Chapter Text
He’s stood there, hand slack around the pole with his knees knocking the empty seat before him: the lady there had got up a minute ago and he ought to sit down, is making to sit down.
There is a curt series of daily practices that Jon takes to every time he rides the Underground, something that started in his fits of mindless idling and developed outward when he’d, against all possible odds, finished every book in his apartment. Each of his encyclopedia-size tomes included, and as it followed, there was this bulk of unused time during his balances between scouring for a new library within walking distance and waiting for the arrival of his bulk-ordered blank tapes — an expenditure given added zeal by the Institute budget, one which has managed through the longest odds by not being shot down by Elias. He can borrow from the actual sum, and just down the corridor, Martin cannot put wool throws over the chairs without being called up for a HR (Elias, but in a different room) review.
The times interwoven pass this way:
He looks at the bindings of the books in his fellow riders’ laps, trying to gauge of any would be of interest to him. He starts to scan each advertisement (for something that, even if it were to interest him, he would not be able to afford this time of the month), people shuffle past behind him and he throws himself little quizzes after passing a few more stops: What was the woman with the olive shawl holding? A boxed kettle. What was on her shoulder: A reusable tote.
If his new flat hadn’t thrown him miles further away from the Institute, if he’d considered travel distance at any time during the process of the move, he wouldn’t have this outlier problem of no stimulation. It was question of finances; he hasn’t told anyone out of shame, mostly, and he’s still baking excuses as to why so much excess time is buried in the Archives. Frankly, having— there is a man sitting next to the seat he’s making to sit down on, and though the words are inverted he tries to form a synopsis of the paper column being read... it and its’ well-spaced, color-rich illustrations.
The man with the flatcap? Newspaper, rolled up, printed three days ago; wearing a lanyard. Looked young and may have been, he interprets baselessly, working... for his Uni’s publication.
Frankly, having a flat is more of a title thing than a utility thing for him. Well-spaced, color-rich illustrations.
He wonders how many of these people have statements they’re still sorting out while he’s waiting on the platform, color-coding the people; a shawl here, a flatcap there, herringbone vest, thick cotton khimar. How many of these people have experienced things so beyond their capacity of comprehension they are below unclassifiable, lesser than unclassifiable, not worth the strain of being converted to word, to experience. Memory mistaken for dream, or migraine.
He looks at the man, he looks at the gazette the man is reading, he looks at the column of the gazette which the man is reading, and something nameless makes him just nearly ask if he has a statement to give.
The column he’s inverted-reading switches mediums, jumping over from pencil illustrations to sharp photography. Auricular Miraculous, the column is titled. Five pages into this article, Jon sees the gleaming inverted faces of each member, the one in the center holding her cello in a triumphantly-closed pair of fists, and there’s a- there’s someone holding a clarinet.
Double-take that appears as a nod to the rest of the carriage, because that’s wrong. A clarinet. Photograph of a six-string sextet, two cellos, four violins, one clarinetist, a... clarinetist. Out of focus and behind the black of the vignette, nearly out of frame. Their outfit does not match the coordinated ivory of the sextet, an outlying seventh who breaks the momentum. They’re brandishing it like a trophy, even, its’ bridge key shining in the light; the leather of Jon’s bag creaks too loudly when he stoops somewhat, trying to get a look at the face of the reader and see whether he’s noticed this discrepancy as well. There’s bad design choices, on top of that: with the way the colors are balanced from what must be the auditorium it was taken in, the brain flies to think that they’re the one who’s had the operation,
“Uh- excuse me, could I sit there?”
which in Jon’s case, he now notices, was the first face to ensnare his attention. Before the cellist, before he read her inverted name. The harder he looks, the more the figure... recedes, sliding as though upon oiled soles. Sliding out of frame, and from there, further behind the margin
“Sorry?”
He’s being tapped on the shoulder. Two fingers, very light, coming from the hand of someone who’s wearing mismatched socks. His eyes fall from the column, and the first place he’s looking is the floor— then the brogues, then the patterned socks (Memphis left Mondrian right) and
“Are you, um-?”
back up to the two fingers, again. But more urgently than that, the amount of bags the person is carrying: sloughing off of their arm in twos, in fives. To raise the tapping hand all were shifted to the other forearm, which Jon can tell is going red and ringing where the chafes are. Reusable tote bags— he checks for the color of their shawl to corroborate old information and form a trend in Underground riders— and it’s with certainty that he concludes this to be a shopper.
Which is wrong: a Martin, actually. Jon’s head traces back. The column reader licks his finger and touches the edge of the page, flips the page. Clarinetist dissolves.
“Oh. Martin.”
“Jon?”
New flat, redirected commute, his entire body reducing to automation when he’s lost in details or watching his own face. He gets one last look at the name of the gazette before straightening his back - something in his spine makes a sound it shouldn’t - before pulling to the side and taking some of Martin’s things. Martin wears no shawl. Why is that.
“What is all this? Here, let me help.”
“Oh-- it’s, you don’t have to, but thanks, that’s- whew, they’re heavy. I think I lost some blood circulation for good getting these down here, Jon, I- Jon. Wow. Good morning, I didn’t know you were on this line, I’ve... never seen you on it before. I mean,” pause for a short, wild exhale, “hardly even knew it was you.”
“The coat threw you off, did it?”
“Uh, not in a bad way. It’s really making you look taller. I have no idea how, but it gave you a foot.”
“I want to say I don’t know how I feel about it just yet,”- has forgotten he was even wearing this coat; preoccupied, looking at everything else, clarinets- “but I think it’s too soon to tell. And if I want to return it, that means going back to my old block. Something I have no inclination to do. Sit, sit.”
“Well, if I may, with my two cents: trenchcoats? Always form-fitting. Whether it’s seven decades or seven minutes ago.”
Another shawl three benches down, is that the same-? No, no. “Or some seven-hundred euros ago, shipping included— and, it so happens, that... Well.”
“No. It wasn’t. Jon, you did not-”
“Too soon to tell. Too soon to tell.”
Laughter. Then, Jon is awake and aware.
Martin takes the seat Jon had been making to sit down in, fresh-faced with high squared cheeks. Very briefly, the column reader whirs backward to the start of the article: in the slot of a second in which the photograph spread is visible, the clarinetist is gone. Martin is saying something, but the clarinetist is gone and the vignette is fuller.
◽ ◽ ◽
The sort of cold that throws stretched sighs in white not just in front of a person, but long behind them as the movement continues. Sunken in from its’ facade, the Institute’s doors are at least ten foot, very imperial, and each morning suits a short waiting game in the time it takes to be acknowledged and buzzed inside. Hoping, then, that it takes less than an hour.
After three minutes stood in the cold Martin clears his throat, moves. It’s here that he begins to say something - Jon not hearing the heft of it - and trying to wedge himself through the mousetrap-weight of the lefthand door — he does well with this up until it opens, dramatically. Clocking Jon in the head. The buzzer goes off like a gong.
