My limbs would not obey me. I watched my own hands carefully close the lid of the chest. I stood up and left the room very quickly as if propelled by an external force, shutting the light behind me. I sat on the top stair, staring into the darkness until I was sure even Frank had gone to sleep.
Diachronicle
DAYS 295–304 (LATE MAY, YEAR 1)
In which there isn’t enough magic to go around
THE NEXT DAY WE RETURNED to the ODEC to begin a more sophisticated series of experimentations. Rebecca East-Oda made it clear that she felt Oda-sensei’s involvement in the project had reached the end of its natural course, and so neither of them returned with us.
We were to essentially sequester ourselves for a fortnight as Erszebet eased back into the habit of performing magic and displayed her skills for us. Although we were free to leave the building to eat, exercise, take the air—even to return to my apartment occasionally to shower—Erszebet and I would sleep in the ODEC room; Tristan was already happily ensconced in his bachelor pad of an office. By the time we arrived that first morning, the Maxes had brought in camp cots, towels and linens, a couple of well-fed lab rats and lab-rat grub, a case of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter for Tristan, toothbrushes and toothpaste (oh God, I’d barter my body for a tube of Crest now! Cleaning my teeth with a paste of borax and ground cuttlefish bones, with anise to “sweeten” it. Ych.) . . . and as many breakfast groceries and snacks as the college-dorm-style refrigerator in the upstairs office could hold. There were also several boxes of seemingly random props from a list that Tristan had texted the Maxes the night before. As soon as they’d set up our bunker, the Maxes packed up and moved on, presumably to their next shadowy government assignment. They took all but one of the Vladimirs with them. We still had a full complement of Lukes to guard the building and assure our security, but they were otherwise useless.
The days that followed were long ones, the take-out food we lived on relatively tasteless (by twenty-first-century standards . . . context really is everything!), and by night we were each too tired even for conversation. Tristan in particular was worn down and preoccupied. My memories of that time are drab and bleary, despite the remarkable nature of our undertakings.
The first week’s experiments, dictated by Tristan, included: manifesting inanimate objects, both those occurring in nature (e.g., sticks and stones) and those man-made (e.g., a cap gun . . . or at least something resembling one); changing the chemical composition of liquids (e.g., water to salt water); moving small things (e.g., the manifested cap gun) from one spot in the ODEC to another. The array of requests evolved over the days from the mundane (“turn this sweater inside out”) to the fanciful (“turn this vanilla ice cream into Rocky Road”) to the creepy (“animate the stuffed cat”) to the startling (“turn this lab rat into a newt”).
Erszebet was willing to show off her powers, although after a day or two of adjusting to having them back, she made it very clear that she found the assignments themselves tiresome and stupid. She would, she informed us, perform magic because it pleased her to do so after so many years deprived of it; she would not perform it simply because Mr. Tristan Lyons required it of her. She was flexing a muscle she’d longed to flex for many scores of years, and to a certain degree she was preening. Once the buzz of that wore thin, we knew she would feel no obligation to continue the dog-and-pony show.
Tristan did not waste breath explaining to either of us what his higher-ups were expecting from this sequestration; I just took his lead, trying to learn as much as we could about Erszebet’s powers, although it was a trying undertaking. Erszebet herself had cast us as good cop/bad cop, and it was natural enough to play those roles. Tristan pushed her; I cajoled. He made her feel significant; I made her feel appreciated. Truth be told, after three days of it, his job proved far easier than mine, for she was, to use a post-Victorian turn of phrase, high-maintenance.
Other than her attitude, our biggest headache was that obviously we could not tape or photograph what she was doing in the ODEC; we could not be in there with her without blacking out. She had to thump on the door just to let us know she was finished with each spell.
Our only recourse for research, therefore, was for me to interview her after each exercise. Since she would not answer Tristan’s questions (or rather, answered them, but only with gratuitous derision), he divided his time between measuring and studying whatever object she’d worked her magic on, and hourly emailing his bosses at the shadowy government entity regarding our progress. Apparently the Maxes had delivered glowing reports on the results of Erszebet’s first spell and it seemed the bosses wanted everything she did to be as attention-grabbing as she herself now was.
Erszebet, in these interviews with me, was not illuminating. Here follows almost verbatim, as I can remember it, the gist of an early attempt:
(Upon the occasion of Erszebet taking my sweater into the ODEC with her and changing it from green wool to lavender polyester, which took much longer than we expected—an entire afternoon—and left her strangely exhausted. NB: Yes, Tristan had specific reasons for such peculiar and frivolous-seeming instructions.)
MEL: Can you explain to me how you did this?
ERSZEBET: Pah. I found where you were wearing lavender polyester and brought that here. It was hard to find. There are not many opportunities to find you owning polyester.
MEL: The physicists would say that in some parallel reality to this one in the multiverse, there is a Mel wearing a lavender polyester sweater.
Erszebet makes her dismissive face, and shrugs to make it clear she doesn’t
MEL: What we want to understand is, how does it end up here, in this reality, and what happens to the original sweater?
ERSZEBET: I summon it here and get rid of the other one.
MEL: How, though? By what mechanism?
ERSZEBET: The same way you do anything. You do what causes the desired result. If you want something to burn, you set it on fire, if you want something to be wet, you pour liquid on it. If you want something that is upstairs to be downstairs, you send someone to collect it. It is exactly the same. Except it is more complicated to calculate what to do—for example, in that metaphor, what route to tell the servant to take upstairs, how fast to move, and so on.
MEL: But can you explain technically, mechanically—not metaphorically—what you are doing and how you do it?
ERSZEBET: Pah, if you don’t understand a perfectly simple explanation, then you are too stupid to understand a more technical one.
MEL: Fine. Can you at least explain to me why some people can perform magic and others can’t?
ERSZEBET: This is like asking why doesn’t a blind person know what blue smells like.
. . . and thus went all interviews. There are transcripts of two dozen such on that original laptop. They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don’t escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.
FURTHER, ERSZEBET WAS capricious, and she knew she held all the power. We were demanding something of her (quite a lot of something, to be fair), while there was nothing we could offer her in recompense. Her greatest desire was fulfilled by circumstance: as a nineteen-year-old bombshell, she would never be re-incarcerated in the retirement home. She had other desires, but expressed them only erratically at first. Most significantly, on our twelfth day in seclusion, when we had stopped for lunch, she announced she wished to go to Hungary “to spit upon the graves of my enemies.”