by Curtis Hox
Sophisticated. How long has Hexcom been at this?
“They’ve got my mom in a convalescent center nearby. She’ll be there for a few weeks. I’m going to stay. You should come and check it out.”
“Right,” Masumi said, unwilling to commit. Then she remembered what Dr. Sterling had mentioned earlier about needing help with Crossover. “Do me a favor and email me the interpolation in that book by Descartes. Exactly as it’s written.”
“Sure.”
“When you coming back?” Masumi asked.
“Tomorrow, just to get my stuff. Can I see you?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I miss you.”
“God.”
Masumi hung up, then finished cooking her meal.
She ate it with an untouched glass of wine while standing in the kitchen. No TV, no music. No computer. Just her thoughts.
Dr. Sterling had confided in her. Masumi wondered if Dr. Sterling would be angry at her disobedience (one that should never have been forced on her). Telling her not to open the door was an insult. She felt it was her moral duty to look behind it. Dr. Sterling had admitted nothing was there, though. Masumi’s insistence that she be told the truth had been a test Dr. Sterling passed.
If she had lied …
However, even though Dr. Sterling would not explain where the door would eventually lead, she had at least stopped dancing around the mystery. She’d explained to Masumi that Crossover lacked one final stitch that would provide a comprehensive whole. When Masumi mentioned that Towns had found a book by Descartes with an interpolation, Dr. Sterling had perked up. Masumi then promised to get the interpolation. Maybe it would help.
Her phone beeped.
A message from Towns appeared with the interpolation.
Masumi forwarded it to Dr. Sterling, then finally took a sip of wine. She thought about Towns and his crush and if she were making a mistake chatting with him. He had given up on Riodola, obviously seduced by Dr. Sterling’s competitors.
Masumi missed him, a little, and wondered if she might persuade him to come back. She could always sleep with him again.
That thought distracted her enough she didn’t see Dr. Sterling’s text: Masumi! Call me!
Instead, Masumi grabbed the bottle and moved to the futon where she planned to finish reading the Battlestar Galactica novel Towns had left in her apartment.
* * *
The next morning, Masumi sat at Hattie’s kitchenette table.
“So?” Masumi asked, rubbing her temples like her head might explode. “What’s going on?
Hattie took a sip from a steaming cup of coffee. “Long night?”
“I drank an entire bottle of wine. Finished a fun book, though.”
“Good for you.”
Hattie smiled. Masumi groaned.
“What is it?” Masumi asked. “You look like you won the lottery.”
Hattie hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and she knew she looked like it. She’d been at her desk in her office. She still wore her robe and hadn’t done anything about her hair.
After she’d showered this morning, she’d paced through the stacks, thinking the unthinkable. She needed to look at the book by Descartes to make sure. But a stitch from the interpolation Masumi had sent fit perfectly: in the universe. Such a small phrase. It filled the narrative of Crossover perfectly.
When Hattie had read the message, she’d felt her cell phone grow heavy. She’d had to set it down. The familiar tunnel vision had even given her vertigo.
Bleedover had spoken to her, and she’d listened.
“We have to get Towns back here,” she said.
“He asked to see me tonight. His mother is better. He said Hexcom offered him a job.”
A job?
“Get him here. We’re so close.” And then, “The Lyells are poison, Masumi.”
“Close to what?”
Hattie shook her head. “Not yet, but soon, you’ll understand.”
Alice arrived in the doorway.
“Come in,” Hattie said.
“I have news. Towns is in, of all places—”
“We know,” Masumi said. “Hexcom.”
Alice looked deflated. “Right.”
“I’ll get him here,” Masumi said.
“You can persuade him?” Hattie asked.
“I think I can get him here at least one more time. After that, I don’t know.”
“He likes you,” Alice said.
“I know.”
“Jeez,” Alice said. “Have you guys kissed yet?”
Masumi groaned again.