While being given a stern talk from the masthead’s front himself, a long rant to the tune of constant reference to employee identification and the importance of its’ use, rather than behaving in a manner completely out of line on Institute property—
(“It’s just- it’s cold out there. I mean, it was cold,” says Martin.
“––I suggested it. It was my mistake. Full responsibility. Full,” says Jon.
“Neither, of you, are, listening,” says Elias, dragging his words terribly, cutting off both.)
—both had keyed out.
In the Archives’ vision-neutral beige lighting, tinted deep, Jon digs into his temples, exhales, lets all out. What it is he’s been holding in this last week, the last two - it has no name, and comes out as though retched. And his head, this headache is light as far as they go, but there is a bruise now that he doesn’t have enough hair to hide; it was a strain to keep his head craned a way in order to refrain it from entering Martin’s privy.
A cluster takes semicircle form around the Blackwood desklet. Martin’s outdone himself in flying colors— he woke up half past three in order to make a meal that could feed everybody - kindly while, much like him, also straining to adhere to people’s palettes. With Melanie duly considering veganism, there was that consideration niche to head off all the others and keep him re-planning, re-planning, scrapping the preparation already done. There was struggling to find bags to haul the hauls here, reusable types that wouldn’t have their handles snap the moment he stepped through his threshold— another hour trying to solve that problem when it came up, then not being able to scrounge up enough cab fare for the distance, and lugging it all down into the tube station... Later: Jon.
Jon edges toward the others, strafing. Contending with an invisible barrier.
Scuffing forward, too much of the front pads of his feet in that off way he moves across the room. Martin, not nearly catching his gaze but trying, wants to say some impossible thing approaching I would’ve just turned home had I not saw you, probably, and not came in, cause all this is a mess and I’m just hoping it’s not undercooked, but his mouth is behind his fingertips and viewing a person as an effigy of luck is a poor, poor thing to do.
Jon has his own plate. It was the first plate.
“All that’s for me? Ah, yes. You’ve done it at last. Much obliged,” says Tim, then marching off with four bags’ worth stacked across one arm. Martin toddles up and aims for his neck, firmly enough, with a pair of wool mittens which shed fluff.
Jon stays long enough to exercise some etiquette: have half a cup of water with his fellow staff (counterweights), nod at things, but the moment he can shrink back to his residency he does so: he is further back amid the papers and amid the bookage before he was of any conversational importance.
Even knowing where he left off and with all his desk as he left it — the one worn desk of about six; the main corridor of the Archives has uncountable arteries — he still finds himself glazing over his numbers, misspelling surnames -- once, twice, as he refiles such and such... not picking up the things he doesn’t feel attracted to, which is a homework method, not a work method.
After due self-criticism, he returns to (sitting on) the Kelemen case.
A mess. Aimless. The brunt of things either come before or after the person’s recording. One drops their occurrence, goes, and the subject Fear either returns to take more lives or it collapses beneath its own weight. Kelemen, however, comes, then comes again, then comes again, each time more disoriented. Jon knows what he’s looking at overall, this foot-high weft of documents in her file. He knows what he is looking at yet chooses to disdain it. Vast, just vast.
It takes the usual time for his laptop to boot and in the wait he scratches out notes, sifting here, sifting there, bending himself to do so at an angle that makes his back scream. The connection is slower here than in the rest of the Institute but it’s the only location where his eyes don’t feel as though they’re covered in boiling oil.
It may have been... foolish, to think that a big proprietary change would extend outwards and refit things. Make things more bearable, the time spent getting here, the time spent leaving here, the time spent being used by this building, the time spent being extruded by this building. People — there are people out there and they have, they mind, they sort through statements not yet formed - and they are going about their lives all the while. State...ments. Things that have happened, had, minded, carried, by the person. Insignificant happenings until they are not.
Jon made a mistake and he is stuck in its’ mire, Jon spends hours staring at his lap, or the ends of his shoes, bruises on his wrists of unknown origin, helpless.
“Aren’t feeling up for it today?”
On top of his drifting there is also a guilt about how he’s only been picking off the edges of his lasagna.
“Don’t take it personally. I’m liable to distraction today, it seems.” Inattentiveness,
“Tell me you had a big breakfast, then, at least?” Unloading an armful of white tapes yet unlogged, stacking them nicely by the dozen. Martin makes a dynamic expression. Martin sits (in a chair. Jon is paying attention.) “You know. A kind of honorary new tube route! special for what’s probably been the most exhilarating day of your life? Woo, right?”
Soggy cinnamon toast dropped into the suds of the sink by mistake, yes. A vat’s amount of cream across the backside, half of which slid into his throat and the other half down the front of his shirt. No time to do more than get at it with a napkin, he was already late. Boxed kettle, not new but the packaging is aged as though it is, olive, shawl.
No appetite at all this hour yet Jon still finds his fork acting. Does not grimace on a bite of cold lasagna, deeply cold, has been sitting here for eighteen minutes unbothered, untrammeled, unacknowledged, Jon has not bothered with it before now — and on seeing Martin’s rapid approach, angled the plate behind his laptop to give a plausibility that the concealed end may have been eaten, savored even, yet when he ran this simulation in his mind and found it to not work he begun stabbing the thing with a debit card he has not used in ages to, through slices, give the veneer of any possible involvement and Martin is
Martin (Archival Assistant) is
now pausing in the way people in turn-based conversation often do, which leads Jon to
“Don’t let my rosiness dupe you into thinking I’ve taken too much from our collective luck pile.” (Remove the debit card from view by lowering it. With two fingers insert it into sleeve. Hide the broader side of the plate. Obscure with forearm.)
“Ah, the luck pile. The luck pile is going to start receiving overdraft fees in the mail in about... mm, I’d say two weeks, no notice? We’ve all needed bigger withdrawals too, lately, haven’t we? But, if you fill it with water, don’t you have a swimming pool? I think that’s a swimming pool.”
“Fill it in and make a patio because no-one’s swimming in this weather. Fees, fines.” Pause. Turning his wrist makes the card drop onto the floor with a hard plastic clack Martin does not heed. “Di- did you get what I forwarded you or did Tim do that already?”
“See - swimming pool logic,” says Martin, seating himself, move the plate again, “is an offshoot of half-full logic, right? You’ve heard of that. I’m taking these optimism sessions at the-- forwarded? I— oh, right. Uh... I don’t think he-- huh. I haven’t seen her in yet, but... she should turn up around noon? I could pull up her- if you want me to reach out, that... is.”
From his point as subject, it’s on reminding him of the present case that something in Jon’s expression seems to contract, Martin notices, in the way metals flatten within industrial presses. The outsized fluffed Victorian-possibly chair seems two ages younger than its’ occupant when the allusion is made, his fingers dig into the rests— Martin’s always thought that if he didn’t put up so many variations of a straight face, Jon would combust.
Something’s not been right for a bit and he doesn’t know what angle would be best for an approach. Tim’s aware of it too, they convene when Jon is out (but he’s thoroughly laissez faire; ‘I mean... yeah. Manifestly. Jon’s off. Jon’s off. Something about Jon’s person, is off. Okay. He’s never on.’).
