by Curtis Hox
Hattie remained alone on stage, while security escorted Masumi, Alice, and Eliot downstairs into the subbasement.
A sea of hands shot into the air.
She waved them down. “Let me say a few words before I answer your questions. The demonstration is real. It can be repeated, and it proves, de facto, a new conception of reality is in order. Science need not fret—its methods are tried-and-true. Its objects of study, though, are complex and must be rethought in the light of this New Phenomenon of Bleedover.”
“For some unknown reason, at this time in human history, our perception of things has far outmatched our explanatory power. What most intrigues me is that this new perception emerges within the scale of human culture, not the relativistic scale of planets and galaxies, or the micro scale of the subatomic world. The scale of human culture, its objects, so readily accessible, must now be assessed in a new light.”
“To this aim, I propose new interdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity in the academy. I’ll begin, here in this old library, the examination of a working science of culture that sidesteps the aims of sociologists for one that details actual methods for the instantiations of cultural objects. If our understanding of reality must also change, so be it.”
Stephan jumped to his feet. “I demand you explain what you mean by a new conception of reality.” He actually turned red, as he stood there with arms on hips.
“Don’t be daft, Stephan. Anyone with eyes who saw the appearance of the apples knows what that means. Things don’t just appear out of the air, do they? Take a look. There are three magical apples just sitting over there.”
Stephan left his satchel under his chair as he stormed out.
“Any other questions?”
Hands rose in unison, and Hattie let herself feel victorious.
CHAPTER NINE
After everyone left, Dr. Sterling and Alice prepared to spend the day arranging her office. Towns was with his mother but said he’d be back soon. Masumi and Dr. Brandeis returned to the science complexes to gauge their reaction.
Dr. Sterling impulsively sent Brad and his team home, telling them she’d be in touch if necessary. The Landash Library would be her haven, but could it protect them?
She had paid for the construction of an apartment in the subbasement, her own private funds furnishing the suite. She planned to live in the bedroom and a kitchenette until finishing the portal, and her Society. The small shower and bathroom barely provided enough room for her to maneuver. Yet it would suffice, as would the tiny closet that would house her weekly attire.
She had ordered a washer and dryer, as well as designated space for a pantry. In the hallway outside, though, they had plenty of room for her institute and her department. She even left a series of rooms empty to be converted to dormitories later. Two full classrooms had already been outfitted for the fall semester.
The Landash Library would see more activity than in it had in a century. She hoped she could hide down there, for just a little longer.
* * *
Hattie watched Alice place the last item in the final shelf of books. Alice ran her fingers along a row, clearly happy with herself.
“Success,” Alice said, then scooted back around Hattie’s desk.
The floor was littered with empty cardboard boxes. Even the large shelving unit behind the desk had been packed, enough that it would take someone willing to move all the books to reveal the doorway hidden behind it.
Alice had placed Dr. Sterling’s monographs in a choice spot on a center shelf just above her head. There they were, all twelve, each one an important comment on the N.P.B.
“I can’t believe all that’s happened,” Alice said, “the move of the department and the institute, the announcement of a new science, the creation of the Society, the apple, the doorway.” She sat in one of the empty chairs, splaying her legs in satisfaction, kicking a box out of the way. “I was wondering …”
“Yes?”
“What was the point of those pieces of laminated text we placed in the library?”
“Like I told Masumi, a ritual—”
“No other function?” Alice had a way of knowing when Hattie was deflecting. “None at all?”
“What is it, Alice?”
“Why go to the trouble of encasing unreadable text in plastic and have us litter the place with them?”
Oh, all right, then.
Out of her blazer pocket, Hattie pulled a small metallic case and set it on her desk.
Alice kicked boxes away to make a path. She moved close enough to lean over Hattie’s desk.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
Alice revealed a lock of dirty-blonde hair bound in filigreed silver. “Beautiful.”
“Yes it is.”
“Whose is it?”
“An old friend’s.”
Hattie watched Alice’s eyes widen with excitement at seeing something mysterious.
Alice was as much a well-packaged product of contemporary life as the next college student. She was maybe a bit more intellectual, certainly transformed by recent events, but still no more aware of the possibilities of the fantastic than anyone who grew up in a world dominated by technoscience. An object’s aura meant nothing to someone who could walk down an aisle at Walmart and see branded containers replicated endlessly in a multitude of colors and images. The idea of something handmade had little impact on Alice’s generation because most things were mass produced.
What Hattie saw Alice experience, though, was something old, primeval: a recognition the object was different or, even better, enchanted.
She saw reverence in her student’s eyes and feared her blind adoration.
How to stop it, though, when it’s real?
Alice raised her hand as if to stroke the relic.
“Go ahead.”
She gently lifted it from its cradle.
“I believe it provides me with insight,” Hattie said.
There, she’d said it. The ultimate claim of the mystic.
Towns walked through the open door and paused when he saw the lock.
Hattie retrieved it from Alice. “How’s your mother, Towns?”
