Notebook 8. First contact.
I had been using the frame as a place to hang my coat.
The experiment had failed for six months, and the coat was a good one. I could not bear to put it on the lab’s painted hook, which left a brown mark on anything pale.
On Tuesday I moved the coat, put my hand on the contact pad and saw a woman staring back at me from a room full of cupboards.
She had my face, an unfamiliar haircut, and a mustard stain on her cuff.
I held up a card: WHO ARE YOU?
She searched a drawer, produced a pencil, and wrote on the back of an envelope: THE PERSON WHO WAS GETTING A CLEAN TABLECLOTH.
Her free hand stayed on the other pad. When she lifted it to catch an envelope sliding off the shelf, the frame turned gray.
I waited for eighteen minutes. I had the card ready when she returned.
PLEASE DON’T LET GO.
She looked at it, looked at me, and deliberately raised her hand.
Notebook 8. Terms.
The frame showed us only while both pads were touched. Light crossed it. Sound did not. Neither paper nor fingers could pass through; I bruised a knuckle establishing the latter, and she watched without attempting the same test.
In her world, my apparatus stood in a cupboard belonging to an amateur theatre. It had arrived with a batch of secondhand shelving. She had meant to ask someone to take it away. The pad lay flush with the shelf where she leaned her hand to reach the patterns above.
I had an account of its construction, three years of failed approaches and an entire theoretical vocabulary. She had an invoice for forty pounds and a cupboard she wanted back.
We made name cards.
Mine said REN VALE, PHYSICIST.
Hers said REN VALE, COSTUMES.
I wrote ARE YOU ME?
She crossed out the last word on her own card, rewrote it more heavily, and pointed.
Notebook 9. The first exchange.
There was a two-position selector and a button beneath each frame. Mine controlled the bins in a sorting unit. Hers controlled the places where the theatre’s old ticket printer put its strips of paper. We both had a black position and a white position.
I chose white. She chose black. When we pressed our selector buttons together, mine moved to black and hers moved to white.
Each press sent one piece of paper through its machine. After the exchange, my card dropped into the black bin; her strip dropped into the white tray.
I tried ten more exchanges. If either of us declined to press, nothing crossed. We could reset the selectors afterward, but that did not move the paper already sorted. Nothing else changed: not our thoughts, not the labels, not what we could choose to do next.
I held up a drawing of the two choices crossing. She nodded.
Then she held up an envelope marked TUESDAY RENT and put it beside her white tray. Beside the black she put one marked FRIDAY RENT.
I wrote ONLY A TEST.
She wrote I HAVE TO SORT THESE ANYWAY.
She held up EITHER DAY IS ALL RIGHT. I KEEP PUTTING IT OFF. PICK ONE FOR ME.
I set my selector to white. She set hers to black. We pressed. Her selector took my white position, and her RENT strip fell into the Tuesday tray. Mine took her black position and sorted another blank test card.
She wrote TUESDAY IT IS, folded the ticket into the envelope and took her hand off the pad. The machine had not paid her rent. She had used my choice to settle when she would pay it.
The sorting unit had been expensive. The rent envelopes were ordinary. It annoyed me that her first use of the effect was to save herself an indecisive afternoon.
Notebook 9. What I did not report.
I started putting my hand on the pad at three every afternoon. Ren had agreed to that time. She usually arrived a few minutes late, her pencil somewhere she couldn’t find it.
I learned that she lived above a bakery, had once broken her nose, and had a daughter called Cora. I learned that she used the theatre’s cupboard because her flat was too small for the dresses she repaired.
For the first few weeks I did not tell her that I had applied to design costumes before I studied physics. My father had said I could draw for pleasure; the scholarship would pay for something useful. I had been angry with him for years without ever being sure he was wrong.
I asked Ren whether she liked her work. She held up a beaded bodice, showed me the place where its lining had torn, and wrote ASK ME WHEN THIS IS FINISHED.
I could have put that in my report. Instead I wrote: Counterpart appears professionally satisfied.
Notebook 10. Invitation.