Probably just move trouble. Stress? He wouldn’t say so. He wouldn’t even be asked so, really, and — it’s big, it’s grand news, yet this sense of decay is still as live as it ever was. It isn’t getting better, and Martin knows it isn’t getting better, and he watches his hands going at the armrests and pulling fluff out as they move back.
If not a thanks for being on the same carriage this morning, one question instead. How are you sleeping, but that... too invasive, isn’t it - and he balks, actually, at how little he knows about the life of his supervisor, ‘boss’, luck effigy. He moved, yes, but where to? Where from?
From Jon’s point as troubled object, from seeing the screen of his laptop which has booted up directly to the website of the column, one moment is dedicated to a sharp exhale and the next he’s bent forward and scrolling for the article. Attentiveness.
“Jon?”
“Yes? No. No, you don’t have to get him. We don’t want to occupy his. Invaluable time, do we,” - these words come with all the pauses of a person not engaged in the turn-basedness- “It’s— I brought it up for a reason. I’ll handle the outreach for that statement myself, I’ll do the rest of it myself. There’s no point in it for either of you. A month. A month, at most, before that’s signed, sealed, done with, so on, so on. No, what I want you to do is this. There’s something that’s come up. There’s this...”
“But there’s no need to - it’s really not an issue, if it’s a priority thing. We could take on another if we keep halving. Don’t you think Ms. K deserves som-”
“...anomaly, I’ll call it. You were— when you came up. To me. I was looking at this. Newspaper, that the man- a man, was--”
Rubbing at his lip, making a slightly offput face that is not seen: “I’m sure, but isn’t everything we get here an anomaly in its own right? I’m not-- how much sense does it make to go after people and start up new ends? You know? If it was anything really bad, he’d have just come in about it. That’s more of... the M.O., you know? I mean. If it was more important than walking out onto your balcony and not having a way to get back into the house, then surely—”
“Some people, have statements,” Jon’s teeth clamp just as the hard clack of low heels comes near, “they are still sorting out.”
The memory of Ms. Kelemen (vest: herringbone blouse: powder blue shoes: green shawl: reusable tote) is still stretched thin, if not more so now when compared to her last appearance of the many repeats. From the moment she flits herself down into the provided seating, now some eight percent more frantic, something unorthodox happens: Martin sits in for the recording as well.
Here to observe, says his posture and the way one unneeded hand is shoveled uncomfortably between his thigh and his left knee, the swing of the ankle, Jon has checked out. Ms. Kelemen wants to change her entire statement, again.
‘Not a problem. You’ll have to fill these out.’ Jon hears himself saying these words and feels a drawer shooting open as he pulls his wrist back. Too much force, strain, he doesn’t feel it. What is in there. The blank tapes he bought with the rest of his last paycheck. They sit with more online-bulk-auction scuffing than Martin’s sacrosanct unload, messengered into the Archives through all the politesse of the man upstairs.
Martin looks over, and in doing so, sees the concealed end of the plate.
She is having fourteenth thoughts on the goings of things. Now, not only is the house not real (declared this Tuesday — ‘I passed it yesterday on my way to my work. And the building number, the color of the front, the types of windows - it simply is no longer the same building,’) but the balcony itself isn’t certain anymore. Seven years before, she claims, there was no such balcony attached to the foyer and the one that was there was attached to the master bedroom. The blueprints are contradictory, she says, pulling plans from her purse. Unfolded, it’s the scale of a map for the Trans-Siberian raillines — Jon has checked out. Ms. Kelemen wants to change her entire statement. So it goes. Jon is laissez faire.
She walked out onto the balcony, turned around, double-glass paneled-doors were missing, no ground or floor or anything beneath her to speak of, some eighteen hours of this freefall, nobody knows her now, the building has been cleared, et cetera,
Martin tries for the reigns. The reigns give him rope burn when she loudly insists the dates, the dates, are disordered: she provides new ones, Martin does another unorthodox thing by dual-wielding one fountain pen to get a steady line, Jon has checked out, Ms. Kelemen wants to change her entire statement, Jon will have to scrap this entire tape. It’s a waste. His scraping at the back of his neck egregiously loud in the background, somewhere a vent is churning repurposed air that has been cycling this Institute all over hundreds of years now, this could have been avoided. This should have been avoided. The message to Tim was something heavy on the capitalization and italics, cancel, cancel, cancel the one-o’clock, sent while underground, internet there was ineffective, Ms. Kelemen wants to change her entire statement.
Tim is taking an unauthorized break somewhere.
Jon only looks up from the floor when Martin stands (patterned socks: Memphis left Mondrian right) and steps onto his debit card as he moves to show Ms. Kelemen out, following up all the way with psychiatric references. That was accidental. That was accidental, so says the Archivist to himself in drone as he affixes and sorts out the beginning of a statement.
And affixes, and affixes, as he reads, and reads,
Tim’s shoulders look wider today. His ankles are crossed over the chair she had sat in. Grin of the clarinetist. “Anomaly,” he says.
Where he was not here a moment ago, he now is, and after one minor jolt, Jon... returns to the website, and everything is disordered anew, un-loading from the poor connectivity. He nearly blames Tim for that, streaming entire trilogies on breaks he shouldn’t be taking, as he does. “Well. Since, you’re here-”
“Ooh, I’m in trouble.”
“-I can’t imagine anything so important you could’ve had to do at seven in the morning today that it took you away from doing what I asked you to in the email which you read anyway-”
“Ouch. It’s almost like... I have a life outside of the aarrrchives or something, isn’t it? Pity, really, that some of us haven’t the slightest clue what the trappings of that feels like.”
Freight train-headlight stare. “I—”
“I for one just think you’re getting a biiiiiit too into it. All this, I mean. The sound of all this, that weird... sort of lingo you get with it? I’m saying, what’s stopping you fro -- you could just say, look, guys, ‘found this weird thing on the... where were you? The tube?”
“Yes. I was. This morning, when I was on the northe--”
“’See all sorts of things in the tube that defy categorization. The rare bit is for someone to come along and term them anomalies, I think that’s-”
“Does it occur to you that you may be focusing a little too much on m--”
“-look, if I called every anomaly I spotted down there as such I’dve got knifed ages ago. You’re not being — you always take the hardline realism slant, right, so what’s changed? I was of the mind that you didn’t believe in any of this.”
Hard inhale. “Tim.”
Tim nurses his thermos. Tim drinks loudly. “Martin, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen on the Underground?”
Brogues against tile, this direction, patter. “You know, I wonder sometimes,” Martin begins, “if, just, like -- things are more realistic when you see them. If there’s something in the brain that gets prodded wrong when your eyes make it... when it becomes less of just a con...cept? Uh... Uh, and also, I don’t think that’s-- fair, Tim. It’s hard not to believe in it now. And does it even matter if we don’t? If it’s going to be here anyway-”
“If you’re babysitting. Okay? If you’re babysitting, and you let the little kid into the other bedroom when they cry wolf on you and say they’ve seen a, what, an eight-headed debtor ‘neath the bed, you’re just confirming that, oh yeah, that’s there. Yeah? Agreeing with the ghost in the basement that it is going wooooh only makes it believe in itself more. That’s when you get those poltergeist-tier messes, I’m telling ya. Now, right,” he leans in to Martin, flapping his hand to beckon him- “If Jon is in over his head, the definitive king of absolute enthusiasm—”
“When there is a threat,” Jon begins, loud-
“I really think it has to be more about our participation. Our belief. Because that ghost-” Martin is tying up a take-home package for Jon over and over as he tries to perfect the ribbon.