Hattie listened to them bicker for a few minutes. Alice was obviously jealous, for a number of reasons. That didn’t matter. What mattered was loyalty and dedication. Alice’s time here had been idyllic, with far too much taken for granted. Without competition she had become lax, entitled, petulant. Masumi approached their endeavor with stolid grace, never giving away anything, but always eternally surprising. Alice would have to accept her secondary role.
“Get Towns back here tonight, no matter what,” Hattie said. They both stopped their chatter. “Have the portable studio equipment ready in my office, Alice.” They’d left it upstairs after the demonstration. Masumi nodded while Alice soured. “Tonight, ladies, tonight we complete the portal.”
“Sure we do,” Masumi said.
“And, Masumi, have him bring Descartes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dr. Hattie Sterling’s Society of Spinners became more than an idea on that auspicious evening when Masumi and Alice led Towns to the old library to incant the last stitch of her Crossover Framework.
Hattie was surprised at how early they arrived. Towns had only needed an hour of practice that evening in the studio. With the last stitch from the Descartes interpolation, he learned the entire Crossover framework in that time.
Something about him bothered her, though, as she watched him prepare in her basement office. He looked the same with his backpack, a T-shirt depicting a big dinosaur eating a bunny rabbit, and ragged khaki shorts. She sensed a change in him, though. He had seemed shy before, sure, something she had hoped would loosen with time. But now he refused to look at her.
She tried small talk, asked about his mother, received polite but curt replies. She even asked him about Hexcom.
No response.
“You promise you’ll come visit me at Hexcom,” Towns said to Masumi.
“I promise.”
“Let’s get this over with,” he said. “I’m ready.”
He promised Masumi he’d finish the doorway. And that’s what he’ll do. Then he’ll leave—go right back to the Lyells.
Towns claimed he was successful twice, each time forcing Hattie to peek behind the door, then shake her head to try again.
The incantation took eleven tries—Towns’s voice echoing off the walls the entire time—before he got the entire framework right.
Hattie wanted this incantation to be difficult, something he wouldn’t be able to remember, something that would require rehearsal. Masumi, as instructed, had already reformatted the hard drive with the framework .wavs. All of his practicing in the studio, gone. She would even wipe the .wavs from the handheld device he now listened to when this was over.
“That was a good one,” he finally said, his voice raw. “I think.”
This time when Hattie cracked the door, she reached her hand into the darkness.
She felt no barrier.
As peeked through. Instead of a grainy, gray concrete wall, she saw a sable emptiness. The office light penetrated only a few feet. She opened wider, just enough to fit her head in, and saw a passageway.
She stilled her breath, allowing her eyes to snapshot the scene: a narrow hallway with hardwood paneling on the walls the color of mahogany. A varnished wood floor of glossy parquet. The ceiling was covered in ornamented vinyl rosettes painted black and highlighted in silver. At the far end was another door, this one of polished hardwood made of rough-
hewn slats running at a steep angle, like a farmhouse door. A simple cast-iron handle painted white promised access to another world.
She shut the door and faced her students.
“Yes, Towns; it was a success.”
“Can I go now?”
“Sure,” she said.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew his Socspin ID card. He set it on her table.
“See you guys. Good luck.”
Towns glanced at Masumi once; then he turned and walked out.
“I’ll call you,” Masumi said.
She shut the office door behind him.
“Now, let’s have a look,” Masumi said.
She approached Hattie but didn’t ask permission. Masumi grabbed the door handle and waited for her senior to move.
Hattie stepped aside.
The door swung wide. Masumi gasped as she viewed the hallway extending about ten feet into the wall.
Hattie watched Masumi catalogue what she saw, ignoring Alice, who rambled about “miracles upon miracles, and “it’s a mistake to let Towns go. I should try to retrieve him.”
“Another door; another mystery,” Masumi said. “I have to ask: what’s on the other side of that far door?”
“I need two nights, maybe three, to prepare myself. Then I’ll go and look.”
