“Nothing on mine, either. Walls without doors and deserted gardens wherever I went. As if all of LandmArk’s architecture had folded into itself. My Nihilism’s a dead loss here. Canceling only the family power of Farouk’s descendants, eh? Some talent.”
The Funny-Eyed-Lady’s voice had thickened so much, she seemed to be stifling it from within. Victoria had often seen her angry, but never to this extent. Her fingers were strangling the chains of her swing as she bent over even more, showing the roots of her hair: it wasn’t a trick of the light, it was growing back blond. The Fake-Ginger-Fellow remained silent.
To Victoria’s surprise, the Funny-Eyed-Lady finally burst out laughing.
“It’s the pits! If we can’t leave this ark anymore, or have dealings with any Arkadian, I’m soon going to run out of cigarettes!”
The garden’s gate creaked when it was Godfather’s turn to arrive. He was whistling a chirpy little tune. Victoria ran up to him. Even if he was unaware of her presence, even if his smile remained elusive, Godfather made her feel less sad. Every morning they all split up, and every evening they all met up again in this garden, where they all spent the night together. It was like a game with no loser or winner.
“So?” grunted the Funny-Eyed-Lady. “Has our situation evolved, ex-ambassador?”
Godfather kicked up a ball lying in the sand, and made it bounce higher and higher.
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
Only the ball bouncing on Godfather’s foot replied to the question. The Funny-Eyed-Lady got up so suddenly that her swing rocked to and fro.
“While waiting for that ‘perhaps’ to become a ‘yes,’ I’m off to answer a call of nature.”
She headed to the back of the garden, to a little tiled building that Victoria knew to be the restroom. She had once accompanied Godfather there out of curiosity. She hadn’t done so twice.
The last bounce of the ball sent it spinning so high in the air that it didn’t come down; it got stuck in the branches of a tree. Godfather watched the leaves twirling around in the sunset’s rays. He caught one in midair, and turned it this way and that, between his fingers, with fascination, as if trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe through it. Victoria adored this way Godfather had of studying everything in minutest detail, touching everything within his reach, tasting everything that could be popped into the mouth. It was a bit like he was experiencing the world in her place.
“I’m certainly no expert in monogamy,” he finally declared, “but I know a lonely woman when I see one.”
Still perched on his swing, the Fake-Ginger-Fellow glanced at the restroom at the back of the garden. The sun, increasingly low in the sky, was stretching all the shadows, apart from those that were tightening like brambles under his soles.
“I’ll speak to her.”
“And what if, instead, we spoke, you and I?” Godfather suggested. “A man-to-man talk.”
With his usual smile, he leaned over the Fake-Ginger-Fellow, who slowly, very slowly, raised his bushy eyebrows. Godfather focused on him in much the same way as he had, a moment before, focused on the leaf he’d caught as it fell. A shadow, such as Victoria had never seen before in him, started to fall from his eyes—how could such light eyes produce such darkness?—and penetrate those of the Fake-Ginger-Fellow.
“Or should I say,” whispered Godfather, “man-to-god?”
Victoria was fascinated and scared and excited; she was too many things at once and had no words to describe them. Godfather’s shadow just kept spilling out until it had enshrouded the body of the Fake-Ginger-Fellow, despite it being sturdier than his own. The latter was caught in this black trap without even attempting to struggle. The rocking of his swing gradually came to a stop. His jaws opened, but he uttered not the slightest sound. Nothing else seemed to exist for him, beyond the implacable eyes of Godfather, who kept leaning further in, mingling their gold and flame locks.
“What is it like? How does it feel when one possesses thousands of identities and is drowning in the consciousness of a single man?”
Godfather’s voice was soft as silk. Nevertheless, Victoria felt an entirely new respectful fear of him.
There then occurred something astonishing. The Fake-Ginger-Fellow’s face went all soft and changed shape, as if his flesh were made of modeling clay. His features became finer, his hair lightened, and in mere moments, he looked like Godfather. He had his beauty, his untrimmed beard, his gaping hat, even the black tear on his forehead. He had his eyes. With a single look, he projected onto Godfather all the shadows that shot out from under his feet like countless tentacles.