“What’s that?”
“A gift.”
He looked as if he’d been walking (and perspiring) in the sun all day. He wore a bright-red T-shirt designed in Asian artwork with a figure that looked like a cross between a samurai and a vampire. It was soaked through several times. A few lines of sweat streaked rings around his neck. He probably needed a shower. He definitely needed his mother. And now he looked detached from everything happening here.
“The lock was a gift from a friend who died.” Hattie paused as she considered the yearning in both her students. Alice betrayed her eagerness, Towns his confusion.
Hattie knew that what she did now, how she handled this might reflect in microcosm her relationship to every later member in her Society.
When they make demands, she wondered, what would she do?
No way around it, then. Best be clinical, empirical, rational.
“Sit down,” she said.
Towns stood his ground for a moment, then chose the remaining chair.
“Margery was unlike any of us,” Hattie said. “She was connected to what was happening. She was a special … person.” She stumbled on these last words, stopping herself from saying prophetess or sorceress. “Margery knew what was happening long before we had any words for explaining it. She called bleedover ‘the stuff of narrative that bleeds into the world.’ She was always talking like that. When she died she instructed me to take a lock of her hair.”
Hattie breathed deep and presented the locket. “There were others there that day who received relics like this. They’ve been touched as well, each one specifically. Mine, I believe, provides me with insight into the N.P.B.” Alice looked about to burst, but Hattie raised a silencing hand. “I believe I will eventually see the entire picture of what’s happening with the N.P.B. I’ll know, not si
mply believe.”
Towns asked, “Can it help my mother?”
“I don’t think so.”
He nodded, but didn’t look pleased.
“Can we visit her grave?” Alice asked.
Hattie cringed. “No, we cannot. She was cremated. An injustice, if you ask me.”
“Tell us more about Margery,” Alice said.
So it begins.
Hattie told them about their meeting in college in the first year. The creation of the reading group: Corbin, Dreya, Eliot, even Stephan Ross, before the problems began. She spent an hour on her friendship phase with Margery, then moved into the lover phase.
Hattie choked on a few words about how she knew what Margery would become. There was no way to avoid this hagiography. If the cement of her Society were to stick, it would be because of those members like Alice who sat rapt and even those like Towns with private challenges who still remained to hear. She realized she felt compelled to explain. This was a part of the rational process, even if it was similar to what charlatans peddled in the name of the divine.
Hattie knew she had to accept the hard truth.
Fine. If it has to have a religious flavor, I’ll dress my Society with ornamentation taken from religious experience. Fine.
“My mother’s sick,” Towns said, “and you can’t help. Why should I care?”
She knew Towns had been listening. “That’s beyond me, Towns, for now.”
“Right.”
He left without saying another word.
“He’s not himself,” Alice said.
“I think we may lose him. I just need some time.”
* * *
The next morning, Towns and Sandi sat by his mother’s side, close enough to hear her barely perceptible breathing below the hum of the equipment. The low light in the room suggested she was taking a nap, even though the apparatuses of modern medicine surrounded her like a complex machine organism designed to keep her alive.
“I know someone who might be able to help,” Sandi said. “He has his ways.”
“I believe in that stuff,” Towns said.
Sandi waited to see if he would continue. She didn’t know why they wanted him or why his sick mother mattered. She just knew she needed to open him up.
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “Maybe I can talk to my friend.”
Towns retreated from his momentary eagerness, as if he had no reason to suspect she would.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll go out and make a call. Be comin’ back.”
* * *
An hour later, the door opened, and two silhouettes appeared in the doorway. Sandi walked in with an austere man in a suit. The man was old enough that you could see the dome of his head through his depleted hair. He had the enlarged nose and ears of someone nearing the end of his life, and even big shoes and baggy pants that bunched up at the belt. He glided to the bedside.
“May I?” he asked.
Towns nodded.
The man approached his mother, then placed his hands on her forehead. He mumbled sibilant words.
“Come on,” Sandi said. “Let’s give them a few moments.”
They left the room and didn’t see Mr. Ontavalo insert a ten-cc syringe into her IV filled with a powerful epigenetic repressor.
* * *
Towns returned and sat in a chair and dozed. He didn’t pay much attention until Mr. Ontavalo changed from his odd mumbles to something like you’d see in an exorcism movie. He admonished the sickness, asking for his mother to help to fight the poison.
“All the voices of the Deep cry out in adoration,” he said. “Just listen.”
Towns thought Sandi’s friend was a crackpot until his mother’s breathing deepened.
Her eyelids fluttered. Towns actually jumped to his feet.
“Blessed be,” Mr. Ontavalo said. “She has heard our prayer.”
Towns’s mother woke up and asked where she was.
“Mom!”
* * *
Towns Packer spent the rest of the day with her, as his new friends hovered in the background, waiting to pounce.
She finally slept, this time returning to a peaceful world of harmless dreams. They recruited him right there, never finding an easier mark.
“Dr. Sterling lied to me,” he said.