“But believing in yourself makes you more apt to do things, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but, but I mean, does the ghost believe anything? Let alone believe in anything. And is that ‘believe’ in the way we think of it?”
Pause. Steam is still coming out of Jon’s ears. Steam is coming out of Tim’s thermos. Stream, unwatched, on his phone, wifi-carnivore. Tim: “Huh.”
“Because you have the one that, um, Sasha was talking about. The one she, she met. If the whole thing is that you can’t rely on your senses, any of your senses, how do we know this isn’t some elaborate...” Martin makes a confusing hand gesture here, both hands appearing to take off and put on VR goggles repeatedly, “...thing. I don’t know. I don’t have a word - do either of you know what I mean, though? Our perception...al criterion is always just being, like, scrambled, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“My suspicions are nailed.” Tim slaps his knees: “Someone, is enlivening the punch bowl.”
Melanie materializes behind something (Tim’s head) and Jon summons all his will to not flinch at the sight of that(; she had been crouched to reach a low shelf. She comes up, sleeves covered in dust). “If you’ve got a poltergeist, acting like it isn’t there’s probably going to get you your skull cleaved. All I’m saying, all I’m saying.” She rests her papers. Tapes go off the table in tens. Plastic clacks which no-one heeds. “What’s this about punch? It’s not even noon, guys.”
“We’re theorizing,” Tim claps his hand over her shoulder; he’s been calling her ‘Mel’, which is confusing Jon, confusing him terribly, “whether or not this is all just a massive hallucination.”
No-one indicates out the fluff on Melanie’s head. Melanie is provisionally ‘Mel’. Mel: “And your analogy for that is that someone’s putting crushed phycobilins in the vents and letting them just... circulate ‘round’?”
“Psyco-? Crushed whats?”
“From everything I’ve seen, belief does have a reinforcing effect. Tons of little-- these stupid things college kids do, like bringing home an Ouija board someone else had intended to be roadkill-”
“Uh,” Martin raises a finger- “It’s not like-- but, poltergeist doesn’t sound that far off, it’s maybe in the same vein, but I was thinking more like: okay, so clearly something is... bent way out of shape, but is it as bad as we think. Is it as bad as we think. What if we’re just, making the wolf look that much bigger because we’re- because we live with it.”
—Jon is on his phone, in the Drive, deleting every Kelemen file to free up space for the sextet anomaly.—
Melanie then claps: “Then I raise you this. Do we live with it or does it live with us?” No amount of shock absorption on Earth could diffuse the impact of the mute that follows, Martin during it evidently gearing up for a hard do you mean-? as his eyebrows knit; “Guys, guys. Alright, don’t take that so literal. I meant-”
“Hold on. Hold-- yoo-hoo?” Tim waves the room back to himself- “Is this a thing beneath the bed, a ghost, mushroom...” he has phycobilin pulled up in a search on his phone, but decides he does not want to try pronouncing it, “powder, in the ducts, or frat kids trying to contact the headman of some hunter-gatherer bunch from the reading they didn’t do? Can we stick to one thing? One analogy?”
“The thing that we’re talking about is too complex for one analogy. If you look at them, this language itself has batch upon batch of old adages that are just saying the same thing, aren’t they, but based on where they were said, details change. The afterlife. Right? A person didn’t cross over, which... isn’t un-normal. How many ways are there to die, how many ways are there to not cross over?” She turns to Martin: “How many ways are there for our minds, made up of dozens of cells, neurons, all of it, to blow things out of scale?”
“But this didn’t start with-- the thing wasn’t about ghosts, we just— okay. Okay- for now, let’s just-- let’s stick with the wolf which prowls the Black Woods. ‘Uh? So we’re stuck in the cave, it growls, but the reverb is accordioning, and because of that conditioning, yeah, you start to think over time that— and keyword there, think-”
“Is it... benign?”
Martin’s voice is not above Tim’s, and if the latter hadn’t been facing him he would’ve tromped on. “Is what benign?”
“When we went through that door, before? It could have been, like... I don’t know, a... metaphor our minds created to-- to soften the blow?— Kind of help us cope with the fact that -- you know, we really, we really don’t have any control over what happens to us.”
He’s still not finished wrapping the food nor tying the bow. Melanie sounds out with hardline affirmation and yells for Basira to get a fourth opinion, Tim tries in vain to wave them both down and return to the bed image.
Jon has edged away and made it to the doors. He takes two minutes to go through it.
◽ ◽ ◽
He is sat hunched forward on the couch staring at a blank patch of wall.
Before this wall, a small radiator in an outdated shade of pink.
The walls are gray.
A moment, his eyebrows lowering into a straight line as he leans forward with more purpose: the wallpaper — which there never was any to speak of; he’s scarcely taken any paint to his walls as it is, let alone the many trappings of wallpaper and all of the moving parts involved in it ⸺ the wallpaper is different, there. In an area two feet across, the kind of gray... changes, but this change is an easily-missed sort, Jon would have said, were the edges of it not shifting where the new-white conflicts with the old-gray. It’s not the right thing to focus upon, but he knows as well that shifting isn’t the right word for what is closer to wrinkling.
(He originally sat down while waiting for both his laptop to boot and the heat to come up; the radiator feels colder after each ten-minute interval when he touches it. This new flat, for which he had to change the larger sum of all his habits, has its’ pluses: the electricity does not flatline at random, older and quieter neighbors both above and below him. But as though he’d agreed to a trade not mentioned in the fine print, now the heat is turned off while tenants are out.)
The couch creaks when he parts from it and his footsteps make no sound: he runs a finger along the perimeter, the border of worlds between new-white and old-gray.
(And he almost acquiesces that it makes sense. Most people here are elderly and just have caretakers; he didn’t vet this building well. Another mistake. But cheaper, considerably safer. I’ll be happier here. More able to do things. All the happier.)
Beside him and heating the cushion, his laptop grinds into animation.
The loading bar ticks along, ticks along. Not that good with operating it, the thing. It’s fickle.
(In trying to pick up his coat and the laptop at the same time he had dropped the latter
and stood unmoving for three minutes. On impact it had clacked.)
(Martin had containers and made the plate into leftovers. It is now in the corner of the fridge that stays cold.
Jon had deliberately tried to evade him.
A month ago, he’d showed him how to change his readers from bright to dark mode, reducing
that hot-oil-over-eyes feeling substantially — Jon is still working on how he plans to structure
his thanks in person rather than e-mail.
The Archives have this muteness that demands sleep, and someone’s mouth has evidently been running,
because Elias tends to ask how the nap was, or whether or not he’s paid to make light of his hours,
and Jon has reason to suspect everyone for different reasons.
