Open/Close – Chapter 1
They pinned it all on Schuldich, afterward. For opening the door, but mostly for having brought in the recliner in the first place. After all (Nagi would snarl intermittently for the duration of their travails), if the bastard wanted to recline he could have found himself a plastic folding chair, something that weighed a couple of pounds and for which grudging self-adjustment could have been made. Or – always hypothetically speaking of course – he could have asked Nagi, who would have calibrated the Hyperspace Lab at the outset, thus saving – not frantic worry, but several hours of Nagi's time that he was never going to get back. But no: Schuldich had to go his own way, and he had to overdo things. As always. How had Nagi racked up the bad karma of his continued company?
And on and on. Not that Schuldich cared. Guilty as charged was not only his middle name, it was his first and his last, and he'd had a lifetime to grow into it. If karma were the point at hand-
But it wasn't. The Lab was the point at hand.
To describe the Lab...
They'd gotten it from Headquarters, on a technology inventory request. They'd been travelling a lot during those few months, from Himalayan valleys to Oceanic atolls, and Nagi needed a way to keep his files and equipment close to hand. That was the way he'd worded it. What he'd been looking for was a souped-up laptop case, which showed how little they'd known about the Organization's resources even then. (Not to mention how alien the Elders' thought processes were when they weren't paying attention.) Nagi asked for portability, so they gave him better.
The physical aspect of the thing was a hardcover-novel-sized box sheathed in featureless black plastic, running on a 9V battery that didn't seem to need much changing. There was a port for Nagi's laptop, but most of the time it lay unattached, somewhere convenient and unobtrusive. The coffee table of the Tokyo condominium; an upstairs corner of the Munich townhouse. There was a switch. Flip the switch—
It was like projecting a slide of a photograph of a door. A regular house door, molded wood painted white swinging on metal hinges. Except there was no beam of light, and if someone stepped in front of the box the image on the wall remained. And the brushed chrome of the knob was solid enough.
The Lab was on the other side.
It presented as a corridor, three point two meters by two point five meters, extending lengthwise into something Crawford said was expressible only with asymptotic notation. As far as Schuldich was concerned, that meant trying to find the other end was a waste of time. The walls felt like glass to the naked touch, the floor – improbably – like vinyl tile, and there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling that flickered on when the door opened and stayed on until they'd left. Nagi had piled his machines a few feet away from the door, around the single electric outlet in the wall (Crawford didn't try to explain that one), and they never ventured far beyond that point. The furniture, after all, was the only crutch visual perspective had to lean on, and to kick the legs out from under the latter would have been... altogether disorienting.
Just staring hard at the walls could do it. There were stars behind that glass. Pinpricks of light, unwavering due to the lack of surrounding atmosphere (but where were they?), scattered spendthrift across the field of vision like seed diamonds. Others too: billowing red giants, the aching non-light of a neutron star. Watch too long and one became convinced that the Lab was moving, skimming from one fragmentary elliptic path to another at impossible speeds, dancer-like, its brief orbits sketched around partners that trailed planets like baubles, coyly veiled in nebulae, asteroid belt half undone and inviting...
The dazzling scintillation of a passing comet...
A view, in other words, for which the human eye was sorely under-equipped.
Endless galactic vistas, 1; depth perception, 0.
Nagi didn't like it much. Nagi had a 22" screen that eliminated nearly all peripheral vision, meaning that as long as he was working he didn't have to care. Farfarello went thoughtful faced with the harmony of the spheres, which was why the Lab ended up subbing as their briefing room. Schuldich rather thought that Crawford had taken other considerations into account, perhaps regarding the inherent difficulty of bugging a wormhole in the space-time continuum. (But would said task be impossible for the Organization itself?) He didn't know for sure. He rarely knew for sure with Crawford. That bothered him, but not always.
He liked the Lab.
It was quiet, for one. Every room in every building in the world bore a unique ambient noise signature, barely perceptible to the common ear but often a controlled roar in Schuldich's; the Lab made no sound at all. Not even the fluorescent lights hummed. It was how he knew the place was a wormhole. When Schuldich was alone in the Lab it was like the sorry shoddy universe had been wrapped in cotton wool, and for a short time it felt like bliss. A short time. Not too long, or boredom set in.
At some point he started using it to take five-minute cigarette breaks. Minor defiance of the rules: he wasn't supposed to smoke in the common rooms of the flat, let alone the Lab. (How did it ventilate? Was the air perhaps – asymptotic?) Of course, Schuldich was never one to take much heed of minor regulations, but as the weeks passed he noticed something interesting.
