The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Much as Ophelia perseveres, she doesn’t see Thorn among them. She, herself, begins to be overcome by a fear that’s as disembodied as she is. The scarf tenses all its loops around her, and, similarly, the aerargyrum clings ever more tightly to her, swallowing up what remains of the surroundings, even blotting out her sandals.

  What if she were doomed never to find Thorn again? If she were doomed never to find anything at all again?

  Suddenly, a figure appears through the fog and makes straight for Ophelia, without the slightest hesitation. The more the gap narrows, the clearer the figure becomes. A back? The individual approaching her is moving backwards. It staggers, wiggles its knees, folds and unfolds its arms. Even its overall appearance keeps fluctuating and blurring. When, finally, it swivels round, it turns out to be a little young lady with messy curls, rectangular glasses, and a three-colored scarf.

  Ophelia’s echo.

  It’s standing so close, it’s almost touching her. Its colors, at first just like Ophelia’s before the Horn of Plenty sucked her up, gradually mirror those she has now. From pink, its skin turns to verdigris; from brown, its hair veers toward blond. Her echo looks so much like her! Apart from the fact that its scarf doesn’t seem to be animated. And that it is chewing something.

  “Who is I.”

  It uttered these words between two chews, in a barely human voice, but Ophelia’s voice, all the same. How does it manage to speak? It waits, impassively. What does it want of Ophelia? How does it feel toward her? And her, how does she feel about it? More than anything, she wishes she could ask it where Thorn is.

  Ophelia moves forward. The echo sneaks away. The more she tries to approach it, the more it backs off, into the aerargyrum. Is it running away from her? In this realm of echoes, she is probably the only person to have a guide, and she has no intention of letting it slip through her fingers. She walks faster and faster so as not to lose sight of the absurd image of her own body contorting itself to run backwards.

  After an endless, almost blind race, Ophelia bursts out of the aerargyrum. She has left a washed-out world for an explosion of colors. A red ocean stretches as far as the eye can see, beneath an orange-colored sky. Ophelia gazes at the beach of blue sand, into which her feet are sinking. It’s no longer just her that’s in the negative, it’s now the entire seascape. Why? There’s no ocean in Babel, and yet this one seems more real than the Deviations Observatory, which has remained shrouded in fog behind her.

  “Who is I.”

  The echo is balancing on the moving surface of the water. It’s still chewing, as if it had a sweet in its mouth that won’t dissolve. With its finger, it points to an island in the distance, with purple vegetation. The distance separating Ophelia from this other shore instantly shrinks, until there’s no distance at all. And now, here she is on the island, walking up an avenue, deep in the luminous shade of the trees. Her echo is still walking backwards in front of her, as though to it, all this was merely a game of tag. Nothing here is normal, neither the improbable colors nor the abstract aromas nor the liquid sounds, but Ophelia feels sure she has been here before. She becomes even more sure when she reaches some majestic buildings of glass and steel in the midst of the jungle. She had lived within those walls. If her heart had retained an organic logic, it would have started to beat faster and faster. She’s afraid—afraid to hope. It’s her echo’s turn to follow her at a distance, as she takes the initiative of going inside, and starts climbing some stairs. She had fallen at this very spot, she remembers, striding up a step. It was on her first day.

  She goes through the door of a university amphitheater. Around a hundred apprentices in yellow frock coats are seated along its tiers, hunched over their notebooks, frantically scratching away on the paper with their fountain pens. They are all in the negative, like Ophelia, but not one of them cares about her. The shadows of their family powers quiver with hyperactivity. They all seem in the grip of some indescribable torment, tearing out the pages of their notebooks, and then starting their work all over again, from scratch. Judging by all the balls of paper littering the entire floor, this performance has been going on for a very long while.

  Ophelia smoothes out a random piece of paper. The white ink on the black surface is just meaningless scribbles; even she, who has become a perfect illiterate, can see perfectly well that these are not words. For these young people, who all aspire to joining the elite, no longer being able either to speak or read or write must be a veritable nightmare.