Again, yes, this he admits. It is not— no, he isn’t paranoid- but watchful, conscientious, aware, all the while
his counterweights take unauthorized breaks. He sits among his six desks with his face in his hands
and does that for hours sometimes, hours.
Reason to suspect everyone,
which includes, again, yes, Martin, for stopping him at those ten foot doors,
Making some sort of other gesture, waving
to Tim in reference - We could all go grab something,
you know, kind of a celebration? For...? I haven’t seen your place, yet,
or... any of them, actually- um. This actually sounds really forward,
uh. Doesn’t it. Um. Never-mind, it’s... let me just--- if you’re still
in the chatroom, I, I’ll send, I’ll- if, if you--
Just— have a good night, Jon.
Get home safe, okay?
brogues pattering in another direction,
Oh-- Jon! Jon! Wait!
This is for you, just... all of the leftovers.
Here,
and giving him a large, large container.)
With Georgie there was this tacit comfort that if something was moved there were another pair of hands to have done it. Jon could ask, be sure of it later and assuage any paranoia-to-be. It works better more to avert any (mementos, sentimental objects...) clutter in order to have a firmer concept what is in and out, what he owns. Everything adheres to utility. Useless as it is, the router beeps; the toaster toasts when beckoned to; the dishwasher rattles as though to remind him it is inoperable; the cabinets are acutely arid, save one for plates and cups. Only two of each. Who is coming over.
The result is callous. Unpainted walls (gray? white?) and a permanent starter-dorm appearance, but a notch of security that nowhere besides the Institute really has. Has ever had, but he goes to lengths to forbid himself from thinking back that far.
Jon sits. Very quietly. Looking at it, the white, the gray. The wallpaper, even.
To be certain, he flicks the light switch on because something is refusing to calculate. The colors are wrinkling against one another, spaciousness smeared, current light notwithstanding; something is refusing to calculate, and he stares knowing there should be a threshold there. There is. It just has yet to be seen, is the interruption.
Still sitting down. No, he had stood— did he not stand, just now? The light is on,
(although he’d never stood, an aspect which could mean anything)
but Jon is calm now, very calm now. Enough so to sit back down and rest his mind.
He does not do this. He presses up against the new-white to see. The wrinkles have grown more slight, stiffer still. It’s only when his eyelashes are close enough to touch them that the wall... changes: albeit being the same, uniform air-bubbled plaster, beneath the flat pits of his hands it stutters backward from him. Moves. (slides off, onto the margin, behind the vign)ette
The floor makes space. The ceiling has a slight delay. The ceiling smears through the bare lightbulb, and he frustratedly flicks the switch again as he did before whilst sitting down.
He tries to remember when was the last instance he had slept for any time longer than in short bursts of ten minutes.
When he backs away, he returns with a pencil (a long shiver runs down his back which betrays the assuredness he is trying to affect). He draws a rectangle, using the ripples as his guide and tries not to grunt when the top line moves just out of his range. It’s not supposed to do that, which is not to say that it couldn’t. He brings himself up onto his toes, it goes just the higher.
Jon, nickname, birthname Jonathan, wants to stand on a chair. He won’t. He can’t move anything. If he forgets he did, what happens then?
(He has folders in his phone’s gallery dedicated to the three rooms in his flat;
they form backups. Corroborations to sight and memory, as palpable as are cassette
recordings— would photos taken digitally, he wonders, be as impervious if printed as
polaroids are? How different is the basic technology at play here?)
When he backs away, the couch wheezes beneath his weight, the other half of cushions raise in slant. A graphite rectangle, little more— and as though falling into a calmer state, as though exhaling, sighing, the wrinkles begin to crease out over his lines and accept them. The new-white fades back into old-gray, but it— it still– what’s missing?
So he then, exhausted of all options, is hastily making an oval meant to represent a doorknob and considering the addition of a door number, as far from reason as that is, when he realizes the light is off. The light is off, or more accurately, it isn’t on where it was a moment ago he knows it was, deeply, impalpably, he knows it was. The turn on his heel is slow. One three-sixty movement to measure the room, to class his objects.
(The wall moved backwards, but the radiator did not go with it. The radiator, in the breadth of a blink, vanished. But when he puts his hand there, and he feels the heat, )
Then he’s back, facing... it. Graphite rectangle. This one didn’t work before and it wouldn’t now, he reminds himself (does not register his own use of past tense here). Jon doesn’t understand them, he doesn’t understand them, but there must be physical laws to which the Spiral is forced to abide just as he himself knows he can’t jump and expect to keep going upward.
As an object, it doesn’t. It does not. It does, not. It can’t. Things are lost and gained in translation as the render is made from that reality to this one, but something produced on this side would have no bearing on the other.
...This, this is. He laughs, lays down, balled up on couch, this, this isn’t, none of this is, I’m encouraging it, indulging by agreeing, stepping out. Meeting it.
The flat. But this is nothing new, them coming along,
the Spiral coming along and fiddling with the contained
cornered containety of a room, rooms. Three weeks
before his last eviction, something about coming home
to a definitionless, floorless, ceilingless, walllllllllllless
oval room with all his furniture stretched thin was
however his reaction was made, it prompted his upstairs
neighbors to call the police. he remembers
nothing beyond that.
And the case, the Kelemen case,
the Kelemen case, he wanted to wash his hands
of as soon as he could,
Kelemen’s drawn-out Vast case, because the parameters were too
familiar. And he saw himself in her doubt as much
as her reluctance to sleep in a room, a room of any note,
in a flat, in a house, the fear of those sort
of glass-panel doors, that sort of balcony
railing ever cropping up again,
Michael is behind the wall.
her fear - it’s too close to his fear of the door.
Michael is stuck, then, trapped in an area that is no more than three inches thick total if that, but assuredly curious still and amused at what has been done here. Inside the wall, rather than behind, which- cannot happen, but still it happens. It leers: the new frame. The threshold that the wrinkling formed, was cluing him in on.
Jon tries to imagine being the one to open it and a migraine. A migraine begins to. The migraine filters in, the door against his temple, ten foot, his skull to wood; his outcry coming a minute late.
As always, he feels them before any other sense can speak, the presence before the tuneless hum as color floods into the door with the rush of hourglass sand— or there is no transition, and the color is simply there; when the moment has passed, there is no way to say.
(And with Michael,)
Jon is stood atop his small radiator and drawing the top line properly
(something which just nearly crushes the poor thing).
The wrinkling redoes itself into the line he draws, the dips created
by his hand’s shaking included.
(His wrist is being guided. Wet leather non-hand pressing into his. Not skin.
Not warm like skin but rough like sandpaper that cannot scratch. Concrete.
The chair is too small for the weight of them both, one having to
bend awfully to avoid going straight through the ceiling,
not an issue in the old flat.)
The work of the(ir combined) effort slants diagonally at the top of its’ frame
and the inner door is bent as well, accurate to a recreation with no original.
The doorknob is shaped like a liver.
