The Insides Read online

  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 OVID?”

  “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.

  8

  TRIANGLE

  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.

  Remembering that time reminds her, also, of Eivind, her brother, three years younger, who similarly shied away from others, adults and youths alike, electing to spend his afternoons walking along the roads that ran along their town’s shoreline. In the evenings when they would both return home they would retire to their individual rooms: occasionally, she would look in on him and find him scratching out complicated labyrinths on graph paper, or poring over some English-language rule books for role-playing games. For a while it struck her as odd, his interest in these games, as she never saw him play them with friends. Nor did he ever ask her to play with him. Eventually she figured out that it was something about these systems themselves that satisfied him. To him, the systems were ways to conceive of a world that ran according to rules, according to procedures that he could grasp and make function. Once she realized that, she could understand the appeal.

  That was the thing about their relationship. They spent little time together—it was not uncommon for them to go a day without even exchanging a word—and yet she felt like she understood him. She felt as though they were close, although it was a strange closeness, a closeness that manifested itself in distance. They each recognized the tendency towards solitude in the other, and each respected this tendency, gave it room to survive. They gave one another space as a gift.

  She understood this as love. And to be loved that way—it brought her a happiness that she has not felt since. She revisits the emotion in memory, some days, as though to confirm that it was real, and she can almost feel it again, but not quite: the emotion in remembrance is like an orchid, viewed through frosted glass. But she feels grateful to have been loved that way, even if it was only for a short while, and even if everything would have been different had they been normal close, close in a more traditional way. If they’d been normal close, if they hadn’t allowed one another quite so much distance, then maybe she would have felt alarm earlier, the night that he didn’t come home; maybe she would have tried earlier to reach their father on the boat; maybe she would have called the number for her mother that she never normally used; maybe she would have understood that his absence was an emergency instead of only understanding this in the morning, when it was far too late. Actually, no, maybe the emergency would never even have happened: if they’d been normal close she would have had more opportunities to protect him, the way an older sibling is supposed to. No one would have approached the two of them if they’d been together, inseparable. What happened only happened because he was alone, because he was being loved only from afar.

  “And the gloves?” Pig says.

  “What’s that?” Maja says, blinking herself back to the conversation.

  “The gloves,” Pig says. “You wear gloves. That’s part of it, right?”

  “Yes,” Maja says. “That’s part of it.”

  They arrive in the city, starting by driving straight down into midtown Manhattan, into the glut of cabs choking the streets. She probes the grid, beginning to feel for any trace of the blade. After an hour or so she’s amassed enough little hitches, enough tugs in the right direction, that she’s able to have Pig turn around, head back to the Heights.

  “No, wait,” she says, after they’ve gone north for a while. “East.”

  And so they leave Manhattan, heading over the Washington Bridge—and then the tugs lead her south again, down Grand Concourse. She frowns as they make the turn. Something’s wrong. She feels pulled in separate directions and she can’t figure out why.

  By this point, she’s tired and thirsty and she has a pattern of snags in her mental map that are adding up to a dull headache and nothing more.

  “Pull over,” she says eventually, and she gets out of the town car, stands there for a second on a Brooklyn street corner, breathing the smell of hot garbage on the August air, squinting into the light bouncing off the window of a dry-cleaning place, as though the glare might trigger some epiphany.

  She balls her fists and presses them into her face for a hard second. She feels angry. She
is angry at whoever has the blade, angry at the idea that this person might be keeping it from her, her specifically, even though she knows there is no way that this could be accurate. She is angry at the idea that this person is deliberately preventing her from doing her job, even though she knows that this is not accurate either. She doesn’t care about what is accurate; she just needs a way to focus her displeasure. She tries to envision the person laughing at her. Without knowing anything about the person, this is difficult: all she has is the knowledge that he or she is out there, somewhere. But she tries anyway, tries to form this raw sensation into something that she could treat as a nemesis, some shape with a face.

  She gets a blurry sense, vague eyeholes hovering in a field of mist. You’re not smarter than me, she thinks at it, angrily. I’m smarter than you.

  And it works. She pulls the answer away, just as if she had pried it directly out of someone’s hands.

  She gets back in the car, slams the door. Pig looks up at her. There is something boyish about the expectation in his face; she can see then, maybe for the first time, just how badly he wants to find the thing.

  “It moves,” she says.

  “It moves?”

  “The blade,” Maja says. “It moves around. I was looking for something in a single place, staying put. But it doesn’t stay put. It changes location.”

  “Someone’s—wielding it?” Pig asks.

  “Moving it. Carrying it.”

  “As a security measure?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  Pig frowns. “Does this,” he starts, before breaking off. She waits while he compiles a sentence in his mind. “This is new information,” is what he eventually settles on. “How much does it change what we’re doing here?”