Until then, we had moved only bits of paper. I had suggested a different trial: write two things we could genuinely choose to do, then promise beforehand to follow the exchanged assignments. Ren had agreed to think about it. That was all.
Our institute was celebrating a hundred years. I had been asked to say a few words. The invitation allowed one guest.
I labelled my black bin GO ALONE and my white bin ASK FATHER. I put a blank card ready to feed into the sorter. If I accepted the experiment, I would do what the receiving bin said. The machine could move the card; only I could make the phone call. I imagined the old man in a new jacket, listening to me describe something nobody else had done.
I showed the cards to Ren.
She wrote WHAT DOES HE WANT?
I hadn’t asked him. It seemed beside the point.
She showed me her labels: white for SCHOOL COSTUMES, black for PAID COSTUMES. She could follow the resulting assignment if she promised to, but the apparatus could not make that promise for her. She had more work than she could finish.
I wanted to try a consequential exchange. That was the word I used on my card.
Ren pointed to the school card, then held up a photograph of a girl in a cardboard crown. Cora’s production was on the same night as my dinner. Ren had promised the teacher she would finish the costumes, but the paid order would cover a bill that was late.
I wrote WE CAN LEARN SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
She wrote YOU CAN.
She pointed to her white selector position, then to my white bin: ASK FATHER. If she pressed there, my card would tell me to invite him.
I put my selector on black: GO ALONE. That would give her my black position, sending her order strip into PAID COSTUMES. I was asking her to break a promise to her daughter so I could call my father an experimental result.
She pointed from my black selector to the photograph of Cora. I reached for a pencil. Before I could write, she shook her head and took her hand off the pad. Neither sorter moved.
I waited. The invitation stood beside the frame. I could have called my father. Instead I returned to my notebook and wrote that a suitable trial had been deferred.
Notebook 10. Unscheduled contact.
I tried at four. I tried at five. At half past six her face appeared, lit from below. She had been looking for a sleeve pattern in the cupboard.
I held up JUST ONE EXCHANGE.
She closed her eyes, then wrote three lines in large letters.
MY GIRL IS TEN.
HER SCHOOL PLAY IS NOT YOUR SECOND CHANCE AT COSTUMES.
I AM NOT A WAY BACK.
I stared at the second line.
I had told her about the scholarship the week before. I had explained it in a tone I used for describing old equipment, as if no heat remained in the subject. She had listened with one hand on a machine she didn’t want.
I began another card: THAT ISN’T WHY—
She showed me the photograph again. The crown was crooked. Cora had painted a row of green windows across the front, though castles in school plays usually had gray walls.
Ren was waiting for me to stop writing.
I turned my unfinished card over.
WHAT DO YOU NEED?
THE CUPBOARD.
Notebook 11. Last agreed meeting.
I called my father. He wanted to come to the dinner, but he needed the lift arranged before he would buy a jacket. We talked about the station stairs and the sort of shoes he could stand in. Neither of us mentioned my abandoned application.
Ren agreed to one last meeting at three. She wasn’t arriving to exchange choices. She had a man coming to remove the apparatus, and wanted me to see that it was deliberate.
I prepared a list of reasons she should keep it. I considered offering rent money, then pictured asking her to keep a machine she wanted gone because I had bought a place in her cupboard. I considered proposing that someone else in the theatre take over our contact.
When she appeared, she held up the finished crown. The green windows had become small stitched patches. She set it on her head, bent toward the frame and let me see the inside lining.
I pointed to my invitation and showed her the guest’s name.
She gave me a thumb up.
I raised my card of reasons. Her eyes moved to it. She put the crown on the shelf.
The first reason began Unique access to—.
I put the card face down in the black bin. Without an exchange, it stayed exactly where I placed it.
I wrote THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME LOOK.
She read it. Then she reached into a drawer and produced a small stack of envelopes, pencils, costume sketches and all the cards she had used to speak to me. She packed them into a box.
Someone entered her cupboard. I could see only his shoulder. Ren pointed to the apparatus, then to the space beneath the shelves. He moved closer, testing how to lift it.
She raised her free hand to me. I raised mine.
When she took the other hand off the pad, I did not keep mine waiting there.
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