, uncertainly. Before you can ask Jules about what’s happening, the house lights dim. The air smells expensive, waxy.
Four musicians file onto the stage. A string quartet. Violin, violin, viola, cello. The scant audience offers applause. Jules tentatively joins in, so you do too. Ulysses reclines in his seat.
The lead violinist nods, and the claps fade. The musicians lift their instruments. They embark on a complex melody. The sound of their labour fills the auditorium.
‘Tim Spiegel?’ Jules says to the man beside her. The man nods. Jules asks, ‘Is this your cat?’
The man turns. He cranes his neck to look past Jules. Ulysses glances away from the string quartet for a moment to meet his eye.
‘I need to see the tag,’ Tim Spiegel says.
Jules reaches out and overturns the tag hanging from the collar. The engraving, ULYSSES / 29 SIGMUND ST, catches the light.
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