“And you, my child, how do yodel full . . . do you feel?”
Victoria’s first shock was seeing Godfather collapsing to the ground. Her second was when the Funny-Eyed-Lady threw herself onto the Fake-Godfather, making him fall off his swing. Crouching over him, armed with a monkey wrench, she hit him again and again and again and again.
“You really believed it, you cylinder-head gasket?” she screamed. “Thought you’d fool us for a long time? What’ve you done with Fox?”
Horrified, Victoria saw that Fake-Godfather’s skull kept losing its shape and then reforming under the blows.
“Are you done, my girl?” he asked, wearily. “Calmer now?”
“I . . . am . . . not . . . your . . . girl!” screamed the Funny-Eyed-Lady, bringing her monkey wrench down between each word. “God or not . . . I’ll take you apart . . . piece by piece!”
“That won’t be necessary,” a voice interrupted.
It was the man-woman from the last time. Victoria realized that he was in the middle of the garden, then she realized that there was no more garden. They were all now in a very large room. It was even more fancily decorated than Mommy’s boudoir.
Stretched out in the middle of a rug, Godfather lifted himself up onto his elbows. His first gesture was toward his hat, which had fallen with him.
“Really, Don Janus, we almost waited for you. I was starting to think you hadn’t received my message.”
“Your message, niño? The one that consists of knocking on the walls of all the houses and repeating ‘God is here’? I’ve known subtler ways. I must, however, admit that you did honor your part of the deal. You proved to me that LandmArk was implicated in your little affairs.”
The man-woman indicated to the Funny-Eyed-Lady to move back, and then he bowed his gigantic body toward the Fake-Godfather.
“Señora Gonde. It’s been a long time.”
The Fake-Godfather changed shape until he was back to being the Bespectacled-Little-Lady whom Victoria had briefly met on the bridge, between two Fake-Ginger-Fellows. She seemed fragile and tiny compared with the man-woman but didn’t seem at all intimidated.
“I truffled the pine . . . preferred the time when you called me ‘mother.’”
“A mother capable of reproducing identically anyone she meets in the street, but not her own creatures. Pretty ironic, isn’t it.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady raised a hand toward the man-woman towering over her, but he disappeared and then reappeared at the other end of the rug.
“You’ll understand if I don’t let you get too close to us, my Book and me, Señora Gonde. I’ve grown attached to my intact memory.”
Godfather tried to stand up, but couldn’t. Half a smile lingered at the corner of his mouth, but Victoria could see clearly that he was shaking. He stared at the Bespectacled-Little-Lady with a mocking curiosity.
“What are we going to do with her, Don Janus?”
The man-woman wrapped a finger in the curl of his moustache.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” whispered the Funny-Eyed-Lady, tightening her grip on her monkey wrench.
“Nothing,” repeated the man-woman. “You find yourselves here in a non-place of my mak
ing. Even the most gifted of Arkadians couldn’t leave it unless I decided so. That applies equally to Señora Gonde, powerful as she may be. I committed myself to us—what was the expression you used, again?—us ‘all giving her a real tongue-lashing.’ Consider it done. You have proved to me that my ark was implicated in your affairs, but it was through your own fault. It’s you who brought Señora Gonde to me. So it’s you who will keep her company here and stop disrupting the world.”
“Janus. Give me an Arkadian.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady pushed her brown hair back over her shoulders, and it now hung down to her waist.
“Give me a Needler.”
Victoria had once heard Mommy use that tone. Her necklace had broken, and beads had rained down, all over the sitting room. They were so sparkly! More tempting than all the treats in the candy jar. Victoria had crawled under the armchair to retrieve one and had put it to her mouth, curious to know how it tasted. Mommy had then knelt down, dress rustling, held out her wide-open palm, and, in the blue of her eyes, Victoria had seen a storm that had terrified her. “Give it to me.”