Announcing the arrival of its avatar with crinkling static is evidently superfluous, or the sound of some other missed doorhinge creaking was quieter than the sound of his bulb blowing. Then: Jon is in the dark and the presence is to his left but the voice comes from his right:
“We made something together, Archivist.”
Very calm. Nothing asked, nothing asked at all, but it is said with the firm ends of an answer. Jon stops looking because Michael is not... for needful want of better description on his own part, finished quite yet, and what results is something alike to the feeling of having walked in on someone during a change of clothes. Watercolor. Somehow too diluted where their finer details should be, outlines. The real shape of the face.
The presence is evidently enough to the left of where Jon is sitting, but Michael is not there. Wafting around, instead, lovingly multiplying geometric in the gardens of man’s mind.
The static settles to a tolerable pitch and they are formed in full, plausible skin that bears healthy-looking color. Too tall, still too tall, always too tall, but playing nicely so that the upstairs neighbors won’t complain like last time.
And complain to the landlord and have him evicted for repeat disturbances and keep visitors of any sort a mocking dream.
Jon recedes, backing up to nowhere: the light isn’t having the right effect on them. Everything, especially the hair, all blown-out as though the sun is directly overhead— the light? No, the- he looks at the lightbulb— and it’s not brok-?
“We...” Jon’s voice comes out like cotton, weak from hours of disuse.
“Yes.”
“Did I help you?”
“How germane to ask. I, have been having that same occasional difficulty, and I needed... a hand, today, yes,” they agree, head tilted and words stretched beyond any fit. A short laugh as they bounce on their heels once, the entire flat rattling when their head hits the ceiling. “I hadn’t anticipated the effort even appearing today would ask of me. Lately, I need to involve far more exertion into my... visual presentation, for you, which grows sometimes tiring.”
For the latter half of it, the voice matches the placement of their body, which makes Jon feel stranger and more vulnerable and worse.
“You’re-” sudden tic, he pulls at the bridge of his nose, “Then why, I-- what’s the point, then. Why make all the effort.”
“I wanted to see the new fittings. I felt I had, to see the new fittings. And it is wondrous. Your judgment is imprecise at this time.”
“That is the point, isn’t it.”
“What a hurry,” a pause which, in the case of a human, would be reserved for a quick breath, “you were in, to locate me.”
To say he wanted to be here would be a lie. But the urging need to leave the others are therefore the Archives was louder than his sense and louder than the calm folds of the cot he keeps there. Knowing all the way that the Spiral would be here in wait for him, following the pattern, was a thought residing in the back of his mind, yes — and it seemed the lesser of the distractions, considering the laptop is now running and he may now infix himself into work.
He has a life outside of the Institute. He does. He does know what the trappings of that feels like. He does.
Moving house was a title thing more than a utility thing, and an avoid-the-Spiral thing more than a title thing.
◽
When they stay in (one of) his flat(s) for over ten minutes, Jon becomes accustomed to the pressure: the constant pop and plug of his ears milds until it is just bearable, the marching of his heartbeat stills as also the blood moving behind - inside - his lips slows when he is no longer pulsed throughout by something now too dulled to be termed ‘fear’. Fear just ebbs these days, mostly. In spite of the wide grin with the layered teeth, the fingers which splay off into impossible angles and juts... there is nothing felt, nothing felt.
A houseguest, another houseguest, an other houseguest, only more individual frills.
Because the ceiling bulb is outside of any surety he finds himself turning the lamp on instead. Careful not to budge it. Michael, smiling contentedly, concurs that this light is on; good. Filed away secure into the filing cabinets of the mind,
“It looks very, very nice, Archivist.”
until, that is, he thinks about who it is that is agreeing, but it’s already been done. It is nestled away, color coded, and carefully placed so as to not overwrite previous information already stood in the long rows of his mental shelves. (What, not who. He’s dealing with an object. He’s dealing with a concept.)
Michael hums a little song that comes out atonal when they lean against the couch’s armrest, patting the seat beside it. Cushion fluff comes loose as their non-hands drag away.
And Jon is at his table, sitting uncomfortably. Squinting through the fluorescent blue light and blinking rapidly. He’s scrolling through the online version of the column now that it isn’t hamstringed by the Archives’ slow net; it reads about a member of a sextet emerging successfully from surgery. She is a cellist, origin: Dubna, who has recovered just in time for a show she had before publicly stated she would not appear in. A blow to her fans, it seems like, who pay top-dollar for the two biannual London shows... Jon squints more, there’s some forums mulling on the wonder-recovery... Skimming, skimming - skimming — until the picture sits squarely in front of him at last.
All of the other images, the illustrations and those of the cellist when she is singular, all of those are fine- but the picture, with the clarinet—
“What d- ah, right. The.” Jon tries to clear his throat, but there is a lump. “The door, you mean. Uh. Does it.”
“Very formed and practical. But... you don’t seem to have as high a level of appreciation for it as I do.”
“I don’t know if it makes me feel anything. Looking at it gives me slight chestburn. How’s that?” They nod long, pleased, and Jon doesn’t know what that’s meant to mean, so he “You would’ve come in the usual way had I not cooperated, I’m guessing?” keeps on with his automatic, nonsense speech.
“The usual way,” they fawn as they repeat; auricular, miraculously. “What is the usual way? Where, is the usual way? Can there ever be a usual? What is the word to you in the context of me?”
—only loads halfway. It does not load top-to-bottom, but rather left-to-right, protracted: it stops in the center of the cellist’s bow, and she is cut in half. He checks his connectivity. Slow, still, but the rest of the site is fine, the rest of the images are fine. It’s majority text,
...but now that he zeroes in on it, even that isn’t appearing right. Dubna is mentioned nowhere, her name is wiped where he remembers it to have been. It hurts to do but he lets up on his eyelids, wide-eyed to the barrage of UV. Detailing for details.
It just said Dubna. He just read it. It only had her full name and it never said the forenames of the other sextet members, but all that has switched. Getting close to something approximating feverishness, Jon pulls up the Contact page of the website, whereat he
“I’m not just here for distress, you know. I’ve come to conversate.” It’s the sound of speech, rather than their words, that makes Jon’s head whip up.
“That’s... reassuring. Usual, in your case, is some kind of. It’s- just a standard issue door that you thunk down into some improbable location like my dishwasher.”
“Oh, oh- would you like that?”
“Course not, but now that I’ve said it I know what to expect nn- this, time.” Nearly said ‘next’ time, which would have been interpreted as an invitation, and therefore fatal,
…whereat he sends an email - twice, by mistake, from hitting the enter key too hard - regarding the article. Asking the publishers if it’s being edited while live, because in the next window over the pictures are disappearing and reappearing in the wrong order...
“Ah. Then I won’t.”
“Won’t strum up enough ‘distress’ for you, will it?”
...browser freezes and boots up again with the user interface all in German... adverts for balcony installations, mild retch...
“Can’t. And it isn’t that by itself— it’s how you described it. If you could expect me to do something, or have an expectation in any capacity, that would lend you to making predictions. We, can’t, have that. Being predictable is one of my worries that I have to shoulder, one... which I don’t want emphasized.”