“Are you kidding me?” Masumi strode into the corridor. The light from the office penetrated just deep enough to see the end. She stopped at the far door. “Is it locked?”
“Yes.”
Masumi pushed on the handle. It wouldn’t move.
“Figures,” She said, continuing to face the closed door as if she might will it to open. “Where’s the key?”
“I don’t have a key.”
“Didn’t think of that, did you? Now what?”
Hattie strode into the narrow light that penetrated the corridor.
“Veneration needs to be paid before that door will open. Just waltzing up there is the worst form of disrespect. Preparing to unlock that door will be the first rite of passage of our new Society. Besides, you’re not ready, Masumi. I’ll prepare myself and go first. You can then follow me when I return. Agreed?”
Masumi returned from the other end. “Sure.”
“What about me?” Alice asked. She looked like she’d swallowed a spoon of fish oil.
“You’ll be third.”
“That’s just great. Third.”
“Now, out.”
Hattie beckoned Masumi, who left the corridor; then she shut the door.
“Alice, I’ll be in my apartment all night and day tomorrow. Check your phone. I’ll let you know when I’m ready. It could be the following night. You too, Masumi. I’ll want both of you here when I enter. Someone let Eliot know that he needs to be here too. This’ll be our first ceremony as a Society. When I return everything will be understood.”
With hands on their backs, Hattie shushed them out of her office. “Close the door behind you.”
* * *
She sat at her desk, palms flat, eyes shut, trying to resist an urge to celebrate.
Margery, can it really be happening?
Hattie slid her hand down the side of her cold, metal desk.
She unlocked the bottom drawer and removed a stack of yellow legal pads. She also removed a false bottom to reveal all three hundred single-spaced pages of her novel. They were dog-eared and smudged and some even coffee-stained. She’d begun the manuscript on an old Royal manual typewriter, then switched to an IBM Selectric. She’d used single line spaces because she’d never thought of it as a document an editor would read. She’d wanted a memoir of her time with Margery. It became a piece of fiction later, once she realized what she was doing: recreating a world as she remembered it.
Hattie retrieved the manuscript and began to read, slowly, with tender care. She would not stop, except to use the bathroom, or to eat and drink, for nearly forty-eight hours.
* * *
Nearing the end of the second night, having read through the novel three times, Dr. Hattie Sterling returned the last page to the stack.
Margery, yes, Margery understood. I should have listened to all that talk of the imagination. Nineteenth-century Romantic wishful thinking, I always countered. Emerson on crack, I used to say. Maybe not. Margery never relented. Imagine, Hattie, a time before TV, radio, before the massification of mechanically reproducible imagery and objects; a time when you knew everyone in town, when most of your day was spent in a field or small shop. Ink was expensive, parchment a difficult material to produce. To see an actual image telling a story, you had to travel to a church and look up at the stained glass or the spandrels. I’ve been to Chartres; it’s a narrative in stone and glass. If you lived away from town, you never saw such things. Once you did, maybe sitting in a cathedral after taking a nine-month pilgrimage, the power of the orchestrated metanarrative overpowered you with its beauty. The sculpture, the frescoes, the icons, each one glittering in light designed to heighten your awareness. Your imagination, then, kept these close at hand as you returned to your dull world. We have lost something, Hattie, in the barrage. Mass imagery has deadened something in us … but it is awakening.
Hattie’s imagination worked in overdrive, barely circumscribed by her cramped apartment. Her mind balanced like gimbals, as if it might tilt any number of ways.
She was ready.
* * *
Hattie dressed in slacks, blouse, simple neck scarf, and light jacket in that classical style fashionable today, as well as decades ago. She carried a large tote bag over one shoulder, in which she had placed her novel (now bound with rubber bands); a roll of cash that could feed a small family for several years; large, dark sunglasses; and a flashlight. She wore a stylish, silk shawl, which she tied under her chin. She looked like she was going for a day of fun in the city.
