Rubik Read online

  ‘Well, I suppose I’m performing from unauthorized photocopies, so I’m already going to hell. Ha-ha-ha. Don’t you hate it when there’s no space for a page turn? I feel like we as a society should be above this.’

  Kish smiles carefully. Her mind is edging away from a memory.

  9300730

  Rebecca folds up her photocopies and tucks them under her arm. She smiles. ‘Well! See you tonight then, Kish!’

  ‘Good luck,’ Kish says as Rebecca exits. Kish looks around the photocopier room, forgetting her original purpose here. The hum of photocopiers turns into something marine, mournful as the deep sea. White mechanical whales.

  Rebecca has accidentally left her book wedged under the photocopier lid. Another aching spine. Kish retrieves it carefully, and leaves it shut on the desk.

  In the afternoon, Kish dreams she is inside an auditorium that seems to have infinite dimensions, somehow both interior and exterior. She is young again and clutching a musical score to her chest. She walks to the stage, which is not elevated but more like a pit, and each step of her descent echoes feebly like a dropped pebble. There is no piano on the stage; instead, there are seven telephones arranged in a half-circle. She rests her music on the stand and takes her place on the wooden stool. Here, in the cold glow of the spotlight, facing telephones blank and impartial as jurors, she cannot recall ever practising this piece. She will have to wing it, like Rebecca. She examines the score but she cannot remember how to read music, cannot remember which telephone corresponds to which note. What was the mnemonic again? What does Every Good Boy Deserve?

  A man approaches the stage. His face is undetailed, eyeless. He picks up the nearest telephone receiver and enters a number using the rotary dial. His fingers are long, white, the texture of clay. He lifts the receiver to his shapeless ear. The telephone nearest to Kish begins to ring, but not the briny ring she expects. It’s that seven-note motif again. Rising one step, falling, beginning again. The eyeless man seems to look at her.

  It is at this point that the dream malfunctions softly, like the last click of a wind-up toy. Kish says, I’m sorry, I haven’t performed in a while, a very long while, but the scene will not proceed. The phone is still ringing. She reaches for it. The instant she touches the lacquered receiver, her consciousness activates. She is lying on top of the bed sheets, in the same clothes she wore to school, one hour before the concert will begin.

  Kish parks her car and trails the clusters of students and parents to the auditorium. Accustomed to the school as a daytime space, she always thinks of these night-time recitals as uncanny. Kish turns her phone off. She finds a seat near the back of the hall, where she watches the parents milling around the urn and picking over a tray of Arnott’s Assorted Creams. The choir teacher shepherds her students to the stage for warm-up. Rebecca is seated at the school’s concert piano, a mellow upright Kemble. She has bothered to paint her nails a velvety green.

  Kish meets the eye of the parent of one of her students, across the aisle—she manages to recognize the face and smile before the lights go down.

  What follows is a murky procession of tentative ensembles and soloists, each child performing with a solemnity that is seemingly instinctual, absorbed like culture. They pronounce their composers’ names with ripe over-articulation; they close their eyes when they take their bows.

  She registers her own students’ performances as if she is inside an aquarium. The notes have a different gravity, in this spotlight, on an unfamiliar piano. In the week following the concert, Kish will discuss this fact with her pupils. We are not like the violinists or the clarinettists who may take their instruments with them to the stage. Each piano is different water; we must adapt without flinching from the moment we dip our finger into the first note. Yes: this is the metaphor she will use, she’s decided, and she will use the term ‘we’, even though, by even submitting themselves to the spotlight, these students accomplish what their teacher has not accomplished in years.

  When the lights come up for intermission she feels like she’s unfurling from hibernation. She is grateful that none of the parents comes to start a conversation with her. She tries her best to exude an air of both competence and enigma.

  The Pushkin boy is here. Kish accepts this fact calmly at first, but then must rethink. The Pushkin boy is here. In civvies, his hands and the concert program clamped between his knees. He is not performing tonight, nor—to Kish’s knowledge—does the Pushkin boy have any siblings. He is also minding a woman’s handbag.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss?’

