Though Lizbeth Margeride has no recollection of ever once having entered the room, she has been here many, many times, and, in its way, each time has been different. But always her awareness of being here begins with her seated in the white chair at the southern end of the table, facing her sister, Elle, who sits at the northern end, facing her. Both of them are wearing nothing but white camiknickers that would have been fashionable in the 1930s, with matching white stockings and Mary Janes. There is a chessboard on the table between them, and it, too, is entirely white, every one of the sixty-four squares precisely identical and yet unmistakably distinct.
The first violation of the room’s immaculateness is the sixteen and sixteen chess pieces themselves, as there are both white and black pieces. The black pieces are arranged before Lizbeth, and the white before Elle. It is appropriate, Lizbeth thinks, as Lizbeth always thinks, that her sister will make the opening move, as is ever the privilege of white, in keeping with the color scheme of the white room.
The second violation is the sisters themselves. Though their hair and eyebrows are almost as pale as the room, their milky skin seems just shy of pink in this place, and their blue eyes are as radiant as star sapphires. Their twenty fingernails have been polished crimson. Their lips are rouged. Shocking dabs of color amid the tyranny of white.
White.
This is the illusion of a single “color” perceived by the three sorts of cone cells present in the human eye when confronted simultaneously with all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum at once. White isn’t the absence of color, as many mistakenly believe. It is, rather, the perfect reflection and perception of all colors, therefore the antithesis of black—black being perfect absorption, which is the perception of the absence of color.
Elle moves her queen’s white knight ahead two spaces and one space west.
Lizbeth studies the move. It may seem hours before she counters.
One must move with the utmost care.
Too much is always at stake.
Always.
Sometimes, even the gods themselves are merely pieces in a higher game, and the players of this game, in turn, are merely pieces in an endless hierarchy of larger chessboards.
“My move,” Lizbeth says.
“Take all the time you need, love,” answers Elle, as she always does. “What matter if you take a hundred years?”
She speaks with neither malice nor restlessness.
“A slow sort of country,” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
Beyond the white door lies an endless white hallway. Lizbeth knows this instinctually, though she has never once stood, crossed the room, and dared to open the door. There is a soft horror in all this white that would be increased a hundredfold, she suspects, if the door were ever opened.
I don’t really think it’s a hallway at all.
It’s a maze.
The white hands of the white clock on the white wall count off the seconds, minutes, and hours. There is too much time here, and there is no time at all. In all this white, Lizbeth’s thoughts inevitably begin to blur, which is unfair, as one needs clarity for chess, and her sister always gets the first move, being always white, and so still has clarity before the onset of the blur. This room is, Lizbeth thinks, a cathedral to . . .
To what? Closed systems where entropy prevails? A permutation of the second law of thermodynamics? Quantum mechanical zero-point energy? Dissolution? The Nernst heat theorem?
Insanity?
Faultless sanity?
“If you’re cold, love,” Elle says to her, “you may open the window.”
I may, yes. No one and nothing is stopping me.
Then comes the third violation. Her name is not Twisby, but that’s the only name she has ever provided the twins. Or her name is not Thisby. There is sometimes contention between the sisters on this point, but the woman has never offered a definitive answer, no matter how many times they’ve inquired. She is someone we will meet. Lizbeth knows that, just as she knows that her first move will involve a pawn, no matter how much she wishes otherwise. She knows that the woman is threat and shelter, peril and deliverance. A future catalyst. When the woman speaks, the air shimmers and the twins turn towards her in unison. The legs of their white chairs scrape, in unison, as a single sound, against the white floor.
“There is but one evil,” the woman named Twisby (or Thisby) tells them. “Only a single sin. It is waste. Were it not for me and what I will teach you when you are ready, you would be wasted. I cannot abide that. I will come to light the fuse. To provide the push that will be necessary to begin the—” She pauses, then adds, “To begin the cascade.”
The woman opens her hands. Her left palm has been painted as red as the twin’s lips and fingernails. Her right is the color of Lizbeth’s chess pieces, which is to say all colors.
“Quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness,” says Twisby (or Thisby). “But this is only your cocoon, Lizbeth. This is only your cocoon, Elle. Such a metamorphosis awaits you. You will see. There will be no waste. No sin. No evil.”
And then she’s gone.
“Your move,” says Elle.
“Yes,” replies Lizbeth. “My move.”
When at last she wakes from the dream of the white room, Lizbeth Margeride lies very still, smelling her own sweat on the damp sheets, and she keeps her eyes trained on her sister, still fast asleep in her own bed. She watches Elle until dreams come again.
6 .: Late Saturday Night Motel Signal
(Atlanta/Manhattan, 8/9/2035) [Part 1]
Well, baby, I came here for more than that. I’ve seen self-disembowelings, the ballet of now-time Americanized seppuku, hara-kiri, performance-nuanced 腹切り dazzling in scarlet river splendor. I cover the war, as is the battle cry in these nether ditches of secrecy that all are meant to see, as many as will watch. Cryptic voyeurism, right, bitcast for the world if it bothers to look or glances in by accident. Now, that, I think and always have thought, must be the cat’s velvet paw: Überraschung, mothercocksucker! Looking for peeptalk line telly, a bit of footsy ball or hoops, and here’s this bitch over there on the bed turning herself inside out. But yeah, no. I ain’t taken this job and come to this shitty Chinatown flop for no floor show. My motives are, shall we say, ulterior. I’m here for the other thing. I’m chasing a ghost. Her names, she has so very many now—like mind tattoos or identity memes ladled by the fans—all of which run irrelevant to my purpose.
I am assuming I have anything as concrete as a purpose.
See here, all of this web been spun from out a dream I cannot stop having, an echo’s echo coughed up from my scorch-fed back brain, 404-transcription breakdown between my dear and darling hippocampus and neocortex, expectation fulfillment retro-slip out activation-synthesis. Sara White Queen of auld lang syne, how she collected dreams in blue-bottle skullfuck yottabyte quantum cat boxes. SWQ Check, do love such like REM of serotonin and histamine reflux. Now, how-some-ever, is she gone away across the grey Atlantic to Londontown and left me all alone. We are both drawn to our half-drowned burgs, and I could clip the sleeping phantasies across the satellite handoffs to her, sure. But I won’t. I might let some snick whore suck me off standing right the fuck here in Room 707, but my subconscious sick, that’s not for any brigand flensing the sky who just happens across them in hisherit’s driftnet by-catch. I want her to have them, I’ll hand deliver.