  Ophelia bursts out laughing. Her distorted voice bounces chaotically around the amphitheater, attracting furious looks from the apprentices she is distracting from their work. She has never laughed like this in her whole life. It’s an explosion of joy in its purest form. She would so like to tell them all how alive they are!

  The Good Family didn’t plunge into the void.

  Ophelia leaves the amphitheater, runs along the corridors, and leaps over the benches. Her echo tries to follow her in its dislocated way, but she can’t slow down, propelled by the strength of her sudden understanding, freed from a weight that’s been crushing her for a long time.

  There never was a landslide.

  She comes across students and professors, wandering around the establishment. They all look drained, pacing back and forth past doors, coming and going along walls and ceilings, avoiding meeting anyone’s eye.

  Ophelia feels like dancing with every one of them. She dives into a walkway, and between its columns she can gaze at the red ocean, the neighboring islands, and, in the distance, shrouded in fog, a mainland bristling with construction sites. Wherever she looks, land and water form a continuous horizon.

  The Rupture never happened; not, in any case, in the way it has been recounted. The old world wasn’t smashed to pieces. It has remained intact all this time, just like the Good Family, hiding behind the void, behind Ophelia’s dreams. Behind behind.

  It turned in on itself. It inverted itself.

  The sea of clouds? Entire continents of aerargyrum! A formidable concentration of aerargyrum.

  Ophelia suddenly stops running. In the middle of the walkway, in front of a newspaper distributor, behind a long white fringe, she almost didn’t recognize Octavio.

  Octavio . . . She would like to be able to say his voice out loud to convince herself that he is really there, that he has never ceased to be there. He is so focused on the newspaper distributor that he pays no attention to her. He lowers the lever, picks up a copy, tears it up, throws it into a garbage chute, lowers the lever again, picks up another copy, tears it, throws it into the garbage chute, and continues without the distributor ever emptying.

  Ophelia grips Octavio’s shoulder to stop him. She can barely feel him through her glove, as if he were very far away, despite being so close. He turns his eyes toward her, which are no longer red, but turquoise, projecting the shadow of their power like two beams of smoke. She expects him to be as happy as she was at seeing him, but his face expresses only pain. He hands her a newspaper, silently entreating her to help him destroy them all, and then returns to his task, so absorbed that he instantly forgets Ophelia. There is nothing printed on these newspapers. It’s not their contents that matter, but what they represent: the lies of Babel.

  All of Ophelia’s euphoria falls flat.

  Octavio and the others are alive, yes, but at what price? They have been trapped in their obsessions, condemned continually to repeat the same rituals, and remain ignorant of what had really happened to them. Will she suffer the same fate if she lingers too long among them? She remembers the unbearable guilt she had felt when the airship plunged into the void between the arks. She now knows why: because the land of the old world is still there, on the reverse side of the spatial web. And even now that Ophelia has been inverted herself, she realizes that her presence here remains an aberration.

  Second knew it. Second saw it.

  That was why she
had shown her all those pathetic portraits of Octavio. She doesn’t only detect the advance echoes; she wants to stop them. And she had always expected Ophelia to save her brother from this place—from this Wrong Side.

  But how? Ophelia hasn’t managed to find Thorn, and she has no idea how to save herself. She scans the walkway in both directions, looking for her echo, which had been her guide until then. Had she ended up losing it, too?

  An echo. Ophelia realizes that she knows one personally, right here, at the Good Family.

  She takes a final look at Octavio, relentlessly throwing one newspaper after another into the garbage chute. She is sorry to leave him. She cuts across the jungle of a garden, in which she glimpses mute birds and dozy marsupials. She dives into an administrative building and scales its marble stories. She no longer really knows whether it’s she who is running, or the building that’s carrying her to her destination.

  She steps into the director’s office.

  Helen is an echo incarnate, like all the family spirits, but she is also the most intelligent of the siblings. If anyone can help Ophelia to penetrate the mysteries of the Wrong Side, it’s her. The black bulbs barely diminish the dazzling darkness of the office. It’s deserted. Ophelia had been summoned several times, as an apprentice virtuoso, to see the lady director; the giantess almost never left her post, she should have been here.