Hattie stood in the cool space made between the dislodged bookcase and the door.
Her novel was still fresh in her mind. She sensed that this was how it had to be.
Margery had said it many times: The stories we tell are real, Hattie, as real as the breath in our lungs.
Long ago Hattie had dismissed this with analytical precision by explaining the important distinction that separated reality from representation. The real from the unreal. The one trumps the other. She’d delved into Plato, Aristotle, finally arriving at Wittgenstein.
Margery had always countered, but the experience of the imagination can feel just as real.
True, Margery, but that doesn’t make it so. Imagine you’re a princess with a dragon for a pet. Now, show me your pet. Your solipsism is proof the imaginative is nowhere other than inside your skull …
Hattie snapped out of this exchange to let the crisp texture of reality wash over her. It was an actual scene in her novel—one she now imagined with striking accuracy.
When Alice arrived, Hattie shut her eyes again, pointing to a seat. Alice sat quietly while she stood at attention.
Then Eliot and Masumi arrived together.
Hattie turned her back on them.
“I’m going to walk into that hallway and shut the door. I expect you’ll find me gone. When I return, I’ll contact you. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
She didn’t want hear their challenges, especially not Eliot’s. She knew he was formulating a list of questions in the ten seconds he had already been here.
Before he could say anything, Hattie grasped the handle, pulled, and walked into the corridor. She dug into her purse for the sturdy Maglite and turned it on. She might look like a fool in a few seconds, but her ability in spinning hadn’t failed her yet. She knew what the framework meant.
A portal …
She shut the door behind her. The strong cone of light provided full illumination of the small space. It was cool in there, cooler than her office. The air tasted dry, clean.
She approached the other door, her feet tapping on the parquet floor.
Was it still locked, like before?
&nb
sp; No, she thought. Masumi should have shut the original door for this to work.
Hattie waited, knowing Eliot was probably trying to get in.
However, she heard nothing coming from the office door. The corridor was as silent as a forgotten bomb shelter buried beneath desert sands. She wondered if the transition had already begun. She noted no change in her senses; she felt the same.
Hattie laid her hand on the other handle, this one slightly larger, but still cool. She leaned on it, and pushed.
She immediately felt herself hit with a wave of energy like a blast of air from a jet engine.
Psychic … pure mental experience.
She no longer felt aware of her body, yet all of her senses triggered at once, each disengaging and reengaging in her mind one by one. Sight first, replaced by a series of variegated patterns of light, as if she stared into a movie projector. The rest followed. She felt a full rush of adrenaline tinged with dopamine and serotonin, enough to equal any drug-filled, opiate-chasing mainliner’s dream of the perfect high. Her mind freed itself from her body, if only for a few moments. This was the mystic’s personal place, so difficult to describe, so immediate and pure. At the moment of full rapture, it was more than the divine. This was something stranger than God. This was …
* * *
Clarity returned in a series of flashes that blinded her eyes, made her head spin, and nearly caused her to fall.
Hattie stood on the corner of 45th and Broadway in the middle of a bright, spring morning. Pedestrians on sidewalks competed with vehicles at intersections. Towering midtown skyscrapers punched shadows in the brightness. It was recognizable—yet so different.
Yellow cabs honked their horns and revved their engines, spitting out poisonous exhaust. People wore clothes that suggested life a few decades ago. No smartphones, MP3 players, or small digital cameras. Graffiti checkered a blue US postal box. More trash littered the gutters than she’d been used to seeing in years. And the smell from a pile of trash in the street waiting for pickup …
Hattie regained her composure, while the wonder of the moment faded. She noted her exact position. She stepped aside a few paces and stared. At first, she saw nothing. Then the faintest outline, not of a doorway, but an impression of a human shape emerged, distorted, as if someone had taken a sheet of glass and smeared it with lemon juice that ran down its side in liquid sheets. She turned away for a few moments, then returned her gaze and waited. A few seconds, a few more.