Mr. Ontavalo, the actor who was quite happy with his performance, replied, “The Riodola professor? I know someone you might want to meet who can tell you all about her. Have you heard of Hexcom United?”
PART TWO: THE PORTAL
From Appendix 1: A List of Definitions in the back of Bleedover, Harriet Sterling:
Instantiation:
The result of a sung, written, constructed, etc., bleedover interpolation. For example, I have suggested that a fitting first instantiation would be an apple (see the Introduction for the historical reasons why this is appropriate). Again, to translate information in an interpolation into an actual, real object is an act of instantiation: an instant in which transformation happens from the imagined to the real. More impressive, though, would be the instantiation of something that, itself, is an avenue of creation: like a portal, but one that leads somewhere specific, even fantastic.
CHAPTER TEN
On the morning of the first day of summer classes, Masumi entered Dr. Sterling’s office. She removed all the books from the case, carefully stacking them on the desk; then she edged the case aside to reveal the door. She stared at it, annoyed she felt guilty. She had spent the morning removing her personal belongings from her lab, irked by the doorway she wasn’t allowed to open.
Also, Masumi no longer worked for Dr. Stephan Ross. After her involvement in the demonstration, he fired her for being associated with such a blatant case of intellectual, academic dishonesty (so he wrote in her file before passing it to HR). Her funding had been canceled, and Dr. Sterling was forced to pay Masumi’s two-hour registration requirement while she waited on her final project defense (which might not happen now).
Dr. Sterling had taken care of everything, even providing Masumi a salary through the Institute. The Culture Science Department would take some time to construct. Masumi would have to wait to present her work for candidacy. She didn’t mind, though, as long as she had a job. The problem was what to do until then.
To keep busy, Masumi had moved her office into the old library but didn’t feel at ease. She wanted to know what was behind the door and felt offended she couldn’t look.
Masumi placed her ear up against the cool door. She heard nothing. She gave it a slight push, feeling it remain in place.
She operated on the assumption that if what Dr. Sterling did was legitimate, there should be no problem with a simple peek. She expected to find nothing.
When she leaned on the handle and pulled, the door swung wide and revealed unadorned, gray cinderblocks mortared with cement. Masumi touched their rough surface, powder staining her fingertips.
“Figures,” she said, wiping the stuff on her shorts.
She closed the door, and returned the case and the books. She wasn’t sure if she were more annoyed with Dr. Sterling now, or less.
Either way, Masumi knew what stood behind that door.
Now, where is she?
She waited patiently outside Dr. Sterling’s office.
When the door down the hallway finally opened, Masumi said, “I need to speak with you.”
Dr. Sterling looked refreshed, having spent the night at home in the city.
Masumi followed her into the office. “I want you to tell me what’s on the other side of that door.”
Dr. Sterling walked to her desk, set down her purse, and regarded her student. “I should just tell you, Masumi?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because keeping it hidden is wrong.”
“We should be transparent?”
“Fully.”
“Lay it out for the world, no matter what the consequences?”
Masumi caught herself, but
still said, “Yes.”
She began thinking about Shelley’s Frankenstein. She thought of the examples Dr. Sterling might use to bolster an argument that unchecked science is a danger.
What else? Oppenheimer’s recognition he became a destroyer. Sure, but he was a physicist, an engineer, a mechanic of nature. She’ll say that what other men do with his findings cannot be laid at his feet. Or can it, regardless of his own self-damnation? What if she claims—
“Nothing is behind that door, Masumi. Not yet.”
Masumi paused, surprised how easily she’d received what she already knew. At least she’s honest, Masumi thought. “So it’ll lead somewhere?”
Dr. Sterling nodded.
“Where?”
“Sit down, Masumi, and let me explain a few things to you. I’m just missing one piece to the puzzle of the N.P.B. Just one. And I need help finding it. I call it Crossover.”
* * *
Back at the Miramar, Masumi waited for Towns’s call about his mother’s miraculous recovery. He’d sent a text with the news.
Masumi’s phone rang on the counter while she used a long wooden spoon to stir olive oil into a boiling pot of water. She was making a late lunch that smelled of fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, and pasta.
She saw his number and answered.
“Hey, how’s your mother doing?”
“Amazing. I just found out they’re paying her bills too. And get this: they even offered me a job.”
“Hexcom United?”
“It’s such a cool place. I miss you.”
“Stop.”
He relented. She broke pasta with her free hand and dropped it in the pot. She continued to stir and listened as he explained how his mother had just gotten better and how they gave him a nice suite on Hexcom corporate grounds—pretty much the VIP treatment.
Masumi listened, now unconsciously preparing a sautéing pan, as he detailed seeing another method of instantiation.
“Didn’t last though,” Towns said. “Not like the apple … or the door. And you should see this place. It’s huge.”
The fact Hexcom could instantiate didn’t bother her. His description of the facility and its underground complex and massive chambers bothered her, and the fact his mother had gotten better so quickly.