To wit: Crawford never found him out.
It was his first intimation that the place was not as... well, they'd never thought of it as simple. Not per se. But it wasn't as consistent as they'd assumed.
Five minutes in the Lab, Schuldich eventually determined, did not necessarily equate five minutes out of the Lab. Sometimes it equated up to half an hour, during which – according to Farfarello, never stingy with mental eyewitness accounts – Crawford might actually have poked his head around the door to see if Schuldich was there. Apparently he never was. Apparently the inside never so much as smelt of smoke. Schuldich would flick his butts toward the far end of the corridor, and they'd disappear. Once (it should have alerted him to the dangers, but how could he have guessed?) he'd opened the door and stepped out of the hall closet. He'd been in time to see Crawford emerge from the Lab, looking a tiny bit flustered at coming face to face with the object of his search in the corridor he'd just turned his back on. It wasn't much, but coming from a precognitive it made Schuldich's day.
The obvious working hypothesis was that the Lab liked him. This did not strike Schuldich as particularly odd. Everyone liked him. It was the smile or something. He was forever having to demonstrate to various bodies the error of their ways.
He waxed confident; overly so. The recliner was pure arrogance.
Deep red the roses and raptures of vice that number seventy-seven and then they would haunt me in Heaven which has one thing in common too it's-a-it's-a-it's-a sin tonight is the night all right how sweet are the voices of the children of the dark just like Sana-chan live special from Tokyo Tower...
"Shut up! Gott in Himmel, will you just shut the fuck up?"
There was a pause – a literal one. Schuldich's mindscape virtually rang with silence. It was another few seconds before he heard the bolts being drawn back; he shifted his weight from foot to foot and glared. The bolts were new, and at some point they would have to be removed for safety's sake, but so far no one had bothered to initiate the (possibly bloody) confrontation. The semiotics of the situation annoyed Schuldich. Three decently functional sociopaths to one homicidal paranoid schizophrenic, and guess whose bedroom door was locked from the inside?
The door was jerked back on its chain. Farfarello's good eye appeared in the gap, blinking goldenly. "What?" he intoned.
"Shut up," Schuldich repeated. (He could hear a muted advertisement jingle coming from somewhere in the room – amakute suppakute kuchi no naka ni shuwashuwa shite – since when had Farfarello owned a radio?) "Chill it. Keep it down. Why the fuck do you have to broadcast like that?"
"I have no idea what you mean," said Farfarello. The visible half of his face looked bored. Schuldich gritted his teeth.
"Yeah, and fuck you too. Listen, I drew guard duty last night, and tonight we're staking out that fucking warehouse in Kanegawa. I need a nap, okay? Is that too much to ask?"
"And in what manner is this my problem?" (And now it's back to the studio with Haru-kun, chirped the radio, and here as our special guest today we have the immensely popular child star, Kurata Sana—)
"I can't sleep when you're gibbering like that, you psycho!" Schuldich threw out his arms in exasperation. "Take your pills, you freak, why don't you ever take your pills? Do you want to be strung up in a straitjacket and pumped full of drugs?" It would happen too, if Schuldich gave the word, because Farfarello invariably signaled his episodes by getting loud. Schuldich thought he was being damnably sensitive in not holding that over Farfarello's head.
"Keep vigil, then, Beelzebub," said Farfarello. The mental noise was rising again like a groundswell, belying his level exterior: mangled Milton, snippets of talk radio. "Ruminate on your sins, for they are legion. And stay out of my hair. Some of us have plans for the day."
Schuldich opened his mouth, and Farfarello closed the door in his face. The next second the bolts slammed home.
There was a silence – physically, at least.
"Beelzebub," said Schuldich finally, to the air. "I like that." He kicked the door with abrupt viciousness, to no perceivable effect, and stalked away. Once back in the living room he stood for a moment with arms akimbo, glaring at the glass of the balcony door while he considered his options.
Then he turned and made a beeline for Crawford's study.
"Well, two can play at that game—"
When Crawford returned to the flat three hours later, Nagi was in his room and Farfarello was seated cross-legged on the floor of the den, his attention entirely occupied by Playstation and flickering screen. There was no sign of Schuldich.
There was, however, an empty space in Crawford's study where his chair had been.
— Montreal, January 2003
