Chapter 5
Chapter Five
She woke before the alarm with the decision already made, which was the only comfortable part of the morning.
She would delete the photos unseen. She had settled it somewhere in the small hours, in that flat, reasonable voice a person uses on herself when she wants a thing to be true, and she got up believing it.
She made coffee. The machine did its slow gurgle and she stood over it with her arms crossed, watching the pot fill, and she thought about the delete icon and how little it would cost her thumb to find it. It was the sensible thing. It was the safe thing. She did not delete the photos.
The mug went cold on the counter while she found reasons not to.
The phone lay face-up beside it, screen dark, and she knew without turning it over that Logan's name was still sitting at the top of the thread, and that under it there was a column of grey image tiles she had not let herself open.
She wiped the counter that didn't need wiping.
She rinsed a bowl. She checked the weather she wasn't going anywhere in.
"Just to confirm they're nothing," she told the empty kitchen, and she heard exactly how much that was a lie, and she opened the first one anyway.
It was not nothing.
The slab filled the frame, lit hard from one side so that every incision threw a shadow the length of itself.
Black glass, polished to a depth that ate the light rather than returning it, a full meter along its long edge if the ruler in the shot could be trusted.
That was the first thing that was wrong with it, in the way that a thing being impossible is wrong.
Obsidian did not come that big in one unbroken piece.
It cooled with flaws, and it broke along them, and a slab of that dimension without a single relieving fracture was not something the material was supposed to permit.
Someone had laid a folding carpenter's ruler along the bottom edge and set a pair of nitrile gloves beside it for scale, blue against the black, and it was the gloves that did it to her.
The gloves were so ordinary. They were the gloves anyone kept a box of.
Whoever had photographed this had reached into a drawer for a scale marker and come up with the most mundane object in the room, and the ordinariness of them, sitting there next to a thing that should not exist, dropped her stomach out from under her.
The surface was worked edge to edge in low relief.
It was not a stela; a stela stood a ruler on its foot and told you about a king.
It was not a mask, and it was not a mirror, though the finish would have served for one.
She turned the phone a fraction, as if a different angle would resolve it into a category she already owned.
Rows. It was laid out in rows.
She set the cold coffee down and spread the image with two fingers until the top of it filled the screen.
The uppermost register was iconography she knew, and knew well.
It was a band of day-signs, the calendrical glyphs, marching left to right in their proper order, and they were rendered with a confidence that would have shamed most of the pieces she'd stood in front of in climate-controlled museum halls.
There were no false starts anywhere in the band.
There was no place where a hand had wavered on a curve and gone back to correct it, no thickened line where a tool had been leaned on too hard and then eased.
Even the great Late Formative work, the pieces the field agreed to call masterworks, showed you the human being behind them if you looked closely enough — a tremor, a preference, the small tax that a living hand always paid.
This band showed her nothing of the kind.
It was as clean as if the glass had grown that way.
Below the calendar band, the maker had done something Elena had never once seen on any single object in twenty years of looking.
The day-signs repeated, but they were threaded now through a second system laid down beside them: short vertical strokes gathered in clusters, and then a sign she read before she'd meant to try.
Caban. Earth. Movement. The trembling sign — the very one she had nearly corrected on a lecture slide the morning before, the red dot of her pointer hovering over a doubled bar in a hall that held eleven students and cared about none of it.
Caban, and a cluster of strokes. Caban, and a different cluster.
Then again, and again, all the way down the register, and every single occurrence carried its own small count.
She had a pen in her hand before she had decided to pick one up. She noticed it there and did not remember reaching for it.
She worked across the photographs for an hour without once standing up, sliding from one image to the next and back again, copying the clusters onto a legal pad in the private shorthand she'd used since graduate school, the strokes and brackets that meant nothing to anyone but her.
The refrigerator cycled on and hummed and cycled off.
The bar of sun that came in low through the kitchen window climbed the counter and crossed it and began to warm the back of her hand where it moved across the page.
When she finally sat back she had three sheets covered edge to edge, and her hands were not quite steady, and she recognized the not-steadiness for what it was, which frightened her a little, because she had not felt it in a long time and had told herself she didn't miss it.