  She turns around to find the Pushkin parents standing in the aisle.

  ‘Hello,’ Kish says immediately, rising to her feet. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Pushkin, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I think we’ve seen each other at one of these things before.’

  ‘How are you enjoying the concert?’ Kish asks, shaking hands with both. Later when she tries to recall the conversation she will not be able to separate one parent’s words from the other’s.

  ‘Oh, very much. We thought it would be good for Peter, you know—to see what he can aspire to.’

  ‘Of course.’

  On some unheard cue, everyone begins to retreat to their seats for the second half of the concert. The Pushkin parents become hurried. ‘We just wanted to make sure everything was okay with Peter. He seems a bit dispirited lately.’

  ‘He’s doing very well,’ Kish says. ‘I can tell he’s been practising very hard.’

  The parents’ eyes shift. ‘That’s good to hear. He just seems... quieter than usual. He doesn’t tell us much about what he does at school.’

  The lights are starting to dim again, so Kish gives a quick smile. ‘I’ll certainly try to be more encouraging. He is a rather contemplative child. He’ll open up in his own time.’

  She is scarcely certain of what reassurance the parents want. As she retakes her seat and the Pushkin parents return to theirs, Kish inexplicably thinks about the boy’s choices of stickers for his scrapbook cover week after week, as if there’s a clue to be found.

  Perhaps in a bid to dissuade parents from leaving at intermission, most of the advanced students are scheduled to perform in the second half. Still replaying the encounter with the Pushkin parents, Kish fails to check the concert program for what to expect next.

  But she should have been prepared for it anyway. It wanted to occur. The student is from the high school section, Year Eleven or Year Twelve, too advanced for Kish to teach. The ribbon in her hair is utilitarian black; she carries no music. ‘Yeah, hi. Tonight I’m playing “Little Waltz of the Telephones” by Tristram Cary.’ She bows and takes her place at the Kemble.

  She pitches the first note, and like that moment of touching the telephone receiver, Kish teleports.

  Rising one step, falling, beginning again.

  Those bell-like notes.

  The student executes it with impartial gracefulness, as if delivering a message. Kish is paralysed. She is in Officeworks listening to the seven-note motif. She is in the auditorium of her nightmare with the eyeless man. She is sinking into the dark aquarium of her mind as the water dilates and dilates—watching this student, the confident flash of her fingers. Kish is under the eye of a strange madness. White, total, lunar.

  ‘9300730,’ she whispers.

  Inside the pocket of her coat, slung over the back of her chair, the Nokia, which she is sure she turned off, begins to vibrate.

  When a hand touches her shoulder, she almost screams. She pilots herself from a distance. Turns her head with submarine slowness.

  Five fingers shellacked in velvet green.

  Rebecca pulls Kish out of her chair.

  Kish, unmetered through her long weekend, will spend her time recapitulating that moment when Rebecca had ushered her into the ladies’ restroom and confronted her, in her crisp Rebeccan way—You were shaking; I’ve never seen you so rattled before—and Kish, wanting to convince herself of the absurdity of the situation, decided to tell Rebecc
a about the phone call in Officeworks, the continuing toll of the seven-note motif. The way the song seemed to compel her to respond, to make sweat spring from her pores, as if some repressed memory were trying to ooze out and away. This weekend, so conscious of the insufficiency of her skin, Kish will avoid the Bösendorfer, shut all her windows, remove the battery from the Nokia.

  It is only safe for Kish to contemplate the moment in past tense.

  Rebecca and Kish listened to the applause echo in the auditorium like distant rainfall.

  Kish said, ‘It’s like the song is a trigger. A message. Someone’s trying to give me a message.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Rebecca’s eyes were so bright. ‘The Tristram Cary piece—maybe you should, you know, find the score and play it. Play it when you’re alone and there’s nothing to distract you. Expose yourself to it, bit by bit.’

  ‘I don’t need the music,’ Kish said bleakly. ‘I had it memorized, at one time.’

  Rebecca observed her. Outside, in the auditorium, one student left the stage, and another ascended. ‘Why don’t you perform any more, Kish?’ Rebecca asked. ‘I’ve never seen you.’

