The Insides (10 page)

Victor sees her reaction, and he knows he’s partly responsible, and his face softens a little.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Listen,” he says, then, “I’m sorry that I’m being an asshole. I just don’t know what to do. Tell me what to
do
.”

“Fucking—distract me,” she says, angrily. “Give me something to think about instead of my fucking problem.” As she says this, she realizes that this is effectively the strategy she’s taken with herself over the last year. She has served herself a long sequence of distractions, each one enabling her to forget for a little while longer.

“Actually,” Victor says, brightening, “I know
exactly
what will serve this purpose. I was going to wait and show you when it was truly ready, but, what the hell.”

She raises her eyebrows, faintly optimistic. It’s Victor
who’s talking, so she’s expecting this is a buildup to some tasty concoction, a summertime treat of some variety or another. An emergency dessert: deploy in event of shitty day. She envisions a flash-frozen spiral of watermelon, something you could plunk in a tumbler of clear liquor. Who is she to say no? She has no interest in playing the role of gloomy saint, of being wrapped so deeply in the cowl of her woes that she misses out on the world, phenomenal, before her.

“Up!” says Victor, and they both rise. She heads into the kitchen; he follows along. “Voilà,” he says, once she’s all the way in the room.

There’s no dessert in here. There’s nothing simmering on the stove, no remnants of production spread out on the steel prep table. The immersion blender and the infuser and the blowtorch are all racked in their usual slots. But then she sees what Victor wants her to see.

It’s about the size and shape of a wrinkled napkin, and it hangs in the air between the refrigerator and the sink: a tiny cut in space, palpitating gently at its edges. A little vent, opening onto a weird darkness, a darkness that seems more tactile than optical. She recognizes it immediately. It’s a portal to the Inside.

“Holy shit,” she says.

“You know what that is,” Victor says, quietly, a half question.

“Of course I fucking know what that is. I’m just—surprised to see it here in our kitchen.”

Victor drapes his arms over her shoulders. “This is the part where you tell me how
amazing
I am, and how you’re
very impressed
with me,” he says, into her ear, ever the pupil,
ever in search of the next pat on the head. Opening a portal, even a tiny one like this, is tricky as hell and this is the first time she’s ever seen anyone do it who wasn’t a street warlock. So, yeah, she
is
very impressed. But she’s also a little alarmed. She knew that Victor still tinkered with magic; she knew he would use it every now and then to prod his career along, to try to stay on top of the game. But it’s been years since she’s seen him do anything more than some little charm. She didn’t know that he was dabbling in major stuff like this.

Victor releases her, approaches the portal. He waggles his eyebrows and says, in a goofy voice, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” some reference that she doesn’t catch. And he plunges his hand in. Just as she’d remembered, nothing comes out the other side.

“Oh my God,” Ollie says. Upon seeing this, some of her old teenage enthusiasm for magic rushes back, wiping away her adult concerns for the moment. “Let me try.” The street warlocks would never let her enter the doors they’d open; she was always left to wonder what it felt like, in there. Now that she has the opportunity she’s eager to seize it.

“Be careful,” Victor says, pulling his hand back out. “Remember that there are things
living
in there.”

“I remember them,” she says. Shadowy fishlike things, moving about, always just beyond the threshold of where she could see. She lines up her face with the hole, looks in, tries to catch a glimpse of one.

“They used to creep me out, she says, “but—do you think they’re dangerous? I mean—the street warlocks used to go in there and
walk around
, right?”

“True,” Victor says. “But never for very long. And I do remember them saying that you had to
be careful
.”

“Well,” Ollie says. “I’m great at that.”

She pokes three fingers into it, to see if they feel weird once they’re on the other side. They do, a bit; they encounter a sort of wet resistance, as though she is sticking her fingers into a pudding that is exactly the temperature of the air. She sticks her entire forearm in.

“You look like you’re helping a cow give birth,” Victor says.

“Nice,” Ollie says. She reaches in further, going in past the elbow, until the aperture tightens around her bicep like a rubber ring and she can go no further.