  Ophelia knocks into a trolley and hears a damp sound under her sandals. She’s trodden on some glass. Looking closely at it, she recognizes the lenses of an optical appliance. As for the trolley she had banged into, it is actually a crinoline on castors, onto which an enormous dress has been stitched. The bodice hangs limply on the support structure. Ophelia is alarmed. She opens the glass door to the bookcase in which Helen’s Book is displayed. On its skin pages, Eulalia Gonde’s beautiful handwriting has turned into scribbles. There is no coherent language on the Wrong Side. By losing her code, Helen has returned to her original state. Formless. All that remains of her now is an empty dress.

  “Who is I.”

  The echo is sitting in Helen’s chair, which is far too big for it. It has a strange effect on Ophelia, seeing a provocative expression on her own face. It’s still chomping, insolently, on its sweet. No sooner has she ventured towards it, than it springs up and away. Ophelia has the curious impression that this echo wants both to help her and to test her.

  The space surrounding them changes shape, like modeling clay. They are now between two skies, one that opens out above their heads, and the other that is reflected beneath their feet. It takes Ophelia a few moments to realize that they are standing on the gigantic glass dome of Babel’s Memorial, at its highest point. The view is breathtaking. The Good Family is now a mere outcrop of land in the distance; the building containing Helen’s office not even visible on it. Ophelia has a panoramic view of the ocean and the harbor, of the old and new Babel, of arks the wrong way round, and districts back to front. She feels as if she’s looking at a badly developed photograph. Here, the landscape is foggy and incomplete; there, multicolored and confused; nowhere is it harmonious.

  But what shocks her the most are the sailing ships, which she couldn’t see from the Good Family. There are too many of them to count, all stationary in the water, frozen in time and space. An armada several centuries old, thrown over to the Wrong Side before managing to reach the shores of Babel.

  Ophelia looks up at the sun, as it darkens the sky. Its black light floods her glasses, giving a paradoxical clarity to all her thoughts, and so what if she can’t express them out loud. She is replete with an understanding that requires no words.

  The Right Side and the Wrong Side are the two pans of a pair of scales.

  Every time matter inverts on one side, a counterpart inverts on the other side. For all matter that is turned into aerargyrum, so aerargyrum becomes embodied in matter, and for every echo embodied in the world on the right side, the Wrong Side needs a counterpart. A symbolically equivalent counterpart. Eulalia Gonde created a generation of demigods just from a simple manuscript, but in reality, it was but the first act of her play. On that day, she made a deal with the world on the wrong side. And years later, once the family spirits had grown up, Eulalia Gonde had stood almost exactly where Ophelia now finds herself. She saw war returning to Babel. It was the final straw; she decided to honor her deal. Over to the Wrong Side she hurled all the armed forces, all the conflict zones, all those nations incapable of keeping the peace. She sacrificed half of the world in order to save the other half. How many innocents, soldiers enlisted against their will, civilians caught up in battles were thus inverted without there being anyone to explain to them how and why? And how did Eulalia succeed in causing an inversion on this scale, without even having recourse to the Horn of Plenty? To send such a quantity of matter over to the Wrong Side, a new counterpart then had to be extracted from it, a symbolically equivalent one, sufficiently strong to maintain the scales’ balance. No?

  Ophelia senses the scarf bristling. She turns from the ocean, and its armada of ghost ships, to see her echo brandishing a block of marble at arm’s length.

  Ready to bring it down on her.

  (SISEHTNERAP)

  Thorn walks through the fog. It’s aerargyrum, quite obviously. Everything is white, and this whiteness disturbs him (white, winter, snow, Pole). There’s nothing to quantify here, no distances between objects; no time, either. His watch has stopped (white, paper, treasury, Pole). He doesn’t like this nothingness that seeps into the pores of his skin, now an absurd verdigris color, and permeates his brain as an involuntary association of ideas (white, Book, Farouk, Pole). He’s no keener on the inverted symmetry of his body that has changed the position of his fifty-six scars. And he likes even less this shadow bristling with claws that clings to him like a mass of brambles, reminding him, with his every move, of the hideousness of his family power.

