Rubik Read online

  The dead aren’t really gone: they persist as phone numbers, social media accounts, newsletter recipients, aliases on fan-fiction forums. Digital ghosts move and connect us: we feel we know people we have only seen online just as corporations masquerade as familiar friends.

  In Rubik, darkly comedic interconnected stories follow Elena Rubik, her best friend Jules Valentine, and wannabe investigative reporter April Kuan, as a viral marketing scheme’s motivations become cause for concern. There are the adventures of a model turned visual artist, a tech support voice actor, enigmatic schoolchildren, clever anime characters, and more.

  Deftly blending the real and imagined with biting social satire, Elizabeth Tan explores the lives of her diverse group of characters with deep empathy and insight into our contemporary world.

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  This book was originally published in 2017 in Australia by Brio Books.

  13579108642

  Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Tan

  ISBN: 9781944700584

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931436

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Jacket design by Robert Bieselin

  Typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  Praise for Rubik

  “The disorienting effect of accreting, repeating details and unanswered questions makes the final cohesion of Tan’s only slightly fantastical Perth even more delicious. Tan’s careful layering and nuanced craft will gain a strong following among fans of experimental narratives.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rubik is an absolute delight in its wit, kindness, and playful profundity; in its feeling that the human experience is prismatic, filled with hope and despair, darkness and joy; in its universes that are at once familiar and strange. A sparkling, poignant debut.”

  —Brooke Davis, author of Lost & Found

  “Bold, brilliant, hilarious, and beautifully strange. Make time to read Rubik, for it will challenge all your received ideas about what fiction can or should do: here is the future of Australian writing.”

  —Ceridwen Dovey, author of Only the Animals

  “Rubik darts between layers of time, space and reality—fictions within fictions that seem disparate at first but later reveal themselves as inextricably linked. Recalling the surreal connected-universe storytelling of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Rubik is a shot in the arm of Australian fiction, one that will undoubtedly reveal more secrets on successive rereads.”

  —Books + Publishing

  “Rubik is exhilarating... It is a mish-mash of colored cubes, held together by tiny mechanisms, daring you to put the pieces back together.”

  —The Lifted Brow

  “The very best experimental writers have an inspired and weird way of seeing the world that makes much realist fiction seem moribund. Elizabeth Tan’s debut is wonderful, brilliant and mind-bending, and a worthy heir to the experimental tradition.”

  —The Saturday Paper

  Table of Contents

  Rubik

  Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit

  Retcon

  Light

  Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus

  T

  Good Birds Don’t Fly Away

  Congratulations You May Have Already Won

  U (or, That Extra Little Something)

  Coca-Cola Birds Sing Sweetest in the Morning

  This Page Has Been Left Blank Intentionally

  Everything That Rises

  Luxury Replicants

  Kuan × 05

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Rubik

  It’s Sunday evening and there’s nothing to eat. Elena’s bladeless fan pivots in monochrome silence, the centerpiece of a room that’s untidy in an engineered way, like movie teenage bedrooms. There’s the strewn unwashed clothes and wall-to-ceiling magazine-torn posters of brooding twenty-something heart-throbs. Cinematic untidiness. Elena, twenty-five, waking up to the awkwardly looped music of a DVD menu screen, remembering the food problem, flicking her mouse to find the Start bar for the time. Thirty minutes too late for Fresh Direct, ninety for IGA.

  There’s McDonald’s, but she doesn’t like the constant chime of the drive-in or the white lights. The atmosphere in McDonald’s is deliberately uncomfortable, she’s been told. The better to encourage customers to move on so the restaurant can admit new ones.

  She spies a rip in one of her brooding twenty-somethings. Smoothes it with a fingernail. Real? No, fake. It was a gift actually, this ironic teenage-bedroom wallpaper—purchased by Jules two years ago from Owls in the Navy. The heart-throbs come complete with faux celebrity names, part-rogue, part-boy-next-door: Brad Ruffalo, Justin Lee Thomas.

  There should be neighborhood vending machines, Elena decides, tugging her blackened shoelaces. Like laundromats. Fluorescent coves of machine-lined walls, a bench with magazines to flick through while you wait for your Cup-O-Noodles to boil. An idea that someone in some distant city has surely conceived, patented, and deemed unviable by now.

  Elena, out into the crisply illuminated street, through her buttoned-up neighborhood. Distant traffic is sonorous like an ocean wave that never arrives. Fifteen minutes away on the main road there are two petrol stations adjacent to each other, locked, by virtue of their location, into advertising identical gas prices every day. This proximity has also inspired a convenience arms race: the stations’ modest cash register chewing gum selections have expanded, over the years, into glimmering emergency snack food emporia.

  Ten minutes down the slope of Camberwell Street and Jules’s car passes by, on her way to the house. Elena lifts a hand, too late. They have these moments often. Since moving out from under her parents’ roof, Elena has discovered that having roommates is lonelier than she initially thought. You only ever seem to glimpse your housemates while they’re on their way to somewhere else, everyone moving in their own private orbit. Their presence is rarely felt outside of a plate in the sink, a DVD left in the player, rent money squashed in a re-used envelope.