“Can you make it wider?” she asks, flexing her fingers. She can feel little vectors of invisible force radiating from her fingertips: as though every gesture she makes is magnified. She’s starting to get it: what it would be like to go through. She can feel that you could
do things
in there that you can’t do out here. She’s not quite sure what kinds of things, exactly, but she knows that being able to do them would make you powerful. At the thought her heart begins to beat a little bit harder.

“That’s as wide as I can open it on my own,” Victor says, watching her. “But I think I could get it wider if I had a tool.”

“A tool like a wand?”

“A tool like a dagger.”

“Ah,” Ollie says. She slides her arm back out of it; it feels like she’s peeling off an opera glove. “A tool like Guychardson’s knife.”

“It doesn’t have to be
his
knife.”

“No?”

“No. I mean, if there’s some other magic knife out there that triggers clairvoyant visions and makes people barf, that one would do just as well.”

She smirks, despite herself, then frowns.

“I don’t know, Victor, I don’t think he’s exactly in the habit of
loaning it out
.”

“I can be very persuasive,” Victor says sweetly. “Just invite him out. Invite him to tomorrow night’s thing.”

“What thing?” Ollie says.

Victor sighs, showing his annoyance at yet another piece of evidence that Ollie can’t be bothered with keeping her finger on whatever pulse it is that Victor cares about. “Tomorrow,” he says acidly. “Industry night at O
VID
?”

“Oh right,” Ollie says. She remembers now; she actually heard about this one. “You
know
I hate those types of things. I’m not going.”

Victor’s acid tone shifts straight to pleading: “You should
go
. And invite this Guychardson fellow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I only work with him Fridays and Saturdays.”

“It’s the modern age, my dear—text him. You have his number in your phone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Check.”

“Yeah, OK,” she says, not really thinking about whether she’ll do it or not. She slides her hand into the portal again. This time it comes into contact with something firm yet spongy, a sort of reactive tissue—it clutches at her with what
feel like a hundred tiny sucking mouths. Her heart leaps and she yanks her hand back.

“Shit,” she says, looking at her fingers to make sure they haven’t been compromised in some way, even though there is no pain. “Shit. Fuck. Shit.”

“What happened?” Victor asks.

“Something touched me,” she says. “One of the things in there touched me.”

They look at the portal and watch together as it undergoes one powerful pulsation.

“Did it just get wider?” Ollie says.

“It did,” Victor says.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure. But you saw it.”

“I’m not sure I saw it.”

“You saw it. You were the one who asked if
I
saw it.”

“We both saw it.”

“Maybe—” Victor concludes, “maybe it’s time we make it go away.”

“You can do that, right?”

“What do you think I am,” Victor says, “stupid? Of course I can do that.”

He reaches out and claps his hands once, sharply.

Nothing happens.

“Huh,” Victor says.

“Fuck,” Ollie says.

Something slides out of the portal and hits the floor.

Maja and Pig drive south from Plymouth, heading toward New York. For the first part of the drive, as they pass through Massachusetts, Maja struggles against the temptation to try reading him again, to double-check that he’s really done whatever strange thing that he’s done to his history. She wants to, but the shock that it gave her left her with a sort of negative conditioning: she’s afraid to reach into him because she doesn’t want to get the same shock a second time. She oscillates, for a while, between wanting to and not wanting to: this keeps her on edge for maybe an hour. But after she’s gone that hour, without looking, it seems like she’s made her decision, and the question stops being interesting for her. If she needs to revisit it later, she will.

For now she looks out the window: watches the green landscape of Connecticut flicker past. As they draw near one of the state’s cities they pass an exit with a sign for Albertus Magnus College, which makes her smile.

“Albertus Magnus,” she says, breaking the long silence that’s risen up between them.

“Huh?” Pig says.

“Albertus Magnus,” she says again, pointing through the windshield. “Some people think he was a magician, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” Pig says.

“An alchemist,” she says. “He may have believed in the occult properties of stones. There’s a rumor that he discovered the philosopher’s stone and passed it on to Thomas Aquinas.”

“Magic stones, huh?” Pig says. He affects boredom but she can detect an edge of interest in his voice. “Do you buy it?”

“Do I buy it?” she repeats, seeking clarification.

“Yeah. Do you think a stone can be magic?”