  Kish didn’t reply. The numbers were clacking again.

  Rebecca did something rare, then. She reached out and held Kish’s fingers. ‘Kish. You can either wait for another phone call, or you can take matters into your own hands.’

  Kish doesn’t want to leave her house. She scribes the opening seven-note motif from ‘Little Waltz of the Telephones’ on manuscript paper, using an HB pencil drawn from the Officeworks box. She writes the sequence of numbers underneath the motif, one for each note. 9300730. She is sure this is how it appeared in the original score, printed underneath the notes so that they would not be mistaken for finger markings. It was what made Tristram Cary’s score so unconventional. 9300730 is a telephone number, a footnote said, and Kish feels her age, remembering a time when landline telephone numbers had only seven digits. There were two motifs in the piece; the second motif was assigned its own sequence of digits, and throughout the waltz the two telephone numbers conversed with each other, overlapping, insistent on connection. The purpose of their communication was communication. But it is only the first motif that bothers Kish.

  When she has finished, she feels too hollow to continue with the rest of Rebecca’s plan. As if the act of writing the score has eased the dread gathered in her spine, but only slightly. Enough to carry on.

  Monday brings another lesson with the Pushkin boy. Mindful of the Pushkin parents’ words at the concert, Kish asks, ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk to me about, before we begin? Anything you’re worried about, perhaps?’

  The Pushkin boy stares at his fingers. His eyes are red with fatigue, and Kish wonders—and in some way, doesn’t have to wonder—what such a small boy has to endure, to look so weary. While she waits, Kish turns to a fresh page in the Pushkin boy’s exercise book. These new pages are faintly imprinted with the chart she drew for him last week, the one with the multiplying semibreve, and Kish feels keenly her position at the bottom of the pyramid, a lowly semiquaver, only one-sixteenth whole.

  ‘When does it get good?’ the Pushkin boy asks.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘When does it get...’ She watches the Pushkin boy struggle. He’s reaching for the word fun, but he knows it’s not quite the word he’s after.

  Kish wants to hold the child, but instead, she smiles what she hopes is a kind and convincing smile. She chooses her words carefully. She chooses honesty. ‘It won’t become good,’ she says. ‘Not for years. For the longest time... it won’t be very exciting, or very interesting, at all.’

  The Pushkin boy creases his lip. His hand wanders to the Yamaha and presses a dull Middle C.

  ‘But, maybe one day, when you’re thirteen or eighteen or twenty-five or thirty-six, it will be like there’s a little click inside your brain, like the hand of a clock sliding into a new hour, and you will have got it. It won’t necessarily become easier after that. Sometimes you might slip. But it will be okay, Peter. You can’t unknow what you already know. You can’t grow backwards.’

  The Pushkin boy nods. He is, Kish believes, a good boy. He resumes his characteristic neutrality, his gaze emptying, which makes Kish think, for a moment, of the eyeless man. She opens the Pushkin boy’s scrapbook and props it on the stand. ‘Now, let’s see how you’re going with “Clementine” this week.’

  Kish, having had very little to eat for dinner, decides to sit with the Bösendorfer as the sun goes down, the room modulating to indigo. The traffic on the main road becomes thin enough for Kish to hear the birds’ little notes, their succinct language. She has placed her meagre transcript of ‘Little Waltz of the Telephones’ on the stand. She knows, as Rebecca suggested, that every minute she waits is a minute surrendered to whatever figure controls the strings. She finds, like looking at an optical illusion, that she can toggle back and forth from one supposition to the other.

  There is a conspiracy.

  There is no conspiracy.

  She pitches the first note, an E-natural.

  And, like Theseus following a winding thread through the labyrinth, she can only play the next note, and the note after that, and the note after that.

  Perhaps, in her own house, on her own piano, the motif will be inert. At all moments Kish is aware of the room she is in, the watchful lamp, the unused pedals, the metronome in its steepled case. Her left hand on her knee.

  She holds each note for its allotted duration. She lets the motif fall; she begins again. She plays it for as long as she likes. It could be seven, eight times. Thirteen or eighteen or twenty-five or thirty-six.