Like the Bespectacled-Little-Lady now.
A smile lifted the man-woman’s moustache.
“There was a time when I would have been unable to do anything but obey you, Señora Gonde. You just had to demand, and my brothers and sisters would submit to you on everything. That time has passed. It ceased once you, yourself, ceased to be yourself.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady frowned.
“You’ve got the wrong enemy, Janus. You’ve all got the wrong enemy. It’s not me who disrupts the world; it’s the Other. If you don’t quickly help me to find him and stop him, it billow rotate . . . it will be too late.”
The man-woman let out a sigh that made his ruff quiver.
“The centuries go by, and it’s always the same refrain. And my response will always be the same: no, I do not authorize you to approach my Arkadians and to assimilate their powers. You are not worthy of this talent that you yourself bestowed on me. If you were, you would already possess it. Take no offense, Señora Gonde, but the Other never existed anywhere, except in your uncontrollable imagination. I hope, at least, that this last will prove useful to you making the evenings drag less in my non-place.”
With these words, the man-woman disappeared, leaving a large space on the rug, on which Twit was already sharpening his claws. Victoria looked at the Funny-Eyed-Lady, who looked at the Bespectacled-Little-Lady, who looked at Godfather.
“Alright,” he said, still lying on the floor. “I admit it—that I hadn’t seen coming.”
THE DEVIATION
Ophelia was sleeping badly. Her nights now merely amounted to a fitful drowsiness in which the old world and the new were confused. She always awoke with a start, dazzled by the flickering lightbulbs, gripped by a vague fear, as if there were still an old sweeper ready to terrify her, to keep her away from Eulalia Gonde’s secrets. And when it wasn’t the nightmares, it was her thoughts that churned like the drum of a washing machine. The rickety bed didn’t help with thinking straight.
She was obsessed with the Other more than ever.
He had caused the death of thousands of individuals, without ever coming out of the shadows, but she was haunted by what, first, he had killed in her. Having or not having children was a decision that should have been down to them, her and Thorn. The Other had lumbered her with a memory she hadn’t wanted and deprived her of her very first adult choice. Ophelia wasn’t even certain anymore of her own feelings: did this indignation come from her, or from what Eulalia Gonde would have felt in her situation?
Every time she fell on her warped image in the bathroom’s distorting mirrors, she thought of that long-ago night when, despite herself, she had released the Other. Despite herself, really? She tried with all her might to remember what had set things off. She saw once again her bedroom on Anima. She saw once again the wall mirror. She saw herself once again in her dressing gown. She thought she saw once again that presence, barely perceptible, behind her own reflection.
Release me.
There must have been something else. As young as she was, Ophelia would never have given in, without a reason, to the whim of an unknown reflection. She couldn’t have decided, on a mere impulse, that the best thing to do was to pass through the mirror to clear the way for him. And then, once again, what had happened next? While she was stuck between her bedroom and the home of her great-aunt, what had become of the Other? From where did he exit? In what form? What had he been doing for all these years?
Ophelia sometimes thought back to that glazing-and-mirror store, where she had seen herself covered in blood, in front of Eulalia, the Other, and the void. It was infuriating to be plagued with strange visions, and yet not be able to remember something that really did happen to her during her own childhood!
Just like her repetitive thoughts, for Ophelia, each day at the observatory was an exact replica of the day before. The nanny-automaton took her to the projection room, where geometrical shapes formed and distorted on the screen; accompanied her into a tent where Ophelia went through the same crazy movements before being photographed; led her from one carousel to another, on which there were absurd workshops; sat in on both her medical consultations and her meals; and then locked her into her bedroom until the following day.
The only disruptions to this ritual were the very frequent power cuts, which stopped the carousels mid-circuit and put out the refectory lights mid-supper. Since arriving, Ophelia hadn’t seen a single lightbulb working properly.