“Worries.”
“Yeeeeesss.”
“You. You shoulde- you have worries. I don’t-- what could you possibly-”
“Is it not the burden of anything with consciousness to think itself to the point of pain? In your own words, Archivist: standard issue, which tells me I’m beginning to bore or becoming cyclic. It’s a very helpful critique. I’ve been meaning to vary my entrances, given how mistrustful people are now... not only of each other, but even towards their own curiosity.”
The Archivist is pulling a strange face as he types, white-knuckled, as though he’s out to punish his laptop. This is observed through a lens other from their usual wry giddiness. He’s not listening.
When they stay in his flat for over ten minutes the panic has usually subsided by the eleventh.
Jon remembers why he’s sat like this in the first place, bent in his attempt not to scoot the chair out from its’ chalk square on the floor; he mitts his phone up out of his pocket, the one with no hole. He turns it to the side and backs up to get an adequate view of his screen. “You’re doing this too, I imagine.”
Now they’re up, footfalls echoing. Walking on wood, the sound is of tile.
Echoing then pausing, long spaces in between. A slow walk over in which they round the compact table and skirt its’ edges with their hand-impressions, which leaves trenchal dents. Jon’s breathing is measured, segmenting how long he can keep this up before the panic rears to return, and how long he can ignore the leer he receives from this rapidly approaching face that weightlessly hems by.
It makes for a slow stutter through the outlands of Michael’s woolgathering gaze. Soft, aimless, casting over the Archivist.
“Doing what?”
“Could you-” they are much, much closer. “Could you... wow. Could you go sit down. If you’re so intent on staying.”
“I did, sit down. I was just sitting. I had just sat. I previously was seated. You didn’t join me.”
“I didn’t know I was being invited to.” When the leering does not end: “But since you’re here now, you— the seat’s there, below your end.”
For the first time during a smile that Jon has seen, Michael’s eyes are also crinkled: “Joy.”
...he looks down, brogues - Memphis left Mondrian right, looks slowly up, moves aside when the recognition comes; he greets Michael, takes half of their bags, gestures for them to sit, they sit, he watches the clarinetist oil away, both share grievances for the next five minutes over how something must just come along and make people jumpier in the later months, because it’s only the last three of the year that more than sixty new statements a day is commonplace, the problem is that one out of every thirty visitors is a Ms. Kelemen...
Jon expects to hear the deafening wood-against-tile screech of dragging, but one of the two stools is lifted kindly and moved. All manner of dents.
With this, he takes another picture, and titles it so it’ll be next to the last one he took of his table. In it, Michael’s torso is missing. Just a head and tucked knees that come up too high. When he tries once more, it doesn’t take. The result sitting in his gallery is a slab of black. And Jon considers it, a twitch in one eye as he begins to distinguish their outline— an attempt that ends when doing so begins to hurt- “Interesting,” they hum. On the second attempt, the camera app crashes, which follows into the third and fourth. Fifth, the picture takes, but it is of his bedroom.
When Jon tries the flash and his phone autodials Sasha’s inactive number, he drops his hands and makes some indignant noise— and that laugh, that laugh comes like a gnarled pipe organ as it does, but softer, now. “Okay. Forget it, should’ve... known, you’d— look, if you’re going to be here long, I- be... unobtrusive. Can you do that?”
“Unobtrusive,” they echo.
“But you’re not doing this, then. To my laptop.”
“Nooo. There’s an unfortunate nuance to my presence in any of its degrees, which is that things, without my direct involvement, tend to become inaccurate.”
Michael’s sentence closes too sharply, Jon has his chin balanced over the backs of his laced hands. The neighbors don’t talk, they don’t make sounds, he is too far up to hear London’s nighttime blather — the focus is of them humming in contemplation, which guts at him. There’s a real attempt at a melody, but it just grinds away at the eardrums...
“The camera, though. That has to be intentional. Look.”
...Their eyes narrow. “Rec, -ords. Archivist, would you be surprised, if—” - they wait, as though for themselves - “a worry of mine is of... an overattention to things which have no relation to me? Bad habit. And yet. It seems, that your needful need to memorialize everything is spanning out far beyond the perimeter of the In,-stit,-ute.”
Now noticing his gallery has not closed itself, in rather few flicks Jon sees his contact sheet-looking rows of every picture he has taken of the flat in the last two days. Old-gray, new-white. Navigating through shows every step of the unboxing, every inch of the progress. Georgie flickers around like stopmotion. Tens of pictures into hundreds. Hundreds turn into a thousand. A thousand and then some.
“What does it look like?”
“A habit as bad as my own.”
“I’m trying to ascertain things that take place outside of the— ahem. That expression ‘personal record’ does have personal in it for a reason. These pictures, if I need more of them, I take more.” Clear of the throat. The gallery: thousands-and-some and into a thousand and five hundred. “Granted, though, there probably is a more efficient way to do this I’m just not thinking of. If that’s what you mean.”
“I never know what I mean.”
“How come?”
Unbelieving blinks, a minute of a widening grin. Cried out, happily: “How come?”
A staccato laugh, drawn on much longer than usual, until there is a vague certainty they may implode. In a lapse of social cue comprehension Jon ponders whether he should be laughing too.
Beneath this two-by-two table, his knees touching their shins — his shirt chafes from his sweat, bedding him down, immobilizing. Half past midnight, and he is still not out of his work clothes. This coat. No, he had got it second hand, and it was nowhere near that price in the box he’d scuffed it from, but it was, once, if the tag attached and lodged in the collar is true. Delicate hem, if torn. Glued now to his nape.
As extension of Michael’s centrifugal effect — something he mildly has known about, but denied — they make him sweat. He doesn’t understand the somatics of it any more than he does the Spiral’s, if they can be termed so, physical laws. Observation of physical affect like chestburn: well, something about you being within a twenty-foot radius makes me look like I just did a cross-country, but that isn’t as conversational or anything they should know. Encouraging them.
Then, against the pleads of his ebbing fear, he rests his head against the table. It drowns the laughter out, surprisingly. Forehead first, turning when his nose hits. The crooks of his arms and the soft of his sleeves as firm stands for his head.
If they’re going to, they’re going to. But he asks, muffled: “Are you here to-”
To,
to collect?
Are you going to kill me? That sort of thing.
Being said, it sounds coarse. Not something
he wants to know, but it isn’t him,
necessarily, who wondered.
Jon cuts himself off as a, what is it. A coldness, the sort from this morning when he saw the vignette, earlier when he’d faded out of a conversation he was an initiator of. Coldness from side A of his body to side B. The vignette as comparison, placing it, comparing it, it as it —— and here now, implicated in
the ringing that rolls from one side of his head to the next sounds incorrect with
both ears being plugged as they are - but there are words surfacing, images. It
presses up against the base of his skull. Near the bruise, if not there.
Skull against wood aged for centuries, gong sound, migraine for rest of workday.
Another head tilt. “Noooooo...”