  She lets the motif rest on the highest note. Her heart isn’t beating any faster than when she began. She retracts her right hand from the keyboard.

  Something clunks inside the Bösendorfer. Then a rolling sound like a marble travelling on wood. The piano recedes into the floor; the lid closes softly. As the Bösendorfer goes down, a cellar door articulates itself at Kish’s feet, stairs evaporating into darkness, the smell of old, deep varnish. The Bösendorfer, now submerged, presents itself as the first step. Kish gives one final thought to the Pushkin boy, his earnest, sad question, and like the clock in the metaphor of her reply, Kish—soft, old, creaking like a cathedral—slides into a new hour, awake now to the time signature; lifts herself up from the piano seat, and begins her disappearance.

  Retcon

  Falling, she is the tensile arch of a fermata poised above stave, a notation to sky—she is the equation of 3x to the power of two, her landing scatters coordinates—italicized by momentum—legs half-jacked—spiked with gravity, she invents a new axis—nobody will ever be able to say what was so compelling—some will attribute it to the filmmaker, some to her particular electricity—others will say it’s because she doesn’t leap from a helicopter or a bomb blast but a benign gray sky—others say that there are a billion pictures of falling, and popularity can be bought—and wasn’t there another falling body, more than a decade ago? Still there is undeniable magnetism in her falling body, her mathematics—she will be referenced in The Simpsons and the shortlived web sitcom Alpha Cheese—she will manifest as ink on T-shirts and temporary tatts—in the video for ‘Icon (Get Your Game On)’ by Miko and the Exploding Heads she will don cartoon colors, outlined in querulous black, rotoscoped beyond recognition—a kinetic sketch—lolcats recreate her fall—she is pure verb, the articulation of flight, she is the truth—she is every metaphor in the fucking universe.

  Jules wishes she could tell the difference between good coffee and bad coffee. Too often now she’ll be in a conversation where the name of a café or coffee stand will come up, and the other person will wrinkle their nose—wrinkle their nose like they’re in a freaking Blyton book—and say, ‘Aw, the coffee there’s shit. They have the worst coffee. They have to do something about it.’ And Jules will just have to sit there, nodding sagely, because everybody she ever talks to is tired, and tired peo
ple always talk about coffee.

  Like this guy here, who took one sip of his macchiato and declared that the barista at that joint should be shot, all of them shot; the place has to be investigated, dammit, exposed for the phoney rip-off scam that it is; jerks, all of them.

  Jules can’t remember the guy’s name, but thinks it’s probably Adrian. ‘Gah,’ Adrian says, taking another unsatisfactory sip, because bad coffee is better than no coffee. Especially out here, in the gray sunlight on Fitzgerald, lugging a tripod. Jules is carrying Adrian’s camera bag for him—such was the intensity of his displeasure, it inspired Jules to project herself as a calm grown-up in comparison.

  ‘So,’ Adrian says. ‘Jules. Jules Valentine. Is that your real name or what?’

  ‘It sure is.’

  ‘What’s it short for? Julia?’

  ‘Juliet.’

  ‘As in Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘...So your name is Juliet Valentine.’

  ‘Yes. Here’s my card.’

  He takes it in his coffee hand and angles his head to read it. The card, which is Patrick Bateman bone-white, says in glossy center-aligned Helvetica:

  STFU

  Adrian, balancing his coffee, slides the card into his pocket.

  They arrive at their shooting location, a dull brick wall in the Coles car park. Adrian sets down his coffee and opens his tripod, and then consults his phone for the time. ‘The light should be just about right now.’

  She’s got a fake gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans and it’s uncomfortable as hell. It really pinches when, at Adrian’s instruction, she scales the wall, one-and-a-half times her height and two bricks deep. Jules balances in borrowed Converse high-tops, squinting at the sky and thinking that this light will never look right for anything: the clouds, too brightly lit, too silver-edged. And this Adrian guy, who is not exactly unlikeable but like a train intent on arrival, shooting through every stop, permitting no one onboard.