“Yes,” she says, without hesitating. “Anything can be magic.”

“Really,” Pig says. “Anything.”

“Well,” Maja says, “think about it. How do magicians make an ordinary thing magical?”

“They wave their hands over it or some shit,” Pig says.

“That’s one way of doing it,” Maja says, smiling a bit in spite of herself. “But really it’s even simpler than that. You make an ordinary thing magical just by paying attention to it. And humans can pay attention to all kinds of objects. So any kind of object could, theoretically, be magical.”

Pig’s eyes flick away from the road, range over her face for a second. She feels pleased, like she’s gotten him to reveal something, although she’s not sure what, exactly.

“Well, that’s your whole thing, right?” Pig says.

“What is?” Maja asks.

“Paying attention to stuff,” Pig says. “I mean, that’s what you do, right? That’s how my dad described it to me, anyway: you pay attention to like
layers
in things that other people don’t see?”

“Something like that,” Maja says.

“So everything’s a little bit magical to you, then?”

She considers this. “Yes.”

“OK, then, let me ask you something else.”

“OK,” Maja says. “Sure.”

“How is it that you’re not crazy?”

What makes you so sure that we’re not crazy
, says the Archive. Maja, playing it more cautiously, replies, “Pardon me?”

Pig frowns slightly, adjusts his hands on the steering wheel. “Well,” he says. “Things talk to you. They talk to you and tell you what they’re all about.” Maja considers, for a moment, whether to engage this line of questioning. But it’s nothing. It’s no more than she would explain to any other client. So why not. “What they’re all about, yes.”

“Which includes where they are.”

“Where they are, where they’ve been,” Maja says.

“Where they’ve been. You mean, like—in the past.”

She hesitates on this, bites her lip. Pig’s mask, with its glitchy history, still doesn’t sit well with her, and his curiosity about that aspect of her talent sharpens her suspicion slightly, makes her regret having alluded to the past, even casually. But she proceeds.

“Yes,” she says. “Like in the past.”

“And it can be something that’s up close or far away,” Pig says.

“Yes.”

“So, OK,” he says. “If you’ve got everything in the whole world talking to you—I mean, I’m no expert, but that’s a lot of Goddamn things, am I right?”

“You’re”—at this she has to actually crack a smile—“you’re not wrong.”

“So if they’re all talking to you simultaneously—how is it that you don’t just go nuts?”

“Ah,” Maja says, understanding finally. “That was a problem,” she says. “Originally. When I was a teenager, and was just figuring out how it worked.” She frowns, wanting to take what she’s just said and refine it for accuracy. She’s still not eager to open up to Pig, but her distaste for imprecision works to override this. “The problem wasn’t the things,” she clarifies. “Most things just—they’re peaceful. They sit there quietly, like they’re waiting. Waiting to be asked something. And when I ask, they answer. But otherwise they tend to be quiet. It’s not like you put it, it’s not like they’re all talking simultaneously. But people—it’s different with people.”

“So, wait,” Pig says. “Your thing works on people, too?”

“Of course,” Maja says. “A person is really just a special category of thing. But—less quiet. That’s what was hardest, back then.”

She remembers puberty, remembers the queasiness she would feel in the physical presence of other humans, the way she would feel sprayed with the constant broadcast of their shames, their secrets. Even the mundane glimpses she would get of other people’s lives left her feeling uneasy: she did not
want her head crammed with visions of people chewing up breakfast meats or adjusting a bra or sitting on a toilet.

“So how’d you manage it?” Pig asks.

“I swam,” Maja says. “A lot of laps.”

Being at the natatorium, alone in water, seemed to mute her awareness of a world filled with other people. She would occasionally catch a glimpse of a swimmer in an adjacent lane but the water would just seem to wash away any sense of them as a particular human. After her swims her usual routine would be to change into her sweat suit and jog a mile to the library, her tangled hair freezing in the dark. In the library she would sit in the remotest carrel she could find and she would read biographies, which she experienced as a manageable way to learn about others, without having to submit to the overwhelming experience of actually being around them. But she doesn’t tell Pig about the library. That’s a thing that she wants to stay hers, and hers alone.