Jon wonders why that confirmation doesn’t make him heave in relief as he watches this exchange take place. His body with Michael, yet his conscience sat five feet away from the living room, from the couch, perhaps spectating from behind (inside) the closed bathroom . That confirmation means this: more life, continued life. More hermetic plodding. Work tomorrow, and needing to follow up with Kelemen or Richardson or Dubna-origin cellists, Elias’ daily ire/disappointment, a new tube route, another old stricture of his life uprooted by the move, all the same, all the same. However: a new flat.
And the internet connection is still toss-quality. And Martin was wrong. It isn’t looking that makes it realer, it isn’t even the knees-to-shins, it isn’t even their knees impaling through the table.
Michael just smiles, toying with a ball of cushion fluff. The joys of the Archivist.
The joys of the Archivist come manifold, the nonverbal exchanges as result of that same inchoate knowing being just one - though, the odd drawback he has, self-inflicted, is that he is still far too given to leaning into his own awareness, which falters. Which makes him forgetful, and other times ignorant. Blinds him.
Considering the long term, they’re quite happy about this.
“I was wondering when you would get to that.” All light within their voice exits as a flat tone edges in: “I wanted, to be somewhere I would not have to think about the thing which I am not doing. It is becoming urgent, Archivist. It’s been a long time, a very long time, since. And the longer the intervals between, the more difficult it gets-”
“To pantomime with a body.”
The joys, the joys, the joys... “Yes.”
Nobody’s entered a door in over one week. Nobody in the corridors. Jon blinks shudders recoils nearly is sick whilst re-entering his skin feeling distinctly as though something spoke through him moment ago just then spoke through him speech as result.
Turning to Michael, turning to the couch, um. Turning back to Michael. Uh, “Urgent. Urgency. How, how oft- how much, do you need, to...”
Occasional difficulty. A drought of so-called wanderers, body problem.
“More.”
Jon rubs at his neck in an attempt to dispel some of the nervous energy he’s amassing - distress, they tilt their head, they tilt their head appealingly, — the clear-cut feeling something used his body to- his body, spoke through his body. His voice, not as his own. Stentorian with no stutter.
“Then-”
They make a shape out of the fluff. “Ten days.”
“I-- that's it?”
“After that, things become very, very difficult.”
“Ah. Then I’m not following why you’re not... I don’t understand why you’re not here to do that, do it. Honestly. I am. ‘Could’ve just tugged me in when I was pencilling it out?”
“That, would necessitate much physical involvement-- which is very objective. Objectivity unshapes, and... ruins. Archivist, this seat?”
“I thought you recognized it.”
“Yes. It’s quite nice to be seated. Did you ever notice, I could never sit on your furniture before?”
“You couldn’t, or I didn’t let you, or you didn’t want to?”
“Ability wanes.”
Jon thinks about wallpaper.
“A passageway is an installation, an infrastructure. It is not furniture itself that falls outside my aptitude. But the lamp, the table. The, radiator... When I am left with the difficulty as it is, these,” - emphatic movement of non-hands, and something sounds to have broken - “are unprepared for objectivity. What I could once do, I cannot. Self, is frustratingly finite. Self cannot be conducted-”
“You made it seem deliberate.”
“- and nor can its behaviors. Body is deterrent.”
“That all-purpose malleability of yours. The hardline falsity slant you’re always on, how--”
“Constant malleability is constant unease.”
In another place, Jon’s composure is being laughed at for using the term ‘anomaly’. Jon’s composure needs ten minutes to ensure every one of the Institute’s many doors is a door alone. Migraine figures. Migraine counterweights. Even, Migraine-Michael. He says, hearing of himself only single syllables, “What, do you want me to do.”
“Nothing.”
“You realize lying often doesn’t mean you do it well.”
His words are met benignly. Throughout this ravine their laugh accordions. “All I wanted, at best, is an ear to listen, and... what are you, Archivist, if not that?” A brief ten minutes of their lullabic non-music hum. “But I would like for you to understand. The futility was all there was, outside. And the choice was of being out there. Coils, cartilage. Or-- coming here, on the opening day.”
The clocks slow to accommodate him, and all of his pauses, another brief ten minutes. “I think I’m going, to go to bed now.”
“Rest well.”
When Jon raises his head, there is a plate on the floor. Dashed there, shards scattered and forked into the wood, with a square gridded half of lasagna sitting preserved and unaffected. The shredded ends of his coat’s own sleeves, a tape he knows by sight to be the Kelemen he discarded.
He looks at that for a while, and when he is done, the sky is white and backlit by sun.
And the coffee table is back, one leg missing, congruent with the two-hundred dedicated photos. And the paintings are back, looking syrupy and useless in their black-and-white modernism when compared to those yellow ringlets.
Michael smells like clean glass. A tablet of smooth, warped marble. The concept - it and its malfunctioning body - it and its benignity - has left him.
He lowers his head again. The room is, then, as quiet as a road in the minute before the accident.
◽ ◽ ◽
Not being the sort of person who gets back into bed easily if he was not there to begin with, he opts, perhaps from that same ebbed fear, to stay where he is. To go to the bedroom would involve turning knobs and crossing thresholds. Balconizing (does not register his making-up of a word here) himself.
When footsteps overhead jolt him, another person stirring, here he lays: face compressed against the armrest and body coiled in a rictus - one, he does not notice, that places all of himself on the couch’s cushion which his guest had occupied. One leg adjustment ends it.
Tim did get the forward, and the notification of such is the first thing Jon’s phone dyes his face a fluorescent white for: he sends something back and pulls up the column website. Verticalized, thinner, but the reader is competent and he finds Auricular Miraculous before he looks up
It has lost the width and the vignette has been cropped from the photos, given. But it is still all of the same components; the cellist center-stage and surrounded by those she plays with, somehow untouched by the intense flash lighting that pales the figures, and — no clarinetist. It dawns on Jon here that he only stirred this pot at all for the clarinetist, stroking the illogic in the placement of that person, and not so much considering there may not have been...
to see that the wrinkling is back. The smudge of old-white and new-gray, of new-white and old-gray, of moving house being a title thing more than a utility thing, and an avoid-the-Spiral thing more than a title thing, and an avoid-the-Michael thing more than an avoid-the-Spiral thing, but the latter two are hopelessly done up in each other, and ⸺ Martin was partially right. Visual signifiers embolden, validate. But there was no — no, no. It does things like this. Enough smidge of suggestion and one convinces themselves that there was -
...a clarinetist to begin with, yes. Jon sits up. Blinks his view clear, the fluorescence gone. Takes a flash photo of the wrinkles - now curved and slanted. The first picture of a new, devoted folder. Next time, for records’ sake, for the Institute’s sake of documentation, he’ll get a clear picture of them.
(Somatic: The scar itches beneath his skin and sends that irritation throughout the body, traveling by nervous system. This physically sets off alarms, white blood cells and such, until ten minutes of their presence, at which it numbs and the reaction becomes to perspire. He believes this is hyperthermia. The chestburn comes from the source of the scar: his thorax.)
(This is incongruent, as the stab was first in the left side of his chest.)