The Tertiary Room
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The second tape began with static, then her grandmother's voice: "If you're listening to this, I've already told you about the fire." But she hadn't. The first tape had been about a wedding in 1952, nothing about fire at all. Elena rewound it. The static again, then: "The fire was how I learned I could survive my own becoming." She listened hard, waiting for further details - about how and when and why and in what order. Just waiting, mostly: static, her grandmother ranting on about her own life, a yelp, a scream, and quiet. Then the first tape finished and the second one started up again before Elena could swap them.
"Jesus, I know I'm going to hell," said her grandmother's voice on the second tape, "but I hope they have at least three pink flamingos." She was scrolling the pages of the book in her hand. It had a heavy plastic cover, as if it should be protected from rain or scuffs or something. Elena didn't know what that book was or what her grandmother might be doing with it. Or why she had suddenly stopped mentioning the fire. Now underground, the Tertiary Room, whatever, the woman was quoting Theodore Roethke: "To hear the ripe fruits crack/Snapping in your hand." There was a yelp. The voice said, "Jesus saves, and so does a dildo." And then the static interlude again, with its question - terrible, terrible question: "So, anything yet?"
Elena banged her thumbnail into the stereo volume knob. Much too loud, Max belatedly told her. Outnumbered this time, she showed how to cue up then rewind (they did both speed things up as well as reduce the static noise). Her grandmother responded:
"You look so much like him, I sometimes think I haven't really left him. That he's somewhere twisting the handle of one of the one-way mirrors of some huge hospital. That he visits me in my right and left lungs. I knew because one night he told me."
"Granny?" said Elena. "What are you talking about?"
"The old man. The funny old man."
"The one on the other side of the one-way mirror."
"Yes, the one on the other side of the one-way mirror." Still reading from the book, "I could smell him wherever I turned. All night and all that day. I saw him do it, but I didn't touch him, even though my—or his—flesh was covered with stolen blue flames." A long pause, then: "You thought I was a monster. You thought I was a knee-high god." There it was again: a short, sharp yelp. "Well," she added, "perhaps I am a god. Perhaps everything is."
The noise of the volume knob being turned down, of a CD being swapped out, of the rewinding of the tape, and of a door shutting. Silence. Lighter now, Elena supposed. "Do I still look like him?" she asked her grandmother.
"Huh?"
"You know: 'Because he's somewhere twisting the handle of one of the one-way mirrors of some huge hospital.'"
"Nope. Not at all." The voice hollowed out, went through a cavern. "You're a wonder." There was that escalating, almost nonsensical noise - "here's to my sweet Satan," until the tape finally broke. Elena turned back to the box. One more thing to go through while the clay workers finished their surfaces.
The One Year Magic Primer, version 1904. In Pagan America, and before, there'd been books that offered you a few fun tricks - can your friends vanish like ghosts or move letters in newspapers or talk backwards - if you would only make the earthen or yellowish metal rings to encircle your head. Get The One Year Magic Primer, read it cover to cover, and you could see things no one else could see. But the first trick Neurig wished to teach you was that the book was a trick itself: fire opened the covers; an unrelated certificate was stuck in between the pages; a grainy photo appeared where the ironclad promise to teach One Year of magic should be. I said the book would end you after a year of use. But it would only bring forth a few days before that end. And a hum and rumble, and then a slowly dissipating darkness.
Neurig wished to make you know; to make you think - briefly: we are alone in the universe◆ About the ending
❧ About the title