She had lost all notion of time. She had also lost the only person she could really talk to. Cosmos, whose attempt at conversation hadn’t gone unnoticed, was no longer allowed to sit beside her in the projection room. And there weren’t many places one could talk that were free of a nanny’s recording device, or away from the collaborators. Ophelia had had no further dealings either with the beetle woman or the lizard man or an observer since joining the Alternative Program. As for the directors of the Deviations Observatory, she had picked up the odd whisperings about them, but hadn’t encountered them once since arriving.
She hadn’t seen Thorn again, either, and, of all the privations, that was the hardest. Was he managing, on his side, to investigate without arousing suspicions?
While waiting to be able to talk to him, finally, she watched, listened to, touched everything she possibly could within the containment zone. She had found nothing vaguely resembling a Horn of Plenty—her image of one, at any rate. On the other hand, she noticed that every day there were more useless knickknacks around the corridors, and more wasted food in the trash. She hadn’t had another revelation about Eulalia Gonde’s old life, so she made do with endlessly revisiting, in her mind, her last memory, trying, in vain, to establish connections between the cellar with the telephone, Project Cornucopianism, Eulalia’s metamorphosis, the advent of the Other, the collapse of the arks, and the inverts’ carousel rides.
And yet she knew there was a link.
Maybe Ophelia had already reached the limits of the first protocol of the Alternative Program. Maybe it was in the second protocol that things finally made some sense. According to Cosmos, it was from the third protocol that no one ever returned, but she wasn’t there yet. When she had announced to her nanny-automaton that she felt ready to move on to the next stage, the latter had let out such a guffaw that it sent shivers down Ophelia’s spine.
Ophelia peered up at the blurry statue of the colossus, standing in the middle of the observatory like a stone mountain, his head with its several faces looking down on the world. “I see everything, I know everything!” How he annoyed her . . .
In short, time was passing, and Ophelia hadn’t got any further. She couldn’t see any logic to all that the observatory made her do, her and the other inverts. The only thing that was blatantly obvious to her was how right Blaise had been. The Alternat
ive Program didn’t seek to heal inversions; it made them worse.
Every day it became harder for Ophelia to read objects in the residence, despite there being so many of them. On the other hand, she did find herself animating them, without meaning to, increasingly frequently, and always at her own expense. Cushions bounced on her while she slept. Chairs trod on her feet, furniture pushed her around. Once, during supper, a fork had stabbed her in the arm.
Things began to get worse when, one morning, Ophelia put her tunic on back to front. Much as she kept trying, it proved impossible for her to put it on the right way round without the help of her nanny-automaton. Next it was the turn of the handles. Door handles, drawer handles, faucet handles: they all became insuperable obstacles to Ophelia. It was no longer just her Animism that was awry, it was her. Left and right, up and down, they all got mixed up in her hands. Getting out of the restroom became a daily challenge. She would have found it easier to keep making slips of the tongue, like Cosmos . . . She didn’t know whether it was the gymnastics she was made to do, the screenings she had to attend, those carousels she had to suffer from morning to night, or a combination of all that, but for her, nothing seemed to go smoothly. It had taken her years to curb her clumsiness, since the disastrous mirror passage that had released the Other and messed up her organs; barely a few days here had sufficed to make her relapse.
And yet, she wasn’t the worst off. In at least one of the three morning screenings, a woman on the program had an epileptic fit. An insomniac started screaming like a lunatic just as he was dozing off. The old man who would hit his ear kept muttering the same phrase, “must go up down below . . . must go up down below . . . must go up down below . . .”, as if repeating the words an invisible crowd was shouting down his earhole. Cosmos himself, who seemed one of the least unstable, would sometimes isolate himself in a corner, motionless, for hours.
And then there was Second.
The intriguing, the fascinating Second, with her two-sided face. She looked like no other invert and benefited from a special regime. She didn’t sleep at the residence, didn’t have her meals with the community, only took part in workshops that appealed to her, and could speak to whomever she liked without being chastised. Sometimes she would stare into space for ages, her iris-free eye wide open, and then she would start to draw. It was almost compulsive.
The Storm of Echoes Page 15