  Thorn quickens his pace through the aerargyrum, without trying to understand how he is still managing to walk. Here he has neither his leg brace nor a stick, and his leg is assuming totally illogical angles at every stride. He feels no pain, which doesn’t gladden him at all (white, amnesia, mother, Pole). Grinding bones, inflamed joints, mnemonic migraines, all this organic information constituted contours that had now disappeared, along with the decor. Without these contours, his memory is overflowing like liquid (white, enamel, smile).

  No.

  Thorn refuses, categorically, to let that particular memory, even more than all the others, impose itself on him. He refuses that door that he waited outside for three hours, twenty-seven minutes, and nineteen seconds, and that was never opened to him. He refuses that keyhole, just at the level of his eye, before his bones had begun their excessive growth. He refuses the laughter of his mother, who is showering Farouk’s new ambassador, barely more than a child, with compliments, and already inviting him to dine at her table. He refuses that boy who’s not him, and who has all that he will never have: a respectable birth, a future that’s all mapped out, beauty in every millimeter of him, and his mother’s smile. Above all, with his eye pressed to that shameful keyhole, he refuses the loneliness he detects in Archibald’s eyes in the light of the chandeliers, much like the loneliness he’s feeling in the gloom of that antechamber.

  White. Thorn quickens his pace, plunging deeper and deeper into the aerargyrum, and its absence of contours. He knows neither where he is nor where he’s going, but he will keep walking until he finds the only door that hasn’t remained closed to him, and behind which he really is expected.

  Ophelia’s door.

  Overflowing yet again (door, room, Eulalia Gonde, Rupture), Thorn’s memory drags his mind backwards, in inverse proportion to the forward movement of his strides. The more he advances into the whiteness, the more he goes back in time, to Farouk’s past, which his mother had imposed on him.

  In the beginning, we were as one.

  But God felt un
satisfied with us like that, so God set about dividing us. God had great fun with us, then God tired of us and forgot us. God could be so cruel in his indifference, he horrified me. God knew how to show a gentle side, too, and I loved him as I’ve loved no one else.

  I think we could have all lived happily, in a way, God, me, and the others, if it weren’t for that accursed book. It disgusted me. I knew what bound me to it in the most sickening of ways, but the horror of that particular knowledge came later, much later. I didn’t understand straightaway, I was too ignorant.

  I loved God, yes, but I despised that book, which he’d open at the drop of a hat. As for God, he relished it. When God was happy, he wrote. When God was furious, he wrote. And one day, when God was in a really bad mood, he did something enormously stupid.

  God smashed the world to pieces.

  Thorn sees again, in a scene his mind has replayed a thousand times, that door that Eulalia Gonde slammed behind her on the day of the Rupture. She locked herself up in her room. She forbade anyone from following her. Farouk, whose trembling hand on the door handle Thorn can see as if it were his own, finally disobeyed her. He opened it; he went in; he looked. Half of the room disappeared.

  Thorn walks ever faster in the whiteness, twisting and untwisting his leg, stuck in this incomplete memory’s furrow. It’s no longer just his claws sprouting from his shadow, but a tangle of roots and branches representing the internal ramifications of his memory.

  Eulalia was there, facing a mirror hanging in the air, standing on what remained of the floor. (Try your dears.) So why had Farouk felt this abandoned? (Dry your tears.) Why had he felt the same as Thorn, peering through his keyhole? (God was punished.) Why had Eulalia Gonde decided to rip that page out of her Book, to amputate it from her memory, to condemn the family spirits to amnesia, as well as, effectively, all their descendants? (On that day, I understood that God wasn’t all powerful.) And what’s this mirror all about, hanging in the middle of the room, between floorboards and sky? (Since then, I’ve never seen him again.)