  On this night she selects the Gull station. Drawn immediately to the heat-lamped food display, the desperate huddle of pastries. She selects a Homestyle Country Pie, declines the tomato sauce, and separates a ten dollar bill from her tight jeans pocket. She contemplates her change, but none of the neon drinks in the fridge appeals to her tonight. She tears open the packaging to her pie. It does not taste of any country she knows.

  Elena, on the diagonal, outside and away from the white glow of diesel and LPG, the faint croon of the radio playing infinitely for refuelling motorists.

  The car that hits her is a 1991 Ford EA Falcon, making a right turn as simply as a child rotates a toy ninety degrees. The bonnet whips like a swordfish. When it knocks into Elena the pie ejects from her hand, becomes airborne, and in her last moments she marvels at the literalness of it. A pie in the sky.

  One hundred and fifty-seven of Elena’s 212 friends find out when some of the remaining fifty-five leave condolence messages on Elena’s profile. Over the course of Monday afternoon, 157 people assess their relationship to Elena Rubik, reframe the significance of their last conversation with her, express their grief in 420 characters or less. They stare at her profile picture and try to imagine her as somebody no
longer alive.

  For each new post on Elena’s profile, unread notifications accumulate in her inbox. Among these emails are weekly newsletters from Owls in the Navy, of which Elena is now one of six deceased subscribers.

  Elena’s DELL Vostro becomes the property of Mr. and Mrs. Rubik, who cannot access it without her user password. The DVD that Elena watched on the night of her death is still inside it, and has since accrued a late fee of $82.50. The laptop will remain inside a box in the Rubik family study.

  Some time in the year that follows, Jules accidentally scrolls too far down her list of phone contacts and sends a text to Elena Rubik instead of Edward Lee. She is about to send an apology when she realizes. She wonders if she ought to delete Elena’s contact details. She thinks of Elena, out on Camberwell Street, whitened by her headlights. She imagines her mistaken text message vibrating in the pocket of Elena’s ghost, outside that gas station, where somebody—she doesn’t know who—still leaves flowers.

  On 15 July 2011, Elena’s online age ticks over from twenty-five to twenty-six. This is when one of Elena’s friends clicks on her profile to wish her a happy birthday, discovers the thick backlog of messages, and commences her mourning two months behind everybody else.

  On the Luxury Replicants fan fiction forum, Rubik3 appears at the bottom of the front page under Today’s Birthdays. Renzo notices it, and PMs Elena:

  Hey Rubik, happy birthday! Haven’t seen you around for a while. How’s the next chapter of EotG coming along? Do you need a beta reader? Renzo.

  Three years later, another member of LR will lose his battle with cancer, spawning a tribute thread and tentative plans to contact the member’s family with donations. Renzo will think about this incident with Rubik3, his unanswered PM. He will feel the moment like a tongue probing a gap in a line of teeth. A distant truth that never arrives.

  Just when the residents of 14 Camberwell Street resign themselves to moving back in with their parents, Jules finally manages to find a fifth housemate, one Bernard Cash, who shifts into Elena’s old spot after it has been cleared of everything except for her wallpaper. Bernard will reconfigure the room—place the bed by the wardrobe and the desk by the window. He will plug his power board into the wall socket and attach his phone charger, his lamp, his fan, his Macbook. He will think of Elena, of her ex-housemates turned brittle by some strange guilt that he discovers he understands completely. He will spend a moment in silence, sitting in his new room, but he won’t feel creeped out. He will ask Jules for the wireless password. He will check the time on the Desktop. He will Wiki ‘Brad Ruffalo’ to figure out what he’s been in.

  Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit

  Kish, unarticulated today, without bar lines, spine creaking like a hymn book; soft, old Kish, having dreamed last night of being an engulfed cathedral, ascending to consciousness in perfect fourths. Arched by a yawn. She uses a torn sheet of notepaper to catch her fingernail clippings. Kish, with newly angled nails, boils an egg for breakfast, scrapes the flesh clean from the shell.

  Yesterday the piano tuner presented her with a crisp envelope containing all the snapped mechanical pencil leads that he liberated from the Bösendorfer’s hull. Today Kish will purchase regular HB pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a discreet receptacle to place inside the piano room for pencil shavings. Kish, drinking the last of her black tea, modulates into a key of distant relation, something edged, notated by sharps instead of flats.

  The school where Kish works is old enough to smell like a museum, the pupils’ uniforms the same itchy green as a musty billiards table. They start their day at ten-to-nine, but Kish’s first lesson is scheduled for ten-past-eight. The Pushkin boy, from Year Three, is sullen but cooperative at this hour. He is careful in passing his thumb smoothly underneath the bridge of his curved fingers. She can hear his tender breath each time a scale or arpeggio demands this movement.

  There is something so heartbreaking about his attentiveness that Kish must look away. She thinks instead of the Yamaha cleaved open like a fish, machinery exposed: ribcage of felted hammers, eighty-eight clusters of strings with their precisely tempered intervals. The sounds that emerge will nonetheless resist replication; nothing, not even this Pushkin boy’s scale, will exist so perfectly ever again.

  Outside the music room, a group of boys kick a football, long and high. Kish and the Pushkin boy can hear each kick resonate like a cartoon punch, the boys’ spirited yells. The Pushkin boy, despite his concentration, would prefer to be out there. He has a hunch of resentment, a grumbling belly of rushed cornflakes. These lessons cost the Pushkin parents sixty dollars for forty minutes. They want a bright child; they want to give him Opportunities. They fought hard for this timeslot, at ten-past-eight, so that the Pushkin boy would not miss one minute of his education. The lesson will end, the siren will ring, the boy will proceed directly to class. The boy’s jumper is second-hand, stretched for a different-sized head; the woollen fibers look abrasive as fire ants.

  Kish listens, contemplating all the factors that contribute, however minutely, to this boy’s trembling scale.

  Before the lesson is over, Kish tells him about semiquavers. With a blue pen she draws a neat chart in his exercise book: the semibreve, a lonely ovum, splitting into two minims, then four crochets, then eight quavers, then sixteen semiquavers. The Pushkin boy, only just learning about fractions in class, signals his understanding with half a nod. She closes his exercise book and places it on the stand beside his scrapbook. They have a few minutes left.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about before we go, Peter?’ Kish asks.

  There isn’t. Kish opens up her file and spreads out the sheets of stickers. They are bright as candy, emanating a garish optimism incongruent with Kish’s character. The Pushkin boy selects an angel fish, which Kish carefully peels from the glossed paper and positions with the other stickers on his scrapbook cover.

  In the afternoon, at Officeworks, Kish roams the columns of paper and bulk manila folders. She places a box of pencils in her blue shopping basket. She is considering which pencil sharpener best befits her when the Nokia rings. A private number.

  ‘Hello?’

  For the first moment, all she hears is crackling silence. Like a gramophone, or twigs snapping. Kish, too deep in the Zen of stationery shopping, feels no irritation. The instant she decides to hang up, something begins.

  A motif of seven notes, rising one step, falling, and then jumping up, beginning again. Like a gentle alarm clock, insistent and plaintive. The piano, bell-like, in the treble.

  Unbidden, the sequence 9300730 flips into Kish’s mind, each number clacking in turn, like information on a train station timetable.

  The motif continues to announce itself.

  And then, horribly, she understands.

  The box of pencils in her shopping basket trembles. Kish is shaking, her lungs tight and airless, as if someone is turning pegs in her spine. The strength of her shoulders’ convulsions is enough to rattle a box of stickers off the shelf.

  The Nokia beeps three times; clicks, slices Kish’s aural tether. Returns her, dazed and cold, to Officeworks.

  Her colleague Rebecca is working on page-turning strategies, declining Kish’s offer to be her page turner for the evening’s school concert. ‘What I’m waiting for,’ Rebecca says, ‘is when they integrate tablets with pianos. Wouldn’t that be exciting? Maybe the music could scroll along with you, like autocue.’

  ‘Would you still be able to write extra notes on the score?’

  ‘...I guess it wouldn’t really be the same, would it?’

  It has been three days since the incident at Officeworks. Kish, perched on a desk in the photocopier room, submits herself to the drone of fans. Rebecca slams the paper tray shut.

  ‘Are any of yours playing tonight?’ Rebecca asks.

  ‘Just a few of the intermediate ones. When there’s too many of the beginners... the parents seem to leave after their child has performed.’

  ‘
Doesn’t that just get up your nose? It’s going to happen tonight too, you’ll see. After intermission the hall will be half-empty because all the choir members and their parents will’ve deserted us.’

  ‘The poor kids at the end.’

  ‘I know.’

  Rebecca flips to a new page, presses down on the photocopier lid. Kish feels the pressure exerted on the book’s spine as if it were her own. A laser passing like an alien probe over her spreadeagled existence.

  9300730

  Kish watches Rebecca overturn the warm pages and Scotch-tape them together. ‘Okay,’ Rebecca says. ‘I know the answer is yes, but, still: would it be poor form to Blu-Tack the pages to the piano?’

  ‘Nobody will notice.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t fall on my fingers.’

  ‘I’ve done it before. Nobody noticed. Besides, the audience will be watching the choir, not you.’

  ‘That’s good. I haven’t practiced the last few pages. I’m going to have to wing it.’

  Kish waits a few beats. ‘You’re practically going to sight-read it on the night?’

  Rebecca laughs. ‘Don’t tell on me.’

  Kish watches Rebecca hold out the pages appraisingly before her. Rebecca is the only other member of the music staff with whom Kish regularly converses. Rebecca’s position at this school, with its still-fledgling music department, is an anomaly. At other schools like this, Kish knows, it would be the norm for piano teachers to double as choir accompanists. But Kish cannot accompany, and Rebecca, as far as Kish knows, has no inclination for teaching. One could say, perhaps, that Kish and Rebecca need each other.

  ‘I lied before,’ Kish says. ‘About the Blu-Tack. My teacher noticed. She just about died from embarrassment. After that, I performed everything from memory.’ Kish waits. It feels deceitful not to qualify that statement. ‘This was over twenty years ago. But you’re an adult now, and you only need to answer to yourself.’